'Tribes' in the ethnography of Nepal: Some comments on a debate

The recent interest in the question of tribe-caste differences in Nepal stems very much from earlier debates among Indianists, and the author wants to start this discussion by identifying certain focal issues raises in these exchanges. Administrators and anthropologists of India - these roles sometimes combined in the same persons - were for many years concerned with the differences between tribal and peasant/caste systems. In the heydays of the British raj, the differences were often expressed in racial or physiological terms, aided from the middle of the nineteenth century by the new technologies of photography and anthropometry. In time, distinctions came to be phrased in terms of a set of descriptive social or cultural traits associated with each. Tribal peoples were defined as ecologically more isolated, economically more primitive, socially less complex, and morally more backward than peasant/caste populations. Tribals might also be distinguished on the grounds of technology and livelihood: they were defined in terms of hunting and gathering and/or shifting cultivation, against the settled agriculture practised by caste/peasants.