Vol 2 No 1, 2026 Research Article
Rongsenzulu Jamir, Ph.D
Guest Faculty, Department of Anthropology, University of Hyderabad, India.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/iw/v2n1/v2n108
[Article History: Received: 15 June 2026. Accepted: 14 September 2026. Published: 04 November 2026]
Abstract
What does it mean for a knowledge system to survive? Not merely to persist as memory or samples but to remain living, practiced and transmitted, to understand how people shape and understand sickness and healing. The paper asks this question through the case of Ao Naga ethnomedicine in two villages of Mokokchung district, Nagaland – Longkong and Longmisa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across 2014, 2015, 2022 and 2026 the study documents practices where healing remains inseparable from household and forest. Plants are planted at doorways to ward off malevolent forces, leaves pressed onto snakebites with ritual touch, stems measured against injured bodies and kept over hearths where their work continues. What emerges is not random remedies but a coherent system where efficacy cannot be separated from belief, where healing addresses not just the wound but the spirit and community. The paper engages three debates in Indigenous Knowledge Systems scholarship. First, it frames the erosion of healing knowledge as systematic delegitimization driven by modern medicines, education, and religious conversion. Second, it argues that efforts to integrate traditional medicine into institutional healthcare often reproduce colonial hierarchies by demanding indigenous knowledge validate itself through biomedical standards. Third, it questions whether documentation alone ensures continuity. Against this backdrop, the paper proposes the 4C schema of Consciousness, Conservation, Cultivation, and Correlation as a community‑centred framework for revitalization, emphasizing indigenous‑led intellectual property protection. Survival is not enough. The question is whether Ao Naga ethnomedicine will be recognized as a legitimate way of healing – one that belongs in kitchens, on jhum fields, at hearths, not just in memory.
Keywords: Ao Nagas, ethnomedicine, Indigenous research methodology, knowledge pluralism, 4C schema, intellectual property rights.
