REVIEWS
“We Were Adivasis is a beautifully written book and a compelling read—it should make a significant impact on the established literature about adivasis in India, as well as address affirmative action and inequality issues not just locally, but also globally.”
— Alpa Shah, London School of Economics
“Using an intersectional analysis that explores the lives of one Rajasthani adivasi community, Moodie brilliantly reveals how political, economic, and social contexts alter ideas of ‘uplift’ while simultaneously constructing the dispositions of marginalized people through everyday practices.”
— Inderpal Grewal, author of Transnational America
“We Were Adivasis is a shining ethnography that reveals new vistas for feminist studies, while casting fresh light on patterns of inequality and social mobility in India. This beautifully crafted study of poverty and progress will fascinate those interested in South Asia, gender and development, affirmative action, and the human capacity to aspire for a better life.”
— K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
"We Were Adivasis is very comprehensive in the sense of understanding the social milieu of a tribal group. No doubt this ethnographic detail will be very useful in providing deep insights of Adivasi culture for feminist studies, policy planners, and all those who have keen interest to better understand the tribal worldview."
— American Anthropologist
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1.
Introduction - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0001
[Scheduled Tribe, Adivasi, gender, women, upward mobility, affirmative action, urban, Dhanka]
The Introduction lays out the central themes of the book. It argues that the Dhanka, like other tribal communities in India, must undertake a great deal of imaginative work to occupy the tribal role through which they are recognized as worthy and needy of affirmative action benefits. One of the ways in which the Dhanka perform this balancing act is by narrating tribal-ness or “adivasi-ness” in the past tense through the phrase “We were adivasis.” The assertion that “we were adivasis” allows the Dhanka to both index their adivasi-nessand distance themselves from the stigma of primitivity or militancy by placing this quality of tribal-ness in the past. Understanding this basic Dhanka claim illuminates why they undertake the particular kinds of identity-building efforts that they have embraced in recent years, particularly their annual collective weddings known as samuhikvivahasammelan, Dhanka men and women must embrace stigma and backwardness in order to avail themselves of the benefits of ST identity, which includes the ability to enact the marriage and family practices of other, non-tribal middle-class Hindus; thus, their practices of collective aspiration have deeply gendered effects. The Introduction also introduces the Shiv Nagar Basti, a slum area in Jaipur, Rajasthan. (pages 1 - 27)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2.
Who Are the Dhanka - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0002
[identity, tribe, indigeneity, India, subaltern history, Rajasthan, Bhil, affirmative action, Dhanka]
This chapter discusses the difficulties created by the tribal role that groups such as the Dhanka must occupy in order to be able to claim state affirmative action benefits and protections in India as a Scheduled Tribe. One of the central ways in which the problem of indigenous identity is solved is through the writing of their own histories that let mutually contradictory accounts of Dhanka origins coexist, a strategy that has important implications for the writing of subaltern history. The chapter presents its own speculative and partially imaginativestory, tracing the Dhankas’ probable historical trajectory from communities of mobile Bhils in southern Rajasthan and northern Gujarat to urban-settled Scheduled Tribe in Rajasthan. (pages 28 - 56)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3.
What It Takes - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0003
[masculinity, India, state, upward mobility, civil servant, subaltern, slum, aspiration]
Chapter Three begins a discussion of the gendered dispositions that emerge as the Dhanka undertake the cultural work of collective aspiration, focusing on masculine willingness. Willingness refers to a constellation of attitudes and inclinations cultivated by Dhanka men who highlight their willingness to do what it takes to get by despite historical oppression. Having experienced upward mobility in the last two generations, which has registered in the transformation of their slum neighbourhood, subaltern men adopt the performative practices learned through participation in and contact with the Indian civil service. Such practices, cultivated in proximity to the state, are used to draw distinctions between different kinds of men within the community. (pages 57 - 78)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4.
A Good Woman - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0004
[gender, women, India, love, marriage, respectability, affective labor]
This chapter focuses on Dhanka women who came of age in the era of service, in which men were frequently employed as government workers. It provides an extended reflection on the emotional and social importance given to love between husbands and wives. Like willingness, respectability is an important disposition and goal for Dhanka women, whose affective labors must be seen as part of the project of collective aspiration. Tracking how three individuals are able to narrate their lives as good women, the ethnographic material highlights the gendered division of social labor emerging from the legal identity of Scheduled Tribes. (pages 79 - 106)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5.
A Traffic in Marriage - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0005
[marriage, collective weddings, identity, gender, women, Dhanka]
Chapter Five describes the emergence of annual collective weddings, known as samuhikvivaha, as the centerpiece of Dhanka articulations of tribal identity. Such weddings allow the values of the era of government service to determine the marriage and family arrangements of a younger generation. It further shows that contemporary tribal identity politics must necessarily be worked out in the terrain of marriage because it is here that the difference between caste and tribe has often been drawn. However, the effects of this work are heavily gendered. There is a traffic in marriage in which collective weddings are undertaken for the stated purpose of protecting poor girls and their families from dowry demands, yet reinscribe marriage as the ultimate horizon for young Dhanka women. (pages 107 - 133)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6.
Wedding Ambivalence - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0006
[women, marriage, ambivalence, feminist, ethnography, subaltern speech]
Chapter Six explores the meanings of marriage and weddings, including samuhikvivaha, for the young women who are its intended beneficiaries. Looking at such forms of collective aspiration through the eyes of young women on the verge of marriage, this chapter shows how marriage is ensconced as a horizon of possibility that replaces all other modern goals such as education and employment, while at the same time describing the deep ambivalence that young women sometimes articulate about this horizon via their stories about love and education. It proposes that ambivalence be seen as a strategy of girls to keep themselves open to the possibility that their lives might be otherwise and as a methodological framing important to a feminist ethnography that tries to adequately portray girls’ complex positioning within their family, community, and country. (pages 134 - 150)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7.
Of Contracts and Kaliyuga - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0007
[masculinity, privatization, neoliberalism, Thekedar, India]
Chapter Seven considers the position of young Dhanka men in relation to the broader community projects of their fathers and grandfathers. It shows that in the neoliberal era of the contract, the Dhanka are under threat of downward mobility. The privatization of many utilities in the city and the increasing use of contracted, temporary workers by government departments means that young men cannot undertake collective aspiration in the same ways as a previous generation, a development that often causes friction between men of different generations. (pages 151 - 170)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8.
Conclusion: On Collective Aspiration - Megan Moodie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253183.003.0008
[aspiration, affirmative action, Right to Information Act, state, citizenship, India, feminist ethnography, subaltern, Scheduled Tribe, Rajasthan]
The last chapter expands the scope of the ethnographic account to reflect on aspiration and affirmative action as important sites of political inquiry in the contemporary world. Focusing on the creativity of subaltern citizenship, it argues that such creativity emerges because of, not in spite of, proximity to those state institutions from which subalterneity is often seen as an exclusion. Looking at struggles for inclusion in the Scheduled Tribe category in Rajasthan and new uses of the Right to Information Act, the conclusion proposes that the ongoing work of feminist ethnography demands that we attend to how projects for social uplift can be both collective and differentially experienced based on axes of gender, age, and religious devotion. (pages 171 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
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A Short Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
