This article was downloaded by: [University of Iowa Libraries] On: 30 August 2012, At: 20:50 Publisher: Routledge

Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

How is Afflictive Possession Learned? Gender and Motility in South India

Kalpana Ram
a a

Macquarie University, Australia

Version of record first published: 17 Jul 2012

To cite this article: Kalpana Ram (2012): How is Afflictive Possession Learned? Gender and Motility in South India, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 77:2, 203-226 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.592952

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or

damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned? Gender and Motility in South India

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

Kalpana Ram
Macquarie University, Australia

abstract This paper examines forms of afiction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afictive because they are experienced as coming out of nowhere. It is easier to specify the kind of learning associated with valued forms of possession, which occur in the context of ritual performances that entail informal apprenticeships. The sense in which afictive possession is learned is far more diffuse, and occurs much earlier than the point at which diagnosis occurs. This paper traces such learning to early forms of socialisation into gender, focusing on motility and bodily comportment, as central to the way in which the lived body of gender moves between different practical environments. In an environment that includes spirits and deities, female movement acts as guarantor, not only of social stability, but of cosmological order and disorder. keywords Learning, gender, possession, embodied movement, habit

hat does it mean to learn something when the phenomenon under question is neither a valued skill, nor a desirable state of affairs? This paper examines forms of afiction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afictive because they are experienced as random and as coming out of nowhere. Yet when viewed from a more external perspective, there are social regularities in the incidence of such forms of possession. In Tamil Nadu, the Tamil-speaking state of southern India, women are more likely to be associated with such afictive possession, while ritually valued forms of possession are more likely to be associated with men. At this point, we join what is one of the best documented regularities in the anthropological literature on possession, which has extensively attested to a gendered pattern to the distribution of possession. In the 1960s, Lewis opened his landmark essay on the sociology of

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

# 2012 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.592952

204

kalpana ram

possession by writing of a literature studded with references to the frequent prominence of women in these cults (Lewis 1966), drawing particular attention to the clustering of womens possession among the more devalued and marginalised cults. Although the exclusivity of that association between female cults and marginality has been challenged, the sheer empirical, statistically signicant juxtaposition of women and possession has continued to surface unabated in the literature. Such statistical patterns do not denote the same kind of fact as the patterns to be observed in natural phenomena. However they do indicate that not all is ux in social phenomena either. There is, as Merleau-Ponty has suggested, a phenomenological basis for statistical thought. It belongs necessarily to a being which is xed, situated and surrounded by things in the world (Merleau-Ponty 1986:442). Gender is just such a form of situatedness, and as one of the primary forms of social differentiation, it is capable of re-inecting virtually every other social practice. In southern India, gender xes and situates possession, in terms of the incidence of possession, in the distribution of value in relation to possession, and in bestowing the social meanings of gender that are so obdurate that they continue to cling to the body even in the transformative state of possession. As patterns that are specically social, they directly implicate and draw on social behaviour and meanings that are learned. Yet this cannot be the kind of learning of gender that we associate, for example, with girls learning tasks and skills such as weaving. Women do not aspire to learn afictive possession why would they? It imparts no valued reputation such as weaving affords in the creation and maintenance of a beautifully decorated home, nor does it allow women to be admired as hard-working and gifted (Portisch 2010:568). This is all the more the case in India where all forms of possession are devalued and marginalised in the wider context of Indian modernity. The opening section of this paper explores the ambiguities introduced by the modern devaluation of possession, before considering the very different senses in which two kinds of possession the ritually valued, and the afictive might be said to be learned. In fact, neither kind of possession is readily described in terms of learning. For even in ritually valued possession, what one sets out to learn is not possession, but a way of reaching out to a deity and making him or her come alive to all who are gathered to witness the power. To single out possession as a single element in order to study how it is learned, therefore already runs the risk of stripping the phenomenon of the very features that give it meaning to participants and, therefore, enables learning to occur.
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

205

However, to the extent that this kind of possession has a value, some form of apprenticeship is more readily discernible, and therefore amenable to ethnographic observation and description. It is no coincidence that the few detailed descriptions of apprenticeship related to possession in Tamil Nadu, pertain specically to this context, as ethnographies of performance styles known as vil pat.u and terukkuttu. The methodological problems are far more severe .t when it comes to afictive possession. No-one sets out to learn what it takes to bring on a devalued and unwanted social event. If it is learned, it is inadvertently so. However, it is precisely such features of possession which make it of relevance to far more than just the study of possession. The learning of gender abounds in milder instances of such paradoxes. In learning to be men and women, we acquire, not only valued skills, but accompanying attributes that are socially devalued, and may even be crippling. Is it possible to remain faithful to the experiential sense of the random and unpredictable nature of the way in which such possession strikes, while also developing an account of the learning that lays the social ground for such connections between afiction and gender? I believe it is, provided we direct our attention to aspects of gender which are not reducible to the capacity to do specic tasks or acquire a specic set of skills, but which, instead, come to be lived as basic bodily orientations to the world. I take my inspiration from the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger (1962), a genealogy within which I locate my reading and the use of key concepts in Bourdieu (1992) as well. I seek to illuminate a set of bodily orientations that are not entirely determinate, yet shape us in ways that cannot simply be shed at will. I will focus on the dimension of bodily motility as primary in the formation of such orientations, for it is in and through movement that we familiarise ourselves with the world. These movements may initially be both exploratory and pragmatically driven, for we experience the world not as an undifferentiated whole, but in smaller, more meaningful chunks. As Heidegger (1962) points out, we primarily apprehend the world not as something homogeneous and measurable, but as individual places that are picked out for us by our everyday concerns and forms of practical, bodily familiarisation (p. 137). However, practices that are aligned with the conferral of socially central identities such as gender, also succeed in depositing generative dispositions that exceed the contexts that initially generate them. Although my attention to bodily motility is shared by recent studies of learning that emphasise motor cognition in the informal learning of practical skills (Marchand 2010: Siii), some divergences from these studies are dictated by my focus on gender. Learning gender has a
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

206

kalpana ram

characteristic quality of diffuseness, stemming from its very centrality. This means that it is not to be located or sequestered in some particular time or place, but is rather a part of daily everyday activity, as well as belonging to different kinds of practical environment which are not sealed off from one another. For this reason, an account of gender dees aspirations to a more scientistic delimitation of the context to be studied, an aspiration that might be encouraged by attention to the learning of more specialised skills. However, this very quality of diffuseness in the acquisition of gender as comportment is a strength when it comes to exploring the sense in which afictive possession is linked with women more than with men. To elucidate this dimension I draw, in this paper, on Merleau-Pontys concept of what it is to acquire, inhabit and utilise a body of habit (Merleau-Ponty 1986), such that afictive possession becomes one (but only one) of the potential modalities in which femininity may be lived in a particular social environment. Clearly, a much wider project is indicated here. To see how such potentialities and vulnerabilities described in this paper as latent might actually be taken up in the context of the particularities of an individuals existence, requires a fresh effort of synthesis and imagination. In a longer treatment, I would especially wish to infuse my account of learning through the movement with an explicit consideration of the affects, emotions and moods which guide our sense of involvement in the world (Ram 2008; Ram 2011; Ram, forthcoming), and which in turn shape attention (Gieser 2008). Furthermore, there are many components to learning possession, not addressed here, which occur after the diagnosis is made, in the course of visiting shrines and practically engaging with healers. I set aside these tasks for the simple reason that I have attempted precisely these and other goals in my forthcoming book (Ram, forthcoming) to which I refer readers. What is essayed here is something far more delimited. I wish to take a step back in time, as it were, from the point at which diagnosis occurs. In a specic kind of environment, one in which ghosts, spirits and deities are potent beings with specic ontologies, able to interfere with human affairs and enter human bodies, I wish to see whether there is some ingredient of the learning of gender which will illuminate the socially shared predisposition to associate womens afictions with possession. Ambiguities of Power and Meaning Possession exists as a heavily contested practice in Tamil Nadu. If there is a dominant attitude, it is one of scepticism, possession having been marginalised from the very vocabulary of modernity, as well as of what constitutes Tamil
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

207

tradition (see Ram 2010). Scepticism about possession is in some ways a timehonoured attitude in Tamil Nadu, thanks to the ambiguities that dene the phenomenon. Ancient literary texts of the cankam period (between the middle of the rst century and the late third century CE), are full of vivid allusions to the deceptions made possible by the ambiguities of possession. Is it an illness? Is it divine? Or is it simply a case of the heroine passing off her love affair as something more elevated?
Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012
My friend! When my mother, on account of my illness, arranges for the velan to come, will that velan be able to nd out about my affair with the lord of the fragrant country, when he is in the frenzy of possession? (Translated and cited in Hardy 1983:138)

What has changed in the attitude to possession is simply this: for modern scepticism, the possibility of true possession no longer exists. Possession is now either superstition (muta nampikkai, idiotic beliefs) or, more sympathetically, a form of release for stress and social tension. Lewis argument (1966, 1989) associating possession with a release of social tensions among the marginalised may well have been superseded in anthropology, thanks to efforts by scholars such as Boddy (1989, 1994) in pioneering a hermeneutic, interpretive approach as an alternative to the instrumental question: what or whose interests does possession serve? But in India, as in other postcolonial societies, the instrumental question draws fresh impetus from the very character of modernity, not simply as a state of being or as a taken-for-granted condition, but as a conscious drive to reform enclaves of backwardness. Under such conditions, the sociological understanding of possession as an index or a misguided understanding of an underlying stress is alive and ourishing, part of a governmental secularising explanation in medicine, psychiatry, and social work, as well as among lay intellectuals (Ram 1996; forthcoming). As an index of stress or as mental tension (Halliburton 2005), possession too loses its specicity and becomes just one of a number of idiotic beliefs. This loss of specicity has older colonial roots. As Smith describes it, possession was simply factored out, mostly ignored by nineteenth- and twentieth-century occidentalizing narratives of Hinduism. Thus it was not manipulated, constructed, or reconstructed as part of a colonizing project or a nationalizing discourse (Smith 2006:23 n3). But the problem of representing possession lies deeper than colonial or nationalist discourses. Shared culture is always fractured by inequalities of class and caste as well as of gender, and these fractures, much older than colonialism,

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

208

kalpana ram

have in turn played a central role in the construction of modernity. It has been particularly easy to marginalise possession in postcolonial modernity because it has never been uniformly valued even among religious worshippers as a form of worship. Sontheimer (2004) singles out ve components of Hinduism that have interacted over thousands of years and re-inected one another. These consist of Brahmanical scriptures, asceticism and renunciation, tribal religion, folk religion and bhakti or devotion to a personal, single god. In both folk and tribal religion, the god exists in the here and now, is earthbound, and does not live in some puranic svarga [heaven] (Sontheimer 2004:410). In such forms of worship, upper caste demarcations between purity and pollution, between demon and deity, become blurred. The ethnographic material I present here from Tamil Nadu based on eld work among coastal sherpeople (Ram 1991) and Dalit agricultural labouring communities locates itself squarely at the folk end of a continuum within Hinduism. Today, Brahmanic Hinduism is routinely contrasted by Indian intellectuals with bhakti. Bhakti, characteristically, is suffused with the emotions of an often unrequited longing for union. But no such question arises for the demonic deities for no such barrier arises between deity and man. Indeed, these deities are positively attracted to human existence, in ways that would be inconceivable to the deities worshipped by upper castes. Goddesses such as Icakki Amman and her male henchmen, worshipped by the Nadar agricultural castes and feared by the Catholic shing castes of Kanyakumari District, are notoriously wild in their behaviour, liable to bring death and destruction rather than a benevolent outcome. Yet they are worshipped. Those who die violent and untimely deaths can haunt as ghosts but they too can be deied and worshipped. Peculiarly at odds with upper-caste values of purity and pollution is the attraction of goddesses such as Icakki Amman to the odours of sexuality, of brides and of menstruating women. Such meanings are as alien to the upper caste Indian ethnographer as to the westerner. However, the marginalisation of possession, rather than eradicating the phenomenon, has simply added to the ambiguities that surround it. In rural Tamil Nadu, possession continues to play a part in the understandings of illness, of worship, of different kinds of relations between humans and deities, spirits and ghosts, and in understandings of states of heightened emotion. Indeed, one of the reasons why possession continues to exercise effects is because it offers a way of dramatising the underlying existential connection between all these different domains of experience. Even individuals whose world does not contain deities and spirits will recognise the description of
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

209

illness as something that can take over our existence. And despite the common representation of emotion in modern western traditions as something interior to the subject, when English speakers describe themselves as being in the grip of extreme states of anger and desire, they perpetuate an older representation of emotions as external forces that possess us. In an environment which includes deities who are attracted to human bodies, such experiences readily acquire a further cosmological dimension. A category of illness that has been widely explored for South Asia is the category of diseases of heat, which are understood as sharing their ontology with that of the goddess herself. The goddess, or Amman, is more liable to possess human beings when she is in her hot, volatile state. The marks of the pox on ones body are akin to possession in that they testify to another form in which the devotee is claimed, imperiously and in often unpleasant ways, by the goddess, as one of her own. The sores are described as the pearls (muttu) or even the kisses of the goddess (Trawick 1984). Accordingly, some of the characteristic curative modes for the poxes, such as laying the leaves of the Margosa tree on the sores of the pox victim, also function as key elements in the cooling worship of the goddess. Trawick speculates that the eradication of small pox may have led to other diseases such as TB supplanting it as a sign of the goddess. But I have found it more characteristic for possession to be used to describe and diagnose, not any single disease taken in isolation, but rather a state of generalised afiction, in the biblical sense of the phenomenon. Afiction attacks the individual in and through her relational connections with the world she lives in. Women are attacked in their capacity to bear children and to mother (see Ram, forthcoming). Spouses and those dear to the individual are struck down. Livestock die. The very capacity to labour is undermined, spelling immediate hunger and disaster in communities which depend on daily labour for food and survival. Such afictions can reduce people to dire poverty, and even strip them of their family and community. In this sense, the diagnosis of possession dramatises a situation where the capacity to live and thrive, described as a persons valkai, is being destroyed. This modality of possession is to be distinguished from another which is just as old in Tamil Nadu. It will be recalled that in the Tamil poem quoted above, the heroine fears what may be divulged when the velan, a shamanic medium, invites the powers of divinity into his own body, in order to divine a diagnosis while in the frenzy of possession. The corpus of poems also contains vivid descriptions of the frenzied dance (veriattam) of the priestly medium: __
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

210
. . . and the priest makes a show on the wide oor With his frenzied dancing, Moving like a puppet handled by a skilful puppeteer (Akananuru 98, transl. Hart 1979:118)

kalpana ram

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

In this context, frenzied dancing is both an indexical sign of possession and one of the techniques of the body through which possession is deliberately brought on. But the term veriattam also highlights the fact that bodily tech__ niques are not just a matter of mechanics, but are necessarily imbued with an emotional dimension. For this is dance (attam) fuelled by a state of extreme __ emotion (veri). In the next segment, I examine some of the literature that highlights the way such bodily techniques continue to be valued and transmitted in contemporary Tamil Nadu. Apprenticeship in the Learning of Ritual Performance Ritually valued forms of possession occur among the performers who stage dramatic epic narratives about goddesses and deied local heroes. Such performances are charged with ritual signicance. Village goddesses, their male demon attendants and local heroes who suffer violent untimely deaths are most likely to be actively courted and propitiated in public performances, and are urged to arrive at the climax of the performance. Genres of performance of this kind include the vil pa t t u of Kanyakumari District where I did my __ initial eld work (see Blackburn 1988), as well as the terukkuttu and kat t aikkuttu __ traditions of Tamil Nadu (Hiltebeitel 1988; Frasca 1990; de Bruin 2008). Battles and sacrices in the epic allow the foregrounding of the favoured theme, violent and sacricial deaths (de Bruin 2008:126, see also Hiltebeitel 1988, 1989; Frasca 1990). Within these styles of performance, possession states are considered by performers to be an integral part of their profession, are anticipated by spectators at well dened moments of the performance of particular plays, and are frequently seen as the crown on the performance, sealing its success (de Bruin 2008:125). The competencies learned are relatively easier to specify than in the case of afictive possession. Apprentices learn techniques such as the application of elaborate face make up, painting up the body (to use an idiom from Aboriginal Australia), and wearing masks (Shulman & Thiagarajan 2008). Dance or attam __ plays a favoured role in these techniques, with apprentices being taught powerful rhythmic and spinning forms of dance steps called the kirikki (Frasca 1990): According to performers, these particular moments of musical and kinetic
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

211

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

abstraction when the kirikki is executed are the most directly linked to the occurrence of possession (Frasca 1990:105). The power of the deitys arrival is capable of sending ordinary spectators into states of possession as well. But it is the competencies of the performers which are central in generating the requisite ritual depth, a phrase Blackburn uses to indicate the level of ritual intensity. The fullest intensity is manifested by the dance of possession, as well as by the proclivity of performers to engage in dangerous activities such as holding burning torches close to the face and walking on burning coals (Blackburn 1988:42 3). The spectators who are moved into states of possession may include women but they are unofcial while those occupying the centre of the ritual stage are all men (see Blackburn 1988:42 3). Training in these competencies is described by ethnographers (Frasca 1990) as informal, in the sense that there are no pre-performance rehearsals, although novices may be asked to memorise songs and passages. The bulk of the learning occurs directly on stage, through appearing with the group in performances, initially in minor roles that do not matter to audiences. In terukkuttu, performers are recruited between the ages of ten and eighteen, and apprenticeships last at least till the age of twenty ve when the graduate will be regarded as versatile and knowledgeable, in that he is now characterised by a style of his own. To become a vattiyar or teacher takes another 15 years (Frasca 1990:46). Afictive Possession In the type of possession I now turn to, there are no teachers, no guides, no group from which one is expected to learn skills by observing and pitching in (Paradise & Rogoff 2009). Instead, a shower of calamities descends out of a clear blue sky, as in this excerpt I offer from my eld notes:
Ritas life became very hard when her husband, an ice vendor, contracted a serious illness. They took him to many hospitals and shrines, but to no avail. An old woman advised them to go to a Christian shrine in Kerala which was efcacious for driving out spirits. By this stage, they had run out of money. The clothes of her children, she says, were rags stitched together. They were reduced to begging, and Rita was distraught. In a dark moment of despair, she approached the well, intending to drown herself and her children. From nowhere, a little white puppy appeared, and kept tugging at her clothes. It would not let her throw the children into the well. Turning back, she felt a deep impulse to abandon herself to the mercy of St. Sebastian, to worship at his feet. But the visions she had were of St. Michael, who asked her to conduct daily public prayers, and to see clients. This was no easy demand. With small children to look after, she felt unable to embark on a ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

212

kalpana ram
consuming task like this. Two years before I met her, Ritas husband died. Her poverty deepened, and she was homeless again. She arrived in Karingal with her children, appealing to the parish priest for help. He offered her some accommodation, but forbade her from using her gift. Rita refused. Finally, the village panchayat allocated her a little land. (Field notes, 1992)

I have described elsewhere (see Ram, forthcoming) the fact that even unlooked-for forms of possession are rarely isolated episodes. They recur, and may be strung out over the course of many years. Like any chronic illness or pain, such possession becomes integrated among the broader existential threads and concerns of the persons life. The life narratives of those who have experienced such ongoing possession episodes testify to this integration, even stitching in continuity to cover over the conspicuous gaps of memory that mark episodes of possession in Tamil Nadu. Such potentialities have afforded anthropologists the possibility of developing narrative approaches to possession (see Introduction, this issue). Some individuals, such as Rita, go further. They successfully integrate afictive possession to such an extent that they make a transition from the experience of possession as externally imposed, to possession as a state they can enter and move out of. With this new degree of control, they are able to act as mediums, dispensing justice and healing to those who ail and suffer (Trawick-Egnor 1984; Obeyesekere 1984; Kapadia 1995; Nabokov 2000). In my forthcoming book on possession, I devote specic attention to the question of the expansion of agency in mediumship, and the way in which that entails a re-denition of agency itself. Women convert afictive experience itself into a form of authority, a sign that one is being called by a deity to take on a special bond. The existence of such female mediumship can be said to soften the contrast between male ritual possession and female afictive possession. However, to soften the contrast is not to abolish it. Unlike the male ritual possession, the cultural capital of such female mediums remains particularly tenuous and subject to contestation. The very fact of having to resort to personal experience for authority bespeaks the absence of the more authoritative forms of transmission that are valued in India the authority that comes from a teacher who in turn belongs to a lineage. Even relatively successful mediums lack the social support enjoyed by apprentices of terukkuttu. Their plight highlights the inadequacy of simply contrasting formal with informal learning. We may remember that the learning involved in becoming a seasoned performer of terukkuttu or vil pa t t u repertoires has been described as informal. But this informality is still __
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

213

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

quite formal in comparison with the learning undertaken by female mediums. Young men who learn terukuttu or vil pa t t u informally do nevertheless have __ teachers. They are recognised as apprentices, who should learn not only from their teacher but from other performers. By contrast, women are explicitly barred from apprenticing themselves to such traditions (see below). The performances of female mediums lack an authoritative set of referents, or a teacher capable of being described as a guru. In short, they lack a tradition (see also Kapferer 1997:48). Women like Rita remain isolated and individualistic by comparison with the male apprentices, vulnerable to the pressures from institutional gures of authority such as the parish priest who forbids Rita from using her gift. Men and women thus occupy very different and unequal roles even in those instances where they may both be said to practice ritually valued forms of possession. Distinctions between formal and informal learning do not capture this dimension of systemic disadvantage, which cannot be understood entirely within the context of ritual power. When we consider, in addition, the greater likelihood of women having their afictions diagnosed as forms of possession, we must conclude even more strongly that the forms of learning that are relevant to possession do not begin with diagnosis, but much earlier, in the learning of gender itself. Something to do With Womens Bodies: The Gender Determinants in Everyday Forms of Motility Gender is absorbed so early and is such a ubiquitous ingredient of everything that is undertaken, that it operates largely in an invisible and taken-for-granted manner as is attested to by the readiness with which scholars themselves tend to leave it out of their accounts. A further consequence follows from this pervasive presence of gender in social life. Learning to be a man or woman is seldom something of which one can hope to deliver a full account, even or perhaps especially for ones own lived experience of gender. Even if I was to attempt a more comprehensive account than is possible here, there would always remain some unexamined area of practice, something that we take for granted in our very mode of exposition. This is because gender is not primarily made available to us in an intellectual form or as an explicit discourse. Even when gender operates to formally bar women from entry into certain enclaves of learning, this exclusion seldom comes equipped with a fully intellectually elaborated framework of discourse. Consider, for instance, the discomture of male performers of ritual theatre when they are asked by the
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

214

kalpana ram

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

anthropologist to account for why women are not allowed to enrol as apprentices. According to male performers of Kathakali in the adjacent state of Kerala, women might become distracted when they marry (Zarilli 2000:70). Evidently, many male performers nd the question itself rather distracting, for according to Frasca, terukuttu male performers became uneasy when questioned (Frasca 1990:213 n11). They described women as lacking the strength to undertake the energetic dance or to undergo the deep full-body massage that is part of the preparation of the body. Frascas informants viewed the ritual impurity of women during menstruation as a further obstacle to admitting them as performers during ritual festivals. Mens lack of ease with such questions no doubt springs from many sources, not least of all the reluctance of the privileged to have to justify the source of their privilege. But there is another source of discomture. What men have acquired is not so much a list of specic reasons for excluding women from apprenticeship in ritual performance, as a pervasive sense of the general unsuitability of women on stage, and an even deeper sense of the stigma attached to women in public performance (Frasca 1990:213, n11). That stigma itself rests on broad-based and diffuse gender constructs, as manifested in the hazy sense of the male performers that exclusion has something to do with womens menstruating bodies, their sexuality (cf. Caldwell 2008:193), their social destiny as wives. So deeply ingrained are these norms that it requires certain kinds of limit cases to provide some insight into what is normally taken for granted. One such case is provided by Seizer in her vivid ethnography of women who do play a part in public performance in Tamil Nadu. Seizer (1995) describes the dilemmas of women who take part in Special Drama, a form of theatre that tours the rural countryside:
The specter of being branded bad is ever present for actresses, all of whom are affected by any single womans slip. Public intimacy with any men other than her husband makes a woman vulnerable to accusations of prostitution. Actresses pay erce attention to when, whether, and how they allow themselves to be touched by a man onstage . . . Actresses unwillingness to compromise personal reputation for artistic reputation contributes to their participation in that stilted, stiff, motionless style I rst found so odd in the dramatic scenes of Special Drama. (p. 169)

The self-conscious attention to ones comportment, to which Seizer refers, neither begins nor ends with the dilemmas of a woman on the stage. This stigma is related to a more pervasive gender scheme which makes female movement the carrier of specic values of virtue that have no parallel in male movement
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

215

(cf. Niranjana 2001). Even middle class women in Mumbai, with all the advantages of class and of living in a large modern metropolis, require their presence in public space to be mediated by signs of matrimony, or by the chaperonage of men, announcing the purposeful nature of their presence in public space by carrying bags and parcels (Phadke 2007:1512; Ranade 2007). Those who appear without such props might well also appear stilted and stiff to outside observers. Such female stiffness is not unique to India. Consider Youngs (1990) striking elaboration on the western phrase girl throw. Young describes the girl-throw as a movement into the world that is arrested and interrupted. It contains both an impulse to accomplish an act or project, and self-censorship and self-doubt as to ones capacities. Accounts which see gender in terms of formal disadvantages and status roles, are typically also unable to conceive of possession itself as anything but a conscious set of decisions and stratagems (Ram, forthcoming, see also Espirito Santo, this volume). Better clues are provided even by the male performers who vaguely afrm that barring women from apprenticeship had something to do with womens bodies. Local discourses and ritual practices also tell us that afictive possession has something to do with womens bodies. Again, these meanings are not transmitted primarily as intellectual pronouncements, but are implicit in social practices that are repeated at pre-specied temporal junctures in the female life cycle: puberty, menstruation, the early period of marriage, and child-birth. At all these times, the odours of sexuality and the ows of parturition are said to be attractive to the demonic spirits. They are times of particular vulnerability for women. At such times, protective practices are employed, such as seclusion, bodily decoration and adornment, the consumption of special foods and liquids to cool the heat of the woman, and special ritual baths to signal the passage of vulnerability. Participation in such practices requires bodily involvement. A sense of pattern and affective continuity is created by repetitions of such involvement. The practices bestow special signicance on phases of life in which the body of the woman is undergoing ux and alteration, enhancing a sense of her special afnity and vulnerability to the spirit world. If such meanings were restricted to special ritualised phases of a womans life the sphere in which they have attracted most anthropological attention they would in fact have less purchase on corporealised subjectivity. But such meanings extend into daily comportment as well. Kapferer (1991) has discussed the relationship between femininity and possession in Sri Lanka as a matter of symbolic construction. He is right, but symbolic constructions do not simply sit like an invisible layer on the body they are absorbed through
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

216

kalpana ram

bodily movement. The dangerous connection to the demonic spirit world is given fresh, if indirect re-enforcement, from the moral codes that govern womens motility. In Tamil Nadu (and in India more generally) girls must, from an early age, but especially after rst menstruation, devote considerable attention to pre-empting and anticipating social censure that might jeopardise their reputation. They must make such considerations a routine component of all the activities, tasks, and movements they undertake. There are positive emotional as well as cognitive inducements for the making of such considerations a project of ones own. Knowing how to comport oneself as a good female subject is regarded not only as a virtue, but as a form of knowledge (Ram 1998b, 2009). Women referred to knowledge either by using the Tamil term arivu, or, by using the Sanskrit term, buddhi. The term, whose more general meaning is wisdom and intelligence, carries a much narrower range of meanings for girls after puberty. For girls, arivu means anticipating and accepting disciplines. They must make such considerations a routine component of all the activities, tasks, and movements that are undertaken. New orientations must be learned after puberty. They are borne in the body, as is implied in Bourdieus (1992) description of bodily hexis among Kabyle (p. 94). The close inter-relationship between bodily comportment and character is encapsulated in the notion of nat amurai, the way or manner (murai) of her _ walking (nat ai). Her nat amurai is how she moves through the world (Seizer _ _ 2005:149). Women I interviewed in coastal villages repeatedly asserted a sense of agency in being custodians of family honour, carrying it in their very bearing and behaviour (Ram 1998). As Abu-Lughod (1986) has argued, the sense of honour instilled in women themselves is often overlooked in the literature on honour as an exclusively male affair. The advent of school education for girls, even in the poorest rural communities, has created a sense of volatility around what it means to educate ones daughters and mothers often move between the two discourses on what this may mean (Ram 2009). Even when it was clear, in the course of discussions, that the women were referring to moral education, both mothers and daughters were characteristically vague in their instructions on how to be a good girl (Ram 1998, 2009). They used generalised, catch-all phrases such as Do not go hither and thither. The punitive consequences of going hither and thither were equally generalised: If one goes out, [they] will speak ill of you. The lack of specic instruction is matched by the lack of any specic context in which girls must exercise their self-discipline. Nor is it clear to whom the girl is answerable. The generality and vagueness of instruction corresponds perfectly with the
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

217

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

actual nature of the expectation, which is that the girl is to be alert at all times, in all contexts, and over all aspects of her bodily capacities not only over movement of the body where one moves, how one moves, whom one moves with but over the use of language, over the direction of her gaze, and over her clothing and the way it moves in response to her bodily movement. The more general and less specied the discourse, the more it is up to the girl to exercise exibility and initiative in adapting the broad cautionary statements to the varied contexts in which she must guard her own honour and the honour of her group. In this sense, learning occurs everywhere, as well as nowhere in particular. Following Merleau-Ponty, I will describe this learned set of predispositions and skills as the body of habit Merleau-Ponty (1986). The body of habit does not dictate what we do at any given point, so it does not coincide with the usual denition of habit as blind compulsion. But it does convey the sense of a learned repertoire that has become a bodily acquisition. In the case of gender unlike the learning of adult skills such as weaving or making music (cf. Paradise & Rogoff 2009) the stakes are very high. Women must come to hold themselves responsible for the very system of honour in which they occupy a distinctly subaltern position. Such a body of habit is acquired not simply through positive engagement, but through the threat of punishment if a girl innovates too far away from the norm. In a recent ethnography of college-going men and women in Kerala, young men speak of the necessity to lower and bring down a girl who is perceived as walking in an unmindful way (Lukose 2009:85). The post-pubertal female body is not achieved without suppression of prior skills and embodied attitudes to the world. But those skills and dispositions do not disappear simply because they are no longer discursively afrmed. I will suggest that many of them re-emerge, in fact, as possession behaviour. Indeed, it is because they persist that they come in for express vilication: girls who laugh too loudly are reprimanded in no uncertain manner, and told not to display their teeth too prominently (pallai kat.ade). .t Female Motility and its Overlay of Cosmological Meanings What has the learning of such capacities to do with a predisposition to afictive possession? So insistent, so ubiquitous is this set of social demands on womens comportment that its absence, or even the relaxation of this embodied principle, can call forth the most dramatic explanations. One only one such explanation is possession. But such an explanation would not itself be possible if certain additional ingredients were not simultaneously present. In being socialised into modesty, one is also socialised into a sense of containing, within
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

218

kalpana ram

oneself, the potential wildness that can bring danger to oneself, to the family one cares about, and to the community. The female body of habit that is acquired in such an environment contains within it a sense of its potential both for maintaining the social world and for undoing it, all through ones nat amurai, the very way _ in which one moves through the world. As if this were not enough, the social danger carries with it a sense of even wider cosmological portent. Both men and women may be treated as auspicious divinities on benign occasions, the principal occasion being marriage, in which both groom and bride are treated, however eetingly, as divine god and goddess. But unlike the male assimilation to auspicious divinity, the Tamil puberty ritual constructs the girl as a goddess who is not only auspicious but potentially volatile and destructive. Both the girl and the goddess are propitiated with a view to cooling the dangers of a potentially hot and volatile being (see McGilvray 1982, 1988; Kapadia 1995). Such cosmological meanings enter into everyday childhood socialisation as well an area deserving of research in its own right. Since this has not been an area in which I conducted explicit eld work, I can only offer a couple of instances from my own childhood socialisation. Fits of unruliness on my part were met by my mother with the invocation of an alien and unruly creature called Alpana whose presence was treated as having nothing to do with Kalpana. I was given the opportunity to walk out of the room and return as the good (camatu) Kalpana. I dimly recall responding with perfect relish to the imaginative reprieve thus afforded. I also recall taking refuge under the bed from my mother wielding a comb and telling me I would turn into a paratai-Kali, the Kali-of-the-rampant-hair (destructive, rampaging) if order was not restored to my tangled curls. The result of such socialisation was felt even years later in Australia, when as a newly arrived teenager I wanted to look like all the other girls at school, who wore their hair out. I would leave home in the demure long plaits of a young Indian girl and open my hair out at school, feeling quite wicked as I did so. With my long black curly hair, very thick and voluminous, I looked, in any case, nothing like the Anglo-Australian girls of my high school, with their sleek blonde hair that seemed to have no volume at all. This only added to the ignominy of feeling, as I approached home and mother, as if I had indeed transmogried into a wanton paratai-Kali. Eventually, I solved the contradiction in the only way I knew how. I cut my hair very short and still wear it thus. These forms of socialisation may never be actualised in the form of possession. But, as is clear from my self-description, they exercise potent effects of varying kinds, and in quite fresh and novel ways.
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

219

In the Christian and Hindu shrines of saints and goddesses that I have observed, where the afictive possessing spirit comes out of hiding and makes its identity felt, such socialisation is realised in ways that directly convey cosmic disorder to spectators. While masculinity, too, is instilled in corporeal ways, male a t t tam or dance has fewer dramatic means at its disposal. __ There is simply not available, for men, the same degree of corporeal contrast between the wildness of possession behaviour and the movements of everyday comportment. A womans sari is transformed from a modest garment to the gear of an athlete, ready for the strenuous dancing and acrobatics that will follow. Women undo their long black hair, swinging their heads thrashing their hair from side to side. The talaippu, the part of the sari that normally covers the breasts and hangs loose over the shoulder, is tucked into the waist to allow vigorous movements. The hem of the sari is hitched to the waist, occasionally by carers, as the women turn into acrobats. Language, which must normally express the restraints of femininity, now affords coarse and foul abuse. Deference to mothers-in-law, to elders, to saints and to men generally, is transformed. The female body runs, jumps, leaps in the air, shins up pillars, and makes men afraid. As one man described it to me, women suddenly possess the strength of tigers. These transformations naturally take centre-stage. But many of the changes which occur away from the shrines, in the domestic sphere are quite subtle. The stance and carriage shift, the style of comportment alters, the tilt of the gaze changes, the bodily mode of inter-subjective exchanges is remodulated. Where women are concerned, these subtle shifts are the stuff of drama, precisely because the normative sense of how a woman should look, move, and conduct herself is so strongly dened. Female possession behaviour is to some extent generic, and may be learned from representations in cinema, television, in novels. For some, it may be possible to observe other women in villages and in shrines. Although such forms of learning deserve greater descriptive attention than is possible here, I would not wish, in any case, to reduce the behaviour to the imitation of a set of dominant representations. The movements adopted in possession have the capacity to actually alter fundamental orientations to the world. Some of the movements of female possession, such as dancing and swinging, are very much a reemergence of earlier childhood movements which girls are required to be put away along with other childish behaviour. But there is a difference. In childhood play, such movements would have been embedded in a broader ow of movements and activities. Now they are not only invested with new meanings, but are taken out of their context and singled out for repetition somersaulting
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

220

kalpana ram

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

over and over again, swinging around pillars until dizzy, swinging head and hair. We gain a sense of what is at stake in such movements from Gells (1980) description of the Muria people of Bastar. Drawing on Diekmans research on meditation, Gell applies the concept of de-automatisation, a process by which actions and percepts normally carried on unreectively are reinvested, by subjects engaged in passive meditation experiences, with a heightening of awareness (see also Ram 2010). The habituated relation between body and world is also a postural relationship. The use of repetitive swinging and dancing movements, when thus singled out, acquires the capacity to alter that postural relationship and thus to alter the habituated relation between body and world. Female possession movements resemble the use of forceful continuous spinning movements used by trained male performers of ritual theatre. In both cases, they form part of the bodily techniques that literally propel the subject into dissociative states (see also Introduction, this volume). I am suggesting, therefore that female possession behaviour is at once a form of realising the gendered body of habit, and a transformation in the relationship between the body of the moment and the body of habit. Does Possession Causally Rely on a Universal Cognitive Template of Mind/ Body Dualism? Cohen (2008) has argued for including explanatory causal frameworks in the interpretive framework within which much of the anthropology of possession has come to be written. She argues for the relevance of basic cognitive developmental systems that operate below the level of conscious awareness and are part of a universal architecture of the human mind. The two major types of possession she describes t the distinct types I have presented. What Cohen describes as executive possession corresponds to the instances of possession I have described as enjoying a positive value in rural Tamil Nadu and as requiring a comparatively formal apprenticeship. Executive possession corresponds, according to her, to an intuitive dualism of mind and body whereby the person is identied as a psychological agent, while the body is assimilated to a physical object. As a result, she argues, it is comparatively easy for people to understand possession as the stable retention of the body while the person, the psychological agent, is replaced or displaced by another spirit agent. The other variant of possession, which I have described as random and afictive, is classied by Cohen as pathogenic possession. This variant in turn corresponds, according to her, to very early developmental acquisition of
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

221

notions of contamination, and strong affects of disgust and fear, in response to such contact. Although Cohen does not specify this, the dualist model of mind and body would presumably also characterise afictive or pathogenic possession, since the nature of the possessing spirit, whether dangerous or benign, is not relevant to the dualist model in both cases the person is displaced. Methodologically, the search for certain evolutionary and developmental universals that act as constraints, but act too as forms of enablement to the range and variation of human behaviour, is unexceptionable. Possibly such developmental universals are matched by corresponding cognitive universals. What I question at this point is whether an intuitive mind/body dualism is such a universal. Certainly, there are, in life, situations where person/body dualism is the most salient description, but such descriptions cannot be generalised to represent our most characteristic or primary mode of experience. Cohens (2008:112) example of the sense of dualism that comes about between an ageing body and a person who still feels young could be regarded as a plausible candidate for such a description. Yet even this situation is not as simple as it seems. The disjuncture is not solely that between body and spirit (or mind), but also between the body of habit, and the body of the moment. It is neither mind nor body, but a persistent bodily morphology which has us still automatically reaching out to do the things we were capable of in the past, but can no longer effect in the present (Merleau-Ponty 1986:73ff). The ethnographic evidence I have presented on possession depends even more strongly on the persistent effects of a bodily morphology, or of a body of habit, in shaping the meanings of possession for both spectators and for the possessed. My account has moved us very far indeed from an intuitive dualism of mind and body, one in which the person is said to be universally equated with beliefs, desires, dispositions, intentions while the body comes to gure exclusively as physical object, a stable container into which the person/spirit is poured. Neither the propensity to very different kinds of possession, nor the meanings attached to the behaviour of possession, can be understood without including the vital presence of the gendered body of habit, the bodily morphology that informs perception and motility. Possession both breaks with these embodied norms and draws on them. In either case, the body is centrally involved. It is not simply the psychologically identied agent inside the body that alters in possession. What convinces onlookers is the unsettling mix of continuity and radical transformation in the body. Cohen (2008) refers to the alterations in voice and language that occur with possession (p. 113). But language itself cannot be seen as divided between the
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

222

kalpana ram

psychological person and the bodily container. Language is experienced primarily as enunciation, as an individualised bodily performance. In addition to language and voice, what are altered, radically altered, are the characteristic forms of motility that are not separable from the person. By the same token, the spirit that replaces him or her arrives replete with its own extraordinary capacities, but also with its characteristic attitudes, humour, insolence, hauteur, anger, affects all of which are conveyable only in and through the body. Yet at no point are possessed men and women ever seen entirely as the spirit. Instead, their ordinary comportment remains as an invisible horizon against which the present behaviour draws its meanings. This horizon remains even more obdurately in place for women, whose bodily behaviour is never entirely absolved of its responsibility to avoid embarrassing and socially compromising male honour and social standing. A husband called Raja Mani, a Nadar tradesman from Kanyakumari described to me his wife Sugandhis possession. Sugandhi was a young bride, married only a month, when Icakki Amman, attracted by the bridal odours, possessed her and continued to possess her for over a year. Raja Mani found her behaviour a source of great shame and embarrassment: Sugandhi would tear my clothes and throw them off, as well as her own clothes, he said. I would have to cover her with my shirt. At no point in this account does the body gure merely as a static container. In no case is either the spirit or the person identied as a set of beliefs and desires residing whole and intact, lurking somewhere inside the external body. It is in the contrast between their characteristic styles of motion that both the person and the spirit are identied. Such contrasts may be the occasion for awe and relief, as in religious cinema when the oppressed heroines movements give way to the regal comportment of the goddess (Ram 2008b). They may be the occasion for shame, as with Sugandhis husband. But in neither case does the gendered body of habit entirely cease to exercise its effects on the perceptions of spectators. Even when entirely transformed by the spirits style of comportment, Sugandhis movements continue to bear the weight of social expectations placed on womens motility. Cohens typology her typology both of the types of possession and of the cognitive systems underlying them allows the anthropologist to proceed only a small way towards answering the question at hand: what do cultural subjects have to learn in order to become possessed? For the answer is potentially open ended. It does not refer to a closed system of the sort that explanatory models require. The cultural materials I have explored in this paper, to be understood
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

223

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

further, would need to be situated in the biographies and experiences of individuals (see Ram, forthcoming). In this paper, I have singled out gender for special attention, given its salience in distributing two very differently valued forms of possession. Yet gender itself is shaped by other social forms of power, including caste. It would be perfectly apposite to begin, at this point, by exploring the ways in which caste, for example, shapes gender motility, as well as various forms of bodily taste that ow, in turn, into styles of possession (but see Hancock 1999). We might then further open the enquiry to explore the more general habitus that sustains a crucial proposition in India: the proposition that human beings can turn into deities. The enquiry, we see, is inexhaustible, and its character derives from the open-ended quality of all signicant social phenomena, whose boundaries are porous. But we mistake the matter if we assume that such propositions are somehow put to Indians as intellectual propositions, or that they inhere, primarily, in causal cognitive mechanisms taken as universal. Rather, they are learned through bodily engagement with a wide repertory of practices which Bourdieu (1992) would describe as constituting one or another generative scheme (p. 112), in which we nd ourselves immersed from birth.

References Abu-Lughod, Leila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blackburn, Stuart. 1988. Singing of Birth and Death. Texts in Performance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits. Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. . 1994. Spirit Posession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24:40734. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992 [1977]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Bruin, Hanne. 2008. Donning the Vesam in Kattaikuttu. In Masked Ritual and Performance in South India. Dance, Healing and Possession, edited by David Shulman & Deborah Thiagarajan. pp. 10734. Michigan: University of Michigan Center for South Asian Studies. Caldwell, Sarah. 2008. Kali and Kuli.Female Masquerades in Kerala Ritual Dance. Masked Ritual and Performance in South India. Dance, Healing and Possession, pp. 18429. Michigan: University of Michigan. Cohen, Emma. 2008. What is Spirit Possession? Dening, Comparing, and Explaining Two Possession Forms. Ethnos, 73:10126. Frasca, Richard. 1990. The Theater of the Mahabharata. Terukkuttu Performances in South India. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

224

kalpana ram

Gell, Alfred. 1980. Gods at Play: Vertigo and Possession in Muria Religion. Man, 15(2):21948. Gieser, Thorsten. 2008. Embodiment, Emotion and Empathy. A Phenomenological Approach to Apprenticeship Learning. Anthropological Theory, 8(3):299318. Halliburton, Murphy. 2005. Just Some Spirits: The Erosion of Spirit Possession and the Rise of Tension in South India. Medical Anthropology, 24:11144. Hancock, Mary. 1999. Womanhood in the Making. Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India. Colorado: Westview Press. Hardy, Friedhelm. 1983. Viraha Bhakti. The Early History of Krsna-devotion in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hart, George. 1979. Poets of the Tamil Anthologies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hiltebeitel, Alf. 1988. The Cult of Draupadi. Mythologies: From Gingee to Kuruksetra. Chicago: University of Chicago. (ed). 1989. Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees. Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Abany: State University of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time (transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Kapadia, Karin. 1995. Siva and her Sisters. Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India. Boulder: Westview Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 1991. A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sril Lanka. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. . 1997. The Feast of the Sourcerer. Practises of Consciousness and Power. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Ioan M. 1966. Spirit-possession and Deprivation Cults. Man, 1:30729. . 1989. Ecstatic Religion. A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. London and New York: Routledge. Lukose, Ritty. 2009. Liberalizations Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham: Duke University Press. Marchand, Trevor. 2010. Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relations Between Minds, Bodies and Environments. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S), 2010:S1S2. McGilvray, Dennis. 1982. Sexual Power and Fertility in Sri Lanka: Batticloan Tamils and Moors. In Ethnography of Fertility and Birth, edited by C.P. MacCormack. pp. 2573. London: Academic Press. . 1998. Symbolic Heat. Gender, Health and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd. in collaboration with University of Colorado Museum, Boulder. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1986 edn. [1962 Engl transl.] Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nabokov, Isabelle. (now Clarkes-Deces) 2000. Religion Against the Self. An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Niranjana, Seemanthini. 2001. Gender and Space: Femininity, Sexualisation and the Female Body. California: Sage Publications. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusas Hair. An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)

How is Afictive Possession Learned?

225

Paradise, Ruth & Rogoff Barbara. 2009. Side by Side: Learning by Observing and Pitching in. Ethos, 37(1):10238. Phadke, S. 2007. Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 28:151018. Portisch, Anna. 2010. The Craft of Skilful Learning: Kazakh Womens Everyday Craft Practices in Western Mongolia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S), 2010:S62S79. Ram, Kalpana. 1991. Mukkuvar Women. Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. . 1996. Rationalism, Cultural Nationalism and the Reform of Body Politics: Minority Intellectuals of the Tamil Catholic Community in Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi, pp. 291 318. New Delhi: Sage Publications. . 1998. Rationalism, Cultural Nationalism and the Reform of Body Politics: Minority Intellectuals of the Tamil Catholic Community. In Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, edited by P. Uberoi. pp. 291318. New Delhi: Sage Publications. . 1998b. Uneven Modernities and Ambivalent Sexualities: Womens Constructions of Puberty in Coastal Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu. In A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, edited by MaryE. John & Janaki Nair. pp. 269303. Delhi: Kali for Women. . 2008. A New Consciousness Must Come: Affectivity and Movement in Tamil Dalit Womens Activist Engagement with Cosmopolitan Modernity. In Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, edited by Pnina Werbner, pp. 13555. Oxford: Berg Publishers. . 2008b. Presencing the Amman in Tamil Cinema: Cinema Spectatorship as Sensuous Apprehension. In Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of Indias Other Film Industry, edited by Selvaraj Velayuthan. pp. 4458. London: Routledge. . 2009. I Now Have arivu (Knowledge) Which Dispels Fears. In South Asia, Special Issue, Indian Democracy and Civil Society, Guest editors Salim Lakha & Pradeep Taneja, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, pp. 485 500. . 2010. Dancing off-stage: Nationalism and its Minor Practices in Tamil Nadu. In Dance Matters: Approaches and Issues in Indian Dance, edited by Chakravorty Pallabi. pp. 325. Routledge. . 2011. Being Rasikas: The Affective Pleasures of Music and Dance Spectatorship and Nationhood in Indian Middle Class Modernity. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (Special Issue, The aesthetics of nations: anthropological and historical approaches. Guest Editors N. Mookerjee & C. Pinney). pp. S159 S75. . forthcoming. Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern. (forthcoming 2013). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Ranade, S. 2007. The Way She Moves: The Everyday Production of Gender-Space. Economic and Political Weekly, 28:151926. Seizer, Susan. 2005. Stigmas of the Tamil Stage. An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in Souh India. Durham: Duke University Press. Shulman, David & Deborah Thiagarajan, (eds). 2008. Masked Ritual and Performance in South India. Dance, Healing and Possession. Michigan: University of Michigan. Smith, Frederick. 2006. The Self Possessed. Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press.

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203 226)

226

kalpana ram

Sontheimer, Gunther-Dietz. [1989] 2004. Hinduism: the Five Components and Their Interaction. In Essays on Religion Literature and Law, edited by Heidrun Bruckner, Anne Feldhaus & Aditya Malik, p. 401 21. New Delhi: Manohar. Trawick Egnor, M. 1984. The Changed Mother, or What the Smallpox Goddess Did When There Was No More Smallpox. Contributions to Asian Studies, 18:2445. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zarrilli, Phillip B. 2000. Kathakali Dance-Drama. Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. London: Routledge.

Downloaded by [University of Iowa Libraries] at 20:50 30 August 2012

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 203226)