The Everyday Life of Culture: Knowledge Transmission and Continuity inIndigenous and Adivasi Communities of South India

Abstract

In Indigenous and Adivasi communities, everyday activities and interactions play a crucial role in passing down traditional information to future generations. This paper investigates how ordinary routines—language, kinship practices, community exchanges, work, play, and ritual—function as critical sites of cultural continuity, drawing on theoretical frameworks of Sociocultural Learning (Vygotsky), Enculturation, Situated Learning, and Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger), Symbolic Interactionism (Mead, Blumer), Practice Theory (Bourdieu), Social Learning Theory (Bandura), and Cultural Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron). Ethnographic research on the Yerukala, Irular, and Kāṭṭu Nāyakar communities in South India reveals how behaviours such as fortune telling mirror broader Indigenous methods for preserving knowledge, livelihood, and identity. 

Oral traditions and symbolic storytelling instil collective memory and cosmology in everyday speech; intergenerational apprenticeship secures the transmission of specialist expertise; and community interactions make cultural practice into both an economic resource and a social link. Embodied work practices and ritualised performances reflect habitus through movements, clothing, and tools, whereas fun and performative elements promote observant learning. Ritual invocations and symbolic acts strengthen cosmological worldviews, allowing for cultural reproduction even in the face of social and economic marginalisation.

This analysis places these findings within broader discussions about everyday living, focusing on de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Living, Bennett's Culture and Everyday Life, Miller and McHoul's Popular Culture and Everyday Life, and Storey's From Popular Culture to Everyday Life. Collectively, these works demonstrate how the everyday can be a potent location of cultural meaning-making. By situating South Indian ethnographies within this comparative and theoretical framework, the paper contends that Indigenous and Adivasi communities exemplify a universal dynamic: the incorporation of cultural survival strategies into the ordinary rhythms of life, where work, ritual, and play converge as enduring vehicles of resilience, identity, and continuity.