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Land acquisition or land alienation has been a very disturbing phenomenon which is going on in various parts of Assam like other states of India. When the cultural obligations and rules of generosity play a role to exploitation, then the question arises – how is culture to be injected into this marketed arrangement? It indicates a pathway to understand cultural obligations in terms of consumption and exchange as an alternative to what we call today, ‘a market’. The paper tries to analyze while state led development activities are significantly liable to most of the land acquisition schemes, the adivasis have been unable to retain their rights and ownership for their own slot. This issue has been remarkably observed amongst the adivasis of the village Amdanga, Assam. They are gradually acculturating themselves into caste category through various intermediate stages, marked by both tribal and caste like traits. The question of obligation or generosity is spun by two possible roots, indebtedness and the material condition of a community in the absence of a market situation. This paper tries to posit the question of traditional idea of generosity and how its expression is imbibed in collectivity, myths and symbolic representations of everyday life. The standard modalities for varied social actions are established by the actors in control. This paper incorporates few observations towards cultural or traditional ideas of generosity which have created obstacles in achieving possible life chances to be fitted to the existing mode of livelihood.