Studying Cultural Synthesis: Evidence from a Border village in South

Studies on social and cultural change in India are explained largely through models of sanskritization, acculturation and little/great tradition. All these models assume a one-way process of change – from the low to the high castes, from the tribal to the non-tribal (be it Hindus or Christians) and from the little to the great tradition. Focusing more specifically on tribal studies, one does witness two main theoretical strands that dominate the literature. One set of studies highlights the distinctive characteristics of the ‘tribal ’ be its culture, religion, kinship or marriage. Another set of literature talks about the integration of the tribes into the Hindu fold through the processes of sanskritization, accommodation and acculturation (Hinduization, peasantization are also terms used for such processes of integration). Many studies on tribal and non-tribal interaction thus document such processes of integration and assimilation losing sight of the fact that such processes of change are not necessarily unidirectional. Singh and others argue that sanskritization goes along with tribalization and offers ample instances of such processes1. Thus a particular culture (or any element of culture) might include elements of both the worlds i.e. the tribal and the non-tribal and hence is essentially syncretic. In this regard, anthropologists ar