The Concept of Tribe and Their Major Problems in India

Abstract

Anthropological studies on culture of tribes give rich ethnographic details about their cultural practices, perception and behavioral aspects. Most of these studies are at micro level, focusing on a single tribe or tribes in a state. These studies have their own strength to understand the problem in a particular time and space. However, very few anthropological studies move out of the behavioral and cultural contexts. They fail to link the larger issues of socio-economic, political, and ecological factors with the accessibility, affordability and availability of health service. While there are tribes which have been coming into the fold of the Hindu cultural pattern, there are those which are moving in the opposite direction. The movement from the tribal to the peasant has not been a unidirectional one. With such diversities, attempts to evolve a general scheme of tribal development, having universal application to all tribes in India, are bound to be abortive. Tribal development, because of the diverse situations, has to be area-specific. Another superficial approach to the problem of tribal development emanates from equating tribal areas with any other economically backward area and recommending identical packages of measures for their uplift. Tribals, as a class, are viewed as poor; they are described as constituting the matrix of Indian poverty.