Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the shift that ethnic dress among the Nagas of Northeast India underwent within the last hundred years: from precisely encoding the individual social status of its wearer to a general statement of ethnic and Naga national pride.

Paper long abstract:

When in the early 20th century the first British administrators and anthropologists wrote their monographs about the Nagas and assembled huge collections of Naga dress and ornaments for their museums, most of these dress items had a precise meaning encoded in them: They would tell about the individual social status of the wearer, which was gained though bravery in war or expenditures in feasts of merit; inherited by birth into a clan; or linked to stages in the life cycle. The reach of the readability of such codes was geographically limited - at times even to a single village - and only in some cases had over-regional validity.

Many of these dress items are still produced and used in Nagaland today - with transformed designs and new meanings attached to them. Recently, a vibrant ethnic fashion scene has emerged in Nagaland, making strong use of traditional ornaments and textiles. But rather than a precise and detailed code of individual social status like in former times, such dresses nowadays express a general ethnic and Naga national pride. The contemporary ethnic fashion scene in Nagaland is, however, not rooted in the local clothing habits and is not following the rules of fashion industry. It mainly lives on the catwalk and through the sponsorship and active promotion by the Naga Government.

Based on field and museum research conducted over the last ten years the aim of this paper is to examine this transition of Naga ethnic dress from social status to ethnic identity.