Ukhrul Times this November introduce to our valued readers an exciting addition to our News portal, The Contemplative Tribal Podcast.
The Contemplative Tribal Podcast (CTP) explores and reflects on issues, events, ideas, creative works and practices from the perspective of tribal life of Northeast India. For more information about the podcast, you should definitely tune in right away by just clicking on Spotify and Google podcasts.
In this episode, CTP talks with Jelle J P Wouters, author of the book In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State and Violence in Northeast India, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press, India. Jelle is a social anthropologist and currently is senior lecturer at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan.
The book is “a critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state’s response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic under view, Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. The book locates the historical experiences and agency of the Naga people and relates these to ordinary villagers’ perceptions, actions, and moral reasoning vis-à -vis both the Naga Movement and the state and its lucrative resources. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics” (Description of the book from Amazon.in).
The conversation with Jelle is split into two episodes.
Episode 1, In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency
Episode 2, talk about corruption and the practice of democratic election in Nagaland.
Money, Votes & the Insurgency Complex
We consider how mishandling of developmental funds and electoral malpractices might be better understood when seen as taking place “in the shadows of Naga insurgency.” Jelle suggests that these phenomena are not as simplistic as they are often presented. Instead, gleaning from his ethnographic research findings, he recommends that we view Naga societies with all their issues and characteristics in light of what he calls, an insurgency complex.
If you like what the podcast do, follow The Contemplative Tribal Podcast on Spotify &
Google podcasts
Get the book from Amazon 