Healing in intercorporeal harmony: decolonial (re-)cognition of Angami Naga shamanic therapeutic traditions in Avinuo Kire's The Last Light of Glory Days

Angami Naga shamanic healing has been oversimplified as religious or pathological in colonial and neocolonial scholarship. Through an ethno-literary analysis of two stories from Avinuo Kire's anthology, this article presents a decolonial account that emphasizes the healer shaman's corporeal embodiment as a liminal bridge between human and beyond-human realms. The tradition is reframed as an ecocentric practice that restores balanced intercorporeal relationality between humans and more-than-human persons, promoting individual and communal well-being within an Indigenous animist ontology. A postscript notes cross-cultural parallels with Western critical posthumanist thought, highlighting shared recognition of human–more-than-human entanglements.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Indigenous shamanic therapeutics have often been reductively construed as either religious or psychopathological phenomena within (neo)colonial academic discourses. Cutting across these reductive interpretations, this article presents a culturally embedded, decolonial exposition of Angami Naga shamanic aetiology and treatment through an ethno-literary analysis of two short stories from Avinuo Kire’s anthology, The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland. Towards this, the article first contextualizes the discourse of decoloniality within the broader Naga socio-political, cultural, and literary contexts and then proceeds to engage with Angami Naga shamanism from an epistemic decolonial standpoint. In this parallel perspective, the study shifts the focus from the mental consciousness of healer shamans to their corporeal embodiment, positing it as a liminal conduit between human and beyond-human realms. Thereby, it re-cognizes Angami Naga shamanic healing as an ecocentric tradition that mediates and restores a reciprocally balanced (inter)corporeal relationality between human and more-than-human persons to promote individual and communal well-being within a harmoniousc Indigenous animist ontology. Additionally, a postscript appended to the article indicates cross-cultural epistemic continuities between Indigenous Angami Naga shamanic therapeutic traditions and Western critical posthumanist postulations as they converge on acknowledging human–more-than-human intercorporeal relational entanglements. In essence, by emphasizing the intercorporeal and relational aspects of Indigenous Angami Naga healing practices, this article casts shamanic philosophy and praxis in a renewed decolonial light of relevance and contemporaneity.