Publisher Description

The title of this book 'Nagas in the 21st Century' is both an adaptation and a (modest) self-proclaimed sequel to Verrier Elwin's (1969) iconic Nagas in the Nineteenth Century. In this anthology, Elwin introduces and brings together a collection of administrative reports, tour diaries, and ethnographic descriptions on Naga tribes, all written in the 19th century. During the colonial era Naga tribes turned into an ethnological hotbed, even a cradle of British social anthropology. Back then, writings on Nagas were many, varied and colourful, and included rituals and religion, political structures and sentiments, taboos and omens, dress and ornaments, funeral customs, head-hunting, monolithic cultures, and so on. This ubiquity of colonial accounts, however, contrasts starkly with the scant material generated during the post-colonial period. In fact, as a corollary of the protracted Indo-Naga conflict scholars working on Nagas now grapple with a decades-wide ethnographic void. This, however, is now starting to change. The contributors to this book take Elwin's anthology, or other colonial sources, as a point of reference, and then link these texts to their own areas of research offering critiques, comparisons, and contrasts as they proceed. A number of Naga tribes are the subject of essays which address various aspects of contemporary Naga society including Naga identity; the Naga 'village republic'; transition in traditional governance; the significance of dreams; the effects of Christian conversion; the Hornbill Festival; a Naga understanding of the head-hunting culture; Naga nationalist politics; festival continuity and change and post-conflict society. Taken together the chapters aim to offer a set of insights and new departures into the study of contemporary Naga society.

Author Biography

Jelle J P Wouters is a social anthropologist who has carried out long-term ethnographic and historical research among the upland and tribal Nagas in India's generally lesser known Northeastern Region, writing about insurgency, violence, vernacular politics, capitalism, resource-extraction, and social history. Main research area and focus today are environmental humanities, climate change, water, and human-animal-plant entanglements in Bhutan, and Highland Asia more widely.He teaches at the Royal University of Bhutan in the Department of Social Science. He holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and later completed a PhD in Anthropology from the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong (India). Before joining Royal Thimphu College (Bhutan) as a lecturer he taught for two years at Sikkim Central University, where he was asked to establish the Anthropology Department, and was a visiting fellow (2014-2015) at Eberhard Karls University on a "Teaching for Excellence" award granted by the German Research Foundation. He currently also serves as the Chair of the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities, Thimphu. Michael T. Heneise is an American anthropologist and presently Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology, History, and Religious Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He has conducted fieldwork across South America, South Asia, and the Himalayas, and his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh was an anthropological examination of dreams and political agency in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. Prior to Edinburgh he studied anthropology at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Highlander Press; co-founder and former executive director of the Highland Institute, Nagaland; and co-editor of HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.

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