The making of tribes

Abstract

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.