Contact zone: ethnohistorical notes on the relationship between kings and tribes in Middle India

Abstract

This article discusses political and ritual aspects of indigeneity in the former jungle kingdoms of southern and northern Orissa. It will ask whether “tribal” principles of authority and sociopolitical organization do or do not differ from “royal” ones, and argue that the dichotomy, which is often taken for granted, between states and stateless societies must be questioned. In place of using this dichotomy, this article identifies a “contact zone” in which acephalous segmentary lineage societies and kingdoms existed side by side and were interconnected in mutually reinforcing ways. But how can such aggregations of two apparently different forms of political organization, with their concomitant ideologies, be understood as forming a unitary whole? How was the relationship between the royal principles of rule and authority of the Hindu kind, on the one hand, and the tribal principles of rule and authority on the other, viewed and practically pursued by the indigenous, and sometimes exegenous, actors themselves?