Expedition Naga: Diaries from the Hills in Northeast India, Peter Van Ham ; Jamie Saul

Part 1: The Longleng Diaries - Peter Van Ham;
Among the people of the clouds;
Headhunting season;
Clan feuds and screaming morungs;
Retaliation and healing;
Headhunting heroes;
Naked and atone with the universe;
The chicken knows the future;

Part 2: The Tuensang-Mon Diaries - Jamie Saul;
Hornets for supper;
Last bits of present;
Roast pig and priviledges;
Curfew and deadlines;
The explorers's ideal;
The artist and his village;
Beer from the toilet;
Footsteps in the fog;
Down a good road;
The 'Sub Ang' bamboo tow ropes and a man from benares;
Days of the drum 1 : Failed flying lessons;
Days of the Drum 2 : The ritual;
The skull of longmein;
Farewell and death in the naga hills;

Background:
The peoples and their land;
The colonial period and its agents in the Naga Hills;

This is what Peter van Ham and Jamie Saul are confronted with when in 2005 they are held by a curfew in the village of Tobu due to a threatening headhunt - one of the many obstacles the explorers encounter on their three expeditions following in the footsteps of the british administration-cum-explorersJ.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills and the Austrian anthropologist Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf. Accessing the remotest villages of the Naga, a Tibeto-Burmese groupinhabiting the Northeast of India and the Northwest of Burma (Myanmar), bring tolife again the old reports, notes and diaries from the 1920's and 30's, When the situation in these hills was truely life-threatening. At the end of the often long and arduous journeys through the hills, unique experiences await the authors: ritual headhunts, spiritual healings by shamans, mass gatherings with 900 villagers pulling a giant log drum up some of the steepest hills imaginable, and villages still fullof impressive architectural structures and traditional carvings, all located in magnificent scenery.