Disruptive transactions: The complex configurations of sharing and the vulnerability of life in the Jarawa Reserve forest in the Andaman Islands

Abstract

The murder of a mixed-race child in the Jarawa reserve territory of the Andaman Islands made headlines in the global media in March 2016. What caught the interest was the murder of the child, allegedly by a Jarawa man in collusion with an outsider, and the ethical and legal conundrum it purportedly posed to Indian state authorities. The murder of the child was in fact carried out at the behest of an outsider, a poacher in the forest who was apparently the father of the child and known to have been involved in multiple sexual relationships with a particular group of Jarawa women who formed a sorority and lived at the fringes of the reserve�s forest. Without the protective structures of a family, this sorority has forged alliances among themselves and consequently remained in an ambivalent relationship to the community, often facing overt restraints on their rights to participate in the practices of �sharing� within the community. The women�s proximity to outsiders and their participation in an alternative exchange economy with poachers and settlers is a mode of survival. This paper focuses on the precarious existence of this group of Jarawa women in the Andaman Islands, reflecting on the contingent and gendered configurations of sharing, non-sharing and transactional practices that have emerged in the context of the Jarawa community�s contact with the outsiders, their confinement in a territory close to non-tribal settlements, and their inclusion in a welfare system that erodes their values of sharing in deeply disruptive ways.