Core Themes of Research

The Highland Institute’s work is grounded in deep, long-term ethnographic engagement with highland communities. Our research is organized around five core themes, each of which reflects our interdisciplinary orientation and commitment to addressing both scholarly and real-world challenges.

These themes emerge from over a decade of collaboration with communities across Highland Asia and beyond, and are animated by questions of identity, ecology, healing, mobility, and power.

1. Societies and Cultures of Highland Asia

We explore the dynamic social worlds of highland communities across Northeast India, the Eastern Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Our research focuses on:

• Oral traditions and narrative memory
  
• Kinship and household organization
  
• Religious change, ritual, and syncretism
  
• Customary law and village governance
  
• Ancestral knowledge and intergenerational transmission
  

This theme is informed by a critical re-engagement with the notion of “Zomia” and other upland theories of marginality, statelessness, and cultural resistance.

Projects and activities:

• Nagaland Oral Literature Project
  
• Intersubjective Ecologies Lab
  
• Summer and Winter Schools
  
• Comparative work in Latin America

   

2. Environmental Knowledge and Climate Resilience

Building on collaborative, community-based methodologies, this theme documents and analyzes indigenous ecological knowledge systems and local responses to climate uncertainty. Key areas include:

• Traditional land management, seed-saving, and forest stewardship
  
• Seasonal calendars and environmental prediction
  
• Sacred groves and landscape cosmologies
  
• Responses to biodiversity loss and water scarcity
  
• Integration of traditional knowledge into policy dialogues
  

Projects and activities:

• Earthkeepers
  
• MyCClimate
  
• Citizen science biodiversity studies
  
• Twinning projects with schools

   

3. Religion, Healing, and Medical Pluralism

Health is never simply biomedical. This theme examines the diverse systems of healing, religious practice, and medical knowledge that shape well-being in highland societies:

• Shamanism, prophetic healing, and ritual specialists
  
• Dreams, omens, and intersubjective diagnostics
  
• Evangelical Christianity and indigenous spirituality
  
• Medical pluralism and hybrid practices
  
• Health workers and rural healthcare ecologies
  

We work across anthropology, public health, and religious studies to capture the plural ontologies that structure illness and care.

Projects and activities:

• PluriMed (Medical Pluralism in Highland Asia)
  
• Collaboration with Doctors For You
  
• Ekologos Fellowship Programme
  
• Visiting scholars and writing workshops

   

4. Political Economy, Borders, and Mobility

This theme interrogates the lived experience of borders—national, economic, and symbolic. We are interested in:

• Indigenous sovereignty movements and state formation
  
• Informal economies, cross-border trade, and mobility
  
• Military occupation, checkpoints, and policing
  
• Migration, labor, and translocal livelihoods
  
• Governance and institutional hybridity
  

Our borderland research speaks to contemporary debates on conflict, identity, and the spatial politics of belonging.

Projects and activities:

• Ethnographic fieldwork in the India–Myanmar borderlands
  
• Comparative work on refugee communities and diasporas
  
• Analysis of archival and oral histories of conflict
  
• Collaborative publications with regional scholars

   

5. Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology

We investigate how memory, identity, and meaning are constructed through objects, media, and curation. This includes:

• Collaborative museum exhibition projects
  
• Repatriation, restitution, and archival ethics
  
• Ethnographic filmmaking and visual storytelling
  
• Field-based material culture studies
  
• Creative humanities and experimental pedagogy
  

We work with museums, artists, and local communities to rethink the role of museums and archives in indigenous self-representation.

Projects and activities:

• Collaborations with the Pitt Rivers Museum, MAA (Cambridge), Humboldt Forum
  
• Film studies workshops with RV University
  
• Student-led visual anthropology labs during Summer School
  
• Oral history, memory, and digitization projects