Non-Fiction Books:

Agency and Knowledge in Northeast India

Sorry, this product is not currently available to order

Here are some other products you might consider...

Agency and Knowledge in Northeast India

The Life and Landscapes of Dreams
Click to share your rating 0 ratings (0.0/5.0 average) Thanks for your vote!
Unavailable
Sorry, this product is not currently available to order

Description

The Nagas of Northeast India give great importance to dreams as sources of divine knowledge, especially knowledge about the future. Although British colonialism, Christian missions, and political conflict have resulted in sweeping cultural and political transformations in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, dream sharing and interpretation remain important avenues for negotiating everyday uncertainty and unpredictability. This book explores the relationship between dreams and agency through ethnographic fieldwork among the Angami Nagas. It tackles questions such as: What is dreaming? What does it mean to say ‘I had a dream’? And how do night-time dreams relate to political and social actions in waking moments? Michael Heneise shows how the Angami glean knowledge from signs, gain insight from ancestors, and potentially obtain divine blessing. Advancing the notion that dreams and dreaming can be studied as indices of relational, devotional, and political subjectivities, the author demonstrates that their examination can illuminate the ways in which, as forms of authoritative knowledge, they influence daily life, and also how they figure in the negotiation of day-to-day domestic and public interactions. Moreover, dream narration itself can involve techniques of ‘interference’ in which the dreamer seeks to limit or encourage the powerful influence of social ‘others’ encountered in dreams, such as ancestors, spirits, or the divine. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book advances research on dreams by conceptualising how the ‘social’ encompasses the broader, co-extensive set of relations and experiences - especially with spirit entities - reflected in the ethnography of dreams. It will be of interest to those studying Northeast India, indigenous religion and culture, indigenous cosmopolitics in tribal India more generally, and the anthropology of dreams and dreaming.

Author Biography:

Michael Heneise is an American anthropologist exploring indigenous religion and medical pluralism in the Asian highlands. He is editor of the South Asianist Journal and co-editor of the Highlander Journal, both published by Edinburgh University. In 2017, he launched Highlander Books, an open access academic press that works in tandem with the journal. He edited Passing Things On: Ancestors and Genealogies in Northeast India (2014), and co-edited Nagas in the 21st Century (2017). In 2016, he earned a PhD in South Asian Studies from Edinburgh University, and is the founding director of the Kohima Institute for Advanced Studies, Nagaland, India.
Release date Australia
August 10th, 2018
Audience
  • Tertiary Education (US: College)
Illustrations
3 Line drawings, black and white; 8 Halftones, black and white; 11 Illustrations, black and white
Pages
172
ISBN-13
9781138479647
Product ID
27821221

Customer reviews

Nobody has reviewed this product yet. You could be the first!

Write a Review

Marketplace listings

There are no Marketplace listings available for this product currently.
Already own it? Create a free listing and pay just 9% commission when it sells!

Sell Yours Here

Help & options

Filed under...