ABSTRACT
Through a critical appraisal of old, new, and emergent scholarship on the ‘tribe’, this entry traces and places the invention, institutionalization, and the later local infatuation with the colonial category of the ‘tribe’ in Northeast India. Further tracking the social life of the tribal category in Northeast India, the entry then relates how in the postcolonial epoch the ‘tribe’ revealed both as an affective source of embodied and emplaced identity and as a compelling, competitive, and conflictual principle of political mobilization, recognition, and claim-making.
