MAPPING CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP ON THE LIMBU COMMUNITY (2003-2024): COMMUNICATION, INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATION AND RESEARCH TRENDS

Abstract

The last two decades have seen significant research works on the indigenous Limbu people in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, education, political science, indigenous studies and more recently, media and communication studies. Despite its expansion, scholarship to-date is still scattered by discipline, preventing a broader picture of the development of its ideas and the new communication orientations. This can be done by systematically reviewing the scholarly work published from the year 2003 to 2024 and to chart the developments of contemporary Limbu scholarship, its significant research areas, methodological trends, interdisciplinary influences, and future research directions. The review is a synthesis of evidence from peer-reviewed journal articles, doctoral dissertations, scholarly books, book chapters, conference papers and research reports. The results show a progressive shift from an ethnographic approach that mainly documented the indigenous culture to interdisciplinary studies on language revitalization, education, participation in politics, gender, TEC, digital communication, media representation and indigenous identity. In contrast with cultural studies, the field of cultural preservation, there is comparatively little focus on issues of media representation, communication technologies, comparative indigenous studies, quantitative studies, and contemporary socio-economic shifts. The review highlights the increasing importance of communication and media studies in the context of lived indigenous identity in a digital world and calls for more methodological diversity, interdisciplinary research and communication studies. This study is an effort to map the intellectual trajectory of Limbu scholarship which will be useful for the indigenous studies and be helpful in the future research of media and mass communication.