ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two issues: the issue of the Adivasi, the indigenous peoples of India and their role in anthropological museums; the issue of the transformation process from collecting to creating art through museums and thus on Adivasi art - as the convergence of the intangible and the tangible. Adivasi category includes around 100 million people forming more than 600 socio-culturally autochthonous Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian language and kinship groups in India, administratively labelled as 'scheduled tribes'. The new museum movement in India, led to the Guwahati Declaration of 1988, has been formulated with new guidelines for Indian museology. The new museology of India has been conceived as a community-based eco-museology, where local cultures were supposed to act as curators, narrators and teachers of their own cultural heritage. The role of museum professionals supposed to be restricted to supporting and mediating these activities. Marginalization started with the British colonial empire and the establishment of the land revenue zamindari system in 1793.
