Helene Basu

This collection of essays makes a significant and innovative contribution to the emerging field of Indian Ocean Studies. New perspectives come into view that highlight movement and exchange across borders, travelling actors, cultures and faiths as well as processes of cultural re-localisation, mixture and assimilation. While these processes are more often associated with late twentieth-century globalisation and West South relationships of dominance, Journeys and Dwellings focuses on historical and contemporary movements and exchanges along a South South (Indian Ocean) axis. How did these contribute to the emergence of plural regional / littoral societies in South Asia? What are the consequences of the displacement of people, flows of culture and labour for a society organised along caste lines in terms of social and religious constructions of reality. The majority of the contributors to this volume address these questions in regard to movements and connections between South Asia and East Africa, but exchanges with Arabia and Lakshadweep Islands are also considered. Studying the diversity of ways of life in the Indian Ocean World, primarily from South Asian sites, the contributors adopt an interdisciplinary approach by combining historical and anthropological methods.

Journeys and Dwellings

Pnina Werbner

The continued vitality of Sufism as a living embodied postcolonial reality challenges the argument that Sufism has 'died' in recent times. Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern Asian city, lying opposite banks and skyscrapers. This book illuminates the remarkable resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations and breaks new ground in current research. It addresses the most recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity and presents important new comparative ethnographic material. Embodying Charisma re-examines some basic concepts in the sociology and anthropology of religion and the organization of religious movements.

Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults

Embodying Charisma

Rituals combining healing with spirit possession and court-like proceedings are found around the world and throughout history. A person suffers from an illness that cannot be cured, for example, and in order to be healed performs a ritual involving a prosecution and a defense, a judge andwitnesses. Divine beings then speak through oracles, spirits possess the victim and are exorcized, and local gods intervene to provide healing and justice.Such practices seem to be the very antithesis of modernity, and many modern, secular states have systematically attempted to eliminate them. What is the relationship between healing, spirit possession, and the law, and why are they so often combined? Why are such rituals largely absent from modernsocieties, and what happens to them when the state attempts to expunge them from their health and justice systems, or even to criminalize them? Despite the prevalence of rituals involving some or all of these elements, this volume represents the first attempt to compare and analyze themsystematically.The Law of Possession brings together historical and contemporary case studies from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, and argues that despite consistent attempts by modern, secular states to discourage, eliminate, and criminalize them, these types of rituals persist and even thrive because theymeet widespread human needs.

Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State

The Law of Possession

Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Bruno Quast

Many myths that are told again and again are myths of decision-making, such as for instance the decision of Adam and Eve in Paradise to eat the forbidden fruit, the choices of Paris and Heracles, or Buridan’s donkey who starves between two equally attractive haystacks because it cannot decide which one to eat. This volume presents novel interdisciplinary approaches to the question of decision-making as it is reflected in myth and literature. It investigates the relation of myth, narration and the challenge of decision-making. The collection highlights especially the narrative structure of the impossibility to decide that has also been discussed in modern theories of decision-making. Contrary to Rational Choice Theories, the contributions of this collection aim at a Cultural Study approach to decision-making that focusses on social processes of culture specific forms and historical change in decision-making scenarios.

Helene Basu

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