Telling the Transformation
Vernacular Tradition-Tropes to Interpret Narratives about Were-Snakes Among the Khasis in Northeast India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/irt.26309Keywords:
Belief, indigeneity, Khasi, Human-animal transformation, tradition-tropesAbstract
I present a critical ethnographic documentation and analysis of the human-snake transformation tradition among the Indigenous Khasi Communities in Northeast India. I look at how traditional knowledge about the folklore of water is conceived through the first- person transformative experience of dreaming. This then catalyzes community responses to ‘were-snakes’ in multi-level contexts. This article is based on data from ethnographic fieldwork carried out with eight were-snakes over the course of seven years. Water is the generic resource, the ‘tradition-trope’, and it is used as an analytical category to look at all the oral narratives connected with the tradition, becoming a communicative modality through which clan, transformation, ecology, and further, the social organization of the Indigenous Christian community are processed.
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