Telling the Transformation

Abstract

I present a critical ethnographic documentation and analysis of the human-snake transformation tradition among the Indigenous Khasi Communities in Northeast India. I look at how traditional knowledge about the folklore of water is conceived through the first- person transformative experience of dreaming. This then catalyzes community responses to ‘were-snakes’ in multi-level contexts. This article is based on data from ethnographic fieldwork carried out with eight were-snakes over the course of seven years. Water is the generic resource, the ‘tradition-trope’, and it is used as an analytical category to look at all the oral narratives connected with the tradition, becoming a communicative modality through which clan, transformation, ecology, and further, the social organization of the Indigenous Christian community are processed.