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Accepted Paper:

The Search for 'Idyllic Places' and 'Wild People': Visualizing Nagas Through the Prism of Colonial Photography  
A.S. Shimreiwung

Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the politics of gaze in the photographic recording of the Nagas by colonial ethnographers during the early part of 20th Century.

Paper long abstract:

The documentation of living condition of tribes in frontier region of British Empire had become an obsession for Colonial ethnographers, who were looking for the 'idyllic' places and 'warring tribes' dwelling in those parts of the world where Western civilization had remain untouched. Along with the ethnographic study that was conducted by anthropologist and colonial administrators, photography and images about the 'natives' became a dominant form of representations of the 'cultural other'. The Nagas, located in the 'frontier region' of British India, were one of such tribal community that had been massively captured through photography. Photographic documentation about the Nagas has been done as part of the ethnographer's 'private collections' and also as a form of their academic inquiry. Often, ethnographic narratives about the Nagas have been interspersed with photos of the Nagas: images forming a narrative of its own and in conjunction with the written text. The literal and visual narratives, although employed in different medium, have converged in various points pertaining to the representations of the Nagas as 'wild people' living in 'hill areas' of the easternmost frontier. This paper will interrogate the photographic gaze of Nagas during the first half of 20th century and those etic lenses that has been employed by Colonial ethnographers.

Panel P18
Framing the northeast: visual practices in Northeast India in the 19th and 20th centuries
  Session 1