The Angami Nagas

Full Price: ~~$89.00~~
Our Price: $79.00

RELATED PRODUCTS

Availability: Available

Edition: Hardcover
Language: English
Author: J. H. Hutton
Year: 1969
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Pages: 499

This account of the Angami Naga tribe was written originally between 1913 and 1915, but owing to the war was not published until 1921. The Angami are therefore described as they were nearly two generations ago; but being perhaps the proudest and most conservative of all the Naga tribes, they may have changed even less than their neighbours since the first edition was published. They were at that time probably the most culturally advanced of the Naga tribes, partly no doubt as the result of their remarkably well developed system of hillside irrigation, bearing close resemblance to that of Luzon in the Philippine Islands, which meant that their villages were never short of rice nor dependent on poorer cereals such as millet or coix. Their resistance to British administration too was much stronger and more prolonged than that of any other Naga tribe, and their courage and enterprise was shewn not only by their formidable siege of the better-armed garrison of Kohima fort in 1879, but by their subsequent raid on Baladhan in Cachar while actually under investment themselves in a stronghold above Khonoma.

The account of the Angamis that follows was undertaken by the author when he was transferred from a district in the Ganges delta to this entirely different milieu and found no general account of the people with whose administration he was concerned, nor any sort of guide to their quite unfamiliar customary law. He attempted therefore to set down a general account of this tribe, to describe its domestic life and agriculture its subdivisions, its laws and customs and its religious observances. Some thirty pages are given to folk-lore and legends, and a little more to language, in which field he had the advantage of a grammar already compiled in 1887 by a former Deputy Commissioner, R.B. McCabe. Among the appendices of which there are a dozen varying from a page or two in length to about forty, are to be found a brief bibliography; notes on the Memi sub-tribe from material furnished by Colonel John Shakespear; brief notices of the non- Angami Naga tribes; notes on traces of totemism among Naga tribes; notes on traces of a matrilineal family system, on rain-making, on stones and beliefs associated with them, and on the calendar. Also to be found are a detailed account of one of the more Important ceremonies, a list of Angami clans, and some anthropometrical tables and a glossary.

The author was member of the I.C.S. from 1909-36 and served in the Naga Hills for nearly twenty years, during which time he contributed this volume to the Assam Government’s series of tribal monographs. He is also the author of The Sema Nagas (1921, 2/e OUP 1968) and as Honorary Director of Ethnography, Asswam, provided supplementary notes and a definitive bibliography on Naga and adjacent tribes to The Ao Nagas by J. P. Mills (1926). As Census Commissioner for India (1929-33) Professor Hutton wrote the Report on the Census of India, 1931 (1933). He alsowrote Caste in India (CUP 1946; 4/e OUP 1963). He was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropoloogy at Cambridge from 1937 to 1950. As a Fellow of the Asiatic Society of Bengal he was awarded their Annandale Gold Medal in 1937, and he was President of the Indian Science Congress in 1932. He was Frazer Lecturer at Oxford in 1938, was an ex-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Honorary Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.

Condition of the book: Usable; but the pages and cover look old