The hidden transcript: Weaving stories of resilience and resistance among the Nagas

The Tangkhul Nagas are intricately bound to nature in their social, cultural, economic, ethical and religious values. The dynamics of Tangkhul's livelihood activities in many ways reflect the complexities of the human and nature relationship. Interactions between human and nature have undergone significant changes during the last century which leaves unwarranted impact on its natural environment. Today increasing scarcity of natural resources is serious in Tangkhul Naga society. Besides other than population pressures, technological intrusion and developmental activities, the arrival of Christianity in the late 19th century proved ominous to the human and nature relations in the lifeworld of the Tangkhuls. The Colonial British introduced Christianity to the Tangkhul Nagas and used as a preliminary strategy to contain the hostile Tangkhuls from fierce rebellion against British dominions in the region. This paper attempts to present the symbiotic relationship of humans with nature in the antecedent lifeworld of the Tangkhuls while arguing for preserving its traditional knowledge system of nature conservation.

Empowering women is not just a moral imperative but also an economic necessity. This article examines the importance of investing in women's economic empowerment which will further lead to achievement of gender equality, poverty eradication, and involvement in economic decision making. True empowerment comes from collective action where both men and women work together to create an equitable society. Empowering women ultimately benefits society as a whole. Economic development plays a significant role in driving down inequality between men and women. Also, development benefits a great deal from empowering women. Tangkhul Naga women play a pivotal role in agricultural practices, household management, and local business initiatives which are essential for sustaining family livelihoods and community welfare. The article also highlights the evolving role of Tangkhul women in contemporary economic contexts, where increasing educational opportunities and initiatives like SHGs are fostering greater participation in formal employment and entrepreneurship. Despite their substantial contributions, Tangkhul Naga women face challenges related to limited access to resources, patriarchal societal structures, and the undervaluation of their labour, particularly in the informal sector. Systemic barriers remain that hinder their full economic potential. By examining the intersection of gender and economic development within the Tangkhul Naga community, this study underscores the importance of recognizing and supporting women's roles as key drivers of economic growth and social change.

This article proposes new ways of thinking about subaltern agency and resistance through a historical study of Egypt's family planning program. According to demographic data and ethnographic studies of rural reproduction in Egypt from 1965 to 1980, the vast majority of rural Egyptian women resisted government attempts to manage their reproduction. This resistance was unique from other forms of subaltern resistance scholars usually study: it was neither a violent uprising, nor was it a "hidden transcript" as described by the historian James C. Scott. Instead, rural women engaged in a different kind of resistance by openly flouting the government's initiatives in an unorganized way without fear of state retribution. Examining rural women's responses to this new government family planning program reveals the state's developmental anxieties in the post-colonial period and the strategies that rural women adopted in response to changing economic circumstances. This article contributes new insights about subaltern agency, resistance, and state power.

This paper analyses Phalee proverbs that refer to acts of speaking and holding the tongue in a community rhetorical context. Phalee/ Phadang, spoken in the Ukhrul district of Manipur, falls under the Tangkhul Naga language sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman family but is mutually incomprehensible with it. Tangkhul is the lingua franca among the villages that make up the Tangkhul Naga identity despite every village’s quotidian language use, rituals, and laws being unique to the village identity. This is a complex phenomenon, and the proverbs that arise out of the Tangkhul-Phalee composite provide interesting perspectives on identity formation regarding language, custom, and art. The collected corpus of proverbs we studied shows that while speech is considered clearly a necessity in terms of self-expression, community policy determination, and social interaction, most proverbs on speaking nevertheless emphasise the power of spoken words and ultimately counsel minimal and extremely careful speech. Silence seems to be often and poignantly granted greater value in communal life. This paper explores how these accumulated insights into speech reflect cultural attitudes in Phalee society and offer insights into the distinctive forms of social governance as mediated through the rhetorical strategies of proverb context and usage that characterise the village identity.

Indigenous knowledge refers to the understandings, skills, and philosophies by societies with long histories of interaction with their natural surroundings. For rural and indigenous peoples, local knowledge informs decisions making about fundamental aspects of day-to-day life. The Indigenous traditional knowledge found in local communities in India is an amalgation of strategies, skills, rules and techniques gained through shared adaptive man- environment interactions to live and survive in the natural way of life. There is much to learn from indigenous and community-based approaches, for the natural disaster preparedness. The people have developed their own strategies and traditional knowledge, and practices provide an important basis for facing even greater challenges of natural disasters. Although their strategies may not succeed completely, they are effective to some extent and that is why the people continue follow those. The present paper tries to explore the Ethnographic approaches in Disaster Management practiced in select Indian States.

Ukhrul district of Manipur is mainly inhabited by Tangkhul Naga tribe. This tribe often uses an enormous range of wild plants to meet their daily requirements. An extensive survey was conducted to document the wild edible fruits used by this community during the years, 2011, 2012, 2013 in Ukhrul district, Manipur. From this study, a total of 25 Angiosperm plant species belonging to 23 genera and 17 families have been recorded. Most of these fruits are freshly consumed while some are taken in the form of pickles, juice, jam, candies, etc. More interestingly, some selected fruits are fermented and used as fruit beer. This fruit beer is offered after dinner in every household. Nowadays, it serves as important source of household income for the Tangkhul community. Among the fruits Phyllanthus officinales, Ficus cunea, Musa sapientum, Prunus cerosoides, P. nepaulensis, etc. are considered as income generating fruits as indigenous fruit beer are also prepared from this fruits. Many wild fruits that are abundantly found in their locality are also sold in local markets. Plantation of these fruit yielding plants in home gardens and farm areas has shown its commercial potential and steps for conserving economically significant diverse plants of this hilly region in a sustainable way. Thus the study reveals sustainable utilization of edible fruits by Tangkhul Naga Tribe of Ukhrul district, Manipur.

We argue that the current environment in higher education is one of the primary drivers for the widespread adoption of concealment tactics with the aim of enhancing wellbeing. To explore the relationship between concealment and wellbeing, we draw upon Scott’s conceptualization of “hidden transcripts” and Keyes’s five dimensions of social wellbeing. Using a collaborative ethnographic approach, we examine a 2-year period of individual and collective inquiry by an eclectic multidisciplinary, international group of academics. Our empirical and theoretical contributions expose a complex and, at times, seemingly contradictory relationship between tactical concealments and relational wellbeing, with variously generative and destructive pathways between them. Our research offers a lens through which we can critically explore and extend our understanding of alternative pathways to wellbeing in organizational life.

This article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).

The Naga, comprised of various tribes, were traditionally governed by independent village republics. The inclusion of the Naga areas into the modern Indian State has been opposed, ensuing in a long-drawn armed struggle for sovereignty. Military measures have been used to deal with this struggle. Naga society is characterized by dualities in the form of the categorization of tribes as an administrative category against the discourse of a greater Naga identity, experiences of electoral politics to the Naga indigenous form of democracy rooted in the village republic, and the protracted Naga political struggle to the idea of Nagaland state as a solution, among many others. These dualities have shaped collective actions in the forms of associations and organizations to constitute the Naga civil society. The paper examines the socio-political realities and the resulting collective actions as a dimension of civil society.

James Scott's latest book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), is certainly instructive for anthropologists and is studded with stimulating insights about power. Nevertheless, it is a deeply flawed work. The book was published several years ago and has been widely reviewed in journals of political science and sociology where the major issues of contention have been Scott's arguments about the nature of hegemony, the rationality of political action, and the logic of explaining revolutions (see, for example, Mitchell 1990 and Tilly 1991). However, the book is at least as much about the political significance of speech. It analyzes the situated nature of political expression, the relationship among speech, belief, and ideology in everyday power relations, and the political efficacy of talk. And it is exactly the language-related concepts introduced in the book-such as transcript and infrapolitics-that are having the widest influence, appearing with increasing frequency in writings about local politics and the political meaning of linguistic and cultural practices. For this reason, my aim is to discuss Scott's work for what it says and assumes about language and power. Ironically, it is just this aspect of the book that has not yet been seriously and critically reviewed. Domination and the Arts ofResistance ambitiously attempts to theorize the nature of communication across lines of economic power. Scott's broader aim is to suggest how we might more successfully read, interpret, and understand the often fugitive political conduct of subordinate (1990:xii). He explicitly rejects the currently common assumption in neo-Marxist literature, as well as in mainstream political science, that subordinate groups acquiesce to economic systems that are manifestly against their interests because they come to believe in a dominant ideology that legitimates or naturalizes the power of ruling elites. Whether in the simplistic form of false consciousness and cultural consensus, or in more subtle stories about cultural hegemony or hegemonic incorporation, these theories look to ideological mechanisms for

Subalterns, as Ranajit Guha famously argued, resist modern states on the basis of pre-existing social solidarities and an autonomous domain of consciousness. Critics of subaltern studies have argued, however, that subaltern resistance is, in fact, deeply implicated in the symbols and discourses of domination rather than simply constituting an autonomous political domain. Might it be possible to take this criticism of subalternity seriously and yet appreciate the complex ways in which adivasi subjects in contemporary India resist and negotiate their subjecthood? Can we, then, locate resistance in the process of negotiating states? Focusing on the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, this paper takes up this challenge by probing into the tropes and strategies by which the contradictory mechanisms and meanings of modern state power have been reworked and resisted in two apparently opposed moments of resistance: the ‘peaceful’ Koel–Karo anti-dam movement of the 1980s and the ongoing ‘violent’ Maoist movement. In doing so, I show how land and community are intertwined inextricably in recent adivasi resistance such that the notion of ‘community’ underpins both territorial claims on the post-colonial state by Munda men and women and efforts to remake political selves in dialogue with statist discourses of primitivism.

In engaging with the debate on modernity, this article constructs the notion of a ‘subaltern modernity’ as a process of epistemological – spatial/temporal/agential – coalescence constituting a transverse solidarity politics. This is empirically informed by the narratives of the livelihood-environmental resistance launched by subalterns in the Indian state of Kerala, known for its twin legacies – of communist government and social development – which have proved to be a direct challenge to the state/corporate-led developmentalism in the region. The article thus attempts to contribute to the debate on modernity more from the perspective of resisting subjects and agents, with their particular subjective experience and understandings of science and reasoning. However, their resistance generates transformative events of universal relevance and thereby global issues of epistemology. As such, the article develops a theory of knowledge that takes subaltern resistance itself as modernity.

In contemporary China, many ethnic minority groups such as Tibetans, Mongolians, Miao, and Tai have their own oral cultures, functioning as oral media. Tai Changkhup, for example, verbally disseminate history and culture and transmit information and knowledge among the Tai ethnic minority in the Tai language. In a straightforward sense, these aspects of oral media are people in and of themselves, and can be called singers, poets, or chanters. Tai oral media, therefore, is the Changkhup themselves. Situated in a specific strategy of subaltern resistance, this research aims to explore a softer ‘everyday form of resistance’—oral media resistance through Tai Changkhup, thereby reflecting the asymmetric power relations between the Han Chinese majority and Tai ethnic minority. Taking an ethnographic approach, participant observation and interviewing combined with individual interviews and a focus group are used for data collection. Thematic analysis is primarily used for analyzing data. The findings reveal that Tai oral media functions as a form of cultural resistance against Han cultural hegemony in a subtle and sometimes unconscious way to preserve Tai traditions and identity, wherein the rituality of Changkhup plays a unique role in sustaining the resistance. Essentially, Changkhup resistance is intertwined with complicity, continuously negotiating with hegemonic power and reinforcing Han cultural hegemony as a result.

The symptoms of psychological conflict between the Madurese parents and Javanese primary school teachers oftenarise. It happens as the result of politeness they express in different culture interactions. This research focused on the politenessstrategies they expressed in the interaction based on the principles of disciplinary as one of the principles of politeness. The dataform included speech and the context of the speech they used to interact in anywhere at any time. The data was transcribed fromspeech events when they were involved in the interactions and audio-visual recordings. The analysis was performed byinterpreting each unit of speech and its context with an ethnographic approach and verstehen. Based on the principle ofdisciplinary, Madurese-Javanese cross-cultural politeness in the interaction of parents and primary school teachers expressed by(1) strategies (1) formal (F), (2) formal and contextual (FC), (3) formal indirect speech act (FI), (4) the formal and contextualindirectspeech acts (FCI), and (5) an indirect speech act (I). At the level of basic strategy, a formal strategy used: 44.44%, indirectspeech act strategies: 33.33%, and contextual strategies: 22.22%. This has shown that in expressing politeness, motivated by adesire to enforce the speech disciplinary, both parents and teachers are still use a lot of attention to words or other linguisticelements. Also, politeness expression was strengthened by the attitudes and behavior within utterance.

This article explores artistic creation as a critical operation in prison, focusing on CORPOEMCADEIA, a contemporary dance project with inmates at Linhó Prison, Portugal. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, and drawing on pragmatic sociology, it examines how dance enables embodied, aesthetic engagement that reconfigures prison experience. Through gestures and movement, critique emerges as a sensitive, situated, and nondiscursive practice that reveals moral and subjective tensions. The article argues that, even under constraint, dance can function as a form of poetic justice and political expression, offering alternative ways of being and relating.