(0.00.23) [long right side shot]
Alan: The Himalayas have long been an area which, that have attracted famous travellers, explorers and anthropologists, and among these one remembers the names of Frances Hamilton, Brian Hodgson, Joseph Hooker, Sven Hedin, J.H. Hutton. And perhaps the last of this great series of explorers and anthropologists, all curiously beginning with the letter “H”, is Professor Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, the Emeritus Professor of Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. And I would now like to introduce Professor Haimendorf and to talk to Himalayas in the following minutes about his work and life in India and in Nepal. Professor Haimendorf, you were born in 1909 in Vienna and you went to University in Vienna, I wondered what courses you did at Vienna?
(0.01.36)
Christoph: In the University of Vienna the courses in anthropology are fairly comprehensive, namely one doesn’t only study anthropology, you also - which was then called ethnology - but also you have to take other subjects, so I did archaeology and also physical anthropology. It is quite useful afterwards if you have some idea about these neighbouring disciplines. And people asked me often when I was in Vienna, I mean this was then Austria which had become small - it was not a colonial power - why were you so interested in doing anthropology? Actually, I got to anthropology through India. As a school boy of age 15 or 16 I got very interested in India, I read Tagore, I read about Gandhi and so on, and so I thought “Ah well, if I take anthropology I might have the chance once to go to India”, so it really - India was the first interest and from that I got on to anthropology.
(0.02.43)
Alan: That’s exactly the question in my mind. Which were the people who influenced you most during your courses? [Zoom in - closer right side]
(0.02.51)
Christoph: Well the anthropology in Vienna at that time was under the influence of what was called “Die Kulturkrieslehre”, I mean the theory about the circles of different cultures - there is no good English translation of “Kulturkrieslehre”. And the two figures who were there most interested, was Professor Wilheim Schmidt, who is a great linguist - and I think now perhaps more known for his linguistic work - and then there was the head of the Institute of Volkerkunde - Institute of Ethnology as one would translate it - who was Professor Koppers. But apart from these two there was also Professor Heine Geldern and he had perhaps the most lasting influence on me because he was mainly interested in South East Asia and he was a great archaeologist - he had done hardly any anthropological fieldwork - but he was very well-known for his archaeological work. And I think it was due to Heine Geldern that ultimately I chose the extreme North East of India for my first fieldwork - namely the Naga hills - I think without Heine Geldern I perhaps wouldn’t have come to this particular area which I found then afterwards extremely rewarding.
(0.04.28)
Alan: You did a Doctoral Thesis at Vienna, what was the subject of that thesis?
(0.04.34)
Christoph: Yes, that also has something to do with that area. It was a comparative study of hill-tribes in Assam and Burma, and with the main kind of interest in their social organisation, political organisation etc. Now that would to a present-day British academic audience sound strange that you write about a people whom you had not seen because by that time I had not been to India or South East Asia, but the Austria of the Inter-War years, between the two wars, was then very short of funds for fieldwork so people usually did their Doctorate first and if they were successful in that, they then managed perhaps to get funds. So I went through the literature on the tribes and when I finally got there I really knew quite a lot about them, that was the one advantage. And that was also one other interesting - which might be interesting feature in that you asked me before about the courses in anthropology - that it was a very kind of wide coverage which is not very common nowadays anymore. Namely, you didn’t from the beginning only deal with India or only deal with Africa, you had to have a sort of broad knowledge of the whole world more or less. I mean you had now and then a course of lectures on South America, North America or Africa and so on, so you perhaps didn’t know as much as a student in a British university might know about his particular field - like Africa - but one had a very wide view and could probably then choose your area with the idea that that is what interests me most - there are other possibilities too - but that would be the most interesting, and I think it was in this way that I approached South East Asia and the hills of Assam and finally the Nagas. At that time I also wasted a lot of time once in 2 years in trying to learn Chinese because Heine Geldern thought that then one could also read the Chinese literature on South East Asia, but that was of course a hopeless thing because you can’t just do Chinese in addition to anthropology.
(0.07.29)
Alan: Was that during the time that you were a University of Vienna Research Assistant?
(0.07.34)
Christoph: Yes, that was at that time.
(0.07.36)
Alan: That was between 1931 and 1934. (“Yes”) Then you did finally receive some research funds to go to India. Who did you - who funded you?
(0.07.46)
Christoph: I got that from the Rockerfeller Foundation. The Rockerfeller Foundation at that time gave funds to countries which had been badly hit by the war before and which were short of funds and consequently the University of Vienna got some Rockerfeller funds and that enabled me first to come to England for some time, because the Rockerfeller Foundation rightly thought that people should have a wider view of university studies on the area on which they would be dealing. So I was given the choice where to go. I think that the university, the Rockerfeller Foundation expected me to say Harvard, Yale or Berkeley perhaps, but I thought that if I want to go to India I must go to London, which was quite correct of course, so I came to London and I spent 2 terms at the London School of Economics and joined the famous seminar of Professor Bronislaw Malinowski where...
(0.09.01)
Alan: Who was at that seminar?
(0.09.03)
Christoph: That was a sort of general post-graduate seminar - I had already my Doctorate then - a kind of post-graduate seminar, and that was in 1935 and 1936, the autumn term and then the spring term, and so I met there most of the anthropologists really or future anthropologists of Britain like Raymond Firth and Barry Ford I think was there too, and quite a number of...Audrey Richards and Shapiro. So by the time, many years later I came back to London to the university I had a lot of contacts already.
(0.09.50)
Alan: And then after London you set off for India. You went first - you sailed by boat to Victoria - and then you went to India and you first stayed at the Vice-Regal Lodge with Lord Linlithgow. That must have been an interesting experience?
(0.10.10)
Christoph: It was a very interesting - and extremely lucky - incident really, and if I may be a bit frivolous over that, it was due to a friendship I had before I left - in London - with a young girl whom I had met at a ball at the Austrian Embassy, and she happened to be a friend of the Linlithgows and when I said that I was going to India, she said “Oh, I have got friends who are going too, the father is going as Viceroy, so I am sure they would put you up” so I had the great advantage which in India at that was obviously extremely conservative and it was very necessary to have the right connections, so I once started with being known as a friend of the Viceroy.
(0.11.06)
Alan: Well that got you a certain way, you then went on by train to Assam, which is where you were going to work, and you travelled to meet someone who was going to have a great influence on you, that was the District Commissioner, Mills, at Kohima, could you say anything about Mills who would later have a great influence on you?
(0.11.31)
Christoph: Well that was another lucky incident, namely that at the time that I was in London, J. P. Mills, Philip Mills, he was on leave in London, so somebody put me in touch with him and we got on very well, and he told me both about what I would find in the Naga hills and promised to help. And again that was immensely valuable because Mills was at that time Deputy Commissioner of the Naga hills, the Naga Hills District, and had worked among the Nagas already for many years, had written 2 books, The Ao Nagas and The Lotha Nagas, he was just at his third book was coming out at that time, I remember he showed me the proofs. He was an absolutely charming person, and quite a scholar, and also a great friend of the Nagas and a very good administrator. He had been in the Naga hills already as a Junior Officer, he Subdivisional Officer in Mokokchung, when Hutton - who later became Professor of anthropology in Cambridge, J.H. Hutton, was Deputy Commissioner in Kohima. So there were these two British Officers who both had a great interest in anthropology and they worked together. I am always annoyed now when I see films - like the film on Gandhi - that, and also other films, where the British are sort of, the British Officers are described as extremely unsympathetic, and stiff and rigid in their views. I must say this is totally different from what I have experienced, not only in Assam but in other parts of India too, I thought that among the Indian civil service there were so many people who were scholarly, who were most sympathetic to Indians, and who had really made great contribution, not only to the administration of India but also to our knowledge of India. I mean very, what these I see as Officers wrote and published is far more than what many of their Indian colleagues did.
(0.14.02)
Alan: Yes, I was going to ask you about others like Grigson and so on later. But you then, you arrived at Kohima, and Mills [zoom out a little] immediately swept you off on a two-week tour with him. This was your first arrival, having come from Vienna and The London School of Economics in the field, among a people who you later described as the “Naked Nagas”, people entirely different, I wondered if you could just say something about your first - if you recall your first reactions arriving in Nagaland?
(0.14.38)
Christoph: Well it was a very great experience, I mean having all read about people and written about them even, from a basis of lack of knowledge really, because I had never seen any Nagas and then suddenly you were thrown into them. It was very lucky that I did that first tour with Mills who could tell me so many things which otherwise one would take a long time to find out. The great problem of course from the very beginning was language. I had tried to learn a little Assamese then at The School of Oriental Studies which already existed while I was at LSE, but I had not been very successful there. And so when I came to Nagas I had really no language which was very useful but I was young still and when one is young one picks up languages relatively easily so I engaged a young Naga who had some English and within about a few months I managed to speak that kind of lingua franca which is a kind of pidgin Assamese, which is now still the only language in which the various Naga tribes can communicate with each other because they all have different languages, mutually not-understandable, Tibeto-Burman languages. So I managed, among the Nagas, to acquire enough of the language so that after 4 or 5 months I didn’t need very much any translator except for difficult, particularly difficult, subjects. But the experience to be in the field of course was extremely pleasant, and also I had the great fortune being with Mills who had all the sort of arrangements, I mean I didn’t have the difficulty of finding out how does one get food and how does now get someone to cook it for you and all these things, because I was at once introduced into the kind of style of life of District Officers, and District Officers then were very different to what they are now, because of course then they walked on foot and there were no motor roads and they walked on foot although sometimes they might have used a pony. Now of course Indian District Officers have jeeps and so they rush from their headquarters to some villages, arrive, talk for an hour or two to the villagers and in a cloud of dust disappear again, so they haven’t that close contact which the old colonial British Officers had, and that actually makes a great difference to the whole administration as it was and as it is now.
(0.17.50)
Alan: Can I ask you again about the language. You learnt - as you say - pidgin Assamese. Did the other District Officers, Hodgson and Mills, speak Naga?
(0.18.03)
Christoph: They spoke absolutely fluent this… what is now called “Nagamese”, namely it is a kind of, an Assamese adapted to Nagas, they learnt also some of the dialects of the Nagas and I think that Hutton I think for instance was quite fluent in one of them. But on the whole, as the Nagas talked to each other in that pidgin Assamese, it was for the District Officer who in any case had to deal with different tribes, I think adequate to have this lingua franca.
(0.18.46)
Alan: You, yourself, decided to work with one specific group of Nagas. Which one did you choose and why did you choose them? [Zoom in close, still right side]
(0.18.56)
Christoph: These were the Konyak Nagas. They seemed to be the most interesting because they had not been under British administration for very long and only a small group of the villagers were under administration at that time, those were the ones where I could go. They were virtually unknown, very little had been written about them. There was one tour done by Hutton, he had once visited some Konyak villages, otherwise nothing was known. The main large tribes, the Angami Nagas, Sema Nagas and Ao Nagas, had all been described in a series of monographs which are still classics nowadays, mainly by Hutton and Mills. So I didn’t want to go to a tribe which had already been studied, so I chose the Konyaks which was very lucky because they were extremely interesting and also very attractive people.
[direct face close-up]
(0.20.15)
Alan: So you arrived to do your fieldwork in among the Konyak Nagas. One of the first sights you saw were the megalithic monuments which stood in the Naga villages. Did this interest you?
(0.20.35)
Christoph: It interested me yes because I had in Vienna, under the influence actually of Heine Geldern who was very interested in megalithic cultures altogether, I had then taken interest in the distribution of megalithic civilisation throughout South East Asia, but I must say, I had also been for a long time by that time in Malinowski’s seminar and so I had slightly changed my view in the sense that I realised that when you go first to any tribe for the first time, any population, you have to try first to get the social system straight and mainly from that point of view would have been almost a frill where I would not particularly take a very great interest, quite apart from the fact that among the Konyak Nagas the erection of megalithic monuments are not as important as among for instance the Angamis, where they have great feasts of merit, and Konyaks don’t. Konyaks only really put up stone monuments when they had brought in some head, they were head-hunters as all Nagas. But by the time I came there the Konyaks didn’t hunt heads anymore, of those villages where I was. Later on I had a good deal of experience of seeing heads on trees, among other Nagas.
(0.22.22)
Alan: I was going to ask you about that. But can I ask you about another institution which you came across and I am interested in your reference to Malinowski and his well-known interest in sexual behaviour of savages. Because one of the institutions you came across were the “Men’s Houses” or Morungs as they were called, which you described as an institution much like the English public school. I was wondering if you could describe what a Morung was, how it worked.
(0.22.52)
Christoph: Well a Morung is a men’s house or bachelor’s home which is a kind of ritual centre of the village, it is also a place where the unmarried young men, boys and young men, sleep, where some married men spend a good deal of their time, which is the centre for village rituals and festivals. You refer to Malinowski’s interest in sexual behaviour, in the Morungs there was no sexual behaviour of any kind, because that was banned to girls, to women altogether, but there were also girl’s dormitories. And while the young men and boys went to the Morung, the girls went to the girl’s dormitories, and the young men could visit the girls in their dormitories; indeed the girl’s dormitories were put up and constructed by those young men who were potential mates for the girls. So it is quite true that this is in Naga culture is quite an important feature, the men’s house and the girl’s dormitories. And of course, men’s houses are very wide-spread among different tribes, not only among other Naga tribes, there is that well-known book “The Muria and their Ghotul” by Verrier Elwin, and he described the youth dormitories of the Muria Gonds in Bastar. There are other Indian tribes too like the Oraons, or the Gadabas, the Bondos who all have either men’s houses or use dormitories. So it is quite an important institution.
(0.24.59)
Alan: And you also find it I believe in Nepal among the Gurungs.
(0.25.4)
Christoph: In, yes, among the Gurungs you have the Roddi Ghar which is however very different from the Naga men’s houses. The Naga men’s houses are also very important because they are the places where most of the wood-carvings and sculptures, wooden sculptures, are because they are highly decorated and painted, so the men’s houses are really a centre both for ritual activities and for artistic activities because the other houses are not decorated. But in the men’s houses there are figures of men and women, elephants and tigers, and that was very sad when I returned to the Konyak Nagas, 34 years later, in 1971, I found that most of the men’s houses didn’t exist anymore. Modernisation had really done away with that.
(0.26.10)
Alan: Did you manage to take photographs of these carvings?
(0.26.14)
Christoph: Yes I did, and in my first book then about the Konyaks which was not a proper anthropological monograph but almost like a travel book, called the “Naked Nagas”, in that there are quite a number of photographs. I also actually collected some of the smaller sculptures, not taking them out of the men’s houses which I think would have been quite wrong, even if one could have done that, but I got the same artist to carve them for me. Some of them are in the Museum of Anthropology, the Volkerkunde Museum, in Vienna, a few I think are in Cambridge. So I did do some collecting. Later on I must say that I found that to collect sufficiently to bring back museum collections takes too much time, and I in the future I did not really collect very much.
(0.27.22)
Alan: On this first expedition you collected...
(0.27.24)
Christoph: On that first expedition I collected quite a lot.
(0.27.27)
Alan: What objects apart from the...
(0.27.29)
Christoph: Well, carvings, textiles, they are easy to collect and easy to transport, all sorts of domestic implements, pots and pans, and grass skirts, and spears and...
(0.27.51)
Alan: drums...
(0.27.52)
Christoph: Small drums and a few things which I had again, they have for instance those gongs the Nagas, with a slit, they are really xylophones, the proper term is a xylophone. And so I had one or two made miniature xylophones, but the big ones are...one would need a huge aeroplane to bring them back.
(0.28.21)
Alan: The main collection that you made is in Austria, is it?
(0.28.26)
Christoph: The main...correct...because then I was based in Vienna still and I had got some money from the Museum fur Volkerkunde, so there is quite a substantial Naga collection in Vienna in the Ethnographic Museum.
(0.28.41)
Alan: But also some of your collection is here in Cambridge.
[Zoom out, still front on]
(0.28.44)
Christoph: Yes, there are a few pieces in Cambridge, and there are very few pieces in the Horniman Museum in London.
(0.28.54)
Alan: You said that when you went back the Morungs were falling into decay. You talk in your book “Return to the Naked Nagas” about the influence of the Baptist Missions in the Naga hills. I was wondering whether they were behind some of this change in attitude?
(0.29.13)
Christoph: They largely were. The Konyak Nagas as I knew them in 1936 and 1937 had not been under any mission influence, and the interesting thing is that after the departure of the British Officials and after the departure of the American Baptist Missionaries, there were Nagas who then spread Christianity among tribes who had been untouched before. And the Konyak Nagas were one of those tribes and I remember in the village, the village called Wakching where I had spent most of the time when I was first working there, the people told me “Well, you know, since Christianity came in, we have given up many of our old rituals and festivities, and but we aren’t really Christians either so now we are nothing. I mean we have lost our old religion and we have adopted a new one.”
(0.30.26)
Alan: It seems on the surface strange that a society which you describe as so happy, gay, cheerful, drinking their own form of alcohol, engaging in very free and open sexual relationships and social relationships, should with such zeal take to a very ascetic form of Christianity. Do you have any idea why they should have done this?
(0.30.51)
Christoph: Well actually I must say they didn’t. Namely outwardly, they became Christians and I think the main reason was at that time - why for instance the Konyaks - that Christianity was linked in their minds with education, there had been Mission Schools, the other tribes had literates etc., then these Naga missionaries came in and said “look, if you want to survive in the modern world and the world of modern Indian politics, you must become literate. And now we will bring literacy.” And it is quite true that all the Nagas who are - presently - are in any government positions, they are all the products of Mission Schools. So those Nagas, those Konyaks, who told me that “now we are nothing, we aren’t Christians and we aren’t, we haven’t got our old religion”, they are those who certainly didn’t take it - didn’t take up Christianity with any particular conviction. See they certainly didn’t give up drinking or rice beer and I very much doubt whether their sexual morals have changed very much.
[Zoom out, now long shot face on]
(0.32.09)
Alan: On their sexual morals, although one shouldn’t go into it too much, one of the very striking features which must have struck you was the difference between the Western, European, Christian attitude towards pre-marital intercourse and the attitudes in this society. What was the main difference between their attitude and...
(0.32.31)
Christoph: Well the main difference was among the Konyak Nagas was that all the young boys and girls would have love affairs, and nobody objected to that, then and later on, once they had some period of pre-marital enjoyment, then they would marry. And on the whole, and that is not only among Konyak Nagas, it is the same for instance among the Basta Gonds described by Verrier Elwin in that book on the youth dormitories, that where there is great freedom before marriage among the young people, the marriages then are relatively stable. But I found that other Gonds I had studied, and we might come to that later on, there is not very much pre-marital permissiveness, there the marriages are by no means stable, and there their sort of flexibility comes in later that people have a succession of marriages. So, certainly one can’t generalise because in modern Western society there is pre-marital permissiveness but not necessarily marital stability, so you might have it both ways too.
(0.34.04)
Alan: During your fieldwork you suddenly received a message that J.P. Mills was going to go on a punitive expedition into an area, to the Patkoi hills. Could you perhaps tell us something about that mission?
[Zoom in]
(0.34.27)
Christoph: Well that was a great piece of luck for any anthropologist I think, that I was allowed to visit...sorry.. to accompany a District Officer who was going on an expedition into areas where neither he nor any other British Officer, not to talk of anthropologists had ever been. It was a kind of punitive expedition but not entirely. It was really an expedition into the unadministered tribal areas which lay between the administered Naga hills district and the frontier of Burma, where head-hunting was going on and everybody knew that and there was I mean, there was no intention to administer that area, but if people from that area raided into the administered parts of the Naga hills then expeditions were undertaken. And in this particular case there had been some raids on villages which were although not administered, were somewhat friendly with the British-administered Nagas and some people had not only, many had been killed but others had been captured, and taken what was said, across the Burma border because the Nagas on the other side of the borders were known to use captives in war for human sacrifice, as a sort of alternative for head-hunting. And the idea of Mills was to free some of those captives, he also succeeded and he freed a few, some of them were children. So the whole expedition had really the purpose of (a) to establish that if they exceeded their sort of permitted limits of head-hunting and made great raids on villages and killed just too many people and captured others, that the Government, the British Government would take some steps, and that was quite successful. But it was marvellous for me because for the first time I got into areas which had never been administered, which had never been even looked at, which were white spots on the map. And that is sort of what an anthropologist really would like to do, to see a society which had not been influenced by outside administration at all.
(0.37.38)
Alan: This was an extremely dangerous mission, you went with two and a half platoons of Assam Rifles and with 360 coolies, and you travelled off into the forest which was filled with sharp pointed sticks to trap you and with the possibility of people firing poisoned crossbow arrows at you. You must have been slightly apprehensive as you set off?
[Zoom in]
(0.38.04)
Christoph: Well, I was a little apprehensive but not very apprehensive I must say. I must say it was not quite as dangerous as later on, in what is now Arunachal Pradesh, then called the Northeast Frontier Agency, I think I did trips that were a bit more dangerous than that. But because there after all we had at least some sort of Assam Rifles, this kind of police force recruited from Gurkhas, Nepalese Gurkhas. But we were actually attacked by several hundred of Nagas and we had to run away. We ran a little faster than the Nagas, not because we could inherently run faster, but because our Assam Rifle escort managed to fire into the group of Nagas which were running after us and that put them off. No it was a little dangerous.
(0.39.07)
Alan: Because at one point you were running up a hill with 500 Nagas behind you and they were firing at the Nagas...they shot 5 of the Nagas, is that right?
(0.39.21)
Christoph: They did. If they hadn’t shot those 5 which were sort of in the front rank I think you wouldn’t be talking to me now because I think we were outnumbered to such an extent, probably 20 to 1, that we wouldn’t have had any other chance.
(0.39.38)
Alan: So we’re talking to you now but you…what was the final result of the expedition? Did they destroy the villages, or?
(0.39.48)
Christoph: The expedition was that those 2 villages which had refused to give up any of those captives and had taken the captives away with them, they were set on fire. Of course that sounds worse than it is, because these houses are built of bamboo and thatch and they can be very easily rebuilt, it was not like burning a village with solid houses, and in order to get them to see that the government is really serious about pursuing their aim of getting these captives back, and he got them back, I mean Mills got them back. So they were freed.
(0.41.34)
Alan: And from the poles in the village you took off a basket full of heads which no-one would be prepared to carry and so you had to carry them back yourself.
(0.41.47)
Christoph: Yes they had hung up in good Naga fashion the heads of their enemies and they were fortunately not absolutely fresh heads, they had still hair and skin on but the hair and skin were dried and so on. And as I was then collecting for a museum, I wanted to have those head trophies, and I found a basket in a deserted house and put them in. But then none of the Nagas who had come with us wanted to carry that basket because they said “well, we carry heads which we have taken and so on, but we don’t really know what the ritual position of those heads is, and it might be quite dangerous for us” so I had to carry those heads myself.
[long shot]
(0.42.05)
Alan: As anthropological specimens, you decided that instead of taking them to the museum, to distribute them to the waiting Nagas and you witnessed what, I think, as you described must be an absolutely unique thing for an anthropologist ever to have seen, which are the head-hunting ceremonies. Could you just very briefly describe…
(0.42.21)
Christoph: Well, the Konyak Nagas among whom I had been living for by that time about 7 months before I got on that trip, they had been were very excited because they knew that I was going with an armed force in an area where there, where head-hunters would be fighting and they expected of course that we would possibly get some heads. They thought of heads which we would cut off, which we hadn’t done, but when I brought back these dried heads they had all been looking forward to fresh heads and they thought “well, dried heads are better than no heads” and they thought that it would possible, it would be possible to perform the ceremonies which are normally performed if a head is brought into the village by a member of that village. Now, I had lived long enough there so they thought that I could for ritual purposes, be considered as being a member of the community and having brought those heads. And then they didn’t ask very much how I had got them, or whether I had actually killed the people or not - heads were heads. So, then they…the question is now, there were altogether I think 6 or 7 heads, now who would get those heads. Now fortunately, it is not necessary for the ceremony to be performed to have a whole head, you can do it with parts. And also, in the same way, as if a real head is brought in, sometimes it is split up, and everybody who participated in the raid will have one part. And they were so keen on performing these rites and having the head because only those young men who participated in the ritual of bringing in enemy heads were entitled to wear certain ornaments and also to have their faced tattooed which is necessary for head-hunters. And as they had lived under the pax Britannica for several years already, they had not had the chance of taking heads themselves, so these substitute heads were very useful. So actually, the ritual was done exactly as if they themselves had brought in enemy heads, and I could both photograph it, I could record it, I could record the various songs and whatever was being said. Unfortunately in those days, in 1936, there were no tape-recorders so I had to write down what they said. And rather amusingly, when 34 years later, when I went there again, and I saw some men who had face tattoos, middle-aged men, and I said “how can it be, there is no more head-hunting and you have these tattoos” and they said “these are your heads”, but actually I think even now I think the last record that confirmed type of head-hunting I think happened in something like 1962 or 1963, on the Assam-Burma border, and I think that on the Burma side where there is virtually no administration, I think head-hunting probably still goes on.
(0.46.31)
Alan: What is the, very very briefly, what is the function - so to speak - of head-hunting? What do they see as the virtue of head-hunting?
(046.40)
Christoph: The virtue is that they believe there are certain kinds of magical forces in the human head and the person who takes the head and brings it home to his village, this kind of magical virtue, that is transferred to his village and therefore the heads are put on shelves in the men’s houses, or chief’s house, and they are kept there, and several times a year they are being fed with rice and rice beer in order to keep this magical force alive. So the idea is really that it is useful for the fertility of the village - the fertility of men and women, of cattle and of the fields - to have these heads. And that’s the same reason that human sacrifice had been performed. Among Nagas, human sacrifice was really a substitute for head-hunting, namely it was that if you bought a slave and killed him, you got all the prestige of head-hunting without risking your own life. But even now you always read about human sacrifice in the Indian press because even now there are cases, only I was recently in India and I saw one or two small reports of somebody being arrested because of having killed somebody in a Shiva Temple and so on, because human sacrifice is…has certain advantages for getting for instance when a new tank or a new bridge is being built, kind of foundation sacrifices and that has not completely disappeared from India now.
[rise and then zoom in, face on]
(0.48.55)
Alan: Well perhaps we ought to move on since we have talked a good deal. There is a great deal more about the Nagas obviously and your return to the Nagas, but fortunately some of this has been written up in your books. You went then from the Naga hills to go and work in Central India, but at a later point you returned to Assam but not to the Nagas. Why did you return and where did you return?
(0.49.26)
Christoph: Well that was really again lucky coincidence. I had, after doing my first 13 months of fieldwork among the Nagas, I had come back to Austria but I had felt that my work among the Nagas had not been completed, I wanted to have another period. So as soon as possible after this I set out for India again with the intention of going to the Naga hills. Actually, a fortnight after I arrived in India the War broke out so neither could I go to the Naga hills, nor was it really possible to go, what I didn’t really want, back to Vienna, because by that time another raid had taken place, namely Hitler had occupied Austria, and consequently Austria was then part of Germany. I had by that time a German passport so when the War broke out in India, I was in the position of an enemy alien, but fortunately I had good connections and so I was allowed to do anthropological work in the place where I was when the war broke out, which was Hyderabad State and I then worked for quite a number of years in Hyderabad. In the fourth year of my stay there I had an offer from the Government of India through my old friend, Philip Mills, who was by that time no longer Deputy Commissioner of the Naga hills but was Advisor to the Governor of Assam. And this message from him offered me a post, under the Government of India, as Special Officer and Assistant Political Officer on the Northeast frontier, which was then called NEFA - North East Frontier Agency, to do some exploration among the virtually unknown tribes which live in the mountains between Assam and Tibet. They had never been administered, all through the British rule, because there was no apparently need or advantage, but in the course of the war, when the Japanese occupied parts of Burma, it was felt that anything might happen in these North-eastern mountains too, and therefore it would be advisable to at least what sort of conditions were there. So 2 or 3 expeditions were sent into these areas and in one section I was chosen to go in and do some - from the point of view of the Government of India - some exploratory work for my own point of view connected with that anthropological work. And I had there the great advantage of going into an area which was inhabited by several different tribes, the most interesting perhaps were the Apa Tanis, who were about 15,000 people living in one single valley, very densely populated, surrounded by quite different tribes. And, to study a society which had never been administered by any outside power and therefore everything was as it had been probably for centuries. So, I spent then, it was in 1944 and 1945, until the end of the war when that whole project was called off, I spent among Apa Tanis and then also neighbouring tribes, and therefore - as I said before perhaps trips there were somewhat more dangerous than among the Nagas because they were very war-like tribes and if you were friendly with one and went to the other you could possibly be attacked. It actually didn’t happen. So I worked there and also later on wrote some books about the Apa Tanis, and I tried in recent years to re-visit all the various people I had met before and it was particularly interesting among the Apa Tanis because they in the meanwhile had been administered by the Indian Administration and had developed extraordinarily fast, they had schools and consequently there were educated Apa Tanis. This was, again I was there last in 1982, which was after all nearly 40 years later, and I could see there the whole change that had taken place in a previously untouched society. But whereas in other parts of India, change usually meant a kind of deprivation, namely people lost their land to more advanced people and their general standard of living and so deteriorated, it was not so among the Apa Tanis. They had greatly improved, if you may say so, the area had not been overrun by outsiders, and the Apa Tanis had sort of accomplished the transition to modernity and modern politics and all that very rapidly and very successfully. There are now Apa Tani members of the Legislative Assembly and other politicians and many are…have University degrees and are members of Government services etc. So that was very interesting to see them in their original state and to see them a long time afterwards.
(0.56.38)
Alan: Yes, we’ll go on to talk about the problems of tribal people and their contacts with the major civilisation. I wanted to just go back to your first arrival [zoom in]among the Apa Tanis and you said that this was more dangerous in many ways than the Nagas, but it seems to have been at least partly a self-imposed danger in that against the advice of almost everyone, you set out unarmed without any escort…armed escort, because the Government wanted you to take some Gurkhas with you, also with your wife Betty, who before, in your previous fieldwork you hadn’t been married, you were now married, so you took a white woman and yourself unarmed into these hills. Why did you decide to do that?
(0.57.30)
Christoph: Well I decided to do that very much against great opposition on the part of the Government of India because they said nobody ever went into those hills unarmed so and “we don’t take any responsibility and if you want to take your wife with you, you must sign that it is on your own responsibility etc.” But I thought that if I go into an area which had had no contact with the outside world and I arrive with an escort of Gurkha soldiers there is just no chance of establishing any kind of friendly relations. So you have to take a little risk and to go in alone, unarmed and also, it’s a great advantage to have your wife with you because they think that people who go with their wives they are probably have no hostile intentions and they don’t go there in order to make war on anybody, even if they had no arms. Apart from that, by that time, it was 1944, we had about done fieldwork in other parts of India in Hyderabad state together for some time and we didn’t want to give up. An so it was for personal reasons as well as for reasons of diplomacy, because that was, made it possible to go to people who one could say were quite wild, in the sense that they had a lot of feuds among themselves without getting very much involved.
(0.59.40)
Alan: You went to 2 areas where as you say people were thought of by the plainsmen as extremely “wild and ferocious”, and yet in your books you describe them with great affection and warmth. How, physically and mentally did you find the hills tribesmen of the Assam area?
(1.00.01)
Christoph: Well those people who were known as ferocious, the people then known as Daflas, now they call themselves Nishis, they were friendly to us and they can be very charming to their friends, but they also can be very fierce to their enemies and actually they were probably the most, how shall I say, marshal, ferocious people I had been working with. I mean, I think everybody, every other man had been involved in raids and many of them had been captured and then held to ransom. So it was a society, a bit like the Pathans on the Northwest frontier, who were continuously in a kind of process of feuds, revenge killings and then periods of peace and then again a raid or feud, and that was - it seemed to be so interesting - to study a society where there didn’t seem to be any kind of local authority. I mean there were no headmen, there was no village council, everyone was really a law unto himself and had to look after himself. I mean if somebody had a grievance, there was nobody he could appeal, there were no legal sanctions, if you killed somebody that man had no redress except that, I mean the family had no redress, his brothers and sons might then kill someone of your side. I mean this was really a possibility of seeing how does a society with apparently no real authority system, how does it function, but it does function.
(1.02.10)
Alan: In this, they were very different in their temperament, from the Apa Tanis
(1.02.14)
Christoph: Yes they were very different because the Apa Tanis, they lived in a very compact area they had large villages of up to 800-1,000 houses, so they couldn’t have really, that society couldn’t have worked without some kind of local system of authority and administration. While the Nishes, they were lived in dispersed settlements so it was not so essential to have a very close control over people’s actions, although the Apa Tanis were dry cultivators, they had a complicated system of irrigation and that too needed some co-operation, some control etc.
(1.03.10)
Alan: Although they had a complex economy, as you said they were a very technologically, very simple society in that they were really pre-wheel and largely pre-plough cultivators when you first went there, weren’t they?
(1.03.27)
Christoph: I think the Apa Tanis must have been, until 30 years ago, very much comparable to a Neolithic civilisation. Namely they had a fairly developed agriculture and irrigation and careful control of their resources, they had not only rice fields but groves of fruit trees and pine trees etc.