Ritual Economy and Women’s Identity: A Comparative Analysis of Burlang Yatra (Odisha) and Bathukamma (Telangana), India

Abstract

This article advances an anthropological analysis of how material substances acquire social efficacy through ritualized circulation, moral valuation, and cosmological embedding in tribal as well as other indigenous societies of India. By criticizing approaches that treat ritual as epiphenomenal to subsistence, it demonstrates how millet-centered rituals actively organize economic relations, structure gendered authority, and sustain collective personhood. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Kutia Kondh of Odisha, and comparative ritual formations such as the Burlang Yatra and the Bathukamma festival of Telangana, the article foregrounds women’s ritual labor as a central mechanism through which ecological knowledge, social memory, and symbolic power are produced and transmitted across generations. Conceptualizing women not as passive bearers of tradition but as ritual-economic agents, the analysis shows how embodied practices mediate relations between land, seed, and cosmology. In this regard, millet emerges as a relational substance that anchors gendered identities and reconfigures the boundaries between economy, ritual, and ecology. The article argues for re-centering indigenous foodways and women’s ritual agency within anthropological analyses of economy and identity. These challenging frameworks marginalize such practices as residual or merely symbolic in relation to “real” economic life.