Abstract
The Apatanis of Ziro Valley are a tribe in Arunachal Pradesh. The community is known for their sedentary agriculture among all dry farming communities in this state. It is sustained without the use of draught power and an indigenously developed irrigation system. Inhabiting a small sequestered plateau, their agriculture represents the most efficient in terms of energy use. Among the traditional institutions of the Apatani is the labour gang known as the Pataň. Its composition is based largely on village friendship cutting across genders that are equally represented, in addition to kinship-based unity. This aspect is evident in a tradition during Myoko festival where friends visit across villages to renew their ties. The festival and its associated rituals also assign a special position to friendship. The paper seeks to explore the ritual aspect of friendship and its relevance of friendship in the circulation of labour for sedentary agriculture.
Highlights
Friendship in its common usage signifies the relationships between people that are based on mutual affection, spiritual closeness, and common interests
Aristotle tried to extract friendship from the realm of eroticism by making a clear distinction between friendship-comradeship and lovefriendship by declaring that friendship was a highly individualised relationship not containing nuances of the erotic (Carpenter, 1917: 59). Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics writes : Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages. . . . Since his own life is, to a good man, a thing naturally sweet and desirable, for a similar reason is the life of his friend agreeable to him, and delightful merely on its own account, and without reference to any object beyond it; and to live without friends is to be destitute of a good, unconditioned, absolute, and in itself desirable; and to be deprived of one of the most solid and most substantial of all enjoyments (Carpenter, 1917: 57-58)
Arunachal Pradesh, which receives the first ray of the dawn, is a land inhabited by multiple ethnic groups
Summary
Friendship in its common usage signifies the relationships between people that are based on mutual affection, spiritual closeness, and common interests. His works contained references to agnostic friendships instead As he discusses the master-slave morality, he links friends and enemies within the values of master-slave morality.1The subject elicited sentimental discourses about the love and loyalty between friends providing a touch of the ineffable practically constituting it into an elusive subject (Rezende, 2007: 8). This overview of the place of friendship in the realm of ethics, typical of Western modernity2bore strong moorings on individuality and volition. I discuss the contemporary society, which is in transition and operates via a blend of both conventional value systems of the Apatanis as well as the modern values accrued through neoliberalism
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