"No Meat, No Festival": Building Solidarity Through Human-Animal Relationship in Nagaland, Northeast India.

• In Event: Animals from a Sociological Perspective Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Violence, Exclusion, and Inclusion

Abstract

“No Meat, No Festival”: Building Solidarity Through Human-Animal Relationship in Nagaland, Northeast India.

In the high-altitude Saramati mountain range in Kiphire district, Nagaland, Northeast India, the statement ‘no meat, no festival’ repeatedly emerged during conversation about festival celebration. This phrase encapsulates a fundamental cultural practice of the indigenous inhabitants of Nagaland, called Nagas, and festivals are marked by elaborate feasts, merry-making, ritual performances and communal gatherings. Here, meat is not merely food but the very substance through which sociality, prestige and solidarity are enacted. Meat distribution follows structured norms based on clan affiliation, age hierarchy, and gendered roles, thereby reproducing social order while affirming collective belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork by integrating engaged observation, informal conversation, personal communication and in-depth interviews with village leaders, elders, women’s groups and youth, the paper foregrounds the role of animals in the Naga social world and demonstrates how animals are embedded in a system of meaning, power, and belonging and how do human-animal relations structure social solidarity in Naga festival contexts. I argue that meat in Naga festivals operates simultaneously as sustenance, symbolic capital, a ritual offering, and a means of building solidarity. In doing so, the paper engages with three intersecting theoretical conversation such as solidarity, symbolic capital and multispecies relations. Together, these frameworks allow us to see meat as a medium through which social hierarchy, status markers, the building of solidarity, and collective identity are structured. This study contributes to the sociology of human-animal relations by offering an indigenous perspective from Northeast India, a region underrepresented in scholarship on animals and society. It shows how multispecies relations are not abstract theoretical constructs but lived realities that structure solidarity, hierarchy and identity in everyday village life.

Keywords: Festivals, Solidarity, Human-Animal Relations, Nagas, Northeast India.

Author

• Ropfuvino Krose, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Nagaland Chumoukedima India