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Long Abstract
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The grouping of tribes into pan-national religions suggests the emergence of new categories leading to contesting situations. In many parts of the world, the indigenous and local religions of the tribal groups are being taken over by major religions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The understanding of the issues dealing with contemporary trends, and the contestations of being absorbed by the larger identity require probing into the historical and contextual accounts of the various tribes. In many erstwhile colonized regions, the tribal communities have lost their religious identity encompassing the aspects of animism, totemism, shamanism, naturism, and so on, and are categorized as possessing an alien religion that was thrust upon them from the outside. Many of them, however, keep their ethnic identity vibrant due to several factors and advantages. Categorization is a process and the groups are formed, modified, and re-labeled in an ongoing activity. This usually happens when the group’s image is socially constructed and viewed by others and sometimes by the people themselves as carrying the labels of inferiority and subordination. These categories then tend to become rigid or fixed and taken for granted as timeless entities. This Panel solicits papers from different regions of the world focusing on the linkage between tribes and religion, exploring the indigenous modes of worship and their appropriation into a new category, the social construction of their identity, and the unraveling of the so far hidden and ignored contestations adopted by the tribes in varied ways.
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