Abstract
Traditionally, children in the Jarawa community (South and Middle Andamans) play games that replicate the movements of animals their parents hunt in the forest. Jarawa children and adolescents grow up observing adults’ activities and incorporating them into their play. Boys often replicate the hunting practices of adults by making replicas of the bow and arrow. Jarawa adults view children as complete individuals and assume that children will, of their own accord, begin contributing to the political economy of the band when they are ready to do so. This also implies that children learn on their own not just finite skills but through play learn to negotiate diverse situations in their changing world. Since 1999 the world of the Jarawas has undergone a rapid transformation. The outward hostility and self-imposed isolation of the Jarawa community have eroded, and the young boys have begun hanging out at the major road passing through the reserve forest. This paper considers changes that have occurred in Jarawa children’s play since 2001 with the influence of traffic, tourists, and a more visible state authority. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter illustrates various aspects of children’s play: the different ways in which play facilitates the articulation and maintenance of, as well as challenges to, power relations between the Jarawa and elements of encroaching modernity. In this sense, play is revealed to be far from just “hanging out at the roadside” but an activity through which children develop and learn to conduct new politico-economic relations in a place where outsiders, state, forest, and Jarawas collide.
Jarawa children play at the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) (1999) imitating fiddler crabs to while away the time before the next convoy of traffic passes by and is attracted to stop and watch the kids at the roadside, while the adults wait on the side to contact and gather from the road users
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26 June 2018
An erratum has been published.
Notes
- 1.
Academic treatments often ignore the recreational and reduce children’s play to an educational activity, although this can encompass learning to be social (Smith 2000, p. 78). One particular example of this is in the conflation of play and work for children (e.g., “play is for children what work is for adults.” ibid, p. 80). While recognizing the importance of play, such discussions ignore children’s own interpretations of play’s worth, which prioritize other elements such as the recreational aspect or the opportunity for autonomy.
- 2.
Cholo-otanka, the Jarawa word for play or playing by children, encompasses any dramatic activity done by more than two individuals of any age, which may include a prop or “toy” that is incorporated into impromptu dialogue in the course of participation and performance. There are no set rules or stated objectives of such activity to begin with and individuals are free to participate or drop out at any point. This notion of “play” is distinguished from the concept of gekone-toronka, best glossed as ritualized, patterned, and repetitive work where the participants, locations, and props or instruments are specified for use, and objective is set before the activity is undertaken by an individual or individuals.
- 3.
Using words may be the convention in anthropological presentation, and certainly it is easier to integrate verbal quotes into a written analysis, but I maintain that considering the play as an image, visual information gained can be gleaned or projected better than through written words. Of course as Jarawa play is a performance and phenomenologically produced, it entails Jarawas own experience as well as reflections on it. While a speech act could also be considered in this light, the process of producing or creating a game that is roadside drama in its repetitive performance is something tangible at the end and can be a powerful experience, especially for young Jarawas. I would argue that it will be necessary in the field of social anthropology to build up, over time, a shared understanding of the levels of meaning in images and how these can be “read” in the same way that we share understandings of how to read graphs and tables (see Pandya 2009). The issue is not that there is a lack of images currently used in anthropology, but rather that they are not used to their full potential by reader or writer. Anthropology as a discipline and in academia in general, we are not trained to appreciate nonverbal forms of communicating analysis. (For more in-depth discussion on the marginalization of the visual, see works in visual anthropology such as Grimshaw (2005) and Morphy and Banks (1997)). When we see an image, we may not be experienced enough in seeing the levels of meaning present in this different register, and therefore we may assume that greater density and layers of meaning are available in a text (see Geertz’s (1973) explication of “thick description,” which only applies to anthropologists’ use of words to represent). The irony is that in the field anthropologists are observers; traditionally we observe rather than read the world we are participating in. Our interest is not just in what people say but in what they do, their thoughts and behavior, as well as their words. Although at the end of each day we are likely to convert our observations and experiences into words, we nonetheless, at this stage in the research process, value what is seen and experienced. In many ways the challenge I face is no different from that frequently experienced in all areas of anthropology: how to interpret others’ and our own experience such that it can be rendered meaningful to colleagues and open to analysis.
- 4.
Boys are free to play nearly all the time until age 15–17; for girls most of the day, in between a few errands and some babysitting, was spent in play. The freedom that Jarawa children enjoy to pursue their own interests comes partly from the adults’ understanding that such pursuits are the surest path to learning. It also comes from the general spirit of egalitarianism and personal autonomy that pervades Jarawa culture and applies as much to children as to adults. Jarawa adults view children as complete individuals, with rights comparable to those of adults. Their assumption is that children will, of their own accord, begin contributing to the economy of the band when they are developmentally ready to do so. There is no need to make children or anyone else do what they don't want to do. It is remarkable to think that our instincts to learn and work enforce a disciplined division of time to work and time to play.
- 5.
Initiation rituals among various Andamanese tribal groups consisted of a sequence of hunting undertaken by the young man that entitled him to be ritually initiated as a member of the band. This accomplishment, demonstrated by the hunting and gathering capacity of a novice, entitled him as a young individual to negotiate marriage alliances within the prescribed groups and even beyond the preferred group.
- 6.
It is generally only in industrial societies that spheres of work and play are kept separate. This drastically limits interaction between different age groups in comparison to that seen among most foraging groups.
- 7.
Much as Radcliffe-Brown (1922) described the emphasis on individual and group interdependence.
- 8.
The impact of the roadside on Jarawa culture is further evident in their naming practices. Traditionally, the Jarawa give their children names associated with a particular season or place. After 1996, children’s names began to reflect the novel introductions from the industrial world. For example, girls were named Entaneyate, the word for when Jarawas manage to get bus rides for themselves, Eweyehatey, meaning ferry boat on which the bus can ride (before 1996 large ferry boats were not in operation), and Uhaayao, the place and time where the bus stops daily. As reported by Radcliffe-Brown (1964: 93, 119, 312), the tradition of naming children was originated from marking time and space. Andamanese children, particularly postpubescent girls, were named after a particular flower that bloomed in the season of the child’s birth. Contemporary Jarawa children’s names are similarly derived from what is described by Radcliffe-Brown as a “calendar of scents” (see Pandya 1994 on significance of smell). However, new event markers have entered into child naming practices.
- 9.
In order to restrain the Jarawas’ proclivity to roam around the ATR and allow themselves to be photographed, the AAJVS workers tried to warn them that if they exposed themselves to the flashbulbs they would burn their skins and cause sores. Such warnings clearly went unheeded as the Jarawas continued their habits of stopping before buses and cars and holding out their palms for bits of betel nut, tobacco leaves, or a few rupee notes and then posing before the cameras.
- 10.
In 2009, a small truck that was left overnight at the roadside due to a breakdown was broken into by young Jarawas, and within a couple of hours, the consignment of colored markers from the truck had been distributed among various campsites near the Middle Strait and Tirupur region. Soon the colored pens were utilized to draw designs on strips of dried leaves that the boys use to put on as headdresses. These patterns were traditionally cut into the bows by the fathers and uncles to distinguish there ownership of the bow, but sons and nephews drew similar patterns with pens, integrating the traditional domain of work and goods gathered from the roadside of into the domain of play.
- 11.
Andaman Primitive Tribal Welfare Association.
- 12.
In October 2014, I initiated the Jarawa school project “Ang Katha” in collaboration with Island administration. Teaching is conducted by Jarawa elders and the social welfare staff. The teaching material is derived from Jarawa traditional practices, and the emphasis is on biculturalism and bilingualism to empower the Jarawa and ensure their identity and traditional techniques and knowledge pertaining to the land survive.
- 13.
Occasionally an adult might offer a word of advice or demonstrate how to do something better, such as how to shape an arrowhead, but such help is given only when the child clearly desires it. Adults do not initiate, direct, or interfere with children’s activities. Adults do not show any evidence of concern about their children’s education; millennia of experience have proven to them that children are experts at educating themselves.
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Pandya, V. (2016). When Hunters Gather but Do Not Hunt, Playing with the State in the Forest: Jarawa Children’s Changing World. In: Terashima, H., Hewlett, B.S. (eds) Social Learning and Innovation in Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers. Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans Series. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55997-9_16
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