Can We Recover a Worldview Lost to Colonialism?

How did people see the world before older systems were displaced by colonialism? This is a question faced by communities all over the world. Anthropologist Tiatemsu Longkumer considers it in regard to one particular group of people, the Ao Naga of northeast India.

Today, Longkumer writes, nearly all Aos are Christian, and none practice the community’s pre-colonial spiritual traditions. And because the Ao Naga did not keep written records before the nineteenth century, written sources can’t tell us how they understood the world.

In contrast to a binary of good and evil, tsüngrem, mojing, and temenen were all understood as entities capable of positive or negative action toward humans.

The earliest written records of the society were created by colonial administrators and Christian missionaries. One such account is “The Ao Naga Tribe of Assam,” written by American sociologist and Baptist missionary W. C. Smith in 1925. Smith described the society as an example of “primitive man” and argued that their worship was driven by a fear of “unknown powers.” He distinguished good spirits known as tsüngrem from bad ones called mojing and temenen.

The following year, British administrator and anthropologist J. P. Mills published “The Ao Nagas,” in which he argued that the Ao religion was not a system of moral rules but instead a set of ceremonies calling on “deities” for help. He laid out a system of supernatural presences, defining “Lichaba” as the godlike chief of tsüngrem.

Since Smith and Mills’ time, Ao Naga Christian theologians have become the foremost experts on their community’s pre-Christian religion. Because these scholars work within a Christian framework, Longkumer writes, they are mainly interested in traditional beliefs and practices as precursors to the full divine revelation represented by the community’s conversion to Christianity.

More to Explore

The Changing Meaning of “Mysticism”

Livia Gershon August 24, 2021 People who don't follow organized religion sometimes describe themselves as spiritual. But this idea isn't a recent invention.

In an effort to reconstruct what Ao Naga beliefs looked like before they were refracted through Christianity, Longkumer turns to animism, a broad term for worldviews in which humans are just one kind of “person,” with the capacity to be in relation to other entities, including the spirits of rivers and mountains.

Longkumer suggests that Mills’s distinction between morality and ceremony confused the reality of Ao practices, which emphasized the ethical practice of living in harmony with the spiritual world. He argues that Lichaba, an anthropomorphic spirit, should be viewed as just one among many tsüngrem, and that—in contrast to a binary of good and evil—tsüngrem, mojing, and temenen were all understood as entities capable of positive or negative action toward humans.

Weekly Newsletter

"*" indicates required fields

Similarly, Longkumer suggests that traditional Ao Nagas did not separate tanüla—a concept something like “spirit” or “soul”—from the material world. They believed that humans and other persons possess tanüla as part of their essence, but that humans are unique in having multiple tanüla, reflecting their diverse inner qualities and external relationships.

Longkumer acknowledges that it is impossible to really know how the Ao Naga saw the world two centuries ago, but he argues that animism can help evoke the complexity of a system that was different from, but no less rich than, the Christian one that followed it.

The post appeared first on JSTOR Daily.