On shifting grounds: agroecological relations, livelihood change, and the politics of ritual among ‘tribes’ and ‘castes’ in highland Odisha

Wilby, Samuel (2024) On shifting grounds: agroecological relations, livelihood change, and the politics of ritual among ‘tribes’ and ‘castes’ in highland Odisha. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis is an account of intra- and inter-communal change in the highlands of Odisha, India. In the steep hills and forest mosaics of southwest Kandhamal, a majority of Kutia Kondh swidden farmers have close ties with a minority of Pano traders and artisans with whom they live alongside. Long maintaining relative political and productive autonomy together at the margins of Hindu caste society, today, the Kutia Kondh are officially classified by the Indian government as Scheduled Tribe (Adivasi), their Pano neighbours as Scheduled Caste (Dalit). Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between September 2017 and June 2019, the thesis uses a comparative study of three villages to explore the shifting grounds of life in highland Kandhamal. Asking why some Kutia and Pano maintain close relations and others are pushed apart, the chapters follow people as they secure their everyday livelihoods, reproduce their families over time, and maintain community relations against the backdrop of local and national politics. Differential state protections, land formalisation, plantations-forconservation, and new divides of education and employment are shifting agroecologies of interdependence. Diverse histories of association and memories of mutuality mediate emerging inequalities between the Kutia and Pano, and it is within the family and particularly through marriage that divergent pressures are perhaps most clearly felt. Moreover, a persisting sacrificial tradition, based on enactments of territorial ‘sovereignty’, is drawn upon by new political actors, fitting, in some cases, with the aesthetics of a growing majoritarian politics. Approaching diverse spheres of intercommunal life in the Odisha highlands, the thesis offers an ethnographic contribution to wide-ranging debates on agrarian change, state-society relations, and political possibilities at the margins.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Samuel Wilby
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Sets:	Departments > Anthropology
Supervisor:	Shah, Alpa and Steinmüller, Hans
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4730

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