In this article, we extend the theoretical discussion about tribal ecology to the ethnographic present. Tribal ecology as an idea helps us to understand the climate crisis because it provides a window into histories of ecological knowledge in the context of large-scale infrastructures of extraction and development. Tribal communities are often frontline communities in terms of their vulnerability to climate change and have also been subjects of developmental discourses. Accordingly, our contributions span multiple fields and epistemic perspectives, including a indigenous sociological view, historical, anthropological, and the efforts of a Danish NGO (iiINTERest).

In the first section, antinomies of ecology, we look at the mobilization of divergent ecological discourse for achieving ends such as community formation and contested identity-based claims for reservation quotas. These two polarities exist on a continuum of how ecological discourses are mobilties for both group solidarity and contested state recognition. Our group is not that tribal communities are uniquely ecological but that one cannot understand tribal communities without attending to the work that ecology does. Following Xaxa (2016), until colonial rule and post-Independent management regimes, tribes “were the guardians of the land and forests and enjoyed unrestricted access to first and forest resources” -- which speaks to the centrality of land and notional ides of territorialized homeland, even among highly mobile tribal communities. We tease out how tribal ecologies are engaged in the affirmative project of group solidarity vis-a-vis land-based claims which in turn draw from grounded epistemologies that construct nature as an animating force of social cohesion. On the other hand, ecological knowledge can act as guarded epistemic knowledge, framed by the Comaroffs as ethnicized copyright material, that can exclude communities, including Dalits, who are partially integrated into tribal formations.

In the second section, scales of tribal development, we explore the spatial dichotomy of tribal ecologies rooted in village life versus ongoing processes of urban migration and agrarian settlement extending back to at least the 19th century. We examine how tribal identities change over time and contemporary development practices reconstruct place-based notions of tribal ecologies as forms of knowledge embedded in village life. There is a tendency for development projects like the one included here to purposefully lump together and un-differentiate subaltern village groups, by they Dalit or SC/ST/OBC, under the shared rubric of BPL. Doing so enables subaltern knowledge to become untethered from specifical communal formations, be they caste or tribe, and for ecology to stand in for a more generalized notion of a village epistemology.