The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi

This volume responds to the need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India. The volume engages in this process by defining a new field of Adivasi studies. As such it prompts a close review of the political and sociological categories of tribal peoples and Indigenous peoples. This process is driven by the relevance of the Indigenous movement worldwide to current research in India. Since the 1990s, and the formation of the International Decade of the World's Indigenous Peoples, this movement has influenced Adivasi self-perception and self-representation.Contributions address the following concerns: the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries; the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept; critical interest in Adivasi historiography via oral and visual ethnographic methodologies; the politics of historical representation and collective memory; the interface between Adivasi activism and academic discourse; and the environmental aspects of Adivasi protest and identity.This book discerns the disciplinary implications of Adivasi studies, both in terms of its methods and approaches and its relations with other existing fields, such as Tribal studies, Subaltern studies and Indigenous studies. As such, it is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies more generally.