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<p>This study interrogates the shifting ontologies of death among the Krünami sub-culture of Viswema-Angami Nagas, for whom death constitutes a passage into an ancestral afterlife. Within Krüna, an indigenous religion in which ritual life is scaffold from birth by anticipatory orientation towards death, funerary practice emerges as a site of embodied memory. Although Christianization has reconfigured ritual authority, Krüna-inflected dispositions persist, producing a textured ritual hybridity in which ancestral and monotheistic imaginaries coexist. This study examines how Krüna and Christian influences have shaped contemporary funerary practices of Viswema through the lens of hybridity. This research foregrounds the emotional depths of Krüna-Christian syncretic ritual propriety through an autoethnographic exploration of the death of the researcher’s grandfather, drawing on personal grief and how it finds consolation often encountering the realities of an evolving culture, which blends ancestral tradition with modernity introduced by colonial monotheism.</p>

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Between Christ and the Ancestors: Death, Funerary Practices and Religious Syncretism Among the Krünami in Nagaland

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月13日

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  • Nohosanu Natalia Rhutso,
  • Amrita Banerjee

摘要

This study interrogates the shifting ontologies of death among the Krünami sub-culture of Viswema-Angami Nagas, for whom death constitutes a passage into an ancestral afterlife. Within Krüna, an indigenous religion in which ritual life is scaffold from birth by anticipatory orientation towards death, funerary practice emerges as a site of embodied memory. Although Christianization has reconfigured ritual authority, Krüna-inflected dispositions persist, producing a textured ritual hybridity in which ancestral and monotheistic imaginaries coexist. This study examines how Krüna and Christian influences have shaped contemporary funerary practices of Viswema through the lens of hybridity. This research foregrounds the emotional depths of Krüna-Christian syncretic ritual propriety through an autoethnographic exploration of the death of the researcher’s grandfather, drawing on personal grief and how it finds consolation often encountering the realities of an evolving culture, which blends ancestral tradition with modernity introduced by colonial monotheism.