By the time Indian anthropology reached the 1990s, tribal monographs had travelled a long way from colonial catalogues of “castes and tribes.” Scholars were no longer content to just describe a community’s customs. They wanted to explain how tribal societies were actually changing, and they wanted frameworks built for Indian realities rather than borrowed wholesale from the West. This shift defines what anthropologists call the evaluative phase, and it is where some of the most interesting theoretical experiments in Indian social science took shape.
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Four phases, one turning point
Historians of the discipline usually split Indian anthropology into four broad periods: a formative phase up to 1919 dominated by colonial administrators cataloguing tribes, a constructive phase (1920-1949) when Indian universities began training their own anthropologists, an analytical phase (1950-1989) built around intensive village and tribal fieldwork, and finally the evaluative phase from around 1990 onward. The evaluative phase is not just a label for “recent work.” It marks a moment when Indian scholars actively reassessed the theories they had inherited, kept what was useful, and built new tools where the old ones fell short. Two influences shaped this reassessment more than any other: an American research group known as the Chicago School, and a home-grown push for indigenous methodology.
The Chicago School comes to an Indian village
Robert Redfield had spent years studying peasant communities in Mexico before turning his attention to India in the 1950s, working alongside colleagues McKim Marriott and Milton Singer at the University of Chicago. Redfield’s central idea was that any civilisation could be understood as a meeting point of two currents of culture: a Great Tradition, carried by literate elites through texts, temples and classical philosophy, and a Little Tradition, made up of oral, local, everyday practices in villages. He also proposed a folk-urban continuum, the idea that societies could be placed on a spectrum running from isolated, homogeneous folk communities to diverse, impersonal urban ones.
Redfield added three more concepts that gave the framework texture. Cultural specialists are the literate custodians, such as priests, scholars, and ritual experts, who keep a tradition’s texts and rites alive across generations. Style of life describes the everyday patterns through which ordinary people actually live out a tradition, not just what is written down about it. Cultural performances are the visible, repeated occasions, festivals, recitations, pilgrimages, through which a tradition gets transmitted and renewed in public. Together, these ideas gave researchers a vocabulary for describing how a civilisation as vast and old as India’s could hold together despite enormous local variation. Singer and Redfield became increasingly committed to studying India specifically once the Chicago seminar’s early findings suggested the country resisted simple, linear ideas of modernisation.
Marriott’s Kishan Garhi and the twin processes
McKim Marriott put these ideas to the test in a village called Kishan Garhi in Uttar Pradesh, where he lived and worked between 1950 and 1952. His 1955 essay on the village, published in the edited volume Village India, is one of the most cited pieces of Indian village ethnography. Marriott noticed that cultural elements did not just sit still in either the great or little tradition. They moved between the two, and he gave names to the two directions of movement.
Universalisation is the process by which a local, little-tradition element gets carried upward and absorbed into the great tradition, gaining a wider, more literate, more systematised form in the process. Parochialisation is the reverse: a great-tradition element gets pulled downward into a village setting, becoming more local, less textual, and less formally organised. Marriott developed these twin concepts specifically to explain how festivals, deities, and rituals in Kishan Garhi connected to the wider Sanskritic tradition without being identical to it.
Marriott’s own examples make the idea concrete. He pointed to Raksha Bandhan as a case of upward universalisation, since the festival blends with a regional celebration called Saluno in Kishan Garhi, where young wives visiting their parental homes mark the occasion before returning to their husbands. Parochialisation worked the other way in the village’s Navaratri celebrations. The pan-Indian goddess Durga, worshipped for nine nights across much of the country, appeared locally as a mud image called Naurtha, a village-specific figure with a localised name and a scaled-down set of rituals. The same double movement, Marriott argued, explains why a pilgrim from Kishan Garhi could travel to a sacred city like Gaya or Varanasi and still recognise something of home in what they found there.
New tools for reading villages and tribes
The analytical phase that preceded the evaluative one was not just about applying Chicago’s concepts. Indian researchers were also building their own research techniques, many of which are still taught as standard method today. Some scholars refined the genealogical method, tracing kinship lines across generations to understand how status and land rights moved through a community. Others developed a spatial distribution technique, mapping where cultural traits appeared across a region to reconstruct historical connections between places. Statistical methods entered village studies more systematically, allowing researchers to measure patterns of social change rather than relying only on descriptive accounts. Text analysis, applied alongside kinship studies, let scholars read classical and vernacular texts as evidence of social structure rather than treating them purely as literature.
Sacred centres, clusters, and segments
One of the most distinctive tools to emerge from this period was the concept of the sacred complex, developed through a detailed study of the pilgrimage city of Gaya in Bihar. This approach broke a sacred place down into three linked elements: a sacred geography of shrines and pilgrimage routes, a set of sacred performances such as rituals and festivals, and a body of sacred specialists, the priests and ritual experts who conduct them. Researchers further divided the sacred geography itself into zones, clusters, and segments, allowing them to map how a single pilgrimage centre connected outward to villages and towns across the region. The method showed, in very concrete spatial terms, how the Great and Little Traditions actually met on the ground rather than staying at the level of abstract theory.
Why Indian anthropologists pushed back
Even as these tools proved useful, a growing number of Indian scholars felt that Western anthropology, however sophisticated, could not fully capture the complexity of Indian society on its own terms. Concepts built for other contexts sometimes flattened caste, regional diversity, or the layered history of colonial contact. This unease fed into a broader project of building indigenous methodology, an effort to develop concepts and research priorities rooted in local realities rather than imported wholesale. This perspective traces back to the anticolonial movements of the 1940s and 1950s, when critiques of Western knowledge systems fed directly into how the social sciences were practised in newly independent India.
The push for indigenous methodology was not a rejection of theory altogether. It was a call for research conducted by scholars with an insider’s understanding of the society, for concepts developed in local languages and idioms where possible, and for a research agenda shaped by the country’s own developmental and social priorities rather than by questions imported from elsewhere. Advocates argued this would produce a more humanistic and critical anthropology, one willing to question its own colonial inheritance instead of simply refining it.
Key evaluative-phase works on tribal social change
This combination of borrowed frameworks, home-grown methods, and a critical, indigenous outlook shaped a wave of tribal monographs published from the 1990s onward. A few stand out for how directly they engage with social change among specific tribal communities.
Marine Carrin and Harald Tambs-Lyche’s Peripheral Encounter examines the long relationship between Santhal communities and Scandinavian Christian missionaries between 1867 and 1900. Rather than treating missionary contact as a simple story of conversion, the study draws on Santhal-language texts produced through this encounter to trace how both sides shaped and reshaped each other’s worldviews over decades of contact.
S.M. Dubey’s Modernisation and Elites in Arunachal Pradesh looks at how new leadership groups emerged in Arunachal Pradesh as the region moved from village-based governance toward wider administrative and political integration, tracking who gained influence in that transition and why.
M.S.A. Rao’s Traditional Rationality and Change takes a broader theoretical view, questioning the assumption that “traditional” thinking is simply irrational or an obstacle to development, and instead examining how communities apply their own coherent logic to decisions about economic and social change.
Tomo Riba’s The Tribals and their Changing Environment turns attention to the ecological side of tribal life, tracing how shifts in land use, resource access, and environment reshape tribal livelihoods and social organisation over time.
Mrinal Miri’s edited volume Continuity and Change in Tribal Society brings together seminar papers from scholars examining tribal India from multiple angles, treating continuity and change not as opposites but as processes that run alongside each other in the same communities.
Kamal K. Misra’s Tribal Elites and Social Transformation studies the Khamti community of Arunachal Pradesh, examining how chieftaincy, monastery-based religious authority, and newer forms of political participation compete and combine as the basis for local leadership.
Taken together, these works show what the evaluative phase actually achieved. It did not discard the Chicago School’s ideas about tradition, nor did it ignore the meticulous fieldwork methods built up over decades of village and tribal studies. Instead, it turned those tools toward a more self-aware, occasionally more critical, and distinctly Indian set of questions about how tribal communities were changing, and who got to decide what counted as progress in that change.
What do you think? Do frameworks like universalisation and parochialisation still hold up when applied to tribal communities today, given how much migration, media, and digital connectivity have reshaped contact between local and wider traditions? And when researchers call for “indigenous methodology,” where should the line sit between insider knowledge and academic objectivity?
References
- http://www.ticijournals.org/tribes-and-tribal-studies-in-north-east-deconstructing-the-politics-of-colonial-methodology/
- https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=history-faculty-publications
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/90307/1/Unit-4.pdf
- https://msbrijuniversity.ac.in/assets/uploads/newsupdate/Unit-3.pdf
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40711-020-00140-9
- https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-981-13-3309-5_9-1
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