Material Culture, Oral Traditions and Identity among the Naga in Northeast-India

(Research project funded by Swiss National Science Foundation SNF/FSN 2006-2010)

Head: Prof. Dr. em. Michael Oppitz
Team-members: Thomas Kaiser, Rebekka Sutter, Alban von Stockhausen, Marion Wettstein

Naga is an „ethnonym“ for a group of tribal societies, settling in the hilly borderlands of India, Myanmar and China. During the British rule in India a number of detailed ethnographies were written by the colonial administrators and large archives and object-collections were built up in British museums. These remained to be the only sources on the Naga, as the region was turned into a prohibited area after Indian independence in 1947. In the 50 years of isolation that followed, life and culture of the Nagas changed significantly; the Nagas turned from a headhunting society built upon a rich material culture and oral traditions, into a “modern” society, characterised by baptism and the political struggle for independence.

In 2001 Nagaland was partly reopened to foreigners on the basis of restricted travel permits. This provided the anthropologist with an interesting challenge: to compare two strictly separated periods of time linked by a combination of field research with archival work in ethnographic collections. This research arrangement may be exemplary for future ways of studying traditional societies, once the actual objects of investigation have ceased to exist.

In regard to the history and culture of the Nagas, change and continuity in their identity are an issue of great importance. Such processes manifest themselves both in material culture and in oral traditions. So far no scholarly analysis had been carried out to document the interrelation between immaterial ideas and their materialisations, - and their dynamics of change. In both fields of anthropological research – material culture and oral traditions – Michael Oppitz (the project leader) had done research in other Himalayan regions. It is hoped that the Naga project will stimulate the wider purpose of a truly comparative anthropology of the Himalayan region.

The project approached the notion of “identity” on three levels: 1. identity as represented in material culture (Marion Wettstein); 2. identity as represented in oral traditions (Thomas Kaiser and Rebekka Sutter); 3. identity as perceived from within as well as from outside Naga society (Alban von Stockhausen). The three levels were integrated in a final analysis. The methodological basis of the project is a combination of field-research, archive-, and museum-research and multimedia documentation.

The results were published in the edited volume Naga Identities: Changing Cultures in the Northeast of India / Naga Identitäten: Zeitenwende einer Lokalkultur im Nordosten Indiens (Snoeck 2008) and in a large exhibition about the Nagas at the Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich (2008). In follow-up projects by some team-members historical photograph collections were put online (the Fürer-Haimendorf collection at SOAS) and an online music archive is in planning. A MA-thesis about the Naga tiger men, two PhD theses, one about Naga textiles, one about historical photographs of the Nagas, and a further book about Naga songs are in the making.