‘Why didn't you bring us a pumpkin?’ Relational recognition of caste, class, and tribe in rural Andhra Pradesh, India

This article analyses the ways characteristics associated with the ‘Schedule Tribe’ (‘ST’) category in India shape situated acts of relating to others with either deference or assumed superiority. Ethnography shows how within an indigenous Adivasi community the traits that determine identification within the group generate feelings of entitlement and stigma, and provide frameworks for ascribing status distinctions to others, as equal, superior, or inferior. The ethnography of interaction between members of an ‘ST’ community captures the interpellative process of social actors continually placing each other into subjectively constituted maps of association and relatedness that are informed by longer discourses of classification. The material illuminates how characteristics associated with ‘ST’ identities that are valorized in one context may be stigmatized in another, suggesting that literatures on politics of recognition must be more attentive to the contextual variability of such frameworks in different spaces.