Tag Archives: Folktales

Many of these stories shed light on the origin of prevalent social hierarchies and fraught relationships between neighbouring villages such as ‘The Migration Story of Jagan Village’. But some of these stories also offer insights into cultural practices such as that of headhunting, and the prestige and honour associated with it. It is also striking to observe that women are largely absent, occupy a secondary status or remain silent participants in these stories. ‘The Story of Yeast’ reveals how women of the Wancho tribe came to be accorded the privilege of brewing wine and how men are forbidden from even touching the ‘tonkhah’ used for the fermentation process, but any kind of privilege is undercut by the revelation that women were bestowed with this privilege so that they could have some control over men at least in an inebriated state. Another migration story, ‘The Story of Our Village and the Village in Myanmar’