Akumtong Longkumer
Research Scholar, Department of History, NEHU, Shillong
To talk about Indigenous knowledge (I use this word advisedly, with an *, with a footnote) today is to betray it. Or, at the very least, to risk participating in a quiet, silent and if one is not careful unconscious institutional vanity.
Almost every modern university has arrived at a pious consensus, that Indigenous Knowledge Systems are vital, living, and endangered. They must be preserved, cataloged, and brought into the curriculum. An impulse, that is often self-congratulatory. This is framed as an act of restitution—what the administrative apparatus lazily calls "epistemic inclusion."
Yet, in this institutional exercise and practice of preservation, a persistent, unassailed duality exist and lives on. It is the old, stubborn antithesis of form versus content (traditionally employed in the field of art criticism).
Just as traditional art critics disavow the division between style and content only to treat style as an accessory shell wrapping a core of extractable meaning, the modern university is also tempted to treatliving cultural traditions with a not so subtle (if one is smart, it is subtle) ambivalence. The institution is quick to praises highly sophisticated and physically demanding rituals for their "cultural richness," while the unconscious mechanics installed by years of academic training, views their physical mechanics (by which I mean the taboo, the labor, the precise spatial arrangements) as an encumbrance. It hungers for a clean, transferable core of "indigenous wisdom" stripped of its ritual excess, as one academic article notes “Even though several indigenouspractices of the Nagas cannot hold good in today’s context, the core foundation of the society,which was based on ethical principles of gender equality (*debatable), justice in administration, communitysolidarity, symbiotic bond with nature... can be imbibed in the modern way of life". Let the material speak for itself," as university likes to proclaim, erroneously imagining it can bypass the physical mechanics of a practice to reach a pure, unmediated concept.
It is not a case of hypothetical failure, but a norm, a standard methodological operation of academic scholarship. When sociological studies analyse the mortuary practices of the pre-colonial Ao Naga, the cosmological mediation of handling death is routinely translated into "bonding social capital" or "norms of reciprocity." When curriculum committees design an Indigenous Knowledge syllabus, living relationships are partitioned into neat modules: Unit I: Performing Arts, Unit II: Traditional Attires, Unit III: Food Preservation.
Before a practice can be recognised as knowledge, the university triggers its nasty habits of converting those lived, textured knowledge, into something teachable "content", converting the flow into static. What the university sometimes fails to recognise is that sensibility itself is a form of knowledge (the texture of live, the unverifiable.
We have been conditioned by institutional habits to treat knowledge purely as propositional data—as statements that can be verified, citations that can be indexed, and concepts that can be tested. But this is a narrow, impoverished view of intelligence. Intelligence is not merely "knowing that"; it is also a sensibility, a way of inhabiting reality, a "knowing how." Sensibility is the sensory, somatic, and relational framework through which a culture perceives and acts upon the world. It has no abstract system or transferable proof, yet it governs every authentic human response (it is unverifiable).
To understand why institutional preservation so consistently flattens what it seeks to save, one must look at how knowledge actually exists within a living tradition. I would like to turn, to my own research on the pre-colonial Ao Naga, death study. Here, social life was historically governed by Sobaliba—an unwritten ethos where sacred rites could not be neatly compartmentalised from daily survival. As I have found out (my perspective, though not absolute, there could be many others) death was experienced not as a biological failure, but as force: a violent rupture in both the moral order and the spirit-charged landscape.
To know death in pre-colonial Ao society was not to hold an abstract theological proposition in the mind. The sensibility was the cognitive infrastructure. It was the somatic exhaustion of Leptsung, where clan elder (a Putier) tended a continuous hearth fire to smoke-dry a corpse—a physical labor that was not ritual ornament, but cosmological knowing. It was the sonic precision of Jeptsur, the structured lamentation of female mourners mapping the deceased’s place—where vocal texture was not mere emotional release, but the active administration of personhood. And it was the spatial exile governing a taboo death, where food was delivered silently to isolated huts—where physical distance and missing speech were not empty voids, but the spatial logic through which a community reasoned about rupture.
To reduce these protocols to "indigenous content" (without acknowledging it is an intended mistake) that can be filed under Sociology or Religion is to commit a unintended mistake. The Ao did not possess an abstract theory of death cloaked in a decorative ritual wrapper. As Jean Cocteau famously observed of style, one might say of these protocols: they are the soul, and the soul assumes the form of the body. The sensibility is the site of knowledge.
When the university strips away the smoke, the somatic labor, the acoustic nuances, and the spatial boundaries to isolate an underlying "indigenous concept," it achieves legibility only by manufacturing a ghost, a shadow world of meaning. It converts a performative sensibility into a static object of institutional possession.
Here we confront a profound double bind (a paradoxical dilemma where one is caught between two contradictory demands, such that complying with one inevitably means failing the other). The desire to preserve endangered ways of knowing is urgent and imperative; to refuse documentation altogether is to collude in theirerasure (it is also historically marginalised) under the weight of rapid social transformation. Yet, to document through existing academic categories is also to reduce a living sensibility into an inert museum transcript.
How do we play within such contradiction?
We begin by making what might be called an intended mistake. This is the deliberate, pragmatic choice to deploy necessary institutional tools—documentation, translation, classification—while explicitly refusing the illusion that these tools exhaust or capture the sensibility itself. We describe an Ao mortuary protocol as a "ritual" because the institution requires a category, but we do not mistake the category for the lived reality. We preserve, while refusing the fantasy that preservation produces a complete recovery.
This requires a radical shift in our pedagogical orientation: a transition from the extraction of data toward a, I apologise but I must use a big jargon here,epistemological performance.By epistemological, it means how one constructsoneself and the world as objects of knowing. By performance, it means that this relation toknowledge cannot remain merely as an idea. One has to take a hand in making the change, inchanging how one positions oneself as a knower and how one allows the object of knowledge toappear.
The task of education cannot simply be teaching students and researcher how to master, classify, and possess Indigenous worlds as if they were libraries of facts. It must be a training of the imagination—a discipline in learning how to encounter forms of knowing that exist strictly as non-propositional sensibilities. It requires cultivating the capacity to attend to form before extracting content, to honor the singular and the unverifiable, and to recognize the exact moment when our own analytical vocabulary begins to speak too quickly. It is a call to be humble. It is to know that we are on an island (solid, finite) with a ocean of traces (infinite, deep, unbounded, uncontained). It is to know Gatot will never arrive, one can only be on the way.
Author’s Note: The theoretical scaffolding of this essay is deeply indebted to works of Susan Sontagand Chakravorty Spivak’s. Its intervention lies not in inventing a theoretical vocabulary from scratch, but in deploying their insights to examine this site of Institutional preservation.
