Difference between Caste & Tribe

• ‘tribal organisation’ and ‘Hindu organisation’.
• technology of production. Tribal technology is believed to be inferior. 
• By contrast, the caste system has a superior technological apparatus and a system of occupational specialisation and inter-dependence
• castes are primarily associated with the agricultural mode of production
• While caste society is considered to be surplus producing, tribes are essentially subsistence economies, in which whatever is produced is for the purpose of consumption.
• From this, we may infer that if a caste society is ‘future-oriented’, a tribe is rooted in its ‘present’. Against this background, whenever the tribes had difficult economic periods, they entered the portals of caste society, taking up an occupation and supplying its product to non-tribal groups, thus entering into what has been called in north India, the jajmanî system (the system of patron-client relations). If it was impossible for them to take up a specialised occupation, because they were largely unskilled, they were always able to become agricultural labourers in order to enter the system more or less permanently
• traditional (‘tribal’) practices, such as non-observance of the norms of purity and pollution, offering liquor to their deities, and eating habits that challenged the sensitivity of Hindus. These assailed the mixed-up compositeness of people in search of ‘pure categories’ – one could either be ‘caste’ or ‘tribe’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘animist’.Census documentation was all about ‘bounded types’; whereas social life defied such boundary drawing
• Many tribes have expressed dissatisfaction with the label ‘Hindu’; and many have tried to revive what they think is their ‘pristine’ religion