Impact Impact of Globalization on Tribal Culture in India: Continuity, Change, and Cultural Negotiation

Domains of Impact,A Framework for Culturally Grounded, Rights-Respecting Development

Abstract

Globalization—understood as the intensifying flows of capital, information, media, people, and ideas—has transformed everyday life across India. For India’s many tribal (Adivasi) societies, these currents have brought new opportunities for mobility and rights-claims as well as stark challenges to linguistic diversity, ecological life worlds, ritual systems, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. This paper analyzes how globalization has reconfigured tribal culture in India in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It situates tribal cultural change historically domains of continuity and change (language, religion, kinship, livelihood, education, media and consumption, political identity); closes with a framework for culturally grounded, rights-respecting development. Globalization's impact on indigenous cultures, particularly Adivasi communities, is a subject of extensive analysis and debate. Contrary to the common perception that globalization solely leads to cultural erosion, recent perspectives suggest a more nuanced understanding. It is argued that globalization acts as a catalyst for a complex process of cultural negotiation, where various dynamics such as loss, hybridization, and creative resurgence occur simultaneously, shaping the evolving cultural landscape of indigenous communities.

Keywords: Adivasi, indigeneity, globalization, culture change, language,  identity politics, India