S. Seigoulien Haokip

Seigoulien is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology.

His research interests by and large focuses on North East India. His MA dissertation – based on concurrent fieldwork carried out in Guwahati – looked at religious practices among the Kuki community. It explored how the Kuki people in Guwahati (Assam) articulate the idea of religiosity and spirituality. His MPhil dissertation analysed how mercantile networks are culturally reproduced across distinctive spaces by using archival as well as ethnographic materials. 

Seigoulien’s PhD project explores the changing contours of social, spatial and cultural transformations in North East India. In conversation with the ongoing debates on neoliberal processes and subjectivities, the question of selfhood and indigenous futures in liberalising India, his PhD thesis ethnographically foregrounds the lifeworld of indigenous Kuki youths and the making of tribal middle-class cultures in an era of accelerated change. 

As a Citizen Historian with The 1947 Partition Archive, S. Seigoulien Haokip has documented oral histories in Manipur. He was also awarded the Tata Trusts – Partition Archive Research Residency Grant 2021. Seigoulien also engage with museums in the UK through knowledge exchange and collaboration. 

• Anthropology of borderlands, North East India, South and Southeast Asia.
• Indigenous futures, development, identity, religion, Act East Policy.
• Aspirations, youth studies, middle-class culture. 

Contact Seigoulien on teaching matters at sh151@soas.ac.uk