ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the imagery of objects in poems on the themes of cultural and environmental change by poets from the diverse cultures of Southwest China and Northeast India. These areas share both borders and a history (and prehistory) of experiences of direct and indirect linkage via migration, trade, and other factors, including the diffusion and exchange of material culture technology and associated cultural forms. The areas also share many similar ecological environments - all of which are now subject to increasing exploitation and development. Oral tradition underlies contemporary modernist poetry in both areas, and many traditional objects are represented in local museums, festivals, and tourist venues. The discussion in this chapter ranges from the nature of imagery of objects in the poems, to representations of the ‘pluriverse,’ to metonymic referentiality and stigma, to hybridity, to cultural display. Examples are drawn from several poems that utilise specific imagery in cultural landscapes that feature wild and domestic flora and fauna and technology such as weaving devices, agricultural tools, and ritual paraphernalia. The discussion draws on criticism from the early modernist/imagist era, theories of oral literature, material culture folkloristics, eco-criticism, and cultural criticism. Similarities, differences, convergences, and themes are exposed by the ‘trans-indigenous’ principle of juxtaposition.
