The Lhota Nagas

Chapter 24: Daily Life.

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About This Book

The author provides an ethnographic account of a Naga hill tribe, documenting settlement patterns, defensive works such as ridgetop sites, ditches, palisades and night gates, village-naming practices tied to landscape and incidents, paths and bridge construction linking villages, and the internal layout of long-street villages with communal ritual stones and household arrangements. The book describes social life including pig and cattle rearing, domestic sanitation practices, ceremonial observances for the dead, mechanisms of inter-village warfare and alliances, and material culture such as tools, bridges and housing, based on several years' residence and local informants.

[Contents]

Daily Life.

The family get up before dawn, the wife being the first to blow up the fire, set the pot on to boil and open the door. After a meal all go down to the fields, taking with them “madhu,” cold rice and some cooked meat or vegetables. This the family eat while they take a short rest in the middle of the day in the field-house. The evening meal is eaten when they come back from the fields. After that it is soon time for bed. When the harvest is in there is less work, and men go away on short trading tours, or make up hunting parties, while the women stay at home and weave and gossip. [87]