Jelle J P Wouters

What characterizes the Naga kin universe? What was lost and gained as Nagas transitioned from a stateless to a state society? What happens to a society when long entrenched in political conflict, violence, and brutality? What is the place of Naga traditions and customs in the contemporary historical moment? What are the political paths and possibilities that fork off into the future? With Nagapolis: A Community Portrait, Jelle J.P. Wouters addresses these and related questions through a varied range of topical essays, from feasting to factionalism, customs to cuisine, prophecy to politics, and colonialism to capitalism. Delving deep in history, politics, culture, and social mores, Nagapolis traces and places Naga society, relating changes, continuities, and changing continuities, to ultimately ask, just what is the Naga community all about?

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The volume contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas.

A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays and an Afterword by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

This book explores the form and character of political and social life in Nagaland. Firmly grounded in the historical experiences and ethnographic specifics of Naga society, its eleven essays variously discuss the origins, evolution and convolutions of the Naga Movement for self-determination, the ways Naga villagers apply their agency and imagination to appropriate and rework India’s democracy process to their own uses and lifeworlds, kinship networks and the social formation of tribes, and the politics of place and identity. This book will be of interest both to students of contemporary Naga society and to those interested in Highland Asia, political anthropology, kinship and tribes, insurgency, and conceptual politics and sociology more widely.

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state’s response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic underview, Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics

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 became an ethnological hotbed, arguably 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. 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 chapters offer a set of insights and new departures into the study of contemporary Naga society.

This annotation presents an ex-centric critique of the universalistic and normative projections of Euro-American inflected political theology. Granted, of course, that political theology has multiple roots, routes, and divergences. My critique here does not do justice to the varying schools of thought that have importantly provincialized and vernacularized political theology perspectives, for instance in relation to secular Islam (Devji 2018), divine omnipresence in Hindu India (Banerjee 2018), or regarding the bearing of the Buddhist ineffable self on political subject making (Giri 2018). It does even do less justice to the theoretical debates and nuances within these expanded thought-fields. These qualifications made, my central and broad thesis is that the Anthropocene must make us reimagine and redesign (perhaps even reject as analytically useful) political theology, and that sustainable futures crucially hinge on our ability to expand the demos beyond the human.

In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) ‘desire’ and (ethnic) ‘closure’ as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region’s present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist ‘desires’ and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic ‘closure’; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic ‘closure’, one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India.

As an institution, Royal Thimphu College, akin to other university colleges in the country, is situated at the vanguard of the Bhutanese society that is to come; not just through imparting young adults with specialised knowledge and skills, with patterns of socialisation, and with canons of cultural representation and style, but equally because it constitutes a decisive stage in life-long individual and collective processes of fruition. It is in this stage, when young adults hover around intellectual, emotional and professional maturity, and usually just prior to the societal roles and responsibilities of family and employment, that young adults are engaged in often highly personalised and equally highly socially conditioned quests of self-discovery and self-making. It is when embodied experiences mould their general outlooks, and when they speculate, reflect and worry about the road they are traveling and about the paths and possibilities that fork off in the college afterlife. This essay seeks to capture precisely this moment; a phase that is fleeting, life-altering, uncertain, and often stressful. It does so through the analytics of ‘experiences’, ‘aspirations’, and ‘anxieties.’

Zomia, in the sense exulted by James C. Scott (2009) as an abode of purposeful political anarchy and anti-stateism, is not an emic conceptualization, not a particular place or an incantation of a collective identity referred to or professed by particular populations of humans. As a spatial and social reality, or as a word-concept, Zomia, then appears an exercise in scholarly magical realism (evidence is ‘thin’, ‘limited’, and ‘ambiguous’, as Victor Lieberman (2010: 339) puts it more discreetly). It is a form of geographical and historical imagination that nevertheless has begun to ‘escape’ the narrow corridors of the academy and into public discourse where it now lives a life of its own. It is an original imagination no doubt – an optic that stimulates fresh scholarship – but one simultaneously cannot escape that Zomia-disciples are letting their imagination run away with them.

This essay traces the early beginnings of the Indo-Naga conflict, which erupts in the 1950s and continues into the present-day. It focuses on the period roughly between the Battle of Kohima in 1944, which ends Japanese expansionism in the east, and the enactment of Nagaland state in 1963 as an envisaged (but failed) political compromise to the demand by the Naga National Council (NNC) for complete Naga sovereignty. This essay uses hitherto scantily used tour and personal diaries, government reports, private correspondence, memoires, and recorded memories to interrogate the master-narrative of the Naga struggle that reconstructs a relatively straight and uncomplicated historical trajectory that sees the genuine awakening and NNC-led political mobilization of an upland community situated off the beaten track of both Indian civilization and colonial domination, and of Nagas’ collective resolve to take up arms to fight for a place on the table of nation-states. Alternatively, if the story is told from the vantage of the Indian state, the dominant narrative apportions blame to a ‘misguided’ Naga elite that seeks to undermine the territorial and national integrity of the Indian state. These prevailing views, attractive for their absence of complexity, however, ignore the anguished debates, interpersonal and intertribal differences, contingent histories and events, dissenting voices, political assassinations, and sharp divisions within the rank-and-file of the NNC, and whose inner dynamics and sentiments could as well have produced outcomes other than war.

In this article I attempt an ethnography of democratic representation in India by examining how ordinary villagers in the north-eastern state of Nagaland relate to their politicians, what they expect of them, and what yardsticks they adopt to evaluate their performance in office. I focus on the dialectical relationship between homegrown Naga political theory and praxis, and the specificities of Nagaland state and governance to show that the form democratic representation takes there is a reflection of historical particularities and the society’s own conception and normative imagination of its political self and sociality. Provincialising liberalist projections of democratic representation, the article contributes to a promising body of creative analysis that is paving the way for a much fuller and richer understanding of existing democratic life-worlds in South Asia.

Interrogating the normative notion of 'man the voter' , this article draws on ethnography among the Chakhesang Naga in Northeast India to communicate a cosmopolitan, culturalist critique – and an answer to this critique – of liberal democracy's hallmark of party-based elections, individual autonomy and equal voting rights. While Nagas have been decorated as 'traditional democrats' , their sense of the good political life is shaped by values of communal harmony, consensus-building and complimentary coexistence. However, these are threatened by practices and principles of liberal democracy, which led Phugwumi villagers to attempt a procedural adaptation of elections by substituting individual voting for consensus-building and the selection of a leader. I use this ethnographic case to provincialize the sprawling contemporary sense of 'liberal universalism' , and to postulate that, in their political sociality, Nagas are a 'society against voting' , an adaptation of Pierre Clastres' (1977) Society against the State.

Compared to the bulky literature on caste and democracy, we still
know little about the form and functioning of democratic politics
amongst tribes. This is a serious lacuna, one which, at the level
of sociology, impedes the kind of careful comparison that has
long proven fruitful to capture the inner logic and intricacies
of social life. If caste is deemed central to any understanding of
contemporary Indian politics, what about those states and constituencies in which tribes preponderate numerically?

This article engages historically and ethnographically the idea and idiom of the prototypical Naga ‘village republic.’ Even as the popular imagination of Naga villages as ‘republics’ traces back to colonial writings, and while much has changed since, I illustrate the remarkable
resilience of the ‘Naga village’ as a political, partisan, self-protective and affective unit. I perceive the Naga village as encompassing a moral community characterized by its temporal and spatial rootedness, and whose inhabitants define themselves through the conduit of historical memory – a nexus locally between history, locality, ancestral genealogy, and identity – and which orients their relations with neighbouring and nearby villages and villagers. More specifically, I discuss the contemporary form and substance of the ‘Naga village’ in relation to
(1) identity and identification, (2) local governance, particularly Nagaland’s policy of communitisation, and (3) democracy and elections.

Highlighting 'pre', 'trans' and 'new' tribal formations amongst upland Nagas in India's Northeast, this article formulates both a historical critique against dominant categorisations of the region's social landscape and posits alternative ways of 'seeing' local patterns of kinship, identity and belonging. Drawing on ethno-historical perspectives from the Chang and Chakhesang Nagas, I illustrate the problematic cultural transitivity of the idea and idiom of 'tribe' which conceals the social formations that existed—and occasionally persist—before, beneath, betwixt and between categories of 'tribe'. This realisation brings us to a dilemma which, I think, ought to be at the heart of the anthropology of Nagas and of India's Northeast more widely—namely, how to account for the ethnographic observation that social organisation—both past and present—is based on interpersonal, village and clan networks which cut across tribal and ethnic groups with clearly permeable boundaries and yet most people maintain a view of the whole society as made up of partitioned, culturally coherent and historically immutable entities.

Taking the upland, tribal Nagas, and the long lingering Indo-Naga conflict, as my case, this article positions divergent contemporary political and territorial claims and counterclaims in the historical longue durée. While the initial assertion for a sovereign, independent Nagalim envisaged a political and administrative reordering of a region cut across by the colonial Indo-Burma border, over time the Naga national movement increasingly conformed to this international boundary—at least in praxis—as political attention shifted towards the integration of Naga lands within India but presently divided across multiple states. More recently, another territorial quandary emerged as the Eastern Naga People's Organization articulated a demand for the bifurcation of present-day Nagaland, as it was enacted in 1963, through the creation of a new state to be called 'Frontier Nagaland'. If amidst ongoing strife and uncertainty, these divergent political and territorial aspirations suggest a sinking ever more deeply into a morass of conflicting aspirations, oppositional sentiments and political disorder, this article attempts to historically situate each of these claims, as well as discusses some of their implications, inner intricacies and indeterminacies, in the upshot serving a heady cocktail of colonial legacies, borders that divide, and post-colonial political imaginations, spiked with shots of old tribal antagonisms and new alignments.

This chapter invites readers to the western and eastern Bhutan highlands to reflect on the situated entanglements of herders and mountains, both of whose meaningful lives are thoroughly intertwined within shared social worlds. We introduce the notion of “mountain clime” to ethnographically illustrate and conceptualize how highlanders are both in the mountain and of it, act in relation to it and are acted upon, sense it and are sensed by it. Our ethnographic narratives transmit mountains as both “something” and “somebody,” matters of substance and significance, enlivened by terrestrial (and increasingly angry) deities, and as geological fact and emplaced ethics and morality. Relatedly, we explore the specific ways in which local climing practices, in terms of how and what highlanders know, feel, and sense about weather, climate, geo-ecological relations, and especially changes therein, are encountered and refracted through the prism of human–mountain entanglements. By foregrounding terrestrial, experiential, and multispecies perspectives, grounded in clime studies, this chapter relays how highland Bhutanese genealogies of knowledge and praxis challenge and complement dominant scientific taxonomies of life and nonlife through situated and lively epistemologies and spectrums of agency that ultimately enhance our understanding of climate change.

Following the recognition of the Himalayas as local, regional, and planetary makers and changers of climate, and as a region experiencing rapid anthropogenic transformations, this introduction initiates Himalayan clime studies with affective, terrestrial, and multispecies approaches. Engaging environmental humanities perspectives, the introduction defines “clime” as a multispecies dwelling place embodied with weather, climate pattern and change, and geo-ecological agencies and relations. From the vantage of clime–climate studies, the Himalayas are affirmed as deep time, indigenous, and relational makers and changers of climate, and—in the Anthropocene context—as disproportionately vulnerable to global climate change. Relating clime/climate change as a multispecies encounter, the introduction attunes to the broader set of agencies and relations that shape knowledge and experiences of climate history, pattern, and change. It then demonstrates that Himalayan climate change is always part of a cultural process, is experienced in specific places, and is lived and adapted to by humans and other-than-human habitats.

State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Our desire for security and power governs us as State. Our desire for possessions governs us as Capital. Our desires imprison and rule us beings as Unbeing. Yet, from Nagaland to New Zealand, Bhutan to Bolivia, a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions has begun. Arising from assemblies of humans and other-than-humans, these revolutions replace possessive individualism with non-exploitative interdependence. Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and other indigenous communities, feminists, poets, seers, yaks, cranes, vultures, and fungi haunt this pamphlet. The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.

Ethnographic engagement with yaks and herders in the Bhutan highlands lead to a rethinking of the idea and idiom of ‘the geopolitical’ in the Anthropocene context. Dominant understandings relate geopolitics to the modern geopolitical imagination, which has roots in the hegemonic, indeed ontological, association between political theory and socio-spatial contracts of states. This chapter forefronts another thought-tradition by relating geopolitics not to the world, but to the earth, not to nation, but to nature. Thus wresting geopolitics from the utilitarian narratives of State-Capital, and its manifold colonialities, this chapter offers an indigenously lived and lively version of ‘geo’-politics, one that is distinctly less state- and anthropo-centric in its form and character. It does so by encountering and engaging the more-than-human social contracts and norm-worlds that, in the Bhutan highlands, entangle and enmesh humans, yaks (and other animals), deities, and the physical earth in material, affective, spiritual, cultural, and political terms. What emerges is an indigenous ‘geo’-politics that relates as a communion and cycle of give-and-take between the earth and all its earthlings, including between humans and their material and spiritual grounds.

By reflecting on this book’s introduction and chapters, this conclusion transmits multipolar clime studies as a multifaceted opening for reorienting, reimagining, and reconnecting with anthropogenically impacted places, species (humans included), ecosystems, and relations. Through conceptual, theoretical, and empirical impressions, it captures how clime studies variously translates, transmits, refracts, and enriches climate science by adding more grounded, holistic, more-than-human, and relational modes of knowing and living with climate change. Next, this conclusion emphasizes the need for emphatic attempts in bridge-building, line-drawing, dot-connecting, and co-creation between climate science, other sciences, humanities, policymakers, and the public. It furthers the clime-turn by coining and advocating, variously, “multilateral clime studies,” “multilaterality of clime studies,” “multi-nodality of clime studies,” and “multimodality of clime studies.” Ultimately, it argues that interdisciplinary,
interscientific, and inter-epistemological approaches generate the more wholesome and inclusive knowledge(s) that our anthropocenic earth now demands.

Through a critical appraisal of old, new, and emergent scholarship on the ‘tribe’, this entry traces and places the invention, institutionalization, and the later local infatuation with the colonial category of the ‘tribe’ in Northeast India. Further tracking the social life of the tribal category in Northeast India, the entry then relates how in the postcolonial epoch the ‘tribe’ revealed both as an affective source of embodied and emplaced identity and as a compelling, competitive, and conflictual principle of political mobilization, recognition, and claim-making.

This entry offers a critical overview of scholarship on democracy and elections in Northeast India. It variously links democracy and elections to the politics of resistance and refusal, to state violence and militarization, and to expressions of identity and rights. Throughout, this entry reveals how democratic institutions and elections across Northeast India have become variously and deeply entangled in purely local histories, cultural contexts, and political value systems.

What characterizes the Naga kin universe? What was lost and gained as Nagas transitioned from a stateless to a state society? What happens to a society when long soaked in political conflict, violence, and brutality? What is the place of Naga traditions and customs in the contemporary historical moment? What are the political paths and possibilities that fork off into the future? With Nagapolis: A Community Portrait, Jelle J.P. Wouters addresses these and related questions through a varied range of topical essays, from feasting to factionalism, customs to cuisine, prophecy to politics, and colonialism to capitalism. Delving deep in history, politics, culture, and social mores, Nagapolis traces and places Naga society, relating changes, continuities, and changing continuities, to ultimately ask, just what is the Naga community all about?

This chapter invites readers to Nagaland (Northeast India) to reflect on the
impulse that compelled thousands of Nagas to participate in a horrific public lynching of a perceived illegal immigrant. The inflow of ‘ethnic strangers’ is seen as challenging the Nagas’ ethno-territorial sovereignty and reinvigorates local obsessions with notions of autochthony – an emotive affirmation of Naga origins, roots, soil, genes, semen, and blood as the prime criteria of rights, entitlements, and belonging. This chapter presents immigration panic and ethnic violence as cultural and bodily friction blocking such flows. The implication? A body politic gripped by a volatile, potentially violent split between those considered autochthonous and those deemed outsiders.

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays and an Afterword by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

Over seventy years of postcolonial time and the influence of Indian and
Burmese/Myanmar nationalist regimes has undoubtedly worked to somewhat blend current political boundaries with political imagination among the Naga on both sides of the Indo- Myanmar border. However, among them Indian and Burmese nationalist tropes and representations have never precluded other, and non-statist, forms of belonging, identification and territoriality that refuse to limit themselves to these national spaces. The implication for ethnographic and social theory for the Naga? That, for one thing, their study within conventional national frames – what is called the fallacy of ‘methodological nationalism’ (see
Gellner 2012) – conjures a deeply problematic, a-historical and overtly statist approach. Here, instead, the study of ethnicity and belonging must ‘go transnational.’ Not, to be sure, because Nagas are diasporic, but because nascent political boundaries arbitrarily truncated their ancestral lands, territories and longstanding socio-political networks between two different countries.

Over the past centuries yaks have co-dwelled, co-evolved and co-shaped with pastoralists, deities, and grassland ecosystems in the Bhutan highlands. Drawing on ethnography, this chapter argues that in understanding life in the Bhutan highlands it is impossible to draw a clear ontological distinction between herders, on the one hand, and yaks, deities, and the environment on the other; to do otherwise results in an epistemological cul-de-sac, that is, of apprehending the physical, social, and cosmological environment as independently constituted and functioning according to their own autonomous laws, categories, and registers of existence. Per contra, drawing on Descola (2005), this chapter approaches highland life as unfolding within a single social sphere, as interconnected in an encompassing social continuum, and thus as conjuring a complex, integrated and layered regime of sociability in which herders, yaks, deities, and the environment are constituted relationally through a dense network of intersubjectivity. Within this ontological field, this chapter asks what it means for both herders and yaks to live a life that is deeply intertwined, entangled, knotted, and ultimately co-constituted with one another. This chapter particularly explores how these entanglements and knots produce a schema and sense of “relatedness” (Carsten 2000) and “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2011) that emerges through social practices of interspecies kin-making.

Among Nagas, the winds of democratic politics and elections carry debris - the debris of democratic waste; the afterlives of political competition and divisions that show themselves in damaged relationships, lingering resentments, festering wounds of broken promises, compromised moralities and the corrosion of community.

This book explores the form and character of political and social life in Nagaland. Firmly grounded in the historical experiences and ethnographic specifics of Naga society, its eleven essays variously discuss the origins, evolution and convolutions of the Naga Movement for self-determination, the ways Naga villagers apply their agency and imagination to appropriate and rework India’s democracy process to their own uses and lifeworlds, kinship networks and the social formation of tribes, and the politics of place and identity. This book will be of interest both to students of contemporary Naga society and to those interested in Highland Asia, political anthropology, kinship and tribes, insurgency, and conceptual politics and sociology more widely.

Integral to Easterine Kire’s growing oeuvre, the Journey of the Stone, despite its claim to being fictitious, galvanizes history and ethnography to open doors into worlds that have long been locked away. It is in this unlocking that this book’s greatest contribution lies.

In the archives of colonial rule, highland communities predominantly appear, James Scott diagnoses, either as contributors ‘to the routine statistics of tribute, corvée labour, and taxation or as barbarians in open rebellion against the state.’ These records represent the perspectives of the rulers, the oppressors, the dominant, and thence reveal little about the agency, aspirations and motivations of upland communities. Tribal uprisings, during the epoch of colonialism, were readily interpreted as savage warfare indulged in, here invoking Eric Hobsbawn, by ‘primitive rebels’; poor and ignorant tribals, that is, with forms of organization and ideology that are distinctively ‘pe-political’ and ‘blind and groping.’ It is precisely such a reading of political history that the editors and contributors of the book under review take issue with, and strongly at that.

Pasakha, perched on the Bhutan-India border, is part of Bhutan’s southern industrial belt with close to 40 factories manufacturing a range of products from Coca-Cola and beer to chemicals and steel. This of course requires labour with a range of skills. As the 48 year old local leader, the Tshogpa, told us, the population of Pasakha is over 22,000, of which the sheer majority are migrants, the local voting populace, as permanent residents, being only a mere 150.

The incorporation of the North East into the Indian Union replicated the colonial order of administrating tribe and territory. The history of the region since has been of shots fired, initially towards visions of alternative polities, and lately, for privileged access to existing state structures.

...However, whereas the Ancient Greeks figure centrally in the history and theory of procedural democracy, which is dominantly thought to have emerged from an Athenian hillside, Naga hillsides find no place in these classic discourses on democracy. And this is problematic...As electoral democracy, in its current form, is everywhere running out of steam, inspiration for its resurrection might well be found in the intellectual history that developed in Naga hillsides, and other indigenous communities, rather than in ancient Greece.

This division of the Naga world in a multidimensional reality wasn’t always there. When the Earth was still fresh, humans and spirits supposedly lived and loved together. Then, with the birth of greed, jealousy, egotism and other negative emotions in humans, the spirit collectives began to withdraw into another realm modelled along the human world with villages, forests, and traditions. In their self-banishment, the spirits realised their own fatal flaw: their inability to grieve — that deepest of emotions born out of love. Now, it made them envy and hanker after men. Humans, in turn, dispatched fragments and images – of memories, musings and reminiscences – into the spirit world, continually constructing and regenerating it. This created a Naga cosmology of distinct yet deeply intertwined realms, locked in a dialectic form which neither could escape. Not even the colonial form of Christianity and its ontology of denial (of spirits, the agency of nonhumans, the unbeknownst) was ever able to hermetically close the door between the human and nonhuman worlds.

In the Naga uplands, few questions elicit such animated and agitated debates as the question: ‘Where do the Nagas come from?’ From one hilltop to the next, a rich repertoire of folktales, oral histories, myths, songs, and legends are relied upon to trace and place far-away origins in China, Mongolia, or the islands of the Southern Seas. This is followed by stories of migratory waves that led the Naga to their current hills, often with lengthy stops at the banks of the Irrawaddy or Chindwin. These are often heroic tales in which he Naga walked single-file and prevailed over hurdles and hardships before they finally arrived in the current Naga uplands, from where they dispersed into tribes.

AFSPA keeps apart ideas of law and justice; a separation that make the Nagas 'killable', as in Oting. The law incorporates them into the Indian nation-state as rights-deprived subjects — and, in the process, reveals the dark side of Indian democracy.

What is negatively called ‘factionalism’ can also be more positively labelled as radical political decentralization. In turn, the constant aggregating and scattering of these factions, their political shape-shifting, and their endless positioning and repositioning both within the Naga Movement and vis-à-vis the Indian state, also manifests as a decisive political anti-structure that eludes the Indian state, purposefully so. When adjudged historically, it was indeed both these forces – political decentralization and anti-structure – that made the Naga near unconquerable by expansionist valley-states. It was in their constant political fragmentation, fissioning, and fluidity that Nagas historically secured their freedom.

In Kohima two hills face each other. During the colonial era one of them was the seat of the colonial government and the other the homestead of the American Baptist Mission. When the weather was clear, British officers and American missionaries could see each other’s bungalows. They invited each other for teas, lunches and dinners. Beneath this apparent cordiality simmered a deep schism, however.

Seen as a historical social institution, the feast of merit seemingly invoked contradictory principles, combining tendencies of economic redistribution and social differentiation, of both socialist and snobbery. More broadly, the feast of merit was, in part, constitutive of the Naga mode of production, which had two distinct dimensions: a material aspect founded on the effort to reap riches from the fields through stamina, strength, and skill in agriculture, and an ethical aspect grounded in a moral economy that successfully broke the spiral of accumulation by culturally enforcing redistribution through community feasting.

Rebellion and prophetism, indeed, were often closely wound up and many a Naga uprising, some bigger and other smaller, were led by trusted prophetic figures who received and transmitted revelations and galvanized Naga publics by appealing to millenarian expectations of a new, and better, world to come and in which Nagas will again be free.

When British colonial officers first climbed the Naga Hills and began probing into the "character" of its inhabitants they soon learned about the social institution of oath-taking, and how oaths were locally held in high regard. Among Nagas, they found, oaths were associated with right, truth and justice.

To most Sikkimese, and especially to Sikkimese Buddhists, mountain peaks do not exist to be climbed, commodified and ‘experienced’ by whoever can afford a permit. Instead these peaks are the palaces and playgrounds of manifold deities who performed, and continue to fulfil, distinctive roles as agents of history, governors of fortune, and resident protectors in an inclusive cosmic polity that hierarchically encompasses Sikkimese society. Mountain peaks, then, are not empty places but the lively dwellings of cosmic authorities who require veneration and worship. Of Sikkim’s many sacred peaks, the mighty Kangchenjunga (Kangchendzönga) stands out, not just because it’s the third highest summit in the world but because it is the pinnacle of sacredness.

Against elections: The Northeastern Indian society that sees voting as eroding community blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2019/03/26/against-elections-the-northeastern-indian-society-that-sees-voting-as-eroding-community/ As India gears up for elections, Jelle J P Wouters explains what he found from his ethnographic research following Nagaland's 2013 state elections. Rather than a society committed to the idea that voting expands individual autonomy and rightful self-expression, he found a community deeply suspicious of the electoral process. A system which they thought was responsible for creating divisions, deepening intra-village rivalries and promoting greed and exaggerating individualism-at least in its current form.

Edited by Jelle J P Wouters and Tanka B Subba, The Routledge Companion to Northeast India (Routledge, 2022) is an important work on Northeast India. The Companion has 81 entries. Written insightfully, each entry is thematically distinct. The entries cover a range of themes, from questions of history, culture, ethnicity, politics, space, geomorphology, archæology to those of language, religion, nature, agriculture, identity, migration, urbanism and governance. Barring a few exceptions, the entries mainly deal with the colonial and the post-Independence period. The contributors to the Companion are scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, located in different institutions throughout the world. They belong to different generations of scholars. It is to the credit of the editors and the contributors that such a Companion is now available.

Vernacular Politics in Northeast India begins with a truism—that the
region and its contemporary politics is poorly understood. Wouters
affirms that given the complexity of the ethno-social landscape, the
unfolding of the ‘political’ cannot be grasped through a narrow disciplinary and institutional boundary of politics

This volume is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the region known as North-east India. A renewed focus on the region in the past two decades has witnessed publications on sociopolitical and historical aspects endeavouring to understand the current dynamics of the region. However, when it comes to (electoral) political analysis of India as a country, Wouters rightly points out that the North-east region is left out (p. ix). Perhaps parliamentary democracy and its entanglements with regional sociopolitics are less understood. The different ways in which power relations, decision-making, consensus building and cosmopolitics play out in the North-east are perhaps embedded in the chequered history of the region, which is an intertwining of the flow and movement of populations and their changing relationships alternating between reciprocation and subjugation, and animosity and rebellion

The book is an elaborate effort to understand the local figuration of vernacular politics in India's Northeast, and how these figurations are contingent with ethnic articulations, politics of indigeneity and specific manifestation(s) of Indian democracy in the region. In the introduction, delineating the conceptual and theoretical agenda of the volume, editor Wouters emphasizes the significance of historical and contemporary contingencies, particularly the dialectical relation between the Indian centre and Northeast, and how such relationship has produced interwoven vernacularization(s) in the region. This dialectic, its underlying logic and the institutional and discursive modalities it emphasizes articulate different regimes of fixation and flexibility, claims and counterclaims in imagining ethnic identities, community sovereignties, and the language and actual arithmetic of voting. A 15 authors' collective of emerging and senior scholars with multidisciplinary background, largely using ethnographic methodology, traverses almost the entire political geography of the region. With rich empirical documentation, they inquire into the articulation of vernacular politics in the realms of the locals. The first two chapters of the volume discuss the potential of traditional vernacular institutions and their conceptualization, entanglement and effects in the shapes of democracy in the region. In the second chapter, Sean Dowdy, through an intimate understanding of Assam's traditional raijmel (public assembly) and the recent attempt for its revitalization, emphasizes the link between the survival of certain vernacular institutions and their governmental logic in the region. He shows how these traditional institutions structure the dialectics of political subjectivity and popular sovereignty outside the logic of the state, which is why historically they would produce a temporary moment of counter-sovereignties. In the specific context of counter-sovereign claims by the separatist movements in the region, the resurgence of such institutes allows space of proliferation of counter-sovereign polities that complicates or weakens the separatist movements. In the third chapter, Milinda Banerjee argues how pre-colonial polycentric distribution of power has produced plural forms of democracy in Tripura, very different from the Western constitutional or Eurocentric forms of democracy that in its Indian derivative has favoured Western educated caste Hindu elites in most cases. The next four chapters concentrate on the question of ethno-territorial politics, election and distribution of power within the region. Saba Sharma, focusing on a sixth schedule area of Assam, argues how in this specific ethno-territorial administrative geography, the performative politics of vote mobilization and voting itself becomes a primary mode of expressing citizenship for so-called non-indigenous communities. Focusing upon a very different landscape, Swargajyoti Gohain discusses the emerging creed of monkpoliticians in Arunachal Pradesh. While these monk politicians participate in the formal politics to

The book certainly is quite a culmination of a great deal of work that responds ethnographically to a myriad of political discourses in Northeast India. It also contributes to the changing understanding of the Northeastern region and provides new suggestions to understand the underlying political networks exclusive to local communities

Capturing the spirit of a community is a daunting task, all the more so when one has to lucidly commit such a representation on paper. In his aptly titled book Nagapolis: A Community Portrait, noted author and social anthropologist Jelle J P Wouters offers a keen eye, one that is both objective and empathetic, as he undertakes this charge through twenty eight finely tuned topical essays. Each essay brings into focus

Rig Tshoel-Research Journal of the Royal Thimphu College is an open-access peerreviewed journal intended to align with a key mission of Royal Thimphu College "stimulate new ideas, knowledge, and practices that serve to enrich people's lives and enhance the welfare of society." The journal aims to issue at least once a year and invites contributions on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries, editorials, and reviews are welcome. T

The first-ever national conference on higher education in Bhutan, titled Higher Education Teaching-Learning in Bhutan: Innovations, Adaptations, Opportunities, and Challenges, was held on the 4th and 5th of July, 2022 at the campus of Royal Thimphu College (RTC), co-hosted by the RTC, Paro College of Education (PCE), and Samtse College of Education (SCE) in
partnership with Department of Adult and Higher Education, Ministry of Education. This special issue of Rig Tshoel–Research Journal of the Royal Thimphu College is dedicated to the papers presented at the conference

Rig Tshoel – Research Journal of the Royal Thimphu College is an open-access peer-reviewed journal intended to align with a key mission of Royal Thimphu College “to be a crucible of new ideas and knowledge that serves to enrich people’s lives and enhance the welfare of society”. The journal aims to issue at least once a year and invites contributions
on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries,
editorials, and reviews are welcome

Rig Tshoel – Research Journal of the Royal Thimphu College is an open-access peer-reviewed journal intended to align with a key mission of Royal Thimphu College “to be a crucible of new ideas and knowledge that serves to enrich people’s lives and enhance the welfare of society”. The journal aims to issue at least once a year and invites contributions
on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries,
editorials, and reviews are welcome

Rig Tshoel – Research Journal of the Royal Thimphu College is an open-access peer-reviewed journal intended to align with a key mission of Royal Thimphu College “to be a crucible of new ideas and knowledge that serves to enrich people’s lives and enhance the welfare of society”. The journal aims to issue at least once a year and invites contributions
on a wide range of subjects. Authors are encouraged to develop their own scholarship in areas of general relevance to Bhutan, submit work that advances knowledge in their fields, and is written in a broadly accessible manner. High-quality original articles in English and Dzongkha including theoretical and empirical research, commentaries,
editorials, and reviews are welcome