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252 ChAPTER 9 Possession and Emancipatory Politics in This book i have deliberaTely refrained from urging readers to view the agency of possession and mediumship as “resistance” to power or as “empowerment,” let alone as a radical liberation from caste, class, and gender relations of power. The reasons for this deliberate restraint can now be explored. The discursive traditions that analyze power have created a hierarchy of agency. Within this hierarchy, the minimum point that can be imagined is the point of resistance to power. But the female medium does not resist. She does not overturn any hierarchy of power relations. If we view her position through the lens of Bourdieu’s (1993) “field of power,” then—within the specific subfield of traditional medicines practiced in a rural district of Tamil Nadu—the female medium can be seen to occupy one of the very lowest positions. Unlike the female medium, most rural practitioners are able to claim some form of cultural capital based on the inheritance of knowledge in a tradition . Practitioners of Cittavaittiya (Citta, or Siddha, medicine) employ the herbs and organic drugs employed by Ayurvedic practitioners but in addition, “make much use of salts, metals, mineral poisons, in short of anorganic remedies ” (Zvelebil 1973, 32). These Siddha specialists trace with pride a patrimonial lineage that goes back to male sages, such as Akattiyar (Skt. Agastya), to whom is attributed the authorship of more than two hundred medical treatises (32), and Tirumūlar, whose treatise Tirumantiram is dated to the second half of the seventh century. In addition, contemporary practitioners invoke, as their ancestors, cittar saints, seventeen in number, whose lives span the pe- Possession and Emancipatory Politics 253 riod between the seventh and seventeenth centuries. Claims of this kind play a key role in the attempts of Siddha practitioners to emulate the successes of Ayurveda (Wujastyk 2008) in establishing affiliation with the “great traditions ” of medicine, yoga, and spiritual practice as part of the Indian national tradition. The one female practitioner of Siddha medicine I came across in Kanyakumari District was of considerable repute but had been taught, by her father, only in the absence of a male heir. Ordinarily such knowledge is reserved for men. Gender inequality also divides the field of mediumship itself. Women’s authorization to become mediums is initiated at random, as an unbidden form of possession. By contrast, male mediums emerge as kuṟi prophesiers or mediums in the more formalized contexts of ritual worship. The officiants at Icakki Ammaṉ’s temple are always male, hereditarily transferring their rights to mediumship at the temple worship of Icakki. They are known also as cāmi āṭi, or “god-dancers,” since the power to verbally prophesy arrives only after the dance of possession (Blackburn 1988, 41). Figures resembling these male hereditary cāmi āṭi have been described as playing an important part in the culmination of the annual festival of the village goddess (Beck 1981; Kapadia 1995). We have already noted the professional groups of artists and performers who perform ritual invocatory styles of epic narrative, such as the terukkūttu performers at Draupadi Ammaṉ festivals. These, as we recall, consist of men only. The women kuṟi speakers, by contrast, do not become healers through a hereditary right, nor do they occupy the most prestigious position in the cycle of ritual worship at the temple of the goddess. They do not enjoy their skills as a patrimonial legacy. They have never been taught their skills by anyone in authority. The contrast goes beyond the more usual contrast between formal and informal learning. Male ritual performers of genres such as terukkūttu are trained “informally,” in the sense that they learn by doing and by participating in performances. But they nevertheless participate in a recognized relationship of learning and apprenticeship to a guru and train as such for many years. Female mediums, on the other hand, neither have a teacher nor do they leave behind a tradition through pupils. The inventiveness I have described in female mediums can be reinterpreted as a virtue born of necessity, of an impoverished cultural capital. The most inventive of all the spirit mediums I came across in Tamil Nadu were the Catholic mediums. These were also the most singularly disadvantaged group of mediums, enjoying no support from the Church or from modernizing intellectuals . Compared to them, even Dalit Hindu mediums such as Mutamma seemed richly endowed with cultural forms of authorization. Mutamma was able to inherit from her father...

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