Beyond erosion: monetization and the recomposition of moral economy among the Tangkhul of Northeast India

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 among the Tangkhul Naga of Northeast India, this article examines how processes of monetization are reshaping local economic life. It focuses on the interrelated domains of cash cropping, education, and migration, where expanding engagement with markets intersects with enduring systems of kinship, reciprocity, and ritual obligation. The article argues that these transformations do not represent a straightforward shift from “traditional” subsistence to market-based individualism. Instead, they involve a process of recomposition, in which monetary practices are selectively incorporated into existing moral and institutional frameworks. Income from agriculture, educational mobility, and migrant remittances is not treated as purely individual resources but are embedded within obligations to family, church, and community. By foregrounding recomposition as a conceptual lens, the article contributes to debates on moral economy and indigenous modernities by demonstrating how capitalist expansion is actively reworked through local systems of value and authority. Rather than signaling the erosion of indigenous institutions, monetization in this context produces hybrid and socially embedded forms of economic life.