We welcome Dolly Kikon for a screening of her film Abundance: Living with a Forest and a talk about her work on Indigenous ecology in the Eastern Himalayan region.

Abundance: Living with a Forest (2024) is a filmic biography of foraging, forest, and jhum cultivation in Nagaland, a hill state in Northeast India where approximately 60% of the population depend on jhum cultivation. Jhum cultivation and foraging have been recognized as community practices of indigenous knowledge. However, both these practices and the forest to which they are intrinsically linked have been threatened by the plantation, monocropping, and infrastructure activities that have surged with the ongoing ceasefire between Naga armed groups and the government.

Abundance: Living with a Forest follows Zareno, a Lotha forager in the forest of Khumtsü, and traces the foraged edible plants as they make their way to the market in Wokha town. The film gestures to an impending loss that Indigenous communities encounter across the world.

Watch the trailer here: 

Listen to the Title Song from the documentary:

Dolly Kikon is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Center for South Asian Studies. She is the author of Experiences of Naga Women in Armed Conflict: Narratives from a Militarized Society (2004); Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (2015); Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019); with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (2019); with Duncan McDuie-Ram, Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (2021); with Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Bengt G. Karlsson, Sanjay Barbora, and Meenal Tula, Seeds and Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023).

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.