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- Title
Fertility or Indigeneity?
- Authors
SCHULTE-DROESCH, LEA
- Abstract
As local practice, rituals cannot be understood in isolation from their historical context. This article focuses on the lower festival (baha) of one of the largest middle Indian tribal societies, the Santal, and explores how national and global inluences have come to shape this ritual in the last few decades. Previously only celebrated in the village context, since the 1980s a more elaborate version of the festival has been hosted by local politicians and activists on a regional level. One objective of this article is to compare the village and regional version of the festival and discuss the main themes structuring each of these contexts. As the village lower festival, in its symbols and activities, centers on the relationship between different groups of kin as well as on an exchange between the village and the forest, I suggest that fertility plays a defining role in it. During the large celebrations of regional lower festivals the performance of Santal culture and identity vis-à-vis other communities stands in the forefront, a dynamic in which the idea of indigeneity is highly relevant. Finally, the article addresses the question of cultural change and explores three historical factors contributing to the emergence of regional lower festivals, namely industrialization, the Indian state's politics of minority recognition, and the Jharkhand movement.
- Subjects
INDIA; FESTIVALS; SANTAL (South Asian people); ETHNOLOGY; HUMAN fertility -- Social aspects; SOCIAL change; MANNERS &; customs
- Publication
Asian Ethnology, 2014, Vol 73, Issue 1/2, p155
- ISSN
1882-6865
- Publication type
Article