The Sources of Authority for Shamanic Speech: Examples from the Kham-Magar of Nepal

Among the Kham-Magar, an indigenous population of West Nepal, shamans end their long ritual chants with the promise to keep to the terms of the contract that bind human beings to the supernatural entities. In this paper I identify the sources of authority that allow the ritual specialists of this community to act as its spokespersons toward invisible partners. Taking up the debate initiated in the introduction to this special issue, I begin by confronting the notion of “social magic” that Bourdieu (1982:97-161) sees as the source of all authority, with the “discourse of magic” proposed by the linguist Tzvetan Todorov (1978:246-82), showing that the two approaches are less inconsistent than might first appear to be the case: both suggest that the efficacy of ritual speech rests on deception. The second part of the paper turns to Kham-Magar ethnography; it examines the staging of the sources of shamanic authority in the ceremony of consecration of a new shaman. I partly challenge Bourdieu’s (1982:20) vision that ritual techniques are mainly techniques of domination, ensuring that the dominant power is reproduced, rather than being a source of authority for ritual specialists: “Rituals represent the limit of all situations of imposition¹ where, through the application of a technical competence, however imperfect, a primarily social competence is exercised: the competence of the speaker who is authorized by his or her group to speak with authority.” The third part looks precisely into the “competence of the speaker,” shamanic speech itself, for possible sources of his or her ritual authority. I explore the pragmatic effects of the ritual use of language, including a reflexive definition of the performer. I argue that these techniques set up the conditions for the emergence of a transcendent authority.

Efficacy of Ritual Speech and Deception

All forms of language, whether ordinary discourse or more formalized kinds of discourse (judicial, administrative, poetic, or ritual), have the power to act symbolically on reality, if only by describing it: in naming things, language “appropriates” them, gives them certain definitions, and informs the interlocutors’ perception of reality. In this sense, an illocutionary act (or an instance of performative speech) that performs the action at the same time as it expresses it, pushes the pragmatic dimension of language to the limit, but is not radically different. Thus, if linguists and sociologists agree on the symbolic and pragmatic power of all forms of language, the point at which they diverge is the place to look for this power.

Against the linguists, Bourdieu (1982:13) insists that language authority comes from outside language itself: “one cannot look into language for what is actually embedded in the social relationships in which language is used.” For Bourdieu, the linguistic characteristics of ritual speech (such as parallelism, formulae, and obfuscation of language) are intended to demonstrate the speaker’s mastery of a technique, and subsequently, to gain him or her the group’s recognition. The formalization of language would not produce anything by itself and would be nothing but an “attribute” of the spokesperson whose authority comes from the group. The efficacy of rituals depends on “the general belief shared by all that pre-exists the ritual.” And he concludes (133): “one preaches only to the converted.” Yet one wonders how the converted were converted in the first place and whether there is not more in a ritual than the symbolic imposition of the dominant order, the doxa.² Before getting to this question in the light of our ethnography, it may be worth turning toward an alternative approach to the ritual efficacy of speech.

About the same time that Bourdieu (1975, 1981, and 1982) wrote his articles on “the economics of linguistic exchanges,” claiming that searching for the effectiveness of speech in the linguistic logic of speech was in vain, the French linguist Tzvetan Todorov (1973 and 1978) published a structural study of magic speech, “Le discours de la magie,” which did exactly that, looking into the inner logic of the magical discourse. Based on a corpus of magic formulae collected in France...