Silent Symbols: Gendered Adornments and Bodily Beliefs among Adi Women of Upper Siang District, Arunachal Pradesh

Abstract

This paper explores the fading traditions of bodily adornment among Adi women of Upper Siang District, Arunachal Pradesh. It focuses on two distinctive practices: the Lekkeng, a finely braided cane anklet made from a different bamboo cane called Tagil (Dinochloa maclellandii). It was worn by the married women of the Pasi and Padam sub tribes of the Adis. And the other were the ritual tattoos once etched onto the faces and legs of the young girls in the northern village of the district, namely Gette and its adjoining areas. Though aesthetic in form, these adornments carried profound cultural and spiritual meanings, symbolising marital identity, social recognition and the metaphysical belief in the afterlife. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews, this study interprets these adornments as expressions of embodied folklore and non-verbal narratives inscribed upon women’s bodies. The Lekkeng functioned as a signifier of womanhood, community belonging and continuity of tradition, while tattooing represented an act of spiritual preparation, believed to grant women agency in the realm of death through symbolic barter. Through feminist folklore theory and anthropological insights into the body and material culture, the paper argues that such adornments reveal how gender, belief and ecology are interwoven in Adi cosmology. The discontinuation of these practices in the 1960s and 1970s marks not merely the erosion of tradition but the silencing of a symbolic language once spoken through women’s bodies.