Photographs and savaging the ‘other’ in the Naga Hills

This article examines the relationship between the medium of photography, the photographed subject, and the colonial ethnographer. Here, what is observed is a reification, and indeed crystallisation of the colonial gaze. Drawing on the photographic archive of Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf and German ethnographer Hans Eberhard Kaufmann, in particular, this article illustrates the ways in which colonial photography of the Nagas offers the present-day scholar a critical medium with which to explore the subtle, and often not-so-subtle, ideological formations that sustained colonial structures of power.