Identity and Globalization: A Naga Perspective

Temsula Ao

TEMSULA AO  is a poet, short story writer and folklorist. She is a professor in English at the North-Eastern Hill University. Currently she is the Dean of the School of Education and Humanities. Her latest story collection These Hills  Called Home: Stories from a  War Zone published by Zuban and Penguin, India is highly appreciated and critically acclaimed.

Identity is a word loaded with meanings, evocative of multiple  interpretations  and in  today’s  context, implicated in a vociferous cry for assertion. The word means different  things to different  people at different times.  It  changes significance over the time-space continuum  and either accrue or shed meanings all the time.

Assigning a common identity to the ethnic groups now collectively known  as the Nagas, comprising of many different tribes, speaking many different languages and within a distinct linguistic group, many different dialects is problematic. For a Naga, identity  is a many-layered concept. In order to understand the implications of identity in the wake of globalization in the Naga experience, the discussion will focus on some primary contexts of its conceptualization with  certain specific examples from the Ao-Naga tribe.

Existential
The existential identity  of the Nagas is immersed in mythical lore¯ how they originated, the location of their origin and why they come to live at different places or inhabit the geographical area called Nagaland and outside the state in some places in the adjoining states. There is no concrete “historical” or material support for the myths of origin; however, these myths have been accepted by people as an inalienable principle of their tribal history. Each tribe with its distinct language, social customs and dress codes has continued to live as an identifiable ethnic entity within the group collectively known as the Nagas. The viability  and continuance of this principle  can be illustrated, for example, among the Ao-Naga tribe regarding the clan divisions and adherence to exogamy. According to their origin  myth,  three men and three women who belonged to three major clans emerged out of rocks at an ancient site called Lungterok.  The myth goes on to say that the marriage among the six people took place with those from clans other than their own. The clan division as well as the practice of exogamous form of marriage among the Aos can be traced to the myth and is prevalent today. There are similar myths of origin in the lore of other Naga tribes, which have become the accepted oral history  of the tribes as well  as the principle of social ordering among them.

Locational
Within the tribe a Naga’s identity is deeply rooted in the village of his birth and residence. Being a citizen of a particular village is the most important aspect of a Naga’s existence because this identity is marked within a specified ethnic and linguistic space. The identity  affiliated to a village draws attention  to clan affinity, possession of ancestral and other  properties  in  the form  of land holdings, and underlines one’s responsibility  to the community  in the form of participating  in community rituals, celebrations, and in the governance of the village polity. A Naga who is banished from his ancestral village for political, social or criminal offenses is like a person without a country. There can be no greater humiliation for a Naga than this fate that strips him of this symbolic identity and he is thus disaffiliated from his origin and tradition. At an inter-village level the antiquity and the size of a village lend a certain aura of superiority  to a citizen of such a village. For example, a villager from Changki, when addressing a gathering of village representatives of  the  Aos,  begins his  speech by introducing himself, as “I am Changki, the father of thirty villages.”  By this he means that he can claim seniority over others by virtue of the antiquity of his village. In a culture  that respects age, such an introduction immediately enhances the speaker’s identity among his peers. On the whole, the combination of ethnicity and territory  gives a Naga the most dynamic definition of his identity.

Artefactual
Art  and its various forms never existed in the Naga context for its own sake. Whatever art forms identified with or assigned to the “Naga” today has evolved from utility items. When houses, village gates, textiles, tattoos and other household items became personalized through extra ornamentation or addition of colours or symbols, the ordinary artefacts began to acquire new significance and became a new set of identifiers within a local context. In men’s wear the most famous example among the Aos is the “Mangkotepsu” or “Tsungkotepsu” shawl, which traditionally could be worn only by men who had taken heads in warfare or given feasts of merit. Such shawls therefore would automatically be identified with persons of high status in society. Such identity markers abound in all the Naga tribes.   Again, the structures and decorations or the lack therein on houses also evince status difference within a given community.

The notion of identity  among the Nagas in relation to the three main contexts is indivisible from the community to which they belong. It is this sense of belonging within these parameters of any given group that validates their individual identities.

Subsumption of Identities
When it comes to being identified, for example, as an Ao, the locational identity  as a member of a particular village is blurred when it merges into the broader identity of the tribe or group. But at this stage, within the group called Ao, the clan divisions remain distinct cutting across village boundaries. The process of subsumption which begins at this stage continues its spiral ascent as it  sweeps aside the local identities  of being an Ao, Angami or Sema etc. when it culminates at the apex point of being identified as a Naga. While the tribal identity is not altogether erased, s/he has to assume a different persona of belonging to a greater whole where all the contextual parameters of her/his identity  become irrelevant. However, even across tribal boundaries certain clan affinities have remained recognizable and are respected. So if an inter-tribal  marriage is being contemplated, care is taken to avoid an incestuous marriage between couples belonging to the same clan.

The progress of an identity  from this point towards a national one blurs all existing parameters and offers a Naga an amorphous identity  based solely on a geographical affinity of residing within the boundaries of the sovereign state of India, which is coincidental. The definitions of this identity are derived from political and economic dependencies rather than any cultural, traditional  or linguistic  affinities.  The Indian  identity therefore becomes a total disclaimer of all that a Naga has conceived of himself to be through generations. His being a Naga, and a citizen of India has to be readjusted in that his existential moorings have to be reinvented in a new context. In the absence of commonalities there can be no assimilation and without assimilation there can be no hybridization. Of necessity it then becomes a question of subsumption of lesser by the stronger force. In the Naga context, the acceptance of the new identity is a matter of political expediency and in the process of accommodating this duality; the people are inexorably pulled towards the forces of globalization.

Globalization
This purely economic theory being peddled to supposedly bring in unity and prosperity to the people will  have to be assessed on the cost that it will  extract from its adherents. The impact of globalization will be most felt in the area of indigenous  cultural  products because to meet global standards, the products will have to be modified,  re-designed and at times even be distorted. The identities embodied in cultural products will  thus be eliminated  for greater marketability.  For example, the famous Ao-Naga shawl called “Mangkotepsu” is a male attire but these days one sees that jackets made out of it have become unisexual and are sold at tourist spots with its lore and history totally ignored. Other handicrafts, dance forms  are also being manipulated to ‘fit’ into the required mould. This process of de-identifying native cultures and their products for the sake of global recognition and economic expediency will  inevitably  lead to a hybridization of identities  in cultural artefacts.

Hybridization implies the subsumption of original features that results in a new product. This inverse process of de-identification begins from the extrinsic domain of visible ethnic identifiers.  But this cannot be dismissed as an isolated phenomenon because the extrinsic markers are an extension of the intrinsic identities.  The loss of the visible distinctions in cultural products will eventually deplete much of the lore and history of the people so that a time will  come when the product will account for writing a “‘de-humanized” history for the people.

The cultures of North  East India  are already facing tremendous challenges from education and modernization.  In the evolution  of such cultures and the identities that they embody, the loss of distinctive identity markers does not bode well for the tribes of the region. If the trend is allowed to continue in an indiscriminate and mindless manner, globalization will create a market in which  Naga, Khasi or Mizo communities  will  become mere brand  names and commodity markers stripped of all human significance and which will definitely mutate the ethnic and symbolic identities of a proud people. Globalization in this sense will eventually reduce identity to anonymity.

Globalization: The Khasi Perspective

Desmond L. Kharmawphlang, G. Badaiasuk Lyngdoh  Nonglait, Wandashisha Rynjah

DESMOND  L. KHARMAWPHLANG is a poet, short story writer  and folklorist. He has written books and published extensively on Northeast Folklore. He heads the Center for Cultural and Creative Studies, North-Eastern Hill University,  Shillong. G. Badaiasuk Lyngdoh Nonglait and Wandashisha Rynjah are Junior Research Fellows at the Centre for Cultural and Creative Studies, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong.

People’s  living  conditions  change throughout history.  Society changes in different  directions because of variations in local resources and local conditions. Today, with the advent of new information technology, industrial production and liberalized world trade, the changes happening around us are having a multidimensional effect. These changes and  their consequences are the  visible  manifestations  of globalization and it is hard to find a single place, which remain untouched by them.

The concept of globalization is not something new. We can find its root dating from the colonial period. When we talk about globalization, we normally refer to a more advanced stage of the process of development of the world economy. It is about the exploitation of the market on a global scale. The impact of the globalization process is more accurately seen in terms of an emergence of global-local nexus, which  has been made possible through  the establishment of worldwide information technology and communication networks.1

The Indian and particularly the Northeastern examples provide  illuminating perspectives of the dynamics of globalization. Prior to India’s independence, the driving developmental discourse was extensive literacy missions, education and healthcare and an implied  adoption of cosmopolitan attitudes that would help facilitate an integration of all Indians into a single national community swearing allegiance to one sovereign state and governed by one constitution.  While it is true that Gandhi advocated an ideology of homespun reliance, the general mood of the leaders of the new Indian republic was rapid industrialization and a moving away from the traditional socio-economic mould. The consequences of the post- colonial idealism was also felt in North East India with a set of some very significant markers that were exploited to gain political advantage through ethnic assertiveness, cultural indigenization  and regionalism. The powerful Seng Khasi and Hill  State movements spawned  in Shillong are the spin-offs of this idealism.2

Keyed to developmental concerns, folklorists have been closely following the intersections of the economic- technical  forces with  folk  culture  on  the  global information super-highway and we have adopted what we would like to call, for now, the “market- model” to test our observations in respect of globalization in the Khasi context.

We conducted a study of the two established markets of Shillong, the Iewduh or Bara Bazaar and Police Bazaar. These two markets are situated barely a kilometer from each other and while the first, i.e. Bara Bazaar, has an antiquated origin, Police Bazaar developed only in the last decade of the nineteenth century. While Iewduh or Bara Bazaar is directly under the control of the Syiem or traditional  chief who has a ceremonial house on its premises wherein annual rituals are performed, Police Bazaar is managed by the Shillong Municipality and the Department of Urban Affairs of the Government of Meghalaya. The lanes and by-lanes of Bara Bazaar are clogged with rude foot traffic, open stalls and mobile vendors fighting for space and attention. The gutters overflow in some sections and the steps, when they are there, are perilous. Agricultural products from far flung and nearby villages are brought in by transportation of all kinds and stout porters are engaged to carry them to the vending stalls. Meat, fish and bulks of grocery are bargained over with exchanges resembling abuses. The various dialects of the Khasi language are heard along with Hindi, Nepali, Rajasthani and Sylheti. Bamboo baskets, fishing equipments and implements for agricultural  operations are sold in bulk.  Here, traditional  measure systems co-exist with  the metric system and counting is done on fingers, paper scraps and Chinese calculators. Strategically tucked in some corners, one finds eating joints, packed to overflowing customers, selling the traditional cholesterol-loaded jadoh and the assorted meat delicacies. Hooch shops run by Khasis and Nepalis are found  to do brisk  business alongside the more intrepid  Tibetans who sell Indian– made foreign liquor.

Police Bazaar, on the other hand, is the romping ground of the hip and the happening and boasts of discotheques, bars and fancy eating-places. The streets are well-lit and cosmetic works on roads and structures go on through out  the year. Beautification  projects are periodically launched. During festivals, public performances are staged at Khyndai  Lad,  (literally,  where  nine  roads converge), in the very heart of Police Bazaar. A huge fountain  set amidst a circular lawn dominates this superbly illuminated site.

Market places create their own texts and are veritable theatres of contact and action. In Khasi folklore, traditional markets are significant mythic sites marking harmony and discord among the community of both humans as well  as beasts. There are many  legends, which  are actually market-lore, that articulate the formation and disintegration of many Hima or Khasi traditional states.3 Even today,  markets are the places for  maintaining human contact and cultural exchanges. They continue to generate new traditions. One ostentatious change is the disappearance of the tailoring songs from Bara Bazar. The tailors of Bara Bazaar are renowned  singers and whistlers as they work on their sewing machines. This tradition has stopped although a handful of tailors still tenaciously cling to their old machines, in the tailoring quarters of the market.  One gnarled tailor rued: “Times are really hard. We are not tailors any more; we are menders and repairers. We repair old clothes. The few clients that we have are people from the villages. The heavy influx  of readymade garments has ruined   our trade. Nowadays, we barely make seventy rupees a day.”

It is not difficult to comprehend the reason for this – less than  a kilometer  away  is Police Bazaar, the commercial center where expensive and branded garments are sold largely. It is the place for dress material, cosmetics, expensive food items and goods associated with the affluent and the trendy. Shops offer a wide range of international  branded products and if one’s resources match the price tags, one can indulge in a Gianni Versace pair of shoes, don a Nike sports jacket or strut around in a pair of Pepe jeans. PB, as Police Bazaar is fashionably called, is a shopper’s stop for the affluent people of Meghalaya and Northeast India.

The profusion of branded outlets dealing in and selling branded products  such as Adidas,  Reebok, Nike  is impressive.  The media,  through  cable TV and the Internet, have created a phenomenal market for branded accessories ranging from underwear to wristbands, water bottles to travel bags, and cosmetics to apparel cleverly classified  as climate light and climate cool. The new order entrepreneurs are brimming with confidence and aver that five years down the line, people will  be wearing only such types of garments. Globalization has thus made the world  a smaller place where people from various corners of the globe can voice a common fashion statement.

During  our study, we noted the presence of what we call the “sweat shops” not far from the glitzy establishments. In these horribly  confined spaces provided by lean-tos, conveniently concealed by facades of buildings, tailors toil to make and stitch adjustments. It is a fact that physically the people of Northeast India are smaller in comparison to people of other parts of the globe.  So it  is very  obvious  that  when  one buys readymade apparel, one still need to have fittings and adjustments made. It would not be greatly surprising to find one or two of the Bara Bazaar tailors working there, having abandoned their freewheeling independence to slave in these dingy surroundings.

Earlier, we had mentioned that the engine of globalization is being fuelled by the media and the electronic image and a direct spin-off of this is the mission of establishing newer cultural values and meanings through the hegemonic communication forms of satellite TV, film, print media and music industries which are decidedly spreading and homogenizing  American post-modern culture. This system, defined by the three considerations of race, gender and income, creates a set of cultural ideologies that are consumer-oriented  and these are marketed, distributed, sold to and consumed by the Third  World,   Soviet  and  European  audiences. 4 Globalization has thus made the world a smaller place where people from various corners of the globe can voice a common fashion statement.

We made a survey of one international and four Indian magazines (Time, The Week, India Today, Outlook) going back through  a year’s issues and found that there are almost as many, (if not more), advertisements than there are stories, and these glossy and often seductive advertisements become sites for consumption lust and if income permits, to be indulged  in. Fashion advertisements occasionally become erotic discourses and the same treatment is extended to cars, motorcycles, alcoholic beverages, food, cell phones, watches and other gadgets. Advertising strategies and advertising subjects “become living display units of the postmodern man.”5

Fashion houses use supermodels and movie stars as brand ambassadors and astounding sums of money are being spent to create awareness about these globally marketed products. While fashion is a reliable reflector of change, it is also the marker of a continuity of control exerted by the affluent and the powerful. The discourse of power is created by no less than one of the multinational fashion houses in the coinage of the term “power-dressing,” and while this may be deceptive or even imaginary, it forcefully enacts the cultural image of the successful individual who wields power in a world which is there for the taking, (thus extending the metaphors of the primal horde myth).
Globalization in the Khasi context, therefore, has provided glimpses of a global market that does not affirm  the sharing of resources or humanness but of accentuating the cultural differences and marginality.  While westernization  of some of the urban elites here has resulted in their integration with globalization, most of our people, the marginalized poor have been effectively left out.

In the dichotomy between tradition and change, the irony clearly resonates in the lost song of the tailors in Bara Bazar. There a tradition  is lost. We cannot retrieve and preserve that song any more except being deafened by the blare of Globalization!
Endnotes
1      Saxena, Ranjana — “Globalization  and culture“  Culture Studies (Themes and Perspectives); 2003 ed. Chandan Kumar Sharma, page 85.
2      (see Kharmawphlang, D L : Why Folklore? Image Creation and Perception, 2005)
3      (see Kharmawphlang,  DL:  Notes from Ri  Bhoi, pp21Manuscript,1997)
4      Barthes Roland, 1975 The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill  and Wang.
5      Lefebvre, Henri1984: Everyday Life in the Modern World

Globalization of Folk as a Genre in Northeast India

Prasenjit Biswas

PRASENJIT BISWAS  is seriously  engaged with issues of cultural pluralism,  representation, identity  and location politics.  He is widely published and currently teaches Philosophy at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Before joining  NEHU  as a Reader in Philosophy, he taught at Bombay and Guahati IITs, and also at Assam University,  Silchar.

The idea of the global is often conceived in terms of an appearance of the “simulacral” that presents the interior of a culture as “decontextualized” or and folk genres in a moment of the Global.The notion of simulacra as explicated by Baudrillard  and Jameson   is   of  much relevance here. According to Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum means a substitution,  a precession of the signs of the real for the real. Such signs are meantal through its representational and “deterritorialized.” Instead of arguing that there is an ongoing dialectic or bind between the local and the global, I prefer to take a semeiotic stance; that is, how the material symbols and codes of stories and narratives get represented in the discourses emerging from within the life-world of the community. Such representations within the domain of folk literature, I would emphasize, could be looked at how genres are co-constituted and how they are designated a place within the site of an ongoing repertoire of construction of meanings. In order to accomplish this task, the paper is divided  into four sections: section one delves into the nature of Global in the Folk; section two deals with  the Representational artifacts; section three provides an analytical scaffolding of the genres in folk  and delves into  the simulacral content of Folk and section four concludes by way of prognosticating the interrelationship between identity to encounter the relational connection between the Subject and the object (1998:166-184). Fredric Jameson has added a further twist to this by defining simulacra as a copy of the copy for which no original has ever existed. In other word, it is a temporalization of the material and the spatial, which he calls “conversion of space into time” in order to strike only a resemblance with the real (1994). This also means a symbolic constitution of the human  Subject, which  no longer exists in space, but exists only  in a temporal space that is configured by a temporally constituted subjectivity. In the case of folk genres that are supposed to be transmitted within a system of beliefs and practices not only bind a society together but also act as the identifying marker of that society. The representational and temporal dimension of folk can go as signs of the real and can substitute  the real. The cultural identity  is constituted by such signs that substitute the world of living by some representation and that readily lends itself to all kinds of simulacral practices such as an advertisement in the media or surrounding the ordinary with the imaginary. The only thing that it  distances itself  from,  is its very  conditions  of coming into being as it alters them beyond recognition (Deleuze 1994: 293).


The Semeiotic Stance of the Global In  the  case of  Northeast  India,  the  practice of temporalization  assumes the form  of “assertibility conditions” of the folk.  These conditions  are both performative as well as pragmatic based upon some kind of semantic grounding  in a discourse, which is constituted by a play of material and power relations. Such discursive construction of “assertibility conditions” structures the artistic and cultural freedom to express oneself from within one’s folk tradition. Contemporary writings  on folk life in the form of tales to signify past assume those assertibility conditions that constitute and facilitate the purpose of rationalization.  Such rationalizations occur through repetition and reiteration of the folk motifs and the symbolic nexus that they form within the social world.  In a collection of Folk tales, entitled as Narratives of Northeast India (2002), the tales are divided into themes such as “origin tales”, “tricksters and numbskulls” and “demons,  ghosts and the supernatural.” Such a thematic arrangement construes a web of both idealized and mundane notions of life in folk imagination. The way it affects the portrayal of the world for reasons that are given to justify some form of belief such that  it  acts as a cultural  capital,  which rationalizes the world. “The Origins of Headhunting”, a Naga Folktale goes like this:

Once upon a time (…) there was only one tree on earth. The tree bore many fruits and all kinds of bird perched on its branches to eat the fruits.One day, a bird accidentally dropped one of the fruits to the ground and a lizard ate it up. When the bird searched for the fallen fruit,  it was informed that a lizard and an ant had eaten it up. Since both the lizard and the ant denied eating the fruit,  it was arranged that the case would be decided by a ceremony of oath- taking.

After the ceremony, it became evident that the lizard was guilty. At this, the entire colony of ants chopped off the head of the lizard and it was taken in a big procession as a sign of victory. This spectacle  was witnessed by human beings. It was in simulation of this incident that the practice of headhunting  was adopted by and came to stay amongst the Ao Nagas (2002:34).

In rendering the story in written form, it is remarkable; Sashiungla Ao uses concepts of “sign”, “spectacle” and “simulation” as a trinary  that assume a metalinguistic application  thereby developing  a logic for explaining “headhunting.” How else does one understand the way the mind works in explaining a practice such as headhunting? Here, something from the natural world provides an analogy and serves as an example for human beings to follow, and constitutes the very basis of belief that explains the reason behind such a practice. Simulation increases the strength of that belief. This is how the psychology of folk belief is consolidated from observation of nature to regularity of practice by way of transforming  events of nature into explanations or reasons of truth  in  certain cultural  and traditional practices. This is how  acts of belief could be put  to explanatory contexts. Within the substitutional practices of the global such simulation yields to any form of equivalence: Headhunting could be made equivalent to war, to primitivism or to insurgency. The situation could be understood in terms of dissimulating the character of the sign:

To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: “Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle  intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false”, between “real” and “imaginary” (Baudrillard 1998:167).

Such a feigning of the real is possibly the only way to recover the Folk. This recovery  assumes the form of a folk processing of contents of belief that occupy a place in imagination by way of turning it into an artifact of cultural reproduction of an identity.

Representations as artefacts of Identity
Representation acts as a norm that binds acts of making visible a performing self within the genre of the folk. A folk narrative performs within a representational artifact. The representational artifact is often situated in cultural practice and belief. The Mizo God Pathien in representational terms “resides above the clouds in heaven” and He is the “provider of rain and daily needs of man”  (Sujata Miri  2005:30). Such a representation results in performances like enacting oneself as daughter of nature such as in the Mizo tale of “Ramenhawii.” The story goes like this:

There was a beautiful girl called Ramenhawii who was famous for her very long hair. All the young men in the village desired her but none could win her favour. One day she was washing her hair in the river, a fish swallowed her hair. A strand of the hair found its way to the plate of the king of the valley as he was being served dinner by the palace cook. Filled with curiosity at the sight of the beautiful hair the king ordered his guards to look for the owner of the hair as he wished to make her his queen. After  a long search, the guards at last found the place where the girl lived but they were unable to approach her as she lived protected by barricades around her.

“Oh! Please tell us at least your name” implored the king’s guards.She replied: ‘No name, no name have I, I live on pure water, I live on pure vegetables (Ibid: 51).’

What the story tells us is how Ramenhawii performs a notion of a self that is different from the notion of the self prevalent in the society by identifying herself with pure water and pure air. In a sense, she assumes the form of the sensible as opposed to corporeal. This is a representational substitution of the real by the imaginary and the self of Ramenhawii by way of decentring makes it an artefact of representation. This artifact does not confirm to any prevalent social norm as she does not agree to the King’s proposal, but merely shows up as a dream-object which she confirms by way of enacting a different  definition of self, i.e., “no name’’ to refer to herself and yet “living” on nature. Such artefacts evolve from the imaginary to become the symbolic when the self is enacted artefactually in a narrative. Mona Zote in her poem, “What Poetry Means to Ernestina in Peril”, writes:

(…) and pious women know the sexual ecstasy of dance and peace is kept by short  men with a Bible and five big knuckles on their righteous hands.

Religion has made drunks of us all. The old goat bleats. We are killing ourselves. I like an incestuous land. Stars,be silent Let Esterina  speak (Geeti Sen et al, ed.2006:67).

There is a different enactment of the self in religious performances as well as in incest. The self is retrieved in the symbolic silence of the star when the heroine Esterina is in peril. Esterina is identifiable in the lived world of Mizoram within the social and cultural space. The self of Esterina is enacted in peril at the disjuncture of religion and incest or of the sacred and the profane. The binary of silence and speech and religion and incest, both modes of enactment transforms the simplified performative self of Ramehawii into the global Esterina within the representational artifacts. The global comes in through such transformed narratives of representation.

Folk as a Genre of the Global

United  Nations resolution to conserve folk,  based on recognition  of “intangible  heritage,”  as a subject for protection, is one of the most significant recent developments of international cultural heritage law. However,  identifying its character has been a major challenge. Understanding the significance of transmission of information (e.g., how a carpet is hand- woven) and the skill of the producer of this heritage is central to its definition (1998). The human (social and economic) context of the production of intangible heritage requires safeguarding as much as the tangible product itself and must be considered in evaluating existing or future protective measures. This perspective addresses the  enormous  economic and  cultural  impact  of globalization which is mostly perceived as a threat to the continued existence of this heritage itself but which also has the potential to aid its preservation. This means allowing the continuation of production of those culturally valued symbols of an ethnic or cultural identity by way of preserving the social context. The task however is complex. To cite an example from Northeast India, one can look at some interesting folk narratives of loss and recovery. The loss of the script due to flood in the course of changing of the course of a river is a legend that Khasis construe to justify  oral culture.  In a very poignant tale of loss, the competition between two river goddesses Umngot (Myngnod) and Umiam to reach the plains of Sylhet is discussed. Umgnot takes a short cut through rocky hills. Meanwhile Umiam flows down peacefully into the plains. Umiam digs through the rocky surfaces and being slow  and steady wins  the race. Looking at Umiam glistening like a silver necklace, the river goddess Umngot splits herself in shame into five: Ka Umtong, Ka Torasa, Ka Pasbira, Ka Kajani and Ka Dwara  (Sujat Miri  2005:20). All  these are lost rivers signifying  that rivers need conservation. With the increasing commercialization of forests and rocks, how can these rivers be conserved and if these are not conserved, how can folk culture be conserved?

Following the law of conservation, folk tales need to be preserved for regenerating/reproducing  a tradition  or traditions in a culture. As a genre, the folklore follows the norm of conservation and proposes an appropriate way of conservation of cultural resources and heritage. If the Folk itself disappear due to forgetting and due to a gradual undermining of heritage sites what happens then to conservation is a serious question that needs to be addressed. Can the intrinsic link between folk genres and sites of their enactment be retrieved and considered for conservation? The situation could be best understood from Ayinla Shilu Ao’s observation of changes taken place in Naga society:

The Nagas of my grandparents’ generation have seen changes in their lifetime that they could not have even begun to imagine. Women who cut with bamboo knives the umbilical  cords of babies they had just given birth to have seen those children grow up to become doctors. Some of their  husbands went  to France during the First World War. One brought back a spiked Prussian helmet to decorate with horns and hair as he must have seen being done, or perhaps even done himself, to a human skull. Another boiled his army issue leather boots as they used to do to buffalo hide back home. He ate it and died, poisoned by the tannin  in the leather. The next world  war brought to their own villages Americans, British and Japanese soldiers. When I was a child one could still see army helmets being used as feeding troughs for pigs in the villages. American troop carriers that are locally called “Dodges”  are still being driven in Nagaland. Now Nagas who did not even own mirrors see images from across the world on television screens (Geeti Sen et al, ed. 2005:112).

The use of army artefacts habitually  as artefacts simultaneously shows ignorance about the modern ways as well as continuation of artefactual practices through objects that do not belong per se to the society, but symbolizes as the left over of the modern communities. The indigenous and ingenuous use of artefacts taken from other cultures show a mismatch with one’s own tradition. In this context, the representation of Nagas in the media produces a mismatch with  how they see themselves. Therefore, seeing themselves in the media must surprise them only to underline an identity  between how a community  sees itself and how the world  sees it. The conservation of indigenous ways of life and their own self-image by themselves do not readily find equivalence in the way they are represented.

The situation could be interpreted  by way of understanding the cultural transition that has taken place in Northeast. In a traditional matrilineal society like the Khasis, the role of Khatduh or the youngest daughter of the family, who is traditionally supposed to inherit the property, is now merely its custodian.  This is a big change that has taken place in that there is a move from an inherent right  to a mere legal privilege.  With the emergence of privatization of property, fragmentation of community land and idea of individual ownership, the matrilineal society of the Khasis has become merely symbolic of Khasi identity, while in practice it is tending to be more and more patriarchal in terms of power and authority. Such a transformation of the society has resulted in the transformation or rather deformation of the folk genre into a symbolic apparatus of production of a sense of identity, while the society itself is moving towards the global circulation of capital and wealth.

By Way of Conclusion
Moji Riba, a young filmmaker  and cultural activist of Arunachal Pradesh could be a reference to conclude this piece. He cites a piece of poem to discuss changes in the context of Arunachal Pradesh (Ibid:113). The rainbow is a ladder by which a god climbs from earth to meet his wife in the land of the moon.The earth and sky are lovers and all living beings are born from the union of them. Lightning is a star-maiden running across the sky.

Riba says, “The poetic vibrancy of the images like these, forming  an intricate part of the folklore and myths in abundance in Arunachal Pradesh, hides much of the transformations occurring at the very core of traditional society today” (Ibid). One tends to generalize that such is the way in which folklore is appropriated within the global in the form of “hiding” and probably better as a form of cultural capital that is hidden within the transformations brought in by globalization.  My own position  is that  such hidden  resources reappear as simulacra in the cultural logic of late Capital in the form of substitution of the real by the sign. The signified that remains hidden within the new meanings of artefacts, as Riba maintains,  acts as the source of hiding  the change.

References
Baudrillard,   Jean. “Simulacra  and  Simulation” in  Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, (ed.) Mark Poster. Stanford University   Press, 1998, pp.166-184. Available  at www .stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/ Baudrillard_Simulacra.html. Accessed on 26.05.2006.
Deleuze, Giles. Difference  and Repetition, trans.  P.Patton. London: Atlone Press,1994.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Darham: Duke University  Press,1994.
Kharmawphlang, Desmond. L. Narratives of Northeast India. Shillong: NEHU Press,2002
Miri, Sujata. A Book of Paintings: themes from the hills of northeast India.New Delhi:Mittal, 2005.
Gen, Geeti et.al (eds). Where the Sun Rises When the Shadows Fall: The North  East. New Delhi: OUO, 2006.
UNESCO, UNESCO World Culture Report. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1998.