Akumthong Longkumer

Akumthong Longkumer is a doctoral researcher in the Department of History at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong. His research focuses on Indigenous histories, mortuary traditions, and the cultural life of the Naga community of Nagaland. His works engages with critical death studies to explore how bodies, materiality, and ritual practices shape social worlds in precolonial and contemporary Naga societies. His areas of specialisation include the historical study of Ao Naga society, mortuary practices and death rituals, oral traditions and memory, and the cultural history of Northeast India. He is particularly interested in the relationship between death, morality, and social cohesion, as well as in questions of care, personhood, and the ethical life within non-Western tribal cosmologies. He has participated and presented papers in National-International seminars, with a papers currently in press.

He has an eye for the morbid and tries to approach it with a sense humor. His writings centers on death, and for pleasure he writes about them on instagram @the_corpse_guy often detailing on death and the culture that surrounds it. He advocates for “death positivity”; and believes that we as a culture should start the dialogue around death and dying. In his personal writings, he chases the rebellious voice likes of Susan Sontag, the eroticism of Anais Ninn and the punk spirit of Patti Smith. A lover of Arts, he admires the work of Goya and Rothko to Amrita Sher Gill. He enjoys reading the classics and he hopes to keep writing about death, life and in between, in the future.