Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on community engagement with the photographs of Naga objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum collections and the repercussions and reverberation of the effect of such information being brought back to the community.

Paper long abstract:

Colonial photographs taken of the Naga Hills and held in British institutional collections have become key examples for Christian Naga of a pre-Christian 'heathen' or 'animistic' life among Naga. By contrast, contemporary research photographs of older, intentionally symbolic Naga textiles in European museums, which were collected during the British colonial rule in Naga Hills, have had a very different reception: they are used to depict a positive traditional cultural impression of the Naga pre-Christian past. This paper focuses on community engagement with the photographs of Naga objects in museum collections and the repercussions and reverberation of the effect of such information being brought back to the community. Through ethnographic examples from the field, the paper addresses the theme of appropriation or specification of cultural heritage by one Naga community, the Lotha.

The paper shows how the research photographs of textiles, catalogue information on them and researchers' field-data, take on a distinctive identity. Community leaders play a role in this 're-discovery' of their material cultural heritage and in the subsequent dissemination of information through an exhibition of re-produced cloths and the publication of a book based on research photographs. The paper discusses how such research intervention brings with it controversies over ownership as well as generating interest among other Naga communities regarding their cultural heritage in western collections.