Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern

Notes

277 Notes Chapter 1: Visible and Invisible Bodies 1. Many of the vignettes presented in this segment have been published in Ram 2001, 2010a, and 2011b. I have not attempted elsewhere, however, to consider this material in a framework that brings together Gramsci’s framework with that of phenomenology. 2. For reasons of space, I am unable to discuss the women’s movement traditions in my account of family planning and state intellectuals, although this tradition provides the inspiration for much of my critique. However, I have published on this elsewhere (Ram 1998b, 2008a, 2009a, 2009b).Activist discourses of the women’s movement in Tamil Nadu and in India more generally keep alive a discursive constellation of meanings that draw on the political traditions of socialism, Gandhian politics, and the tradition of the Self-Respect Movement. These traditions connect the meanings of contraception with a broader understanding of female emancipation rather than with population control and rationality. 3. By the late 1990s, this image already appeared redolent of an earlier, shared era of cultural modernity. Writing in 1998, Mary John contrasts it with the new image of contraception that had arrived in metropolitan India: the massive billboards for the Kamasutra condom showing a “semi-nude young couple in an apparently heightened state of sexual arousal, accompanied by an equally sensational text along the lines of ‘For Your Pleasure’” (377). However, the invitation to join the party is a selective one. For those designated as “the rural poor,” it is “family planning” as state policy rather than “pleasure,” as projected by corporate advertising that continues to exercise greater force. Chapter 2: Minor Practices 1. There is little scope to explore Siddha medicine in this book. For present purposes , I will simply describe it as a southern Indian variant of the better-known Ayurvedic medicine. 2. Of the complex of five “landscapes” or poetic situations, one of the two principal 278 Notes to Pages 56–94 forms of classical poetry in the “pre-bhakti, pre-Pallava” age of Tamil literature, Zvelebil (1992, 250) has no doubt “that the model is ‘original’Tamil, in the sense that it has not borrowed from any other source; it is indigenous to the Tamil land.” The killi plant associated with the goddess is also said to belong to the dry palai tinai, or “landscape,” thus marking it as part of this complex. Zvelebil’s statement is not to be taken to mean (as he points out) that there was a time in which “Sanskritic” elements were not at all to be found in Tamil culture (255). 3. The work on Tamil and southern Indian folk religion in its ongoing tensions and collaborations with Sanskritic culture is a rich and ongoing field of scholarship—see in particular the work of Hiltebeitel (1988) on the assimilation of Draupadi, the heroine of the Mahabharata, into the folk worship of Ammaṉ, and that of Narayana Rao (1986, 1991) and Shulman (1989). Chapter 3: Possession and the Bride 1. In this and the succeeding chapter, I revisit two key case studies from fieldwork in Kanyakumari in the 1980s. I have written about both in Mukkuvar Women (Ram 1991b). 2. The heroine wonders whether the shamanic healer will discover that her illness is really lovesickness: “My friend! When my mother, on account of my ‘illness,’ arranges for the vēlaṉ to come, will that vēlaṉ be able to find out about my affair with the lord of the fragrant country...?” (Hardy 1983, 138). 3. In India, we have a much earlier example of such work. Irawati Karve’s Kinship Organisation in India (1953) undertook to redraw the “kinship map of India” from women’s point of view. She argued that the northern system of kinship isolates women by seeking as marriage partners men who are separated as far as possible from the girl’s family by kinship, by “blood,” as well as by residence and status. In the south, by contrast, where marriage repeats and strengthens existing kinship bonds, “the distinction between the father ’s house and the father-in-law’s house is not as sharp as the north....A girl’s behaviour in her husband’s family is much freer” (Karve 1994, 71). 4. Spirits retain other characteristics of the dead man or woman as well. I had thought that I was unique in experiencing enormous difficulties with the smell of fish, which suffuses the coastal fishing villages. I soon learned that other “inlanders” shared this problem, to such...