Death and Dying in Northeast India: Indigeneity and Afterlife

Description

This book formulates a new pedagogy of death with regard to Northeast India and shows how this pedagogy offers an understanding of alternative knowledge systems and epistemes. In documenting a range of customs and practices pertaining to death, dying and the afterlife among the diverse ethnic communities of Northeast India, the book offers new soteriological, epistemological, sociological and phenomenological perspectives on death. Through an examination of these eschatological practices and their anthropological, theological and cultural moorings, the book aims to reach an understanding of notions of indigeneity with regard to Northeast India. The contributors to this book draw upon a range of subjects— from songs, literary texts, monuments, relics and funerary objects to biographies to folktales to stories of spirit possessions and supernatural encounters. It collates the research of scholars primarily from Northeast India, but also from Eastern India and offers an interdisciplinary analysis of these various belief systems and practices. This book will of interest to those researchers and scholars interested in South Asia in general and Northeast India in particular, and also to those interested in the social anthropology of religion, cultural studies, indigenous studies, folklore studies and Himalayan studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Death and Dying in Northeast India: Indigeneity and Afterlife 1. The Thenness and Nowness of Rituals of Passage Among the Zo Christians: Death as Collective Engagement 2. Mortuary Beliefs and Practices Among the Khasi Tribe of Meghalaya 3. The Rhetoric of Death and Dying: The Khasi and Karbi Context 4. Imageries of Life and Death: The Case of Kombirei 5. The Death Rituals: An Analysis of the Socio-Religious Practices of Death in Bodo Society 6. The Men were Heroes while the Women were Victims: Commemorating the Mizo National Front Movement 7. War and the Dead: Funerary Rites, Mourning and Commemorating Second World War Deaths in Northeastern India 8. Navigating Death in Diaspora: Easterine Kire’s Nagaland 9. Death Rituals: An Insight into the Naga Ancestral Religion 10. No Rest for our Ancestors in Museums: Unpacking the Preliminary Impressions from the Repatriation Process of Naga Ancestral Remains 11. Dialogue with the Shindré: Death Rituals Among the Lhopo of Sikkim 12. The Body in Myth and Practice: Symbols of Death in Yumaism 13. Corporeal Traces and Sacred Lives: Examining the Mummified Relic of Kalu Rinpoche in Sonada, Darjeeling Glossary of Vernacular Terms Index