Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas

A field-based study of oral tradition, identity, memory, and cultural self-understanding among the Ao-Naga people of Northeast India.

Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas: A Journey of Identity Construction explores the rich oral traditions of the Ao-Naga people, offering a careful and compelling account of how stories, myths, folktales, and remembered histories shape community life, identity, and worldview.

Rooted in a vibrant storytelling heritage passed down across generations, this volume approaches oral narrative not merely as folklore, but as a living archive of social values, spiritual imagination, environmental relations, gender roles, kinship, migration, and collective memory. Through meticulously gathered narratives and close cultural analysis, Resenmenla Longchar shows how Ao-Naga storytelling remains central to the preservation, interpretation, and renewal of Indigenous knowledge in a rapidly changing world.

The book reveals recurring themes of transformation, belonging, kinship, moral obligation, migration, and interconnection with land and nature. At the same time, it attends to the historical pressures of modernity, globalization, education, Christianity, and social change, asking how oral traditions continue to sustain identity while also adapting to new circumstances.

More than a compilation of stories, Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas invites readers into the intellectual and cultural world of Ao-Naga narrative life. It shows how stories do not simply preserve the past; they actively shape the moral imagination of the present and provide communities with ways of understanding continuity, rupture, belonging, and change.

Why this book matters

This book matters because it treats oral tradition as a serious form of historical, cultural, and philosophical knowledge. Rather than presenting Ao-Naga narratives as remnants of an earlier age, it shows how storytelling continues to function as a vital medium through which communities remember, interpret, debate, and reimagine who they are.

For readers interested in Indigenous epistemologies, Northeast India, folklore, oral history, gender, and the anthropology of identity, Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas offers an important contribution to the study of how communities narrate themselves across generations.

Key themes

• Oral tradition as cultural memory: The book examines how Ao-Naga stories preserve social values, historical consciousness, and collective identity.
• Identity construction: It explores how narratives help communities articulate belonging, ancestry, gender roles, migration histories, and moral obligations.
• Indigenous knowledge systems: The volume treats oral narrative as a living intellectual tradition rather than as a static repository of folklore.
• Community, environment, and spirituality: The stories reveal deep connections between social life, landscape, nature, cosmology, and everyday ethical practice.
• Continuity and change: The book asks how oral traditions endure and transform amid modernity, education, globalization, and social change.

Book details

• Author: Resenmenla Longchar
• Full title: Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas: A Journey of Identity Construction
• Publisher: Highlander Press
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN-13: 979-8987933916
• Publication date: August 2, 2025
• Print length: 124 pages
• Language: English
• Dimensions: 6 x 0.29 x 9 inches
• Trim size: 6 x 9 inches
• Item weight: 6.2 ounces

About the author

Resenmenla Longchar is Assistant Professor of History at ICFAI University Nagaland. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and her research focuses on Northeast Indian tribal cultures, oral traditions, gender roles, folklore, ritual life, and identity construction.

Her work is concerned with the ways Indigenous communities preserve, interpret, and transmit knowledge through narrative, memory, ritual practice, and social institutions. With particular attention to Ao-Naga cultural history, Dr Longchar examines oral traditions not simply as inherited stories, but as living forms of historical consciousness and cultural self-articulation.

She has published on Ao-Naga folklore, rituals, community systems, gendered social roles, and the cultural narratives through which identity is formed and renewed. Her scholarship contributes to the wider study of Northeast India by foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems, local histories, and the intellectual significance of oral tradition in contemporary social life.

Ideal for

This book is ideal for anthropologists, folklorists, historians, literary scholars, students of Northeast India, researchers of Indigenous knowledge systems, and readers interested in the enduring power of oral tradition.

Subject areas

• Ao-Naga oral traditions
• Northeast India
• Indigenous knowledge systems
• Folklore, mythology, and oral history
• Identity construction
• Gender and social values
• Migration, memory, and community history
• Anthropology of storytelling
• History and culture of Highland Asia

For courses and libraries

Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas is well suited for courses in anthropology, folklore, Indigenous studies, history, oral tradition, Northeast Indian studies, and the study of religion and culture. Its concise length, field-based orientation, and thematic clarity make it especially useful for classroom teaching, reading groups, and library collections focused on Highland Asia and Indigenous knowledge traditions.

Suggested citation

Longchar, Resenmenla. Oral Narratives and the Ao-Nagas: A Journey of Identity Construction. Highlander Press, 2025.