How Anthropology Explores Tribal Societies: Focus on Gender

When anthropologists first began studying tribal communities, they arrived with notebooks already filled with assumptions. Many of these assumptions, especially about gender roles, were borrowed straight from European societies and applied to communities that organised life very differently. Today, anthropology offers far richer tools to understand tribal societies, and a gender-sensitive lens has been central to that shift. Looking at how the discipline defines tribes, how it once misread tribal women, and how it now recognises their central role in production, kinship, and community life reveals a much more accurate picture of these communities.

How anthropology defines a tribe 🔗

The word “tribe” sounds simple, but it has been one of the most contested terms in anthropology. Early scholars like Morgan, Tylor, Rivers, and Lowie attempted to fix the definition, yet no single set of criteria has ever held up across regions. As one widely used anthropological resource notes, the dozens of definitions floating around in anthropological literature are as diverse as the field situations encountered by those proposing them. Despite this messiness, certain characteristics show up repeatedly when anthropologists describe what makes a tribe distinct.

Territoriality, language, and culture 🔗

Three markers appear most often. The first is territoriality, meaning a community’s attachment to a specific geographic area that is more than just land ownership. The second is a shared language or dialect, which acts as a boundary marker between insiders and outsiders. The third is cultural homogeneity, expressed through common customs, rituals, beliefs, and a sense of collective identity. The British anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who conducted fieldwork in India, defined a tribe as a social group whose members speak a common dialect, have a single government, and act together for common purposes such as warfare. Other features often listed include endogamy, kinship-based organisation, subsistence economy, and political autonomy.

A category that keeps evolving 🔗

The trouble is that none of these criteria are absolute. The term “tribe” itself is largely a colonial legacy in the Indian context. The British used it to classify communities that lived outside the Hindu varna system, often in hills and forests. As one Project MUSE chapter argues, the vagueness of the category, its derogatory implications, and its lack of correspondence with reality have made anthropologists increasingly dissatisfied with it, even as they continue to use it. Independent India inherited this category and operationalised it through the Constitution. Article 342 empowers the President to notify “Scheduled Tribes,” and the Lokur Committee of 1965 laid down five criteria: indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact, and backwardness. The country today recognises 705 Scheduled Tribes who form roughly 8.6% of the population, according to data published by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs.

Modern anthropology rejects the older evolutionary view that placed tribes on a “primitive to civilised” scale. Instead, tribes are now understood as dynamic social formations that adapt to changing political and economic contexts, not frozen survivals of an earlier human stage.

The blind spot: how traditional anthropology misread gender 🔗

For most of its history, anthropology was a discipline written by men, about men. Researchers entered tribal communities, spoke mostly to male informants, and assumed that what men said about women’s lives was accurate. This created a serious blind spot. Tribal women’s labour, knowledge, and authority were either ignored or quietly slotted into Western categories of “domestic” and “subordinate.”

Projecting Western asymmetry onto tribal life 🔗

The deeper problem was conceptual. Western anthropologists arrived with an unconscious assumption that gender hierarchies resembling European patriarchy would exist everywhere. The University of Alabama notes that by the late 1970s, feminist anthropologists began questioning the concept of universal female subordination and the usefulness of models based on dichotomies like nature/culture or public/private. Many of these dichotomies were Western categories that simply did not translate to other cultural contexts.

One core anthropological resource on Indian tribal cultures explains that conventional anthropological studies have been strongly consumed for trivialising women’s activities, relying on male informants to know their women. When researchers assumed that tribal women occupied the same subordinate position as women in patriarchal Hindu or European societies, they failed to see what was actually happening on the ground. Decisions women made about food, trade, marriage, healing, and ritual were either invisible to them or dismissed as marginal.

The feminist anthropological turn 🔗

From the 1970s onward, scholars like Eleanor Leacock, Michelle Rosaldo, Karen Sacks, and later Indian anthropologists like Tiplut Nongbri began systematically rewriting this picture. They argued that many tribal and foraging societies practised complementary gender roles rather than hierarchical ones, where men and women performed different but equally essential tasks. Karen Sacks famously used a modes-of-production analysis to show that in many hunter-gatherer societies, sisters, wives, brothers, and husbands all had the same relation to productive resources. Feminist anthropology challenged the unproblematic overlay of modern Western gender norms onto other societies, including the assumption that activities done by men were always more important than those done by women.

Tribal women as integral members of their societies 🔗

Once the lens shifted, a different picture emerged. Tribal women were not on the margins of their communities; in many ways, they were holding them together.

Production and economic contribution 🔗

In most tribal economies in India, women’s labour is the backbone of subsistence. Women work in shifting cultivation, collect minor forest produce, fetch water and firewood, process food, weave, make pottery, and trade. A study on Santhal women in Mayurbhanj, Odisha, documents that women participate in nearly every stage of the paddy cycle, from sowing to harvesting to marketing, often working a six-day week from 7 a.m. A research review in Cogent Social Sciences notes that tribal societies in India have generally been characterised as more egalitarian, with women facing less discrimination compared with hierarchical Hindu caste societies. Yet, despite this heavier workload, tribal women historically faced unequal wages and limited recognition in formal statistics.

Kinship and descent 🔗

Kinship is where the gender story becomes most visible. While most Indian tribes follow patrilineal descent, several follow matrilineal kinship, where lineage, inheritance, and clan identity pass through the mother. The Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia tribes of Meghalaya are the best-known examples. Among the Khasi, the youngest daughter, known as Ka Khadduh, inherits the ancestral property, children take the mother’s surname, and husbands typically move into the wife’s home. Khasi women are believed to play a pivotal role and hold a place of pride in the social setup, distinct from their counterparts elsewhere in India.

It is important to note that matriliny is not the same as matriarchy. Even in Khasi society, important political offices and village headship are typically held by men, though women hold strong economic and household authority. Research shows that urbanisation and globalisation are reshaping these matrilineal structures, with some men’s groups now advocating for greater inheritance rights. The picture is complex, but the existence of matrilineal tribes alone disproves the older anthropological assumption that male-dominant kinship is universal.

Community affairs and ritual life 🔗

Tribal women also play significant roles in religious and community life. They serve as midwives, traditional healers, ritual specialists, and keepers of oral histories. Markets like Iewduh in Shillong are largely run by Khasi women, who manage household finances and trade. Among many central Indian tribes such as the Gond and Santhal, women are central to forest resource management, a domain that is both economically and ecologically critical. The United Nations observes that indigenous women globally are guardians of traditional knowledge, particularly around food systems, medicinal plants, and biodiversity, a recognition that finally aligns with what gender-aware anthropology has been documenting for decades.

Why this anthropological shift matters 🔗

This is not just an academic correction. How tribal women are seen has direct consequences for policy, development programmes, and rights. When official surveys undercount women’s work, they end up under-resourcing the very people who sustain tribal economies. When law assumes patrilineal inheritance, matrilineal women lose protection. The Census of India recognises 705 Scheduled Tribes, but the lived experience of women across these groups varies enormously, and policy needs to reflect that diversity rather than impose a single template.

Anthropology’s journey from defining tribes by rigid colonial criteria to recognising fluid identities, and from sidelining women to centering their contributions, mirrors a wider intellectual shift. The discipline has had to confront its own biases to do justice to the communities it studies.

What do you think? Do you believe the constitutional and administrative definition of “Scheduled Tribe” still serves its original protective purpose, or has it become a label disconnected from how tribal communities actually live today? And if matrilineal tribes like the Khasi are weakening under urbanisation and market pressures, what should be preserved, and who decides?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp05/chapter/general-and-specific-characteristics-of-tribes/
2. https://tribal.study/understanding-tribals/tribe-defining-indian-context/
3. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/320/oa_edited_volume/chapter/2576255
4. https://tribal.nic.in/ST/StatisticalProfileofSTs2013.pdf
5. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/feminist-anthropology/
6. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp05/chapter/gender-and-tribe/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_anthropology
8. https://sryahwapublications.com/article/download/2642-8237.0104001
9. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2024.2360172
10. https://southasiajournal.net/matrilineal-society-of-meghalaya-historical-roots-and-contemporary-challenges
11. https://www.un.org/en/observances/indigenous-day
12. https://www.census2011.co.in/scheduled-tribes.php