Deification of river Kopili in Assam is one example of how reverence for nature is actuated by deification of elements by indigenous communities, which happens through a process of narrativisation in forms of myths, legends and rituals, and perpetuated in the society. Every year, ritualistic performance is carried out in honour of the Kopili river.  Though river worship is not unknown across cultures, worshipping of the Kopili finds significance in the fact that it is carried out by three different indigenous groups professing different culture and faith, speaking different languages. There are, however, formal variances in the rituals performed in these three different groups. This article wants to contribute towards understanding the implications of such perspectives in the contemporary extractive economic regime and territorialised identity politics in the Northeast region of India.

Western rationalism and scientific reading of the self and the universe is based on a binary between culture and nature, a divide that paves way to heighten human supremacy over the non-human world. This modernist thinking tracing back to Rene Descartes, later taken up by scientific reading of social life, creates a table of hierarchy with man on the top and the rest of the nature as means for human fulfillment. Fiddling with nature heightened by this perceived supremacy has not only led to continuous destruction of nature, but also emergence of several anomalies. The present crisis created by novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a case in point. The last few decades have seen emergence of intellectual discourses critiquing scientism and western logic. Philosophical and anthropological studies (including that of Andreas Weber) have been highlighting the significance of indigenous thought and beliefs, showing finer conceptions of humans, persons and the environment, and non-divisibility of culture from nature. There are, however, challenges about use of vocabulary and methods of engaging with the indigenous. Works of these western philosophers and cultural anthropologists still fall within the discourse advanced in/ by the West. So, understanding the indigenous worldviews still remains methodologically incomplete.

This engagement with Andreas Weber’s essay, "Sharing Life.  The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity", draws from observations made and experiences encountered by the author across communities of India’s Northeast. Placing Weber’s enunciations on the ‘animistic worldviews’ in the context of the region, this essay as an engagement with Weber goes on to muse on the ruptures and flows ‘animistic cosmologies’ in the ‘eco-cultural landscape’ of Northeast India, woven around the intimate interaction between nature, nation and nationalities. Built around three broad themes, which I call the testament of the rocks, the journey of the roads and the tales of the rivers, the essay interrogates whether there an ‘indigene’, already and always out there? How to understand the ways human society and the physical-natural environment constantly and dialectically shape each other over time? How can we place the idea of ‘cosmology of animism’ in the context of the ‘lived experiences’ of the people of Northeast India? From the examples of rock relics in geo-security terrains of Arunachal Pradesh to life-worlds in mountainous Naga villages enduring through changes and course shifting rivers in the Brahmaputra Valley, this essay emphasises that the continuous production of the region as a ‘resource frontier’ in the perilous slopes of capitalism needs to be factored in which would tell us that ‘animistic world-views’ and ethos of reciprocity has a milieu that goes through a flux.