The pangs of social change which tribal’s are experiencing are not new. As aboriginals they lived in this country and have seen the rise and fall of several empires. They have participated in several battles, either supporting the local rulers or resisting them.
Social change has become the companion of tribal’s all over the world. Claude Levi-Strauss observed that “every culture must liberate its creative potential by finding the correct equilibrium between isolation and contact with others”.
Social change, thus, is not a challenge. What the tribal’s have to do is find the equilibrium between their indigenous culture and the borrowed culture.
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Methodologically, we should be very clear that like other sections of society the tribals also change. It is not possible for the non-tribal world to attain the cyber age and the tribals remaining static. It would be dishonest to portray them as savage and backward. In 1967, Eliott Skinner, an anthropologist and the US ambassador in the Upper Volta in West Africa, wrote:
It is unfortunate that tribalism with all its connotations of primitively and traditionalism is the name given for the identity being used by groups competing for power and prestige in contemporary Africa. Some of the names which are now used as symbols for group identity do refer to distinct socio-cultural entities in the past.
However, many of the so-called tribal groups were creations of the colonial period. But even those groups for which continuity with the past could be claimed have lost so many of their traditional characteristics that, in fact, they must be viewed as new entities.
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In the process of massive social change tribals thus have experienced vast transformation. Malinowski studied the Argenauts of the
Western Pacific in 1922 and declared that these tribals would experience social change very soon. His observations made in the first quarter of the 20th century run as below:
Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity.
Just now when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men fully ready for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants, these die away under our very eyes.
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K.S. Singh very proudly asserts that Indian ethnology is quite rich in the study of tribals. We grant it. But has this ethnology melted away during the last three or four decades?
As a matter of fact, the tribal ethnology of Risely, O’Malley, Hutton, Bose and Majumdar has become outdated today. The tribals have integrated themselves into the regional, state and national societies and finally into global economic, cultural and political systems.
Let us refer again to Malinowski’s Trobrianders. These people have largely adapted to processes of modernization on their own terms. Modernization has led to changes in political organization, economy and politics of identity.
However, it must be said that despite all these changes, the kinship system and the system of ceremonial exchange among Trobrianders still function, though they do not have the same meaning as before.
Another case is that of Azandes of Africa studied by Evans- Pritchard. These people have taken to wage earning in cotton. The Nuers have also witnessed the some social change.
If Azandes, Argenauts and Nuers have changed considerably, the Indian tribes, e.g., Bhil, Gond and Toda have also experienced social change. It is not that the social anthropologists all over the world were not unaware about the social change which the tribals would encounter in the future. Writing about the wider social change coming in the tribal world, Thomas Hylland Eriksen says:
Anthropologists have, since the very beginning of the subject, been aware of tendencies towards what we may call cultural entropy- that historical process which is today sometimes described as ‘the global cultural melting-pot’, as ‘cultural creolization’ or, rather inaccurately, as ‘westernization’.
However, one may wonder if we are not presently at the threshold of a new era in the history of humanity, the global era.
Eriksen is right in his observation. In any corner of the world today-whether tribal or non-tribal-it is not possible to live without regular contact with the world market and the state. The fact is that the tribals today cannot escape from state and its citizenship. The state, on the other hand, is in close relationship with the civil society. Money has become a dominant medium.
The subsistence economy of the tribals has taken to capitalistic economy. Tourism, migration and other factors of transport and communication have brought the tribals closer to the wider society. It is in this context that we look at the changing tribal India.