ABSTRACT
I went to the Building Bridges conference at Oxford Brookes as a ‘tribal activist’ and without any significant knowledge of Anthropology. Among the participants, there were several eminent Anthropologists as well as advocates of Indigenous Studies. Back home in India at the Adivasi Academy, the institute for Indigenous Studies I founded, I had been talking for over a decade about the need for what was crudely termed as ‘reverse Anthropology’ (Devy 2006: 122). Therefore, to find Anthropologists themselves trying to build bridges between their field and Indigenous Studies was to see an intellectual combat at close quarters. During the discussion, I realised that the forces on both sides were engaged in the same pursuit, their anxieties just as shared, and indeed that they had better make a common cause, for both the sides have a fairly similar battle to fight for recovering ‘understanding’ out of a wide array of stereotypes arising in altogether different quarters.
