Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates certain artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum collected from the Naga peoples of northeast India during colonial time which can be seen to embody 'social relationships based on mistrust'.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on objects in the colonial ethnographic collections from erstwhile Naga Hills, northeast India which are in the display cases of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The objects sometimes promise to harmonise but sometimes are the lines along which mistrust and conflict occur. The objects discussed comprise two roughly carved, four foot high wooden figures which are identified as 'a man of prominence and his wife' from an enemy village, which were kept in the youth- dormitory of a neighbouring village for the purpose of sympathetic magic to cause illness to the pair at an appropriate time in the near future. Other objects in a separate display case include a bundle of sticks and dry leaves which was sent as a warning and challenge to the British administrative officer and a pair of large tiger teeth over which oaths had been taken in disputes. The objects were made in the 1920s before Naga had converted in substantial numbers to Christianity, and warfare among Naga villages still predominated. The paper investigates the extent to which they embody past relationships between clans and between coloniser and colonized and remain relevant nowadays as symptoms of "dark mistrust" in the postcolonial politics of nationalism and the potentially violent internal competitiveness between Naga groups.