Prophetic dreaming has long held significance as a cultural mode of foreknowledge within Indigenous Naga communities of India. Although the post-colonial influence of Christianity has reconfigured Indigenous Naga cosmological worldviews, the prominence of dreams as a medium for gaining revelatory insight into human affairs has maintained uninterrupted cultural continuity. What has shifted, however, is the interpretive modality through which such dreaming experiences are understood in modern Christianized Naga communities. Naga dream divination that was earlier recognized as an animist mode of prescience guided by tutelary spirits is now increasingly attributed to religious supernatural agency derived from heavenly angels. Extending beyond these animist spiritual and religious supernatural interpretive paradigms, this article proposes a new ecocentric perspective for reconceptualizing Indigenous Naga prophetic dreaming through the theoretical framework of critical posthumanism. In this context, it undertakes an ethno-literary analysis of Easterine Kire’s novel Spirit Nights, employing posthumanist concepts of porous human embodiment and human–more-than-human intercorporeal relationality. The study analyzes the narrative’s representation of dreamtime experiences that articulate a Naga personhood continuum between the protagonist’s ‘self’ (ruopfü) and more-than-human persons through the posthumanist notion of porous, non-discrete, and non-autonomous human embodiment. It further examines how dream-mediated prophetic knowledge is gleaned in the narrative as a manifestation of posthumanist intercorporeal relational entanglements across human and more-than-human worlds. The article thus complements existing animist spiritual and religious supernatural readings of Indigenous Naga prophetic dreaming tradition with a fresh posthumanist ecocentric interpretation that re-cognizes dream significations as precipitating from porous human embodiment and beyond-human intercorporeal relationality.

Authors:
Sampda Swaraj, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

About the Presenter(s)
Sampda Swaraj is a PhD scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. Her research interests include Indigenous literatures, new animism, critical posthumanism, and environmental humanities.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampda-swaraj

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sampda-Swaraj

Additional website of interest
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6034-8925

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