Indigenous pedagogies of love: Theorizing nonscalable worlds

Abstract

Indigenous life in India is defined by development. Indigenous peoples in India are categorized as Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional category defined by a presumed backwardness, remoteness, and need for improvement. Indigenous life and community well-being is tracked via development measures and initiatives where development is seen as both a requirement for and vehicle of peace and stability. In this article, we propose Naga pedagogies of love as Indigenous modes of accounting for relations and narrating community wellbeing. We consider Naga storytelling about rice as an embodied Indigenous pedagogy of love that enacts Indigenous futurity in the here and now. Building on theorizations of Indigenous epistemologies, we demonstrate how dominant modes of development and scaling-up are unable to account for Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Instead, we explore forms of reciprocity and sociality that are embedded in Indigenous community and allow us to claim past and future as Indigenous features that are outside the economic domain of expansion.