Tactile tensions: uncertainty, mutuality, and therianthropic nightmares in Highland Odisha

Abstract

In the central highlands of Odisha, India, Kutia Kondh families navigate a precarious reality shaped by productive autonomy, decentralized authority, and material and relational uncertainty. Abundance and destitution are finely balanced in a world where humans, animals, ancestors, and spirits are co‐present and co‐dependent but also opaque and unpredictable. A significant amount of ‘tact’ is therefore required to create enduring links of mutuality whilst also respecting the autonomy of the parties involved. Tactful action appears at multiple scales: everyday relational negotiations, shamanic dialogues, and ritual sacrifice are attempts to bring the uncertainty and heterogeneity of life into some kind of temporary orbit. These tactful elicitations of mutuality are a way to manage the difficult dead, unsatiated spirits, and uncanny therianthropes – nightmares of unmanaged commensuration in a situation of intense more‐than‐human mutuality. While the Kutia have a long history of ‘segmentary egalitarianism’ in regional politics, the everyday management of relational precarity in Kutia villages is opposed to any sense of equality‐as‐equivalence. Kutia families ultimately grapple with different egalitarian registers in the mutualities of upland life. Alongside egalitarian boundary work in communal relations, there is the newer civic egalitarianism of the Odisha state – an egalitarian register at a much larger scale, accompanied by new nightmares of total, tactless commensuration.