Description
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.