Michael Heneise

Dreams and dreaming, sacred ecology, ritual healing, oral literature, biomedical knowledge (s), practices and technologies, contemporary politics, critical thought, Himalayas, South Asia

REL-1005 The religions of East Asia

REL-1025 South Asian Religions

REL-1009 Christianity III: Christian Life Interpretation and Ethics

REL-3016 Anthropological Approaches in the Study of Religions

Michael Heneise is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and a member of the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group at the University of Tromsø. 

Trained as an anthropologist, Heneise's main research interests are indigenous religion, ecological knowledge, ritual healing, and medical pluralism. He has conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean, South America, and in India. He is currently working on a book on the cosmopolitics of ritual healing, based on research conducted in Karbi Anglong, Assam, and among Tenyimia and Konyak Naga communities in Nagaland and Manipur states, Northeast India. 

Prior to joining Tromsø in 2019, Heneise served as Director of the Kohima Institute , a social science research center in the Eastern Himalayas that he co-founded in 2013. He received his BME from Florida State University in 2000, his MTh from the University of Wales in 2005, and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2016. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was program manager for Latin America and the Caribbean at Geneva Global , and supervised development projects in community health, education, and agroforestry. Based at that time  in Quito, Ecuador, he studied anthropology at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO).  

Heneise is the editor of Highlander Press , and co-editor of the journals  Himalaya and  The Highlander . He also supervises the student-run journal The South Asianist  published by the Center for South Asian Studies  at Edinburgh University. He also serves on the editorial board of Gitanjali and Beyond , a journal published in association with the Scottish Center for Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University.

Heneise authored the monograph Agency and Knowledge in Northeast India: The Life and Landscapes of Dreams (Routledge 2018); and edited Passing Things On: Ancestors and Genealogies in Northeast India (Heritage 2014). Along with long-term collaborator Jelle JP Wouters, he co-edited Nagas in the 21st Century (Highlander 2017) and is currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Highland Asia (due in 2021).