Alban Von Stockhausen All Books sku-37366854 Hardcover

Imagining the Nagas is a hardcover book by Alban Von Stockhausen, listed in All Books as sku-37366854. It examines how British colonial expansion into the mountainous borderland between India and Burma in the nineteenth century brought cultural changes for Naga tribes. Missionaries and documentarians followed the conquerors, and their pictures and artifacts reached European homes and museums.

The Nagas' material culture and accounts of headhunting contributed to their portrayal as 'noble savages'. The book focuses on photographs taken by German ethnologist Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann during the 1930s, which the author rediscovered after they were believed lost.

It uses pictorial ethnography to reconstruct Naga cultural and aesthetic life through Kauffmann's lens, alongside photographs by Austrian ethnologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and other sources. An introduction covers both ethnographers' working methods, biographies, and political and ideological entanglements.