Worlds beyond maps : Karbi invisible landscapes, indigenous knowledge, and the hidden ontologies from Northeast India

Abstract

In the Karbi community from Karbi Anglong, India, special settlements exist that are named and are ontologically consequent for the community, but cannot be seen. They are called Rongbin, invisible villages whose invisibility is not a deficiency of perception or just spatial concealment. It is a condition for their existence. Rongbin hides, and will not show up in the visible registers of the world, unless, it chooses to. Karbis do not treat Rongbin as lost or latent. They are present and relationally maintained. Their authority over the land, the ancestry, and the sacred is independent of the visibility.

This ethnography is grounded in fieldwork, spanning over two years. This work considers Rongbin as an opportunity towards developing a sustained inquiry into how indigenous landscape knowledge manifests ontological categories that refuses incorporation into institutional and cartographic accounts of spaces. The argument is not that Karbis “believe” in Rongbin. But that the analytic vocabulary persistently employed in studying such phenomena, involving categories like hiddenness, absences, or the obfuscated sanctity, already forecloses that, what it claims to address. Invisibility thus, is not a puzzle with a solution but a structural property of an exclusive category of place that is maintained in practice, narrative, and a particular orientation towards the landscape.

The text proceeds through oral narratives, etiologies of Rongbin sites, and close attention to the ways in which the community engages and organizes the invisible landscape. The scholarly lenses of analyses involve the ontological turn, vernacular theory of religion, belief narratives, supernatural legend, and placelore. The contribution is intended to further the scholarship on magic, religion, rituals, and invisibility. While religious studies and folkloristics have developed tools that can analyze what communities believe in, this text looks into conditions that render certain categories of knowledge structurally resistant to such analysis, and what does such phenomena that refuses resolution asks of the ethnographer.