Mishmi

Mishmi, a Tibeto-Burman people in the Mishmi Hills about the frontiers of Assam and Tibet, forming three main divisions: Midhi, Dagarn, and Meju, collectively called Nahong by the Tibetans. One group presents a striking resemblance to the Japanese lower classes, but all speak the same language, a rude, uncultivated Tibetan dialect, and most of the tribes have the flat features and yellowish colour common to all Mongolic peoples. Their religion is concerned mainly with the magic arts, and their priests, like the Siberian Shamans, exorcise the possessed and cure all ailments by their spells, contortions, dances and drum-beating. They are polygamists, and dwell in immense houses large enough to contain over a hundred persons under a single roof. In the barter trade everything is reckoned by the "head" - a reminiscence of the head-hunting period, when the heads of their victims served as currency. (T. T. Cooper, 'Ike Mishmi Hills; Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal.)