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1 Introduction
Towards an anthropology of the umwelt
In the month of mÄyi during the hottest and driest season, bĆ«ta rituals are held in many villages in South Kanara, a coastal area in Karnataka.1 Accompanied by drums and wind instruments played by PuruáčŁa musicians, spirit mediums of the Pambada or Nalike castes dance around the precincts of local shrines, issue oracles, and interact with people.
As apotheosised local heroes or heroines or as the spirits of wild animals dwelling in forests, bĆ«tas are generally regarded as deities. While bĆ«tas may travel across regions, they are generally believed to be closely linked to the land and nature of localities. Though normally invisible, their power, or Ćakti,2 fills the deep forests, hangs over the bush and ponds, and circulates through the woods, agricultural fields, and villages. Consequently, bĆ«tas are considered to originate fromâand embodyâa realm of sacred wildness.
Fieldwork for this monograph was mainly carried out in the two adjoining villages of Mudu Perar and Padu Perar in Mangaluru taluk, Dakshina Kannada district.3 Until administratively separated in 1904, these villages used to be a single entity called âPerarâ, and are still collectively called âPerarâ by the villagers.4
In Perar, bĆ«ta rituals are conducted in the geographical area that consists of houses surrounded by paddy fields, palm and areca nut farms, and deep forests and hills. As will be elaborated upon later, bĆ«ta rituals are closely related to the ranks and duties of families, matriliny, and land tenure. In village society, bĆ«ta worship is a sophisticated system that links people to land and nature. Embodying the realm of the wild,5 bĆ«tas mediate the relationships villagers have with fields and forests, and bĆ«ta rituals facilitate the smooth succession of both lands and offices within families. Moreover, through the transaction of offerings and blessings (prasÄda)6 in rituals, the bĆ«tas authorise the hierarchies and relations among village families.
Direct encounters and interactions between people and deities is an essential element of bĆ«ta worship. Villagers directly present offerings at altars and small shrines in their houses, and they receive oracles and blessings from possessed mediums at village shrines. While bĆ«ta Ćakti is generally perceived as an invisible, fertile, and dangerous power that influences the lives and destinies of villagers, through spirit possession it can also transiently manifest in dreadful, androgynous forms.
Drawing on the results of my observations of everyday practices in villages and considering villager relations with what they characterise as âthe wildâ, a realm actualised through interactions with bĆ«tas, this book explores how all these various relations create and recreate the social, religious, and ecological milieu, or in effect the umwelt, of village residents.
Before examining the notion of the umwelt in detail, it should be noted that rather than being static, the village communities studied in this book have been constantly adapting to changes since time immemorable. As described later, since the nineteenth century, rural society in South Kanara has been transformed through the development and penetration of modern legal and administrative systems. Since the mid-1990s, massive development projects in Mangaluru have also caused disruptive changes in rural areas, including the destruction of farmland and the eviction of villagers from the land they had farmed or otherwise had access to. Faced with these changes which can generally be called âmodernisationâ, people have tried to maintain or recreate their way of life by reorganising their relationships with others and by negotiating with strangers. Entangled as they are with various intentions and social relations, these endeavours are beset with conflict and difficulty. Moreover, for the villagers, relationships with bĆ«tas have always been central to their practices and decision-making. These relationships help them confront the challenge of incessant social change, both to keep what they have and to leverage the transitions as opportunities.
When we investigate the mutual formation and transformation of peopleâs everyday practices and their umwelt in their reflexive interactions with modern laws and systems as well as in transactions with the realm the wild and deities, three mutually entangled subjects of study become clear: humans, the wild, and modernity. In the following section, I will examine previous studies that have focused on modernity and the occult, as well as on ontology.
Theories of modernity and the occult
Magical-religious phenomena such as witchcraft, magic, and spirit possession have long been important subjects in anthropology, and since the 1980s, many writers have considered how the occult in non-Western societies relates to modernity (e.g. Comaroff 1985; Geschiere 1997; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999).7
In his early work, Taussig analysed Bolivian minersâ worship of Tio, the spirit owner of the tin mines, as a cultural response of neophyte proletarians towards the capitalist mode of production. According to Taussig, peasants working in the mines understood wage labour and the new socio-economic system as evil and unnatural, and the devil figure of Tio strikingly articulated this interpretation. Devil worship thus represented both the predicament of the peasants and their critical consciousness and struggle against the exploitative modern capitalist economy (Taussig 1980, pp. 17â22, 144â145, 232â233).
Geschiere, by posing the idea of âthe modernity of witchcraftâ, has also presented a fresh viewpoint for analysing the relationship between modernity and the occult. According to Geschiere, in postcolonial Cameroon and other African societies, discourses about witchcraft have burgeoned in modern sectors such as politics, sports, institutions of formal education, and so forth. Such rumours and discourses expose concern about the proliferation of novel forms of witchcraft, but they also reveal the popular interest in various hidden opportunities to acquire and accumulate new forms of wealth. In Africa, rumours and practices related to witchcraft are evidence of peopleâs efforts to interpret changes brought by modernity and to gain control over them. Thus, Geschiere argues that we should focus on the âmodernityâ of witchcraft, rather than considering witchcraft in contraposition to modernity (Geschiere 1997, pp. 1â9; Ciekawy & Geschiere 1998).
Likewise, using the concept of âoccult economiesâ, Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) analysed the relation between the rise of occult phenomena and social economic conditions in postcolonial South Africa, where there has been a dramatic rise in fear and suspicion of occult phenomena such as witchcraft, Satanism, zombies, and ritual murder. According to the Comaroffs, these occult phenomena express the discontent and despair of people distressed by the mysterious mechanisms of the global market economy, but they are also symptoms of an occult economy waxing behind the civil surfaces of the ânewâ South Africa. The practice of witchcraft and other mystical arts in postcolonial Africa was âa mode of producing new forms of consciousness; of expressing discontent with modernity and dealing with its deformitiesâ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999, p. 284, emphasis in original).
Focusing on modernity and the occult in non-Western societies, many observers argue along the same lines. When discussing transformations of traditional societies under the pressure of modernisation, peopleâs occult practices are held to be significant in modern situations. They are often interpreted as distinctive responses to, or critiques of, changing social conditions.
Such an analytical frame may be embedded in the conventional methods and practices of anthropology, wherein anthropologists from Western societies have long felt impelled to study âpre-modernâ occult practices in non-Western societies and to publish the results to their own reading public. In this context, magical-religious phenomena such as witchcraft, magic, and spirit possession in non-Western societies have often been collectively regarded as a reference point not only to antithetically define âthe modern Westâ, but also to disclose what ails the West through difference or metaphoric connection. Regarding this, Sanders wrote,
Anthropologists have thus foregrounded resistance and critique in many forms, from large-scale revolts and revolutions to their everyday and more spectral manifestations. Anthropological explanations here suggest that occult forces and discourses can be seen as offering a sustained critique of the genesis or intensification of capitalism, modernity, neoliberalism and globalization, specifically, of the novel inequalities and exploitations these things engender. Through the occult, the argument goes, Others in faraway places expose unsettling truths about our contemporary world and its woeful workings.
Perhaps it was inevitable that anthropologistsâtasked with studying the lives of non-Westerners and representing values and logics different from those in the Westâwould tend to analyse magical-religious practices in non-Western societies as critiques of or alternatives to a value system based on rationality, individualism, material possession, market economy, exchange value, and concepts understood to constitute modernity. Similar interpretations of the occult, however, predate anthropology and were already in evidence in mid-seventeenth-century Europe:
Discourses and legal actions naming and constraining âspirit possessionâ over the past four centuries helped to create the dual notions of the rational individual and the civil subject of modern states. The silhouette of the propertied citizen and free individual took form between the idea of the automatonâa machine-body without willâand the threat of the primitive or animal, bodies overwhelmed by instincts and passions.
Johnson observed that according to the early modern philosophy of Europe, a person in the modern West who was overwhelmed by spirit possession was seen as the inverse of the rational, autonomous individual. This tendency to compare and contrast images of the self in Western and non-Western societies has persisted in recent studies of spirit possession and personhood. For instance, Smith (2006, pp. 19, 74â75) argues that spirit possession, as the exposure of the fluid and permeable nature of personal identity, coincides with features of South Asian personhood, which are fluid, divisible, and permeable. Here the possessed, or indeed the South Asian person, is construed in contrast with the ideal, autonomous, Western person.
More recently, however, interpretations of occult practices have gone beyond the simple inversion of idealised images of society and personhood in the modern West; rather, occult practices are now seen as exposing âunsettling truths about our contemporary world and its woeful workingsâ (Sanders 2008, p. 111) or as critiques of modern Western values which presume the importance of individualism and material possessions (see Johnson 2011, p. 417).
Since the 1990s, when new notions such as the âmodernity of witchcraftâ and âoccult economiesâ were introduced by some anthropologists, it has become common to interpret informant discourse on the occult as evidence of ambivalent attitudes towards modernity. For example, analysing occult narratives of the Mawri about roads in postcolonial Niger in terms of the materialisation of peopleâs experience of modernity, Masquelier argues that roads are part of a complex economy of violence, power, and bloodâobjects of both fascination and terror. Thus, their tales linking roads with the occult should be understood as âcreative efforts to articulate local understandings of mobility, morality, and marketing in all their literal and metaphorical meaningsâ, which brings to light peopleâs troubled encounters with modernity (Masquelier 2002, pp. 829, 831â834).8
These recent studies have examined new dimensions and meanings of the occult in non-Western societies by considering it in relation to comprehensive modern phenomena, such as globalisation and neoliberalism. Even so, taking the occult in non-Western societies as a reference point that both enables a definition of what is modern and Western and provides an opportunity to critique problems with the West, most writers are still tied to the general viewpoint of previous studies. In other words, magical-religious practices in non-Western societies continue to be analysed in terms of their relation with, and response to, powers and social economic changes originating in the West. Such an analytical framework has led some anthropologists to refer to the occult too generally, without a deep analysis of the particular history, specificity, and locality of each phenomenon.9
Moreover, as is obvious in discussions of occult economies (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999), studies of the occult in a non-Western context tend to assume that the modern values and systems that cause radical change in local society are beyond the understanding of local people, and consequently, occult practices are an imaginative expression of people metaphorically interpreting these changes. Framing magical-religious practices as imaginative interpretations or metaphorical critiques of modernity seems to obscure an understanding of how these practices are entangled with modern values and systems in concrete situations.
Before considering this aspect in more detail, in the next section I will examine a recent trend in anthropology which also focuses on magical-religious phenomena in non-Western societies, but provides different ideas and methods for their analysis.
Ontological questions and âthe reality of the otherâ
Since the end of the 1990s, a host of new anthropological studies conducted through the lens of ontology have been published. Researchers have turned to ontology in order to criticise the anthropocentrism of modern social science and to complicate and invert the natureâculture dichotomy and its assumptions of the universality of nature and particularity of culture. To transcend these issues, multinaturalism, radical essentialism, the ontological self-determination of the other, and other alternative frames have been proposed. Leaving aside the varied anthropological studies approaching ontology through philosophy, phenomenology, and science and technology studies,10 in this section I will mainly examine the arguments concerning what has been called the âontological turnâ in anthropology (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007). It should be noted that the theoretical trend examined here, hereafter called the OT, does not cover all anthropological works that are âontologically attunedâ (Kohn 2015, p. 323), that is say, that deal with ontological questions as an underlying theme; rather, this section is more narrowly concerned with recent discussions of the ontological turn.11
In addition to criticising the modern dichotomy of nature and culture, advocates of the OT also see it as means of freeing anthropology from the shackles of epistemology. Since the goal is âtaking things encountered in the field as they present themselvesâ (Hena...
