Literatures and Oratures as Knowledge Systems : Texts from Northeast India
Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. Literatures and oratures as knowledge systems: texts from the northeast/Mrinal Miri. 3. Notes on tribal world, truth and art/Sujata Miri. 4. Narrative as an/other history or his/story otherwise/Sukalpa Byattacharjee. 5. Matrix of Manipuri culture: Lai-Haraoba of Manipur/L. Joychandra Singh. 6. Pictorial representation and knowledge: case study of Hastividyarnava/Meghali Goswami. 7. The performance of identity and histories of representation/Rimli Bhattacharya. 8. Exotica or ethics? reviewing the aesthetics and politics of contemporary Manipuri theatre/Epsita Halder. 9. The trickster figure in north-eastern folklore: contemporary transformations in an Ao Naga short story/Debashree Dattaray. 10. A study of selected old sayings and narratives of the Mizo: oral literature as knowledge system/Margaret Ch. Zama. 11. Ethnophilosophy: conceptual artifacts, wisdom and critique of anthropocentrism in India\'s northeast/Prasenjit Biswas. 12. Making sense of the present through Sanu Lama\'s Mrgatrsna/Pravesh G. Jung. 13. Ki Jingsneng Tymmen and the clan elder/Esther Syiem. 14. Generating knowledge: Khasi-Jaintia oral texts/Soumen Sen. Index.
If asked, a litterateur of Northeast India will speak of the primacy of perception - within its domain the world speaks to the author. This is the world that the author encounters within the bounds of her senses. The nature of this perception permeates the life-world which, in the northeast\'s context, has an untold biography. It is untold because the language-silence negotiation is not rightly explored in the language of common history writing. The litterateurs of Northeast India tell us this biography and contest the mainstream interpretative parameters that do not take cognizance of the meaningful pauses between utterances and sentences in the process of forming a world out of a life-world. They tell us a history in the form of storytelling - a history which is alive and it is that history, bringing with it visions of pluralist epistemologies, that the papers collected here try to bring forward. (jacket)
If asked, a litterateur of Northeast India will speak of the primacy of perception - within its domain the world speaks to the author. This is the world that the author encounters within the bounds of her senses. The nature of this perception permeates the life-world which, in the northeast\'s context, has an untold biography. It is untold because the language-silence negotiation is not rightly explored in the language of common history writing. The litterateurs of Northeast India tell us this biography and contest the mainstream interpretative parameters that do not take cognizance of the meaningful pauses between utterances and sentences in the process of forming a world out of a life-world. They tell us a history in the form of storytelling - a history which is alive and it is that history, bringing with it visions of pluralist epistemologies, that the papers collected here try to bring forward. (jacket)
