Recognition Without Redistribution: Tribal Recognition and Caste Capitalism in India

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Pinky Hota, associate professor of anthropology at Smith College.

In this talk, Hota attends to discussions of money, indigeneity, and value to show how Kandha adivasis [“Scheduled Tribes”/“original inhabitants”] in Odisha, India engage the language of their own racialized simplicity. She focuses on how Kandha advivasis display understandings of the shifting contours of indigeneity and indigenous recognition as a set of entitlements from the development state.  Hota suggests that they signal understandings and occupations of indigeneity through a variety of practices—from demanding their economic dues from caste Hindus to accepting bribes themselves—in order to aggressively counter assumptions that they do not understand money’s workings and the broader sociocultural processes money indexes in the local development economy.

Hota argues that invocations of money and value as racialized scripts of adivasi indigeneity serve as fictions crafted by state officials, caste Hindus, and development workers to precisely naturalize the accrual of capital by caste Hindus—historically and within the workings of the contemporary neoliberal development state—as well as the inability of adivasis to achieve economic progress. These fabricated tropes of racialized simplicity demonstrate the collusions between the development state and neoliberal logics that entrench adivasi economic disenfranchisement in India as well as elide contradictions within the “modern” Indian state. Strikingly, adivasis appropriate these fictions using a language of rights and entitlements ushered in by recognition to stake their claims to the entitlements of their proprietary indigeneity anew. 

Ultimately, Hota showcases the extent to which “tribal” as indigenous recognition in India does not counter, but rather encapsulates, the logic of the market. Kandhas describe their disillusionment with these failures of recognition yet recursively return to their tribal recognition as singular—and proprietary.

This event is co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department.

Pinky Hota is associate professor of anthropology at Smith College where she serves as a faculty member for South Asia Studies, participates in Smith’s Program for the Study of Women and Gender, and is a member of the Smith-Duke Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Meridians. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren and Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundations and published in Modern Asian Studies, Anthropological Quarterly and Political and Legal Anthropology Review.