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Abstract

Food practices within Indigenous communities are important sites of caregiving, cultural identity, and knowledge transmission. This study examines the food practices of the Ao Naga Tribe in Northeast India through a feminist ethnographic lens, focusing on the gendered organization of cooking, caregiving, and traditional healing practices. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2025, including semi-structured interviews and oral histories with community members in Nagaland’s Mokokchung district, the study explores how everyday food preparation and care practices shape household and community life. The findings reveal that women perform most of the daily cooking and caregiving responsibilities. At the same time, men often undertake specific roles in festival contexts, such as meat preparation and ritual activities. Traditional healing practices, including the use of herbal remedies and consultation with local bone healers, remain embedded in household knowledge systems. However, their transmission is increasingly shaped by processes of modernization and changing cultural beliefs. Rather than interpreting these roles solely as evidence of inequality, the study highlights how food preparation, caregiving, and healing practices function simultaneously as forms of labour, cultural responsibility, and knowledge preservation. At the same time, women’s everyday labour frequently remains socially undervalued. By situating Ao Naga experiences within broader debates on gender, care work, and Indigenous knowledge in the Global South, the article contributes to feminist scholarship by demonstrating how cultural practices of care sustain community life while also reflecting evolving gender relations.

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