Tradition & Culture of Khampti

"Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual". The very popular saying by the legendary Greek scholar Aristotle clearly emphasise the social image of man than the man himself. A man makes a society. His role for a society formation is absolutely inevitable. He cannot escape his contribution in the environment he stays in. But again when he is abstracted from his very own association, a struggle for existence and identification would become a fateful phenomena. Thus humanity and civilization are inseparable. In simple words a tribe can be defined as a social group of the Homo Sapiens, having distinct flavour of culture, tradition, religion, customs and practices. A further elaboration may describe tribe as a group of indigenous people, with traditional or sometimes primitive approach. They are often termed as the aboriginals, the natives or the first people. However about 5% of world population are occupied by various tribal groups. There are about 370 million tribal people in the world, communicating in more than four thousand variety of language, belonging to five thousand different groups, prevailing over ninety countries around the world. However 70% of them are homed in Asia. Thus Studying about tribes widens a new periphery of vision. Learning about them extends a better capacity of understanding the evolution of mankind and human civilization. South East Asia is populated by different groups of ethnicities such as Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Sino Tibetan linguistic stock, Kra-Dai speaking people Indo-Aryan and Dravidian and even Arabs. The Shan people are one of the major ethnic group belonging to Kra-Dai language hearth and the Tai Khamptis are the heretic part of the Shan group, prevailing over this zone.