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132 ChAPTER 5 Learning Possession, Becoming Healer in This chapTer I explore a category of women mediums who “heal” while possessed.1 Such healers, called spirit mediums in the anthropological literature , have been widely noted in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (Trawick Egnor 1982; Hancock 1999; Kapadia 1995; Obeyesekere 1981; Kapferer 1991).2 In introducing these women, I am not confronting the reader with an entirely new category. For they are basically no different from the women we have already encountered. Like Santi and Vijaya, these women have experienced afflictions that are due to spirits. Unlike Santi and Vijaya, however, they go on to act as mediums. It is the quality of their relationship with the spirits that alters. In exploring how this might occur, I attempt to speak to a larger theme: how agency and forms of skill might be cultivated without the analyst having to rely exclusively on conscious cognitive operations such as decisions, choices, and the imposition of will on the external world. Material relevant to this argument is also to be found in the following chapter, which undertakes a fuller description of the actual texture of performativity in the sessions of mediumship and focuses on the relationship of mediums to their clients. In this chapter, I simply concentrate on the journey into mediumship. In southern India, more valued forms of mediumship than those described in this chapter involve the training of the medium by an already initiated adept. To the mantiravāti, who wields mantras for good or ill, may be added the actors and musicians who take part in the many forms of ritual performance of epics in Tamil Nadu and adjoining Kerala. Such participation requires a period of instruction. Performers, as they proceed, may veer over or culminate in possession (Frasca 1990; de Bruin 2006). Learning Possession, Becoming Healer 133 By contrast with both mantiravātis and performers, the mediums I am concerned with enjoy no formal tutelage, no form of apprenticeship. Their school is “the school of hard knocks,” as the English expression goes. This is why life stories form the ethnographic core of this chapter. Buffeted by a lengthy period of suffering, these women succeed in turning the tide only by reattuning themselves and establishing a different relationship to the spirit source of their affliction. We have glimpsed this possibility in an earlier chapter . Santi, who experienced spirit visitations beginning when she arrived as a bride in her husband’s village and throughout her troubled period of fertility, grew to know her possessing deities well enough to be able to address them in quite a cheeky fashion when she finds them putting in another appearance : “They would come as a jōṭi [Hindi for “couple”]. I lost my fear of them through familiarity [paḻakkam].” The Tamil word used by Santi, paḻakkam, is closely related to the concept of habit, which I explore further in the next chapter. The term refers too to the growth of emotional intimacy, affections, and a sense of relational interdependence. From one point of view,...parakkam [sic]3 was love...Parakkam was the reason for the growth of the feeling of love; love was the reason for the continuation of parakkam. To know somebody, to spend time with them, to be familiar or intimate with them, was to have parakkam with them. When you had parakkam with a person, just as you had parakkam with a substance [such as food or wine], that person became part of your system. (Trawick Egnor 1992, 99) It is this quality I use as the centerpiece of my account of the development of agency within possession. In acquiring intimacy with that which is initially an external force, such women refine their unwanted capacity to attract spirit trouble into a skill. In Kanyakumari, these women are called kuṟi collaravā, “those who speak the kuṟi.”4 Kuṟi has been translated by Blackburn (1988, 41) as “mark, or sign,” “because it has the force of prophecy.” Attuning themselves to the spirit with which they have developed an intimacy, the women prophesy, in the sense of divining the source of the misfortune of those who come to them. To these women, themselves poor and underprivileged, are drawn others, equally poor. They gather around the medium at informally constituted sites of healing: out in the open in the shade of the margosa tree beloved of the goddess, in shrines to IcakkiAmmaṉ or Saint Michael, or in the front veranda of the homes...

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