Tribal Society and Culture: Change and Continuity- A Study of Kondhmals District of Orissa (An Old and Rare Book)

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The aim of this book is to present the effect of modernization on the tribals of Orissa in general and Kondhmal in particular in a single volume to cater to the need of the students, teachers and the general readers. The book provides almost complete information on many important aspects of tribal society of Orissa and especially Kondhs of Kondhmal district. The book will not only serve the requirements of the students of Undergraduate to Post Graduate classes but also help the research scholar for further research on the field. The book gives a lucid reading of impact of modernization on the tribals of Orissa for the common readers.

Professor Manmath Padhy, Professor of History, Berhampur University is one of the senior Professors of history of Orissa. He has 25 years of teaching experience in a University. He has a good number of research papers and books to his credit. More than ten scholars have obtained Ph.Ds under his guidance. He has been Principal of Tara Tarini College for seven years. He has been Head of the Department of History, Berhampur University for two years. He has served the University in various capacities. He is widely traveled and academically associated with many Universities of India.

Dr. (Smt.) Prativamayee Mitra obtained her post graduate degree from Utkal University and Ph.D. in History from Berhampur University. Presently she is working as a lecturer in History in RCM Science College, Khallikote. She has attended a number of national seminars and conference. She is the Life Member of Orissa History Congress and South India History Congress. She has published a good number of articles to her credit.

Looking at the fractured nature of our age-old essentialist epistemy, the postmodern thinker is today on a course to interrogate every conceptual frame/belief system he works with. Philosophers from Heidegger to Derrida to Foucault did not hesitate to invert hierarchies of every hue and explode every myth of structured domination, overt or clandestine. They even argued that the aboriginal huntsman as well as the big corporator of today has been scripting the same text both are constructs of their contemporary ideological dominants. The resonance of such thoughts is consequence-wise far reaching. For instance, what we have been dismissing as barbaric and outlandish is at once fore grounded as meaningful and "civilized" in another sense. Tribal cultural alterity as against the metropolitan East and West has installed tribal rights as a challenge to (in) difference of canonical knowledge. In fact, such revisionist thinking about the tribes it has become an enormous project in itself for intellectuals to probe.

The historicisation of tribal history, socio economic and political, has become the most interesting and profitable challenge to global research today. It has been found that ambivalent interpretations of tribal life culture are irrelevant in the context of revisionist thinking that has foregrounded tribal studies as a problematic, as a stunning discovery of their basic survival instinct and also as a site of continuity and change, alienation and assimilation, statics and dynamics. Primarily anthropological and socio-graphic in format, the tribal demographic reality exhibited a variety of ethnic differences. But the recent critical lexicon demands to analyse the history of the tribes in terms of shifting paradigms, as a sort of archaeological strata writing over geological times the story of our own civilization, and of course as a narrative of continuities and changes after non-tribal incursions into the woodlands. An humble attempt has been made in this study to show the matrix of these stimulations and responses of our tribes vis-à-vis non-tribal ethos.

**Contents and Sample Pages**