Paper short abstract:

The Garo community religion, generally perceived as a religious tradition in its own right, encompasses a broad array of divinatory techniques. The most important of these serve to identify causes of illness. What are sources of authority that these techniques cater to?

Paper long abstract:

Divinatory techniques are an important element of the community religion of the Garo of upland Northeast India. For Songsarek, the followers of this community religion, illnesses can have many causes. The most 'traditional' of these are unseen entities, mostly deities, who have an inclination to deplete people of their life force. In addition, illness can have causes that are apparently a spill over from adjacent ideological domains, such as 'Hindu' evil spirits, or a 'Christian' disease such as pneumonia. Among Garo, religious conversions to Christianity are common, and most Songsarek Garo live in environments that have a strong Christian presence. Historically and currently, Hinduism and Islam are sources of religious inspiration as well. The Garo community religion lacks professional religious specialists. Perhaps consequently, the techniques that it provides are open to eliciting whatever unseen entities present themselves, and not limited to those that belong to the Songsarek realm. Rather than legitimizing the divine, the diagnostic practices that I am focusing on in my paper have an inherent openness to elicit various sources of spiritual, ghostly, demoniac or divine power. I am proceeding from video recordings of a divination that I have made during ethnographic fieldwork. I explore and contextualize the event filmed, and show that the analysis of divinatory techniques can provide valuable insights in the changing religious landscape of the region concerned.