How do you ‘know’ a tribal when you see one? How do you ‘see’ a tribal when you know one?

This article considers the formation of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic implications in the course of understanding and framing the category of ‘tribe’ on Andaman Nicobar Islands. Considering events from colonial and post-colonial histories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the article argues that the process of classification and reclassification, motivated by anthropological knowledge and the drive for welfare, creates a discourse that tends to deny cultural and social differentiation or diversity among the various tribal communities that inhabit different parts of the Island archipelago. Statist definitions in other words serve to reduce the conditions and identities of tribal groups into categories of the ‘primitive’, ‘particularly vulnerable’ or presently as just ‘vulnerable’. While such categorisations may have its uses in the allocation of welfare budgets, the sole focus on the category of ‘vulnerability’ obfuscates a more nuanced understanding of the conditions of life and well being among such communities. The article asks if our ‘categorising impulse’ restrains us from thinking of and problematising questions of ‘agency’ in the self-description and assertion of tribal identities. Why is it that the state or the non-tribal outsider remains indifferent to the deconstruction of the statist category of the ‘vulnerable’? Could the discourse of the ‘changeless de- historicised’ Andaman islander suit the ‘non- tribal’ status quo in the Islands?

THE CESSPOOL OF EMPIRE: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

ASTRIKING NUMBER OF CHARACTERSin Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories who return to England after a sojourn in the colonies have an outlandish aspect. One, a contorted and bilious ex-soldier, owns a pet Indian mongoose. Another has lost a leg to a crocodile in the Ganges and has a poison-toting Andaman Islander in tow. A third keeps a fiendish hound and passes his South American wife off as his sister. A fourth returns from South Africa with a “blanched” face and a furtive manner. Many of these returned colonials are portrayed as menacing, and their presence in England precipitates a crisis, either a crime or a mysterious tragedy. In actual fact, return from the colonies to the metropole was a routine phenomenon, and returned colonials were familiar figures on the metropolitan landscape. Why does Doyle depict the phenomenon of return from Empire as so problematic if it was in fact quite commonplace?

Optimism and Pessimism

When two persons meet together to discuss some enterprise or future event, or other speculative matter, without coming to an agreement, they may separate by one thinking or calling the other an optimist and the other thinking or calling his opponent a pessimist. Thereby they settle the matter temporarily, although of course they leave it undecided and agree only to differ. What they really settle is that two congenitally different temperaments necessarily view the subject from two different aspects and conclude accordingly. They do not stay to enquire which is the true view, the one being inclined by his temperament to look on the dark side of things and see the evils, hates, strifes, sufferings, failures and follies in the world, the other inclined by his temperament to look on their bright side and accordingly see the good, love, joys, and successes in it. Why, indeed, should they stop to enquire? Every mind in the world necessarily construes it in terms of itself, and therefore feels and thinks its individual world—the mind of the fool a different world from that of the sage, the mind of the sinner from that of the saint, the mind of the Andaman Islander from that of the Anglo-Saxon, the mind of the particular person from that of his neighbour. There must naturally be one common world in the necessarily common notion of a like-structured species, but there are as many particular worlds as there are persons in it.