Understanding Sex and Gender: Insights from Tribal Societies

Walk into a Khasi village in Meghalaya and you will see something that quietly overturns mainstream Indian assumptions: property passes from mother to youngest daughter, husbands move into their wives’ homes, and children inherit the mother’s surname. Travel west to a Bhil settlement in Madhya Pradesh, and the picture shifts again. These contrasts are not random. They point to one of the most important distinctions in the social sciences, that between sex and gender. Tribal societies, with their immense cultural diversity, offer a rare laboratory to see how this difference actually plays out in everyday life.

Sex and gender: two different things 🔗

In sociological and anthropological terms, sex and gender are not synonyms. Sex refers to the biological and physiological features a person is born with, while gender refers to the social meanings a culture attaches to those features. As the IGNOU course material on women in tribal societies puts it, sex identity is an ascribed status linked to chromosomal, hormonal and anatomical structure, while gender is an achieved status concerning the psychological, social and cultural components of a person.

The shorthand many textbooks use is simple: sex is biological, gender is social. Sex is something a person is born with; gender is something a person learns, performs, and is rewarded or punished for. Anthropologists writing on tribal India explicitly note that gender refers to the beliefs, traits, attitudes, conducts and activities that distinguish men from women through a process of social formation. In other words, what counts as “manly” or “womanly” behaviour is a script written by culture, not by biology.

Why the distinction matters 🔗

The sex-gender distinction is not a piece of academic hair-splitting. It allows us to ask why a Garo woman in Meghalaya can inherit ancestral land, while a Santhal woman in Jharkhand traditionally cannot. The biology is the same. The gender norms are entirely different. Margaret Mead’s classic 1935 fieldwork in Papua New Guinea was one of the earliest demonstrations of this point. She found that among the Arapesh both men and women were gentle and cooperative, among the Mundugumor both were aggressive, and among the Tchambuli the women were dominant while men were emotionally dependent. That single comparison destroyed the idea that “masculine” and “feminine” temperaments are fixed by nature.

How tribal societies interpret sex and gender 🔗

India is home to over 700 Scheduled Tribes, and their interpretations of gender are anything but uniform. Some tribes are strictly patrilineal, others matrilineal, and a few hold gender relations that mainstream Indian society would find startlingly egalitarian.

The matrilineal exception: Khasi, Garo and Jaintia 🔗

Meghalaya’s three major tribes are often cited as the textbook example of how culture, not biology, organises gender. Among the Khasi, the youngest daughter, called Ka Khadduh, inherits all ancestral property; after marriage husbands live in the mother-in-law’s home; and children take the mother’s surname. The Khasi are described as one of the largest surviving matrilineal cultures in the world.

However, matriliny is not the same as matriarchy. A South Asia Journal analysis points out that women have traditionally held the reins of family power and property inheritance, but men have continued to hold political power and leadership positions, creating a paradox of gendered authority. So even where the female sex is socially elevated, the gender script still channels public authority toward men. This is precisely the kind of nuance the sex-gender framework helps us see.

Patrilineal tribes and clearer hierarchies 🔗

Move to most other tribal regions, from the Bhils of western India to the Gonds of central India and the Bodos and Mishings of Assam, and the pattern flips. A comparative study using National Family Health Survey data finds that the gender division of labour is more flexible and decision-making more equally shared in matrilineal tribal society, whereas it is more clearly defined and hierarchical in patrilineal tribal culture. Same biology, different gender architecture.

Cultural construction of gender roles 🔗

If gender is learned, where exactly is it taught? The answer is: everywhere. From birth, children in tribal societies are socialised into expectations through play, dress, work, ritual, language and dormitory institutions.

Socialisation begins early 🔗

Among many tribes of the Northeast, including the Nagas and the Mishings, traditional youth dormitories have historically separated adolescent boys and girls. Sociology researchers note that institutions like the Tangkhul Naga youth dormitories enforce a clear division by sex while also providing a shared sense of community and purpose. Boys learn weaving of bamboo, hunting techniques, oral history of warriors; girls learn songs, weaving of cloth, food preservation. None of this is biological. All of it becomes second nature.

Division of labour as a daily lesson 🔗

The most visible gender lesson is the everyday division of work. A study on the position of tribal women observes that among the Gaddis and Bhutias, men do shepherding while women cultivate food crops, and a similar pattern holds for the Bhils and Bodhs where men work away from home while women cultivate for subsistence. Children watch this every day and absorb it as the “natural” order, even though anthropologists have shown such roles vary enormously across tribes.

Ritual, taboo and the gendered body 🔗

Gender is also taught through religious and bodily practice. An ethnographic study of the Chuktia Bhunjia of Odisha shows that although the economic division of labour is indistinct, women are perceived as bearers of misfortune during menstruation and are prohibited from entering sacred places such as the kitchen, the cowshed and sacred groves. The female body, biologically the same as anywhere else, is loaded with cultural meaning that restricts movement, voice and access. This is gender at work, not sex.

Implications for tribal women’s identity, work and status 🔗

Once we separate sex from gender, we can finally ask the harder question: what does this distinction mean for the real lives of tribal women?

Work: visible, vital, and often invisible 🔗

Tribal women are among the most economically active women in the country. Research published on tribal gender inequalities finds that tribal women have been working shoulder to shoulder with tribal men to contribute financially to the household economy, and quite often do more physical labour in agricultural fields and forests than tribal men. Yet the cultural script frequently codes this work as “help” rather than as primary economic activity, denying women the social capital that comes with being recognised as the breadwinner.

Status: more freedom, less power 🔗

The popular image of the “free” tribal woman is only half true. Scholars argue that earlier portrayals of tribal women as enjoying higher social status than caste-society women have given way to more critical analysis that examines their economic burden, workload, and access to education, food, nutrition, modern occupation and political participation. Greater physical mobility, freedom in choice of marriage and access to remarriage are real. But heavy workloads, limited political voice and growing exposure to patriarchal mainstream values complicate the picture.

The Khasi paradox 🔗

Even in Meghalaya, where one might expect maximum gender equality, problems persist. A report hosted by the North Eastern Space Applications Centre notes that even in the matrilineal society of the Khasis, where women are expected to be free of violence and discrimination, crime, violence and discrimination against women are reported almost on a daily basis. Inheriting property is not the same as having decision-making power, and the matrilineal system itself is now under pressure from urbanisation, Christianity, and exposure to patrilineal mainstream norms.

Change under modernisation 🔗

The sex-gender distinction also helps explain what happens when tribal communities are pulled into the mainstream. As one study of culture and gender among Indian tribes observes, mainstreaming, displacement and globalisation have significantly altered traditional tribal culture and gender relationships, and exposure to a market-oriented economy has played a major role in changing tribal women’s roles at home and in society. The biology has not changed. The gender expectations are being rewritten, often not in women’s favour, as cash economies and patrilineal property laws replace customary practice.

Why this distinction is essential for Population and Family Health Studies 🔗

For anyone studying family planning, fertility, health outcomes or social policy, the sex-gender distinction is not optional. Sex ratios at birth, contraceptive use, age at marriage, schooling for girls, maternal mortality, none of these outcomes can be explained by biology alone. They are produced by gender norms acting on biological bodies. The favourable tribal sex ratio in many regions, for instance, is not because tribal foetuses are biologically different. It is because customary gender norms in many tribes have historically valued daughters more, or have placed remote tribal areas beyond easy reach of sex-determination technologies.

Recognising sex as ascribed and gender as achieved is therefore the first step toward designing policies that respect tribal women’s autonomy, protect their customary rights, and avoid imposing mainstream patriarchal templates on communities that have, for generations, organised themselves quite differently.

What do you think? If gender roles in tribal societies are learned rather than biologically fixed, what kind of socialisation changes could shift the experience of tribal women in your generation? And when matrilineal traditions like those of the Khasi come under pressure from mainstream patriarchal norms, what should be preserved, and who should decide?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/41949/1/Unit-5.pdf
2. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp05/chapter/gender-and-tribe/
3. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-sepik.html
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya
5. https://southasiajournal.net/matrilineal-society-of-meghalaya-historical-roots-and-contemporary-challenges
6. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2024.2360172
7. https://sociology.institute/sociology-in-india/gender-roles-social-differentiation-tribal-societies/
8. https://ijlsi.com/wp-content/uploads/Position-of-Tribal-Women-in-India.pdf
9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00219096211059818
10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345867714_TRIBAL_WOMEN_IN_INDIA_THE_GENDER_INEQUALITIES_AND_ITS_REPERCUSSIONS
11. https://nesac.gov.in/assets/resources/2020/12/Interpretation-of-womens-Role_An-analysis-on-Khasi-tribe-of-Meghalaya.pdf
12. https://www.neliti.com/publications/359816/culture-and-gender-dynamics-in-the-context-of-tribes-of-india