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Paper short abstract:

My paper engages two core questions, namely: (a) What is the idiom and affective relations through which the indigenous Naga people, in the Eastern Himalaya, relate to crops? (b) How do they experience and cope with profound environmental changes?

Paper long abstract:

With the unfolding of state and capitalist investments in infrastructure (Bhattacharya 2019; Wouters 2020), and sensitive geopolitics—amid world-historical processes of climate change—the greater Himalayan region is identified as an ecosystem at particular risk where species, human included, are experiencing profound environmental changes (Pandit 2017). Moreover, within the greater Himalayan region (or what I call the Himalayan adjacent), following a series of ceasefire and peace agreements between state and insurgent entities, the highlands of Northeast India have, in recent years, been configured as a new resource frontier, as well as a capitalist corridor between South and Southeast Asia. These are expected to drastically impact ecosystems, cultural identities, and people-land relations at an unprecedented scale (Loong 2019). Using the multispecies approach, and employing relational ontology frameworks, in particular, the 'plant turn' (Sheridan 2016; Chao 2018), my paper thus engages two core questions, namely: (a) What is the idiom and affective relations through which the indigenous Naga people, in the Eastern Himalaya, relate to crops? (b) How do they (the Naga people and the indigenous crops they co-evolved and co-exist with) experience and cope with profound environmental changes? Furthermore, using the framework of 'shared vulnerability,' developed in the emergent field of multispecies justice (Celermajer et al. 2020), I examine the changing multispecies relations of the Naga people and their co-existent species (namely the indigenous crops) that have lived with them for centuries.