Dolly Kikon

In 1997, Kikon received her B.A. from the Department of History, University of Delhi while studying in Miranda House. In 2001, she completed her LL.B from the Campus Law Center at the University of Delhi. She moved to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for her M. Phil. Her dissertation was titled Compromised democracy and the politics of participation: a case study of the Naga people from Northeast India. It looked into people's participation in Indian electoral system, development initiatives by Indian security forces and the Indo-Naga ceasefire negotiations.[5]

She obtained her Doctoral Degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University in 2013.[2] Titled, Disturbed Areas Act: Anxiety, Intimacy and the State in Northeast India, her dissertation looked into the "state-making processes in contemporary India... and the many unheralded, though significant ways in which people in the foothills transgress and embrace the cultural and political roles ascribed to them by the modern state."[6] During the doctoral studies, she received the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Dissertation Fieldwork Grant,[7] the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, the Center for South Asia Community Service Fellowship (Stanford University) and the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

Kikon's work on food navigates through landscapes of hills, valleys and foothills in Northeast India, and challenges the existing notions of sovereignty limited to territoriality. The layered articulation of food and the sensory perceptions attached to it challenge anthropological understanding of indigenous food. Therefore, significantly, her work revolves around indigenous food and fermentation as a technique for preservation.

Her article, Tasty Transgression: Food and Social Boundaries in the Foothills of Northeast India, questions the sensory perception of classifying the taste of food as belonging either to the hills or the plains. Through her fieldwork, she points out that this distinction falls apart at landscapes classified as foothills, the geography that situates itself between the two. Farming practices at the foothills transgress social structures and taboos attributes exclusively to societies either in the hills or the valleys.

Through her article, Fermenting Modernity: Putting Akhuni on the Nation’s Table in India, she points out that cultures of reciprocity and eating in Northeast India are integral in order to challenge existing notions of sovereignty as a political project limited to territoriality. Speaking through akhuni – fermented Naga soya beans – she reiterates that everyday practices of eating are entangled with social relationships and histories of sharing and loss.[8]

Kikon was granted the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stockholm University (2013–15) for "The Indian Underbelly: Marginalisation, Migration and State in the Periphery."[11] This work traced the increasing outmigration from Northeast India to the rest of the country. Focusing on migration, it examined the expansion and outcomes of developmental activities of the Indian state in areas associated with economic backwardness, subsistence agriculture and armed conflict.[12] Kikon and Karlsson define 'wayfinding' as a "voyage without a map or beaten paths or pathways to follow and with no clear destination or end station". In the process of wayfinding, young indigenous migrations struggle to make out what and where home is. As they move out of agricultural activities, they are constantly in search out new places and possibilities creating cultural fissures at various levels.[13]

Part of the project, Kikon and Bengt G. Karlsson also collaborated with Andrzej Markiewicz on a photoethnography project titled, Wayfinding.[14] The project was exhibited in Guwahati, Dimapur, Gangtok and Kathmandu.

Kikon worked as a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India and the Gauhati High Court between 2001 and 2002. Her legal advocacy work dealt with constitutional provisions for land and resource ownership as well as indigenous rights.[15]

She has been part of several fact-finding teams over the years in Northeast India: And Quiet Flows the Kopili, Report of Human Rights Violation in the Karbi-Anglong District of Assam (2002); Death, Insurgency, Impunity: A Report on Extra-Judicial Killings in Tinsukia, Assam (2011). She has been associated with the Naga Peoples' Movement for Human Rights, Sisterhood Network (Dimapur), Prodigals' Home (Dimapur),[2] The Turning Point (Mon district) and Action Aid (Northeast India).