"Blog 1: TRIBES OF INDIA : MEENA"

The Meena is an Indian tribe that lives primarily in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. It's also known as Meenanda or Mina in other languages. The Meenas claim a link to Vishnu's Matsya avatar and the Matsya Kingdom of the past. Meena or Mina comes from the Sanskrit word Meen, which means "fish."

Originally, the Meenas were a nomadic people. They were described as a hill tribe comparable to the Bhils, who were semi-wild. However, during the British Raj, they were classified as a criminal tribe and added to the Criminal Tribes Act in order for the British Government to achieve its objectives. The Indian Government currently classifies them as a Scheduled Tribe.

The Meenas are a patrilocal, patrilineal, and kin-based society in the traditional sense. They divide their lands into twelve geographical divisions known as 'Pals,' and they dwell in tight villages or isolated hamlets known as 'dhanis,' all of which are unclean in origin. In most cases, individuals of a single 'got' make up the Meena village community. Two or more 'gots' of the tribe have been established in a vast number of communities. As a result, we can conclude that the village population is primarily tribal. The traditional Meena village follows its old pattern of habitation either on alluvial plains or on the semi-arid plateau, with agriculture being the primary occupation of the community. The boundaries of the settlements and farms clearly demarcate the habitation area.

Ecological studies in anthropology have given culture diverse degrees of importance and held differing perspectives, linking culture to the concept of an external environment setting in which a group of people develops distinct lifestyles. People's lives, particularly their modes of livelihood, are heavily influenced by environmental factors.

Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas opposed environmental determinism passionately and definitively in the first three decades of the twentieth century, assigning the environment a peripheral and non-deterministic function for the most part. The British school of thought saw the environment's role as just defining the boundaries of human resource manipulation.

Though the impact of the environment on people's economic lives is not completely proven, the impact of the environment on people is directly proportional to the primitiveness of their culture. The environment has a greater impact on their economic operations the more remote they are. The temperature, Cora and fauna, and physio-geographic features are the driving forces behind their economic activity, which they employ in accordance with their cultural practices.

The environment and economic covariance in the Meena are tinged with signs of modernism, which can be seen in growing exposure to city life and continuous development programmes.