Paper short abstract:

The Present paper proposes to examine the life-worlds of peasants and forest-dwellers – the communities who purely dependent upon, and are completely immersed themselves with, ecological sphere in which they work and sustain upon.

Paper long abstract:

Since times immemorial, human groups have been operating in diverse geographical systems and have come to develop lifestyles of their own. Although it is quite a complex task to attribute any fixed characteristic feature to a particular human group, it is nevertheless not so difficult an exercise to find a particular set of people living with certain commonalities. Social science scholarship has long been deeply involved in the latter exercise. Anthropology and Sociology are known to have shown a particular interest in observing and explaining the inter-relationships between the human life and the natural environment. One of the most contentious, if not a completely controversial, findings of the social science research in this regard is a recognition that some human groups are more close to their environment than others.

Forest-dwellers, be it in India or elsewhere, are found to have been living in intimate relationship with their nature. Quite interestingly, however, most of the Indian peasant groups too live in close relationship with the nature around which their sustenance revolves, and Indian social sciences do not seem to have paid enough attention to understand these intricate relationships - the relationships between forest-dwellers and the natural environment on one hand and the relationships between peasants and their natural environment on the other.

It is in this regard that the proposed paper would attempt to understand and explain some of the nuanced events taking place in the life-worlds of both the peasants and the forest-dwellers.