Travel, Empire and Ethnographic Self-Fashioning of a White Headhunter: Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf’s The Naked Naga

Abstract

Travel Writing produced under the frameworks of colonialism and ethnography offers an opportunity to delineate the entanglement of the traveller in the ideological underpinnings of empire and ethnography. Drawing on the interdisciplinary formulations of the writing culture debate, the paper construes Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf’s The Naked Nagas (1939) as a travel text that narrativises encountered life-worlds in the Naga Hills, a contact zone in the frontier of the colonial Northeast India. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the paper traces the text’s ideological incarnation under the Nazi regime and foregrounds the self-fashioning by the European ethnographer-traveller as a salvager, a cultural translator and a white headhunter of folkloric proportion. It thereby posits the contact zone’s congeniality for translation and circulation of identities. The text exhibits a futuristic gesture towards postmodernist configurations of ethnographic writing and self-fashioning, and emerges as polysemous and simultaneously participates in and subverts the discourse of headhunting by deconstructing the inherent discursivity in headhunting. Read in the context of the colonial Northeast Indian frontier, Furer-Haimendorf’s narrative, generally marginalised in academic studies, signposts a critique of Christian evangelism as a threat to the ethnographic present of indigenous societies. The paper contributes to the interdisciplinary knowledge on the configuration of the colonial Northeast Indian frontier by envisioning the roles of, and contested affinity among, travel, empire and ethnographic exercises as evinced in travel writing.