Paper short abstract:

All over India we encounter peculiar examples of dispute resolution where the “enforcement of law” is delegated to spirits such as daivas or būtas, devtas or jinns. In this paper I will argue that these spirits are efficacious social institutions in the mediation of justice.

Paper long abstract:

All over India we encounter peculiar examples of dispute resolution where the “enforcement of law” is delegated to spirits such as daivas or būtas, devtas or jinns. In this paper I will argue that these spirits are efficacious social institutions in the mediation of justice. To argue thus I claim that we can leave aside the question whether these sprits are “real” in the objective sense. It suffices to show that their existence is an intersubjectively shared belief. Such a belief is efficacious just like any other social institution whose reality is grounded in the intersubjective social world rather than in the objective world of science or the subjective world of experience. The efficacy of a spirit-based justice system lies in its “performativity” a notion that is tied to the concepts of the “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary force” attributed to utterances and ritual performances alike.