Faculty Profile: Dolly Kikon

Dolly Kikon is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), housed at The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. She is also a member of Recover, Restore, and Decolonize (RRaD), an initiative recently featured in the New York Times for its efforts to repatriate Naga remains in the current care of Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Dolly is currently working on a manuscript titled Fermenting Cultures, as well as a documentary film on Indigenous ecologies called Lithic Worlds scheduled for release in 2026. Her previous documentary film, Abundance: Living with a Forest, has been officially selected in a number of international film festivals and will be featured later this Fall at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We recently caught up with Dolly about her various projects and plans for the upcoming academic year.

My other passion is making documentary films. I am working on my third film titled Lithic Worlds. UCSC featured this project in the Shadow the Scientist (STS) series, an initiative that works to connect the public to scientists engaging in scientific experiments and fieldwork.

Lithic Worlds is a documentary that centers Indigenous storytelling practices to highlight the ecological knowledge of the land. Stones in different forms – monoliths, charm amulets, and boulders, etc – are central in this film because they feature in many stories of origin and sacred practices for Indigenous communities across the Himalayas. I examine what it means to ground our values and principles of care and ethics on stones and the land, even as humans seek to dig them up and cut them down in the name of development and building infrastructure to transport goods and commodities. What can Indigenous peoples’ knowledge about lithic worlds offer during a time when we are facing the consequences of a warming Earth? I try to reflect on these questions in this new film. It should be ready by 2026 if the stars align! 

How exciting – we look forward to seeing it next year! I’m curious, how do you see these academic interests in indigenous cultivation practices and foodways connecting to your work with Recover, Restore and Decolonize (RRaD) to repatriate Naga ancestral remains in the Pitts River Museum collection at Oxford University?

I am a member of the Recover, Restore, and Decolonize (RRaD) team, and we have been working on the repatriation of Naga ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. RRaD is a team constituted by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR). The Naga repatriation journey aims to forge a pathway towards healing and reconciliation among the Naga people. This journey began in 2020, and the process has been an interdisciplinary one that centers engagement, documentation, provenance, and care.

My foundational principle of doing scholarly research is to center the work of care, engagement, and justice.

To answer your question about how it relates to my different academic interests, this is easy. My foundational principle of doing scholarly research is to center the work of care, engagement, and justice. Working on repatriation has transformed my life. I see the challenges and richness of decolonization, healing, reconciliation, and witness how communities outside the academy and universities are practicing and also having rich debates and reflections about these topics. They are able to go beyond making it an article or a book project. It has been five years since I worked as a member of the RRaD team, and instead of writing articles/books, I have focused my time on organizing community-centered dialogues and conversations that are intergenerational and reflective.

The process is ongoing, and we have to take one day at a time. I cannot provide a date/time at the moment, but it will take place in the near future. Our ancestors will return to the Naga homeland and be given the dignified rest they deserve. At the heart of repatriation is the demand to recognise the sovereign rights of the Indigenous peoples and their assertions for the right to self-determination. This was my approach for my recent work on food and land – a project I led from 2021-2023. Food sovereignty and the rights of the communities to land and their agricultural practices are central.

Your documentary Abundance: Living with a Forest has been officially selected in a number of international film festivals. It is going to be featured at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tell us about the inspiration behind your film. What drew you to documentary film as a medium to communicate your research? What do you hope audiences will take away from it?

Abundance: Living with a Forest is a 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. In recent decades, jhum cultivation and foraging have come to be recognized as community practices where traditional knowledge and history of the land are passed down. In this way, they are a significant part of Indigenous knowledge systems. However, the ongoing ceasefire between Naga armed groups and the government of India has led to a surge in development activities that increasingly threaten the survival of these practices and the forest with which they are intrinsically linked. Plantation development, monocropping, and other infrastructure activities have contributed to deforestation across the mountains of Nagaland, obliterating all connections with land and other beings. The film seeks to uplift Indigenous foraging practice within the context of this impending loss, following Zareno, a Lotha forager in the forest of Khumtsü, and tracing the foraged edible plants as they make their way to the market in Wokha town.

As for the question on film as a medium for communicating research, I speak to this at length in my website. I was first inspired to turn to film as a medium of communicating anthropological research and the living world to a wider audience while working on a project on Indigenous practices of fermentation. My first documentary film was an 11-minute story titled “Seasons of Life” about fermented bamboo shoot and the people involved in sourcing, and preparing this delicacy that is popular in many Asian cuisines.

I see film as such a powerful medium because it is so palpable. I was hit hard by the ability to cut and edit raw footage, manage ambient noise, to decide on transitions between interviews and ultimately determine the pace and rhythm of the narrative I was trying to tell, because it meant I had the power to decide what I choose to make visible, erase, and portray about the social realities of Indigenous communities. The ability to choose the frame, quality, text, sounds, and image involves practicing responsibility. This means consciously making voices, practices, and values visible. The voices of foraging and foraging among Indigenous people connect us with ongoing extractive politics, hopes, desire, and resistance of Indigenous worlds.

Yes, the Ecologies of Care initiative is an international engagement project that is collaborative in nature. This June, we hosted a reception and conversation on justice and repatriation at Oxford University. We also held two workshops in South Asia. The first one was held in June 2025 in Kathmandu (Nepal). It included participants working on climate change in the Himalayan region. My colleague and fellow anthropologist, Pasang Sherpa from the University of British Columbia, led this workshop. The second workshop was held in Kohima (India) in August 202,5, which included storytellers, practitioners, and researchers working on Indigenous ecology and sustainability. For the 2025-2026 calendar year, CSAS has a series of exciting talks on food, justice, and community. We have an upcoming international workshop titled “Sociality, Science, and Surveillance: Plantations in the 21st Century” from October 9-10 2025.