Political Economy and Culture of Indigenous Peoples: A Central Indian Case Study

The aim of this research is to examine the culture and politics of the rice economy in Bastar District, Central India by means of (a) the transcription, translation and analysis of the epic songs that 'untouchable' women sing about rice and (b) an analysis of the socio-economic status of the singers. The singers are members of an association of artisans who assert their Aboriginality against their official government 'Scheduled Caste' classification. This epic imagines a relative egalitarian, but patriarchal, social order and the ideology it expresses challenges existing anthropological theories about the nature of hierarchy, 'popular religion', and the distinction between tribes and castes.