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William Sax:The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State
 | Oxford University Press veröffentlichte kürzlich das Buch "The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State" sowie die Hindi-Übersetzung des 1991 erschienenen Buches "Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage" von Prof. Dr. William Sax (Leiter der Abteilung Ethnologie am Südasien-Institut). |
 | The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State Rituals combining healing with spirit possession and court-like proceedings are found around the world and throughout history. A person suffers from an illness that cannot be cured, for example, and in order to be healed performs a ritual involving a prosecution and a defense, a judge and witnesses. Divine beings then speak through oracles, spirits possess the victim and are exorcized, and local gods intervene to provide healing and justice. Such practices seem to be the very antithesis of modernity, and many modern, secular states have systematically attempted to eliminate them. What is the relationship between healing, spirit possession, and the law, and why are they so often combined? |
Why are such rituals largely absent from modern societies, and what happens to them when the state attempts to expunge them from their health and justice systems, or even to criminalize them? Despite the prevalence of rituals involving some or all of these elements, this volume represents the first attempt to compare and analyze them systematically. The Law of Possession brings together historical and contemporary case studies from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, and argues that despite consistent attempts by modern, secular states to discourage, eliminate, and criminalize them, these types of rituals persist and even thrive because they meet widespread human needs.
The author shows how Nandadevi's appeal stems from the fact that her mythology parallels the life-courses of the local peasant women, and that her ritual procession imitates their annual journey to the village of their birth. Drawing on formal Indian theories, verbal commentaries, songs, interviews, articles, propaganda, legends, pan-Indian Sanskrit liturgies, historical documents, and the author's remarkable personal account of the pilgrimage, this gripping narrative is a unique resource for courses in the anthropology of religion, Hinduism, and folklore, ritual, and gender studies.
 | Himalaya ki Nandadevi (Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage) Every few decades, thousands of Hindu villagers in the Central Himalayas of North India carry their regional goddess Nandadevi in a bridal palanquin to her husband Shiva's home, walking barefoot over icebound mountain passes to a lake surrounded by human bones. This Royal Pilgrimage of Nandadevi is a ritual dramatization of the post-marital journeys of married women from their natal homes to their husbands' homes. _Mountain Goddess_ is an anthropological study of this pilgrimage and the cult of Nandadevi, especially as they relate to local women's lives. |
29 Oct 2015
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