In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

157 ChAPTER 6 Performativity in the Court of the Goddess spiriT mediums are Typically incorporaTed in anthropological discourse into the general category of “healers.” However, anthropology must also contend with the currents of meaning that are set in motion when the term “healing” is invoked and that carry it swiftly away from the world of rural Tamil spirit mediums. As they circulate today in popular culture, the terms “spirit” and “healing” spontaneously evoke a version of “spirituality” that is abstracted from any particular cultural context, even while they simultaneously accrue cultural capital from invocations of a grounded “indigeneity.” At a recent forum held in Sydney after the screening of an Ecuadoran film on shamanic healing, a gathering of healers assembled. Some came from different parts of Latin America, others were from Australian indigenous men’s groups, and still others were white Australians conducting healing tours from Sydney down the Amazon. While the audience was extremely enthusiastic, as facilitator I had an uphill task with many of the healers. Why was I introducing politics ? Why was I asking them to describe bodily techniques when healing was fed by pure spirituality? Why was I resisting the idea that Aboriginal and Indian “healing” were fundamentally the same?1 The experience helped clarify what this chapter is not about. Some elements of the healers’ responses would be recognized by the spirit mediums I seek to describe. I can well imagine a shared reluctance to describe for an audience the techniques employed by practitioners who strive to create magical effects. However, other elements, such as the invocation of a pure spirituality, would be baffling to the southern Indian mediums. These globalized understandings of healing assume it is pos- 158 CHAPTER 6 sible to begin (and end) at a methodological level of universalism even before any specific investigation has begun or description has occurred. The notion of a spirituality that transcends politics, that can be located at a point prior to cultural histories, and that even manages to soar above the body as a site of techniques and skills has an old genealogy for countries such as India. In India, colonial and nationalist discourses have long propagated the notion of an original religious purity that became sullied by a certain “decadence” that had set in by the eighteenth century. Performance traditions in southern India that paid an equal attention to the professional and the erotic, to the political and the divine, were understood to have been contaminated by excesses and by the decline afflicting Indian tradition. To restore the lost purity required the cleansing operations of European colonial rule (Mani 1998) and the socialreform movements of the nineteenth century (Uberoi 1996). In Tamil Nadu, pure spiritual dance and music were extracted, to be produced and consumed and henceforth heavily patronized, by a new middle class.2 The cultural history of India tells us something different. Even though that narrative of decline and pollution in turn shaped the cultural history of the twentieth century, the codes and conventions deployed by the healers draw on an older history than that of colonial and postcolonial modernity. State power and religion in the subcontinent have, over the centuries, used one code to support the other. Godly power and the protocol of the celestial courts have been actively modeled on the power of kings, while kingly authority in turn has borrowed the codes of divine power. The condensations and displacements of codes between godly and earthly sovereignty have been strong and continuous in Tamil Nadu since the rise of “ritual kingship” in the Pallava dynasties of the sixth century. Over this time, the endowment and building of temples and the settlement of Brahmans in specially designated tracts of land became a key aspect of kingly authority (Stein 1980; Dirks 1987, 28). The medieval Vijayanagara dynasties further elaborated this mutual borrowing of codes, and the tendency reached its apotheosis in the Nāyaka dynasties of the Tamil region from the early sixteenth century to the 1730s. At this time, the king “assumes the identity, and the ritualized routine, of the god in his shrine....Similarly, courtesans and devadāsīs [women who perform rituals and ritual dance in temples] merge into a single role” (Narayana Rao, Shulman , and Subrahmanyam 1992, 187). Not all South Asian traditions have allowed such a mirroring of court and divine power. Royal authority has been disputed by a rival authority, that of the saint renouncer. The moral prestige and authority of this figure has been a notable...

Share