Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia

Disease, Possession and Healing

Fabrizio Ferrari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138784796
• eBook ISBN: 9781136846281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on original fieldwork, this book develops a fresh methodological approach to the study of indigenous understandings of disease as possession, and looks at healing rituals in different South Asian cultural contexts. Contributors discuss the meaning of 'disease', 'possession' and 'healing' in relation to South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism, and how South Asians deal with the divine in order to negotiate health and wellbeing.

The book goes on to look at goddesses, gods and spirits as a cause and remedy of a variety of diseases, a study that has proved significant to the ethics and politics of responding to health issues. It contributes to a consolidation and promotion of indigenous ways as a method of understanding physical and mental imbalances through diverse conceptions of the divine. Chapters offer a fascinating overview of healing rituals in South Asia and provide a full-length, sustained discussion of the interface between religion, ritual, and folklore. The book presents a fresh insight into studies of Asian Religion and the History of Medicine.

Part I

Introduction

1 Possession in theory and practice

Historical and contemporary models

Frederick M. Smith

A number of questions must be asked of possession at the outset, especially with regard to the themes stated in the title of this volume, namely disease and healing. First, is possession “real?” This is another way of accessing the complementary question: What is possession? The answer to this question could be one or two sentences in length, or it could stretch to ten volumes. In either case the answer will prove inconclusive, regardless of the quantity and cleverness of the definitions, the precision of the logic, the compelling nature of the case studies, and the consistency of the historical and ethnographic data for any given cultural area. Hence, possession is given a broad semantic range and is regarded differently in different cultures and by different informants. Nevertheless, scholars have reached for cross-cultural consistency, and have formulated definitions based on these consistencies. To cite Janice Boddy’s definition, possession is

a broad term referring to an integration of spirit and matter, force, or power and corporeal reality, in a cosmos where the boundaries between an individual and her environment are acknowledged to be permeable, flexibly drawn, or at least negotiable.

(1994: 407)

Another convenient definition, by Carl Becker, states more specifically that possession is a “phenomenon in which persons suddenly and inexplicably lose their normal set of memories, mental dispositions and skills, and exhibit entirely new and different sets of memories, dispositions, and skills” (1993: 11). Other definitions are possible, but these will suffice. Possession has been examined from the perspectives of a large number of disciplines, including religious studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, literary history, linguistics, and specialized medical disciplines. In this chapter, I shall examine a number of aspects of and theoretical approaches to possession, predicating them on configurations of embodiment. Then I will discuss a few case studies of possession and healing that will help us determine the value of these theoretical approaches in interpreting the kinds of possession that will be primarily addressed here.

Keeping in mind that possession is a phenomenon nearly as diversely interpreted as it is experienced, let us introduce this diversity by dividing the field into “positive” and “negative” possession. Positive possession is virtually always ritually constituted, oracular, and invited. It is most often possession of (or by) deities or any one of a number of identified or unidentified ethereal beings. Negative possession is normally diseaseproducing and is attributed to uninvited ethereal agents, most frequently spirits of the dead, but may be ascribed to any unseen entity, from ghost to deity. Possession is a fully embodied experience; it is not something simply thought about, nor is it “just” a mental state. Indeed, its power lies in the force of its embodiment. Caciola writes of the medieval Christian experience that “the body was viewed as encompassing two symbolic internal zones: an exalted spiritual system and a debased, unclean system” (2003: 207). It was on to these zones, she writes, “that divine and demonic forms of possession were mapped” (ibid.). Although the mapping was not quite as evident or regularized in South Asian possession as she indicates it was for medieval Christian possession, it is possible to argue that embodiment in South Asia was mapped according to equivalent systems, based on degrees of purity and pollution that attracted different forms of ethereal being and enabled various kinds of possession. Among the most prominent sources of such discussion from antiquity to the present is the literature of Ayurveda, in which are found demonologies (bhūtavidyā) that can be marshaled in support of such “symbolic inner zones.” I will introduce some of that material into the discussion below.

In this chapter I will look at three examples of possession from India, one dating from antiquity and two from modernity, and apply a number of theoretical models to them in order to illustrate the ways that the use of these models affects our views of these possession events. The example from antiquity is one of positive possession drawn from the B

hadāra

yaka Upani

ad (BĀU) of approximately the seventh century bce, in which the wife and daughter of a learned ritualist is said to be possessed by a gandharva or celestial musician. The examples from modernity are of negative possession, although, as we shall see, the boundaries between negative and positive are sometimes indistinct. These are drawn, first, from an autobiographical statement I gathered from a woman who experienced possession, then a subsequent healing, at the increasingly wellknown spirit healing center called Bālājī, in Rajasthan, in the year 2000, and, second, from observations gleaned at a possession healing temple in Kerala in 2002. The possession expressed in the BĀU is very likely paradigmatic, as are most of the stories and teachings in the Upani

ads, rather than factual history. Yet there is enough intimacy to the story and enough distance from the principal philosophical and theological themes of the Upani

ads to allow room to believe that it is a factual account. A long period of oral transmission before becoming fixed in literary form, such as that which the Upani

ads underwent, will usually reshape facticity according to narrative and cultural demands. We cannot presume that the narrative presented in the BĀU has remained faithful to historical fact after many centuries of transmission. Similarly, regarding the account at Bālājī, we cannot deny the compulsion to mythicize an autobiography, again under the spell or compulsion (often unrecognized) of narrative shape-shifting. The expectation that a story within a Vedic text composed more than 2500 years ago necessarily reports historical facticity less than would a personal account in the twenty-first century must be taken under advisement. Both carry equal valence and must therefore be subjected to the same methodological considerations.

Before probing these examples of possession, it will be advisable to have a brief look at the phenomenon of dissociation, because this is the primary observed symptom of possession in both ritual and medical contexts, which is to say in both positive and negative possession. Although limited dissociation appears in virtually all contexts that demand close focus, from reading a book to watching a movie to carrying out any other task, it is not indicative of psychological disorder unless it is found in extremis. In such cases, one’s sense of personal identity is lost and the individual finds it impossible to return to his or her psychosocial center. This, in South Asia, is the central feature of possession; the individual’s mind and physical habitus become overwhelmed by an emotion, a feeling, a spirit, or a deity. In most cases, the individual will exercise the power that normally accompanies this extreme focus. This display of power borne of dissociation is the visible manifestation of possession, and is not normally found to be harmful. Indeed, possession, culturally recognizable from possession behavior, is not normally threatening. In certain cases of disease-producing negative possession, it must be addressed medically or ritually in temples such as Bālājī or the goddess temple in Chottanikkara (Kerala), but most often it is a sanctioned and even honored form of spiritual expression, such as we find in the BĀU. Sax and Weinhold have recently noted that “the general consensus in anthropological field studies nowadays is that with some exceptions, possessed persons are usually not psychologically disordered” (2010: 237). Littlewood has described how dissociation is brought about in hypnosis, witchcraft, spirit possession, or any number of other states in which altered consciousness is induced. Dissociation, he states, “allows detachment of awareness from the immediate passage of events.” It is, he says,

part of the evolutionary development of “self-consciousness” as an internal system of representation and self-monitoring where the individual’s awareness can objectivize their own cognitions [...] allowing self-recognition, anticipation, introspection, creative imagination, recognition of another’s motivations and possible identification with them, disbelief, and acting: all requirements for our complex programmes of intersubjective action.

(1996: 14–15; also see Klass 2003)

In short, dissociation appears in many non-pathological contexts and, as Sax and Weinhold observe, “dissociative experiences can be culturally adaptive or maladaptive, positive or negative, therapeutic or pathological” (2010: 239). This, indeed, is what we find in most possession states in South Asia.

The domain of dissociation has become vast in the fields of experimental and clinical psychology, and it will help us here to mention a few of these interventions. Donovan (1996) recognizes that both Multiple Personality Disorder and Possession Trance (cf. American Psychiatric Association 1994: 487, 729; Smith 2006: 48–9, 84 n.64; Lewis-Fernández 1998), both within the orbit of dissociation, can be either disease producing or healthful. Most often Multiple Personality Disorder is regarded as an illness while Possession Trance, although frequently beginning as an illness often ends up as a positive experience. Thus, the categories of positive and negative possession are verified within the discourses of clinical psychology. Donovan observes, “multiple personality must be admitted to be a disorder in our culture” (1996: 99). He concludes that although there appears to be no difference between the two at the level of morphology and epidemiology, which is to say that the physiological basis for both is identical, they are construed differently in different cultures. Nevertheless, more recently, Watters (2010) has written provocatively yet persuasively that Western, particularly American, interventions into the analytical and clinical approaches of local mental health care systems throughout the world have not only influenced the way that mental illness and psychological dysfunction are viewed and treated, but also in the way mental illness and dysfunction are experienced. This observation will be re-examined for many years, and probably modified, but the nearly unvarying academic idiom for examining possession experience has been, for more than a century, that of Western analytical (usually psychological and psy choanalytic) categories, particularly anxiety, depression, hysteria, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and dissociation,¹or through sociological prisms such as gender oppression (Smith 2006: 56), which is to say it has been analyzed as anything – except possession. This is not to argue that such diagnoses or analyses are unreasonable or incorrect. Studies revealing that a good deal of women’s possession is connected to a history of abuse remain valuable (e.g., Lewis 1989; Smith 2006: 54–5; Caldwell 1999). Rather, the idiom of these studies and the discourses out of which they emerge continue to demonstrate that the cultural perspective and value system(s) of the dominant modes of analysis bridge the gap with the systems under study only with difficulty.²In other words, whether it continues to be confirmed that in non-Western cultures, most dissociative disorders may be classified as variations of Possession Trance (Cardeña et al. 2009) remains to be seen, and, indeed, whether the concept of Possession Trance Disorder requires revision also must be considered.³

Returning now to the BĀU, the text (3.3.1) describes a case of oracular possession. A Brahman named Bhujyu Lāhyāyani enters the house of Patañcala Kāpya, a learned ritualist, in order to seek advice regarding a certain ritual performance. He quickly discovers, however, that Patañcala’s daughter, whose name is not given, is possessed by a gandharva, a celestial musician. The remainder of the passage deals with this séance; the advice sought by Bhujyu for which he approached Patañcala is not further discussed. Bhujyu asks the gandharva for h...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Note on transliteration
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Possession from the West
• Part III Possession from the North
• Part IV Possession from the East
• Part V Possession from the South
• Conclusion
• Index