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225 ChAPTER 8 Possession and Social Theory This book has proceeded as an instance of a classic anthropological gamble. The gamble takes something like the following form: if we unsettle certain underpinnings of a variety of Western scholarly traditions by moving the grounds of investigation to another place, might not that process also shed light on some of the wider, more enduring perplexities that inhabit scholarly and political debates? The fact that such moves usually leave intact many of the defining assumptions of Western scholarship is testimony not to the fruitlessness of the quest but to the fact that cultural and historical traditions cannot simply be discarded in their entirety and certainly not by sheer will or decision. There is always some assumption left unexamined, some premise left untouched. But this is to be expected. These traditions were not created by purely intellectual means in the first place and cannot be dissolved by purely intellectual means either. The scholar, like any other cultural subject, is shaped by extraintellectual forces. Like any other subject, she cannot help but stand on unexamined ground. Her realistic aim is to hope to subject some of her guiding assumptions to scrutiny. What makes the anthropological project a particularly fertile one is that it can generate not only critique but also new and imaginative hypotheses based on the stimulation offered by very different ways of inhabiting the world. My gamble has an additional component—that it is possible, and important , despite the lessons learned from postcolonial critiques of Western universalism , and despite the now-faint but persistent lure of cultural relativism in 226 CHAPTER 8 anthropology, to generate hypotheses that bring the “exotic” and the “familiar” into a shared framework. This project is to be distinguished from that of anthropology as “cultural critique” (Marcus and Fischer 1986). There the anthropologist , contextualizing and interpreting the unfamiliar culture, aims to “bring the insights gained on the periphery back to the center to raise havoc with our settled ways of thinking and conceptualization” (608). Such a project, despite tonic effects, often seeks to simply confound the West in its own presumptions, offering little guidance as to how one might generate fresh understandings of one’s own social practices. The comparativist project, as in the extensive literature that undertakes to typify personhood in India in contrast with the assumptions of Western individualism, often fails to do justice to the complexities of either location (see Ram 1994b). The West may emerge typified by its own dominant representations to the detriment of its own minority subjectivities, while the other culture may serve only as a foil, also doomed to remain locked into a static typification. Mine has not been a comparativist purpose. My purpose , rather, is to close some of that distance. Even phenomena as extreme as possession, if better understood, can provide us with fresh ways of understanding forms of agency and experience that are not restricted to one ethnographic area but are to be found across a range of instances, many of them quotidian and unobtrusive. It is this feature that distinguishes my project from all variants of ethnographic argument that end in an “ethnospecific” methodology. In pursuing this trail, I have taken to heart de Certeau’s gently delivered challenge to Foucault. It is not simply that a scattered “polytheism” of minor practices survives, dominated, but not erased, by the “monotheistic privileges” of the panoptic apparatuses. Such an insight is not in itself new for older political traditions such as Marxism. What is important about de Certeau ’s challenge is his demonstration that minor practices are significant, have something of wider significance to teach the world. Possession, as we saw in chapter 2, is a thoroughly marginalized minor practice. Although an archaic and continuous tradition in southern India, it has been pushed off the lit stage on which national identity is performed (Ram 2010b). The idea that such a tradition could actually constitute a mode of knowledge, a mode capable of illuminating aspects of behavior and experience, may be quite as radical for the society in which it occurs as it is for others. Possession in Tamil Nadu lends itself to the anthropological gamble. It confounds many of the binary oppositions that have structured dominant discourses of modernity. Illness is represented in such discourses as the opposite of healing. But possession can appear both as random affliction and as the means to a cure. It can appear as the climax of an invitation to a deity or spirit, rendered...

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