Anthropologists have stressed the relationship between symptoms of distress, ritual action and unwanted possession. The article stresses the importance of language and performance in two therapeutic cults in India. The crucial issue here involves showing how ritual becomes a means for either representing or manipulating special mental states. We see how individuals may use possession as a strategy to frame a reformulation of the self. Healing thus involves self-awareness.
In South Asia, women, like subaltern communities, tend to be muted in everyday discourse. In this paper, various modes of female expression will be discussed, as they are displayed in two possession cults, in Bengal and South Kanara.
I am concerned here with how affects and emotions, embedded in cultural idioms, emerge through linguistic and pragmatic processes. To analyze the formulation of the self [3] in these cults, I propose, following Crapanzano to study modalities of verbal interaction during, or between, possession episodes. Self-reflection becomes here a communicative experience that the anthropologist may grasp through processes of ritualization or internalization, which are not necessarily expressed verbally.
According to Dumont 94 the Western conception of the self is characterized by individualism, while the non-Western self is permeated by holism, referring to society as a whole. According to Dumont , Marriott and others, [4] the South Asian self is context-dependent, sociocentric, and lacking in autonomy Spiro In this article, I ask whether self-awareness is possible through ritual, which leads me to consider the problem of culturally determined conceptions of the self in anthropological terms, beyond its obvious psychological content.
The material is derived from fieldwork, mainly among the Santals, in Bengal and Orissa since, and from later work among the Tulus of coastal Karnataka. Apart from life stories, information was gathered about devotion, asceticism and possession Carrin , , a, b, In South Asia, the context which shapes life histories and allows for self-awareness is often pervaded by violence.
