Title: Tribal Culture in Contemporary India: Continuity and Change. A Case Study on Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh
Abstract: AbstractThis paper proposes an analysis of practices among the Apatanis tribes of Arunachal Pradesh (India) in the context of the ongoing processes of social change in contemporary India and their resulting issuesIntroduction and Methodology.The religion of the Apatani group can be considered a paradigm because - just like many other groups of adivasis of India - it still preserves archaic shamanic^sup 1^ traditions of great scientific interest which today are quickly disappearing as a result of modernization processes.In order to understand the peculiarities of the shamanic expressions found in Northeast of India, any discussion about the tribal religion must be first situated in the context of the history and cultural complexity of the whole region. In modern India - and in the rest of the world alike - in spite of the conventional understanding of modernization as secularization, continues to play a major role in politics, society and culture. Indeed that role appears to be increasing rather than decreasing and hence in recent years there has been a flurry of academic activity around such ideas as political religion, religious and post-secular society. In broad terms, religion appears to be an increasingly important component of public culture rather than a matter of private belief and practice (Turner, 2010:1).In the first part of my work I expose my ethnographic research and summarize some of the results of the anthropological fieldwork I carried out in the area (from 2003 to 2006): adopting an emic perspective, I participated actively to the rituals and interviewed numerous tribal pujaris.In the second part of the article, I propose a theoretical approach to the study of nationalism and ethnicity and analyze how ongoing transformations have distorted the local heritage by transforming it into a sort of socio-political identity platform. The case of Northeast India can be paradigmatic of many scenarios of the Indian subcontinent.Regional BackgroundThe Seven Sisters states are a region in the North-Eastern India frontier characterized by a high percentage of the population of tribal origin (denominated as adivasis, 'aboriginals', by Gandhi and today ST-Scheduled Tribes by the Government of India). The region comprises the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. After the 1962 Indo-Chinese war, China claimed territorial rights on this savage region due both to its strategic position and to its wealth in natural resources. Separated by the rest of the Subcontinent by the Bangladeshi border, the North-Eastern frontier has suffered for decades a condition of administrative isolation from the rest of India and a chronic lack of development planning. Caught in a reality amidst the twenty-first century Indian economic boom and a virtually uncontaminated eco-systems that can survive only thanks to special laws and projects aimed at the preservation of forest areas and their related resources, those tribes are struggling to preserve their culture, the very existence of which is increasingly endangered. With a long tradition of inner tribal wars, the Seven Sisters still host a number of separatist ethnic movements. The ethnical and cultural identity of indigenous minority groups has been often used to foster such pushes. Yet, despite the exploitative nature of those efforts, indigenous tribes have managed to remain the only depositaries of the local ancestral cultural heritage, including a form of archaic shamanism rooted in the most ancient forms of Indian tradition.The middle section of the district of Lower Subhansiri, in the heart of Arunachal Pradesh, is known as the Apatani tribe territory. Probably thanks to a not-too-inaccessible territory, especially if compared to the neighboring jungles, this community is regarded as one of the most important and best known of the region. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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