Friends
Do you have an old blue cloth-bound monograph on the Nagas sitting on your bookshelf?
Because of the Indo-Naga war (1956 - present), research has been very limited in this region until recently. I am pleased to share about the publication of Nagas in the 21st Century, published by Highlander Books <http://www.highlanderbooks.org/>, and edited by myself and Jelle JP Wouters (Royal Bhutan U.), in which we take stock of research on the Nagas, and introduce the work of a new generation of scholars working on the Nagas - combining colonial archival resources with new ethnography.
Synopsis
The title of the 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 colorful, 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. Taken together, the articles aim to offer a set of insights and new departures into the study of contemporary Naga society.
Orders
Just send me an email — eventually these will be available on Amazon.
Press
Highlander Books is a new open access academic press based at the Kohima Institute, with offices in Edinburgh and Thimphu, and our area of focus is the theoretical and geographical area of Zomia.
__
Dr Michael Heneise
Director, The Kohima Institute
Meluri Road, Kohima
797003 Nagaland
[log in to unmask]
www.kohimainstitute.org
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