We Were Adivasis: Aspiration in an Indian Scheduled Tribe

In We Were Adivasis, anthropologist Megan Moodie examines the Indian state’s relationship to ‘Scheduled Tribes’, or adivasis—historically oppressed groups that are now entitled to affirmative action quotas in educational and political institutions. Through a deep ethnography of the Dhanka in Jaipur, Moodie brings readers inside the imaginative work of these long-marginalized tribal communities. She shows how they must simultaneously affirm and refute their tribal status at a range of levels, from domestic interactions to historical representation, by relegating their status to the past: we were adivasis.