How do you ‘know’ a tribal when you see one? How do you ‘see’ a tribal when you know one?

Abstract

This article considers the formation of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic implications in the course of understanding and framing the category of ‘tribe’ on Andaman Nicobar Islands. Considering events from colonial and post-colonial histories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the article argues that the process of classification and reclassification, motivated by anthropological knowledge and the drive for welfare, creates a discourse that tends to deny cultural and social differentiation or diversity among the various tribal communities that inhabit different parts of the Island archipelago. Statist definitions in other words serve to reduce the conditions and identities of tribal groups into categories of the ‘primitive’, ‘particularly vulnerable’ or presently as just ‘vulnerable’. While such categorisations may have its uses in the allocation of welfare budgets, the sole focus on the category of ‘vulnerability’ obfuscates a more nuanced understanding of the conditions of life and well being among such communities. The article asks if our ‘categorising impulse’ restrains us from thinking of and problematising questions of ‘agency’ in the self-description and assertion of tribal identities. Why is it that the state or the non-tribal outsider remains indifferent to the deconstruction of the statist category of the ‘vulnerable’? Could the discourse of the ‘changeless de- historicised’ Andaman islander suit the ‘non- tribal’ status quo in the Islands?