Customised Cosmologies
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Customised Cosmologies CHAPTER EIGHT CUSTOMISED COSMOLOGIES Religious Pathways, and the Issue of Reality Management Cultural understandings are interpretive instruments and instigators of action. As I have tried to show in chapter five, they are shared and – despite similar content – can arouse various valuations and behavioural strategies among those who have incorporated them. These understandings are always temporary outcomes of ongoing processes of construction and reproduction, products of perpetual negotiation between people and the structure in which people operate. In chapter six and seven I have attempted to expose some essential features of cultural understandings and of the ways they are functioning. Most important of these are their interdependence and the hierarchical way in which they are structured. Literature as well as data from the field indicate that understandings operate formation wise in configurations which I have labelled constellations. These constellations consist of understandings and goals of various importance or level which are arranged in a hierarchical fashion, and which vary in durability. Furthermore, they are characterised by thematicity. Quinn and Strauss (1997:118) have described this as the tendency of some schemas to be evoked in a variety of contexts. According to their analysis, it is one of the aspects of culture which “depends upon the complex interplay between properties of the culturally constructed world and properties of the mind.” The application of the family metaphor and the establishment of fictive kinship ties, mentioned in the chapter on family and friendship, are examples of the spread of understandings across – as Quinn and Strauss would say – different domains of experience. In the final chapter before the conclusion, one of the most elementary and influential collective constellations will be examined. This constellation comprises a number of shared understandings that together form the East Indian’s vision of all that exists beyond the boundaries of the material world. More specifically, by analysing four of the primary understandings upon which notions of super reality are based (8.1), and describing the application of these notions (8.2), the self-ascribed cosmological position of my subjects shall be determined – a position that is constantly negotiated and is clearly 297 GUYANA JUNCTION shaped by the specific Indo-Guyanese history and the formative force of power struggles and processes of internationalisation. The reason I have chosen the relationship between East Indians and the extracorporeal as the focus of this particular chapter is twofold. First, I believe especially this relationship beautifully illustrates something that needs to be emphasised before concluding this book: the importance of individual creativity and choice. My informants’ images of afterlife, god and divinities, laws of super nature, and Guyana’s spirit world, clearly illustrate the role of East Indians as culture composers. Their understandings expose them as managers of change, people with the faculty to initiate transformation and the ability to assure preservation. Insights in the unsighted show how, rather than being simply governed by cultural understandings, individuals employ – and, to an extent, can even manipulate – the content of constellations in efforts to make sense of, and deal with, complex social realities. Conceptions and practices concerning the spiritual help my informants to explain and even gain (a sense of) control of an actuality that is increasingly incomprehensible and saturated with insecurities and injustice. Eternity roads thus confirm the image of the East Indian as cultural producer with a significant amount of autonomy, despite the formative force of structures. Second, and because of the above, a focus on East Indian ‘Eternity roads’ provides me with an opportunity to complete the core section of this book with a comprehensive illustration of the nature of constellations: the analytic core notion in this dissertation. The manner in which the people explain the unexplainable, localise themselves and their increasingly intricate and confusing world in the perplexingly immense creation, and are inspired to act according to these convictions, proves an excellent instance to conclude with an empirically grounded overview of what this dissertation has been about. Especially, similarities and dissimilarities in evolving Hindu and Muslim conceptualisations of the extracorporeal – and the imprint of different notions of a super reality discernible in people’s practices – are revealing. Therefore, this final chapter of part two will be a tribute to intertwinement and complexity, a series of sections in which the production of Indianness in highly dynamic surroundings is summarised: the relationship between the individual and his or her environs; the effects of growing interconnectedness or processes of localisation and globalisation; the historical entrenchment; collective incorporation; freedom of choice; motivational force and the linkage between thought and practice. 8.1 Insights in the unsighted: East Indian understandings of the extracorporeal Baad is dead. Less than a week after we shared a jug of lukewarm fresh cow milk underneath the giant silk cotton tree in his backyard, he died a dehydrated aged man. We had seen it coming, the end of my eldest informant. Already three days ago Sabu, my East Indian bike repairman and Baad’s best friend, rushed into my room with the message of 298 Customised Cosmologies Baad’s rapid deterioration. The two of us went to his house right away. We found him in the anteroom of death, a powerless shadow of a man in nothing but old oversized briefs, displayed on what literally transpired to be his deathbed. He didn’t drink or eat. His weakened body even protested against tiny sips of water. “I am about to die,” is what dear old Baad told us. “It is time to go.” He belched, it smelled, perhaps a little like death. He was right. Two days later he did what he had said, and departed. We have cremated him today, Sabu, I, and about a hundred others, on a nice big pyre down in L’Union at the Atlantic beach. Now, after we have shared a taxi home, the two of us sit on the seawall in front of my house and speculate about the destination of Baad’s post-mortem journey. “Do you think he’ll come back?” I ask my (Hindu) bike repairman. “I am sure about that,” answers Sabu, “he’ll probably get a proper good birth, after all he was a fine man.” “You know, he might even end up on the other side,” elaborates the repairman while he stretches his arm and points his index finger towards the ocean. “The other side?” I ask. “Yes,” continues Sabu, “maybe he will become a white man, just like you. I myself would like that too, being white, that would be a fine rebirth.” With a big smile on his unshaved face, the seventy-two year old explains me that he is sick and tired of life in Guyana. “I also want to go ‘home’ Hans,” says Sabu. “I want to die, go ‘home’ and return as a White. I want to be there where you are from. I don’t like it here. The Indians lie, cheat and drink, and the Blacks steal and fight. Besides, with my best friend dead I don’t really have anyone to hang out with. Man, let me pass away and return smart and sweet. Let me be like the Whites, the ones that live there across the water.” Slightly melancholic but also filled with some strange sort of content, my bike repairman gazes at the horizon, towards his ‘promised land’. He knows he can leave the here and now in order to ‘be’ somewhere else some other time. I guess I should not tell him about my doubts concerning reincarnation, and my fear for a sad and everlasting nothingness, or about imam Jalill, my Sunni friend, who recently assured me that I – and therefore also good old Baad and Sabu – are destined to burn in hell for ever and ever.369 Foremost, understandings of the extracorporeal are explanatory devices and instruments to cope with the unpleasant or unexplainable. Death is a good example. (Personalised) belief systems helped Baad to approach death with confidence, caused Sabu to regard his departure as a liberation, and allowed imam Jalill to assume Muslims are better off in afterlife. Each of them employed their understandings for the sake of reality management. Rather than being simply governed by mental schemas, they operate the schemas and – to an extent – can use them as coping tools. As said, one of the main objectives of this 369 This story of Baad and Sabu was published in 2003 as ‘Baad is dood’ in an issue of the Dutch anthropological magazine Mensenstreken. Sturdy Sabu died a few months later, most of all because he was tired… 299 GUYANA JUNCTION chapter is to demonstrate this faculty to manage and choose, the (restricted) autonomy of culture makers. In this opening section I will further portray East Indian understandings of death, afterlife and other aspects of the ethereal realms. I will provide some insights in the unsighted, describe a series of understandings which cover the core of East Indian conceptualisations of that what is real but exists in the borderlands or outside the boundaries of the reasonable and perceptible: the metaphysical. It is an attempt to capture the essence of local Hindu and Muslim cosmologies. In order to do so, I will subsequently analyse people’s notions of afterlife (8.1.1), their ideas about the transcendental (8.1.2), the explanatory value of certain comprehensive meta laws (8.1.3), and people’s attitudes towards the supernatural (8.1.4). The choice for these properties is a logical one. Although it concerns a classification rarely used by informants, observations and explanations from the field expose these as being both highly illuminative and fundamental to the constellation I portray.