Recognition, Ritual, and Indigenous Identity: Reinterpreting Charles Taylor's Hermeneutics of Recognition Through the Philosophical Worldview of the Irula Community of Attapadi, Kerala, India

This paper develops an intercultural dialogue between Charles Taylor’s hermeneutics of recognition and the living philosophy of the Irula community of Attapadi, in the Palakkad district of Kerala. It examines how an indigenous epistemology articulates a relational understanding of being that both deepens and extends Taylor’s account of the dialogical self. For Taylor, the self is not a self-enclosed, “punctual” subject but an identity constituted within what he terms a “web of interlocution”: one cannot be a self on one’s own, but only in relation to interlocutors who are essential to one’s self-definition (Taylor, 1989). The argument advanced here is that Irula ritual life, oral tradition, and ecological ethics give embodied form to this dialogical ontology while pressing beyond its anthropocentric limits. Performances such as the circular Kummi dance and the community’s narrative and ceremonial traditions enact a lived philosophy of interdependence in which personhood, nature, and the sacred are mutually constitutive. Against the modern ideal of an autonomous individual, Irula thought frames personhood as relational and ecological, grounded in reciprocal recognition extended to both human and other-than-human worlds. Read in this way, recognition is reconceived from an interpersonal moral gesture into a cosmological principle of balance and continuity-an orientation consonant with Gadamer’s claim that genuine understanding is achieved dialogically, through the medium of a shared language (Gadamer, 1989). Situating this exchange within a decolonial framework informed by Smith (2012) and Mignolo (2011), the paper argues that Irula cultural expressions are not anthropological curiosities but philosophical acts-forms of resilience that sustain ethical meaning amid marginalisation and ecological disruption. Integrating Taylor’s hermeneutics with Irula relational wisdom, the study reimagines recognition as a holistic process with ethical, ecological, and spiritual dimensions, and proposes that hermeneutic philosophy expand beyond the human toward a dialogical ethics of coexistence in which understanding the world and caring for it are inseparable.