ABSTRACT
Nagaland, in North East India, has an unusual land ownership pattern with 88.32% land being owned by either individuals or tribal communities and a meagre 11.68% owned by the state. Rightly so, much has been said about the region’s customary land ownership practices and its colligated natural resource mismanagement, underdevelopment, conflict, resource scarcity and poverty, etc. However, beneath such claims there are multi-layered and intersectional components such as ecological knowledge production, power and gender variables, which are rather complex and often beyond commonly conceived notions. This paper interrogates the form and the substance of land ownership and its linkages to a rather burgeoning land alienation and economic isolation of a certain section in a community living in a Naga village. An ethnographic study explores the powers that be and its influence over knowledge production where gender and power shifts play consequential roles. Set in Nagaland, with its share of an international border, studies such as this will further enhance an understanding of the geo-politics of the region and its people groups, which have a bearing on the political ecology of the subcontinent and beyond.
