Vishvajit Pandya is an anthropologist engaged in active field research among the tribal communities of the Andaman Islands since 1983. His published work brings together a wide range of methods and approaches for the study of rituals and cosmology and the visual and material culture of Andamanese hunter-gatherers. His developing research interests also focus on the history and culture of marginalized tribal communities in mainland South Asia. He has published extensively in a range of academic journals and is the author of a forthcoming collection of essays titled, ‘In the Forest – Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History, 1858–2000’.
Vishvajit Pandya, Through Lens and Text: Constructions of a ‘Stone Age’ Tribe in the Andaman Islands, History Workshop Journal, Volume 67, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 173–193, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbn081
The inhabitants of the North Sentinel Islands in the Bay of Bengal have for long been described as one of the last surviving Stone Age tribes of the world. The ‘truth value’ of this assertion has been reinforced over time through a complex and often collusive representational order sustained by for instance the institutions of the Indian state, the global media, travel writers, anthropologists and the non-tribal communities of the Andaman Islands. This paper examines the visual and textual practices that constitute this representational order and pits against it the historical and ethnographic realities that render it vulnerable to radical inquiry. With its critical focus on the truth-bearing propensities of photographic images and their accompanying texts, this paper seeks to interrogate received ethnographic certitudes about an imputed Stone Age people and ponders the possibilities of acknowledging them as historical actors.