ABSTRACT
In India terms such as 'forest-dwellers', 'hillmen' and 'tribals' - not coterminous with, but including 'hunter-gatherers' - were and are used. The protected 'Scheduled Tribal Areas' is a category taken over from the colonial British to retain particular control over the most 'backward' and 'primitive' of India's inhabitants. Many foragers may have been forced to take up other subsistence practices because of colonial, environmental, demographic or commercial pressures, but other processes have led in the opposite direction. Extremely complex histories may characterize these groups and processes of classification. The European choice of subsistence tells the people something of the cultural preoccupations of those writing the conjectural histories - often economists and lawyers, and/or landowners and 'improvers'. The salience, meaning and even presence of such distinctions - and the uses to which they are put - are historically and culturally variable. It is for particular reasons that we preferentially use subsistence as a primary axis of variability.
