Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Anthony Cerulli
(Hobart & William Smith Colleges)
- Location:
- B201
- Start time:
- 28 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the "practice of texts" in South Asia as a way to explore the analytic category of ritual. In light of the ways texts have been and are used in South Asia, presenters on this panel will theorize the constitutive components, uses, and expectations of ritual activity.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines the "practice of texts" in South Asia as a way to explore the analytic category of ritual. Looking at the ways in which texts have been and are used in South Asian history and contemporary society, presenters on this panel will theorize the constitutive components, uses, and expectations of ritual activity. Panelists ground their theoretical investigations of ritual on specific case studies of textual practices, covering an array of locations and focusing on disparate cultural domains, including religion, medicine, and politics.
In theorizing ritual through textual practice, this panel approaches the categories of "ritual" and "text" in South Asia as indeterminate methodological fields, which frequently exist only when caught up in some form of discourse or discursive activity. Texts, for example, may be identified in multiple ways—as manuscript, image, the body, and oral narrative—while ritual may be seen in various institutions of culture—such as medicine, education, art, and religion. Panelists will employ a number of different methodologies, such as ethnography, historiography, and textual hermeneutics, and examine the efficacy of ritual and text as analytic categories to study human experience, activity, and production.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Taking into account new developments in performance studies, critical medical anthropology, and rituals studies, this paper shall explore how sacred texts, spoken in the context of ritual healing events in the Garhwal Himalayas take part in unfolding the performative power of these rituals.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the usage of texts in ritual healing practices in the Garhwal Himalayas, North India. Typically healers, who are either from a high Brahmin caste or from the lowest castes, read from small handwritten scripts during oracular sessions and healing rituals. Often, the texts are in Sanskrit or in another language, like Bengali, and are spoken in high speed. Patients and other participants of the rituals do not expect to understand what is being said or read during the rituals, and the ritual practitioners do not think it important that a patient grasps the meaning of the words spoken. Instead, the texts themselves and the sounds of the words are considered important to produce a healing effect. Together with other techniques employed, they are part of the performance of healing. In my analysis I will therefore pay attention not to the content of ritual texts in use but to the way people relate to the books and the texts employed during ritual healing practices attempting to shed light to their performative efficacy.
Paper short abstract:
Ritual roles of women are ignored in Sanskrit texts. Women's ritual agency is transmitted orally and in performance, while male ritual agency is text based. The analysis of recently printed ritual handbooks for women demonstrates the need to see female agency as part of a "network of agencies".
Paper long abstract:
This contribution deals with ritual roles and agency of women. The concrete case study is a prenatal life-cycle ritual of the ritual repertoire of a South Indian Brahmin tradition, and my reflections are informed by Brahmanic ritual texts in Sanskrit and by participant observation and interviews conducted during many stays in South India. I will show how women are denied publicly valued ritual roles and how their existing ritual roles are not publicly acknowledged. I will show how women's ritual agency is transmitted differently from male agency, namely orally and through performance, while male ritual agency is text based. This becomes visible only if we shift our focus from canonical textual authority to actual practice on the ground. This touches upon the questions as to what counts as "ritual", and who has the power to define actions as "ritual." In a next step, I will focus on the rather new trend of putting women's ritual knowledge into writing, too, and the issues arising from this, namely that we need to see female agency as part of a dynamic "network of agencies" (Sax) rather than assuming an essence where none exists.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the bodily poetics of spirit possession via three Tamil Roman Catholic women who claim to be possessed by Mary. Challenging common notions of "textual performance," I investigate the bodily practices of these women as improvisational, anti-hegemonic counter-texts.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I consider the bodily poetics of three women in Tamil Nadu, south India, who claim to be possessed by Mary, the mother of Jesus. Coming from different caste, class, and geographic locations - and drawing hundreds of Christian, Hindu, and Muslim devotees - these women and their attendant communities allow me to investigate issues of religious syncretism, gender, and power in contemporary south India.
Their practices also challenge common notions of what constitutes "textual performance." I argue that these three women's bodily practices and speech acts work as counter-texts to hegemonic discourses, both Hindu and Roman Catholic. I interrogate their cross-references to other texts, bodily and written, classical and modern.
For the sake of time, I attend particularly to one case of Marian spirit possession: a 38-year-old single mother named Rosalind, who lives with an extended joint family in urban Chennai. Like a number of Roman Catholic women in south India who get possessed by Mary, Rosalind enacts healing rituals with both Hindus and Christians who come to her for succor. She speaks "messages" like informal sermons in various registers of Tamil, ranging from high "centamil" or "Pandit tamil" to "low" or "bent" "koduntamil," the type of Tamil spoken on the streets. She also speaks in tongues.
Many scholars of south India have argued that discourses and practices of spirit possession owe their particular forms of expression to symbolic and literary techniques borrowed from classical Tamil and Sanskrit literatures (Frederick M. Smith 2006, Nirmal Selvamony 2011) and modern political discourses (John Bernard Bate 2006). This paper both borrows from and attempts to push beyond such work, suggesting that Rosalind's performances gesture toward concepts of address found in "Tolkaapiyam," the oldest extant work in Tamil literature, as well as from contemporary rhetoric, Hindu possession practices, and Roman Catholic liturgy.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents texts and rituals of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga system of religious thought as practiced in a living Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition in north India. The singing of hymns is the most important form of lay meditation in this tradition, and the paper analyzes this yogic textual and ritual practice.
Paper long abstract:
The paper presents yogic textual and ritual practices of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga system of religious thought in a living Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition in north India. Sāṃkhya-Yoga is the tradition of Sāṃkhya associated with the Yogaśāstra (Yogasūtra and the Bhāṣya) tradition. Yoga is in this tradition defined as samādhi, concentration, the focus is on meditation, not āsanas. The most important form of lay meditation, although not meditation in the technical sense of dhyāna, is singing of hymns. The paper analyzes the texts and the rituals associated with this yoga practice. The singing of the hymns takes place early in the morning and the exact same hymns are sung every day for a life time. When at home the devotees sing these hymns alone in the morning daily, even husband and wife recite them separately, but in the Maṭh they are sung together in the temple. The hymns describe the Sāṃkhya-Yoga teaching, the philosophy of renunciation, salvific liberation, and devotion to Īśvara. The paper analyzes this yogic textual and ritual practice.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the church festivals of the Latin Catholics of Kerala/South India within the framework of ritual theory. It focuses on changes which occur when formally orally transmitted ritual knowledge is no longer passed on from generation to generation.
Paper long abstract:
The church festivals, dedicated to different saints and organised by their respective brotherhoods, are the most elaborate religious rituals among the Latin Catholics of coastal Kerala. They are characterised by a highly complex system of redistribution of rights and honours, which amply shows the hierarchical ordering of members of the brotherhoods as well as the Latin Catholic community as a whole.
Written statutes of the brotherhood are said to exist, but play no role in ritual practice. The knowledge about the redistributive process, the responsibilities and honours, is handed down orally from generation to generation. However, fewer and fewer people today seem to be familiar with the details of the ritual.
The paper examines the Latin Catholic church festivals within the framework of ritual theory, thereby focusing on changes which occur in ritual practice when formally orally transmitted ritual knowledge - understood as 'text' - is no longer passed on.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the Malayali medical gurukula, "house of the teacher," and suggests that two modes of expression, Sanskrit orality and vernacular commentarial writing, sustain a highly ritualized practice of texts in the education of physicians in contemporary Kerala.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I explore the Malayali medical institution of the gurukula, "house of the teacher," and examine two modes of expression, Sanskrit orality and vernacular commentarial writing, which sustain a highly ritualized practice of texts in the education of physicians in contemporary Kerala. On the one hand, Sanskrit pedagogy in the gurukula asserts a phonocentric ideology. Although the texts of the medical canon were produced and put to writing in the first six centuries C.E., students in the gurukula do not read these works like conventional books. They learn to experience and, ultimately, embody the Sanskrit sources. In ritual processes of memorizing and understanding these texts, medical practitioners and medical texts are not isolable entities; the Sanskrit texts are treated as unfixed methodological fields of knowledge, which become operative in the flow of discourse and practice. They are truly discursive, moving back and forth between teacher and student, being presented and represented again and again, from beginning to end, with ratiocinative scrutiny. On the other hand, alongside oral exchange, recitation, and rote memorization of medical compendia, the Malayali gurukula also promotes an ideology of vernacular commentarial writing and the production of workable (or clinical) texts; the commentary tradition serves as a means of authorization, and it opens up the possibility of ensuring its continued dissemination over time.