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Abstract

Women’s work is commonly conceptualized through an economic lens that prioritizes the valuation of paid and unpaid labor and assesses women’s status and empowerment primarily in monetary terms. Such approaches are limiting as a means of understanding the lived realities of Indigenous Tribal women. In contrast, this article adopts a sociological and anthropological perspective to examine the multifaceted meanings of work among Uchoi Indigenous Tribal women in Tripura, Northeast India. The Uchoi community is a recognized Scheduled Tribe (ST) under Article 342 of the Constitution of India. By situating work within its sociocultural, ecological, and communal contexts, this article demonstrates how work shapes identity, respect, and social standing within the Uchoi community beyond mere economic valuation. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study incorporates women’s memories, lived experiences, and narratives to challenge dominant feminist interpretations of work that remain largely universalist and focused on monetary value. Methodologically, the research employs elderly visitation, conversational methods, and engaged observation. The findings reveal a contextual worldview regarding work among Uchoi women, expressed through practices such as marriage by trial and service, weaving as both work and cultural expression, relational and reciprocal forms of work, collective labour in jhum cultivation, and the preservation of Indigenous knowledge systems. These practices are rooted in Indigenous epistemologies encompassing arts and crafts, weaving traditions, ecological knowledge, and communal labor arrangements. The article emphasizes the necessity of recognizing these distinct contextual experiences, cosmologies, and epistemologies of Indigenous Tribal women in theorizing work and empowerment. It contributes to feminist scholarship by reconceptualizing work through the framework of Indigenous feminism, which foregrounds Indigenous worldviews as embedded in context-specific practices. The paper argues for moving beyond universalized frameworks of work towards an approach that acknowledges the socially embedded, relational, and culturally situated dimensions shaping Indigenous women’s work and lived experiences.

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