Rethinking Anthropology: Culture as Existential Condition, Biodiversity, Indian Knowledge Systems, Sustainability and Social Formation*

This article proposes an existential reorientation of anthropology, with particular attention to Indian social formation. It argues that culture is inadequately understood as a bounded system of symbols, practices or institutions and is better approached as a historically constituted existential condition: the field within which people inherit worlds, experience vulnerability, negotiate power, interpret reality, reproduce social life and transform the conditions of existence. Bringing phenomenological anthropology into dialogue with practice theory, political economy and Indian anthropology, the article develops seven dimensions of culture as existential conditions: historicity, ontological orientation, embodiment and materiality, lived experience, intersubjectivity, finitude and uncertainty and conflict and encounter. It then proposes a biocultural-existential perspective in which biological and cultural diversity are understood in relation to unequal ecological and social conditions rather than as separate domains. Indian Knowledge Systems are examined as historically situated lifeworld epistemologies, with Nyāya offering a particularly useful comparative model of plural modes of knowing. The article further interprets Indian social formation through the articulation of sacred authority, territory, caste, kingship, tribal incorporation, political economy and changing relationships with nature. Drawing on N. K. Bose, Louis Dumont, F. G. Bailey, Maurice Godelier and Virginius Xaxa, it argues that existential conditions neither mechanically determine culture nor remain external to it: they create possibilities and constraints within which people reproduce, negotiate, resist and transform cultural worlds, while cultural transformations reshape the conditions inherited by subsequent generations. Sustainability is therefore reframed as an existential and relational problem requiring not only technical solutions but ecological justice, institutional reform and restoration of meaningful human–environment relationships.