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Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how photographs were used in ethnographic research on the Naga of Northeast India. Due to vast cultural changes since their creation, they were used both as methodological aids in interviews but also as primary sources on cultures for which no textual sources exist today.

Paper long abstract:

Research among the Naga tribes of Northeast India poses a difficult challenge and at the same time a great chance for anthropology. During more than half a century following Indian Independence in 1947, the areas inhabited by the various Naga groups had been closed off to outsiders and virtually no ethnographic research was conducted. During these years a fundamental process of transformation took place in Naga society: The Animistic religious practices of the pre-independence years were replaced by Christian beliefs, suppressing any 'leftovers' of the old religious practices and cultural identities. Today - apart from ethnographic literature published before the closure of the areas - the archives of various European institutions constitute the main 'primary' sources on the 'traditional' culture of some of the Naga groups. This anticipates a situation which will be common for the discipline of social and cultural anthropology in a few decades: The material culture and visual data available in museum collections and photographic archives cannot be contextualized anymore, because the local cultures from which they stem have disappeared or fundamentally changed. If no literature exists for a certain context, the object collections and photographic archives might be the only primary sources available for an anthropologist to ask his or her questions. In an experimental project, the author used the materials of two photographic archives created during the 1930's to write an 'Ethnography of Images' about the Nagas. The given paper discusses some of the insights gained and methods developed in the course of this undertaking.