ABSTRACT
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf’s writings on Northeast India grew out of an interest in so-called remote pre-contact primitive societies. To him and his contemporaries in the West it was self-evident that the ‘primitive’ or the ‘savage’ is located outside modernity. No one would use those categories today. But that does not mean that we have broken away from intellectual habits that privilege the social imaginary of the modern. The politics of indigeneity in some parts of the world is associated with powerful critiques of capitalist modernity. But that is not the case in Northeast India. Whether or not such a critical sensibility becomes part of the political imagination in Northeast India will depend partly on the epistemological standpoint of those who study the region today.
