Healing in intercorporeal harmony: decolonial (re-)cognition of Angami Naga shamanic therapeutic traditions in Avinuo Kire's The Last Light of Glory Days
Interventions April 23, 2025 Sampda Swaraj, Binod Mishra
Angami Naga shamanic healing has been oversimplified as religious or pathological in colonial and neocolonial scholarship. Through an ethno-literary analysis of two stories from Avinuo Kire's anthology, this article presents a decolonial account that emphasizes the healer shaman's corporeal embodiment as a liminal bridge between human and beyond-human realms. The tradition is reframed as an ecocentric practice that restores balanced intercorporeal relationality between humans and more-than-human persons, promoting individual and communal well-being within an Indigenous animist ontology. A postscript notes cross-cultural parallels with Western critical posthumanist thought, highlighting shared recognition of human–more-than-human entanglements.