(Anthropologist, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)

At

IFI-CSH conference room (ground floor)

2 Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road, New Delhi – 110011

Abstract: Scheduled castes and tribes in India have developed different strategies to manage their social marginality and to boost their position in a changing world by trying to make their ritual role indispensable. Most often, it is a question of valorizing their local gods and their tutelary power over forest beings. Scheduled castes and tribes re-position themselves in the religious landscape through puja or shamanism, and seek to convert their ritual power into a capital of social promotion, which may in turn translate for example into the creation of new sub-castes or the emergence of marriages with higher castes. North and South India offer very different scenarios in this matter, even if some features appear similar. Based on a comparison of two cases–one located in Himachal Pradesh and the other in Tamil Nadu–, this presentation aims to question these strategies and examine whether they reflect instances of caste conflict or of a rotating hierarchy.

Romain Simenel is an Anthropologist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). Assigned since 2021 to the CSDS in Delhi and visiting scholar at the CSH, he is currently working on the role of the ritual in environmental management and social promotion in India. He has published three anthropological books and coordinated the book of the COP 21 Climate Change meeting in Paris entitled Ecology of our worlds.

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