Margaret Lyngdoh

Margaret Lyngdoh is a Researcher at the University of Tartu's Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She specializes in indigenous cultures of Northeast India, particularly the Khasi and Karbi communities, with research focusing on ritual practices, belief systems, liminal ontologies, and human-animal transformation traditions within contexts of Christianity, Hinduism, and globalization. Her work bridges cultural anthropology, folklore studies, and religious studies through extensive ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis.

Her research interests span indigenous folklore studies, Khasi and Karbi belief systems, ritual studies, human-animal transformation traditions, vernacular religion, and ecological anthropology. She approaches these topics through a unique lens that combines ethnographic fieldwork with theoretical frameworks examining how indigenous communities navigate cultural change while maintaining traditional knowledge systems. Her work particularly emphasizes the relationship between ecological knowledge and indigenous belief systems, showing how traditional narratives inform contemporary environmental practices.

Her publications reveal a consistent focus on transformation narratives, particularly human-animal transformations among the Khasi people, examining how these stories function within ecological contexts and ritual practices. She has developed innovative methodological approaches for studying indigenous religions, emphasizing vernacular perspectives and challenging Western academic frameworks. Her research demonstrates how indigenous communities maintain cultural continuity through narrative traditions while adapting to contemporary challenges.

• International Participants Stipend, American Folklore Society (2023)
• Research Support Finance, University of Tartu (2022)
• Post-Doc Grant from Estonian Research Council (2018-2021)
• "Iconic Leaders Creating a Better World for All" by Women Economic Forum (2020)
• Albert Lord Fellow, Centre for Studies in Oral Tradition (2016)

Dr. Lyngdoh has supervised doctoral students including Malay Bera (PhD thesis on 'Gender and Nationalism in Fairytales of Late Colonial Bengal') and Kareng Ronghangpi (PhD theses on 'Karbi Oral Narrative' and 'Karbi Belief Worlds and belief Narratives'). She has secured multiple research grants including the Estonian Research Council's PUTJD 746 project on 'Tradition and Vernacular Discourses in the Context of Local Christianities in Northeastern India.' Her fieldwork continues with planned research visits to West Khasi Hills and Karbi Anglong through 2025, focusing on ritual practices, supernatural narratives, and human-animal transformation traditions.

She actively contributes to the academic community as an Executive Member of the Belief Narrative Network (BNN) within the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, and collaborates with the Marginalized and Endangered Worldviews Study Center at University College Cork. Her recent fieldwork involves documentation and archiving of folktales of the Karbi and Khasi tribes in Northeast India, working with Dr. Mayako Murai and research teams.