KalpanaRam Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times

Abstract: Postcolonial critique instructed anthropologists to turn to history in order to integrate time into their discourse. Yethistoriography, even when under- taken from apostcolonial, subaltern standpoint,has foundered preciselyonthe challengeofdoing justicetoreligious subjectivity.How then is the non-religious scholartogain access to religious phenomena?Phenomenological understand- ingsofbody, temporality and place provide an alternative account of what it means to come to understand something.Seen from this perspective,disciplines such as anthropologyinfactrelyradicallyontime, on the capacity of the schol- ar’sbodytoslowlyeffect anew synthesisofbody, place and people. In the ex- pansion thattakes place lies the potential to come to understand, without any necessary involvement of consent or belief, the continuum between religious and non-religious experience.

Keywords: modernity,historicaltime, postcolonial and feminist critiques of modernity,temporality of anthropological practice, phenomenology, bodilyac- cess to the unfamiliar,spirit possession, continuities of experience,religious agency

The studyofcertain kindsofreligious phenomena can reveal our ownpresuppo- sitions preciselytothe extent that it places astrain on the categories we use. This is the orientation with which Iexplored the phenomenon of ‘spirit possession’ in my recent work (Ram 2013). Men and women in rural Tamil Nadu are capable of experiencing divinity and the dead not simplyasavisitation, but in their bodies, as amore or less explicit presence. Such experience has no unequivocal mean- ing – it mayconstituteaffliction or divinefavor.The interpretative challengemay be described as ‘ethnographic ’.Itisundertaken regularly as part of anthropolo- gy’songoing wager that it is indeedpossible to extend our knowledge even of culturalphenomena that are initiallyradicallyalien and unfamiliar to oneself. The methodsIemploy are alsoderived from phenomenology. In phenomenolo- gy,spirit possession would constituteanexemplary ‘limit case’,whereordinary presumptions that sustain us in everydayinteractions no longer support us. We can and do stave off the instability that ensues. We can dismiss the challengeor simplydiminish it by re-absorbing it into existing categories. If we weretotake spirit possession as agenuine phenomenon, it would profoundlycall into ques-

DOI 10.1515/9783110450934-011, © 2017 Kalpana Ram, Published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 192 Kalpana Ram tion anetwork of assumptions about what it is to be human, alive or dead, what it is to worship, what it is to be divine. Instead, we re-absorb spirit possession into the languageofconsciousness (‘altered’ states of consciousness,but con- sciousnessnevertheless),orinto the languageofbiology(measuringbrain activ- ity alterations to see if anything ‘real’ is happening). More frequentlystillwesim- plydismiss it as falsehood. We maynot be able to step outside our ownepistemologies, because they are in fact our ontologies. We apprehend the world not just cognitively but emo- tionally,affectively, and practically. Or – we could allow ourselvestobeunset- tled. My book titled Fertile Disorder.Spirit Possessionand its Provocation of the Modern (Ram2013) tries to persuade readerstocome on ajourney with me, through dense ethnographic exploration of what possession means for different women, in order to return to more common scholarlyand political preoccupa- tions, newlyenriched by new hypothesesand ways of re-imagining at least some of our assumptions. In the book Ideal with anumber of such preoccupa- tions such as gender,agency,the body, emotions, as well as justice. HereIwant to see if we can extend some of thosemethodsand insights to the themesofre- ligion, changeand history which are the binding themes of this volume. Foritis not simply extreme phenomena such as spirit possessionthatact as a ‘provoca- tion of the modern’.Something of that provocation seems to cling to all of reli- gion as farasself-consciouslymodern projects are concerned – whether these be political projects such as feminism, liberalism and socialism – or models of knowledge that take the methodsofscience as theiryardstick of truth. Religion does not have to do much to be constituted as aprovocation. Itsvery visibilityto non-religious others seems an eruption into aplace (the public sphere) and a time (the present) to which it does not belong.What does this reveal of our un- derstandingoftime itself?What understanding of time and of ashared present underlies this responseofsurprise and discomfort at every manifestation of re- ligion?Itisnot onlythat religion is being located in the past,itisalso being as- sumed that the past does not simplyflow into the present.Instead, the present is assumedtoentirely supersede the past.How might we think differentlyabout the relation between past and present such that even those who do not share the assumptions of areligious phenomenon might nevertheless aspire to gain aform of access to it? In what follows Itake up two bodies of work thathelp us think differently about time. First,Iturn to the highlypoliticized set of discourses bequeathed to us by forty years of questions and critiques raised by feminists, post-structuralists, and post-colonial scholars. All of these coalesceinone respect: they have all, in some form or another,interrogated the linear, progressivist self-imageofmod-

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM Gaining Accesstothe Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times 193 ernity.Inturnthey share elements of an alternative model of history and of time. We may, after Foucault,describe this model as an archaeology of the present. The second bodyofwork Iturn to is the discipline of anthropology.This sits oddlyafter turning to the political critiquesfor inspiration. Forpostcolonial cri- tiques in particularhavetended to see anthropology as singularlylacking in an adequate sense of time. Anthropological traditions have been stronglyindicted for failingtoincorporate the time of colonial rule into their accounts of what they see and describe as ‘tribal’ societies for example (Asad 1975,103–120). The explicit models of time anthropologists have offered for the non-western so- cieties they have studied – as non-linear,cyclical time in India for example – might be seen from apost-colonial perspective as too homogenizing (Sarkar 2002,15), and as adding to a ‘time distance’ between the western ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Fabian 1983). In taking such chargestoheart,social changebecame acentral motif for an- thropology.Inmybook (Ram2013) Icloselyexamine the manywaysinwhich spirit possession has been positioned as an index or concrete expression of the tensions introduced by capitalism into apre-capitalist culture. In some cases, as in the factories of Malaysia (Ong 1987), the arrival or consolidation of capitalismtakes the form of new relations of production and new disciplines of work. Others follow the lead of Taussig (1997) in describing cultsofspirit queens as mimetic amplifications of different qualities of the modern state (Mor- ris 2000;Tsing 1993). My ownwork in rural India began in the 1980s directlycon- cerned with questions of social change, exploring the changingnature of the sexual division of labor with the adoption of new technology and capitalist rela- tions of production. Iwent on to research the involvement of women in projects of social reform and development,and the changingconditions under which women ‘came of age’,gavebirth and mothered. But the enigmatic qualities of spirit possession made me dissatisfied with extendingthis kind of analysis to every aspect of phenomena we encounter in the world. In this case it meant ig- noring the very features which weremost spectacular not onlytome, but to those around me in Tamil Nadu. What stood out for all of us was the radical changeinthe very people who were ‘entered’ by spirits. During such intervals, their behavior, gait and languagewould alter.Inthe shrines of Catholic saints wherepeople went to seek relief from the troublesome spirits, the Catholic dei- ties did battle with the demonic. In Tamil Nadu,the Christian powers shared cer- tain characteristics of the demonicworld. Like them, they too entered the bodies of humans,taking them as mediums in such confrontations. It is true that one cannot simplyremainwith the sensory and the spectacular moment even in order to explore the meaningsofsuch moments. Those meaningsturned out to be distributed across the interrelationship between diverse sets of practices

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– some wereritual practices that took place in templesand in Christian shrines, others wereconstructions of gendered life cycles, yetothers wereconcernedwith death and its effectsonthe flow of life energies. The changes Icame to explore weremore personal, as possession brought changes to the livesnot onlyofthe person directlyinvolved, but of all who weretouched by it. In what follows Ifirst trace the kind of alternativespostcolonial and feminist critiquesforgedinrelation to what Ballard critically describes as the ‘preceptsor conventions of asingular historical consciousness,which is thatofmodern, pro- fessional, Western, or now global historicity’ (Ballard 2014,102). Thissingular his- torical consciousness, argues Ballard, is particularlyresistant to religion, for it could be said to have ‘cut its teeth’ on questioning the authenticity of the events described in the Bible (Ballard2014, 102).Ithen trace some of the difficulties ex- perienced in attempts by postcolonial historians to pluralize thoseconventions in relation to religion when writing the history of modern India. FinallyIturn to phenomenologyand anthropology,arguing that thereare other ways of under- standing temporality and change. My aim here is not to elevateanthropological practice but rather to elicit adimension that can be applied morewidely. Through what version of practice, through what version of time and of change, might non-religious scholars gain access to religious experiences?

1Religion and the archaeological approach to the time of modernity

In an openingchapter of Fertile Disorder Iadopt amode of historical analysis.I explore how it is thatspirit possessionand manyofits attendant practices have come to be so absent from the dominant discourses of modernIndia (Ram2013, 42– 70). Itrace the particularworkings of Reason in Indian modernity,specifical- ly in the regional modernity of Tamil Nadu, whererationalitywas the chosen weapon of twentieth century intellectuals engaged in disputing the power of Brahmanic culture. Itrace how ‘possession’,aneminent candidate for cultural iconicity as anon-Brahmanic complex of practices,came instead to be marginal- ized. It has become apractice lacking adiscourse of its own within the dominant episteme. The ensemble of practices within which ‘possession’ liveshas been carved up by different disciplines to constitutedistinctiveobjects of knowledge. The stories of the local goddess who afflicts and cures people appearincollec- tions of local folk tales. The performances of her epics are represented in per- formance studies. The wider practicesofcuring and the diagnoses of misfortune are assigned to anthropology,but are distributed across anumber of sub-disci-

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM Gaining Accesstothe Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times 195 plines, from studies of folk religion to medicalanthropology.Ithus attempt to show that the term ‘possession’,seemingly unitary,isinfact a ‘remainder’:some- thing left over after apreviouslycoherent setofpractices has been thus distrib- uted. What possession can no longer claim in these dominant discourses is the capacity to generate knowledge in its own right. But is this history writing in the usual sense of the term?Itdeparts in certain crucial ways from an objectivist version of history,one in which the preoccupa- tions of the enquirer are supposed to playnopart in the account she producesof the past.Quite the opposite is the case here. The story Ipiece together is situated by my concerns with the politics of the present in India. It is aresponse Ishare with many of my intellectual peers to acrisis in asecularism we took for granted in ‘Nehruvian’ post-independence India. Such an upbringinginupper-caste urban Hindu India allowed one to bask in the assumption that one livedina place whereaunique Indian modernity has successfullyintegrated the best of Indian traditions – this included the best of Hinduism – imbibed as pure spiri- tuality,culled of the taint of caste which was assumedtobeonits wayout.This version co-existed comfortablyenough with an official secularism – until asus- tained challengetosecularism came from the direction of astrident and exclu- sivist Hindu nationalism. There have been different kinds of intellectual responses to this challenge, some of them seeking possible alternative models from different strands of reli- gion itself.Nandyisaleading advocate for such aposition. He finds in ‘everyday’ Hinduism afluidity that lends itself to cutting across the formalities of religious borders.The flexible niche thatallows one to adopt adeity as apersonal object of devotion has meant for example that Muslim musicians could quiteunself- consciouslychoose Saraswati, goddess of learning and the arts, as their presid- ing deity (Nandy2001). Amore widespread responseamong secular intellectuals has been to invoke the medieval bhaktitraditions of Hinduism as an alternative model of religion. At its boldest,bhakti called on worshippers to bypass the me- diation of religious institutions and orthodoxies, replacing them with ateacher who could show youthe waytofind the divine within oneself. Bhakti models of religion also provided the kind of shared languageand basic understandings Nandyinvokes,providing ahabitus which easilycrossed between Hinduism and Sufi strands of Islam. As the work of Eaton (Eaton 1985) demonstrates, the largest populations of Muslims were in undivided Punjab and Bengal, well away from the historic heartlands of Islamic states.Itwas not the state, but rath- er astate-supportedpopular Sufism,that broughtthese communities into Islam, mediated by Sufis who involved themselvesnot onlyinworship but in practical help, healing and adjudicatingoverdisputes.Such ‘conversion’ sat lightlyonex- isting norms and practices,not requiringtotal transformation of ashared past.

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My concern has been that these debates on religion and secularism continue to leave out whole segmentsofexperience of people for whom gods are even more spectacularlyaccessible to devotees than in bhakti traditions. Moreover these are gods who cureaswell as afflict.In1995,the German scholar Günther D. Sontheimer,who adopted some of the insights and methods of the imaginative Indian Marxist intellectual Damodar D. Kosambi, argued thatmodernity has made matters worse for what he called the folk and tribalmodels of religion that historicallycontributed much to Hinduism. In the new Hinduism of the mid- dle class, he concludes, ‘bhakti and the philosophical contents of Hinduism’ have come to stand for the entirety.There remains,inhis view, ‘not even adis- approving awareness of folk Hinduism’ (Sontheimer 1995). Such oblivion is part of amuch more secure hegemonyofthe upper caste/ classes and Ihavetherefore seen it as an urgent task of the present to acknowl- edge the continued vitality of non-elite religion. An excavation of the past under- taken in this spirit makes no presumption of being detached from the subjectiv- ity of the enquirer.Then again, it is not ‘subjective’ in the usual sense of referring to the consciousness of an isolated individual subject.Rather,these are respons- es to shared concerns, comingout of varied but shared projects (secularism, de- mocracy,socialism etc.), and part of wider shared debates.Itisanattempt to see how our subjectivities came to be constituted in certain ways.This referencetoa shared constitution of subjectivity does not entail an assumption that we are somehow identical. Rather,the past operates in the mannerofashared archive out of which we can selectively take and adapt accordingtothe needsand pur- poses of the present. Such are-workingofhistory came into postcolonial studies through the work of Foucault.Ashedescribes it in his Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1972), an archive is both embodied in specific enunciations, statements,aswell as forming the precondition for thosestatements.

The archive is first the lawofwhatcan be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulateendlesslyinanamorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbrokenlinearity,nor do they disappear at the mercy of chanceexternal accidents; but they aregrouped together in distinct figures,composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurredinaccordance with specific regularities… (Fou- cault1972, 129).

It is this version of temporality – as adominant genealogytobeexcavated – which has fed into manyofthe critical discoursesofthe past forty years, not onlypost-structuralism and postcolonial critique, but various strandsoffeminist critique as well. Thus Saidutilizes Foucault’snotion of the archive in Orientalism

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(Said 1979) to characterize the kindsofstatements thatcan routinelybemade about ‘Islam’ or the politics of the Middle East.Such statements can draw on quite different genealogies (colonialism, Christian formulations of Islam,even Greek pronouncementsonthe irrationalism of Dionysian cultsorconfrontations with the Persians) in order to createasense of freshness as wellasdebate even while the archive regulateswhat is ‘meaningful’,legitimate, and what is not, what ‘counts’ as astatement and what does not. But if an archive is actually constitutive of who we are as speaking subjects, then how is one to perform an ‘archaeology’?Foucault’sanswer in this text is that one should explore discourses thathave ‘justceased to be ours’,that is, whereacertain historical threshold has been crossed. That threshold,for India, is preciselythe crossingofacertain normativity assigned to discourses of secularism. Othershaveexploited other forms of dissonance. Said exploits the pain and dissonance he experiencedasapostcolonial subject, at once part and not part of aprivileged location in the North Americanacademy (Said 1979). Feminist intellectuals have used the frustration and pain of having to inhabit aworld where it is apparentlyimpossibletobeawoman and an intel- lectualatonce. What is shared across these different situations is the capacity to make generative adissonance that is at once individuallylived and socially pro- duced. Takentogether, we now have forty years of cumulative insights into the ex- clusions that have been constitutive of modernity.Religion is one of those casu- alties. ‘The Moderns have never been modern’,saysLatour (Latour 2013,14). And indeed, this is the spirit of my critique as well, ultimately. But first it must be said, as Latour goes on to immediately acknowledge,that the moderns have nev- ertheless ‘believed they were modern, and this belief too is crucial, for it has made them act in athousand contradictory ways’ (Latour 2013,14). These ‘thou- sand contradictory ways’ can stillcohereenough to exclude and marginalize so- ciallyconstituted groups and social phenomena in quite systematic ways.Ifwe look back over the different kinds of exclusions and marginalizations that have been enumerated as constitutive of modernity,wesee an overlappingseries emerging.Ineach of these oppositions, religion is pre-framed – each time to its own disadvantage.Dependingonthe context,contemporary utterancescan frame modernity as capitalism versus feudalism,asprogress versus tradition, as reason versus irrationality, or science versus superstition, as changeversus stagnation, as democracy versus authoritarian absolutism, or indeed, as order and hygiene versus disorder and infection. None of these are simple oppositions. In each case, one term plays an inferior role. In each case, however,religion can take on the coloringofany or all the inferior terms,depending on the context: as

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 198 Kalpana Ram stagnant,authoritarian, feudal, superstitious, corrupt,and the sourceofunhy- gienic unscientific practices. What makesthese understandings ‘stick’ is that none of these have operated as purelyconceptual oppositions. They have all been realized in projects of power and intervention that are alsointertwined. As feministshavelong pointed out,such polaritiescome to us alreadyshaped by hierarchies of power that di- vide the territory as well as privilegeone term over another: objectivity over sub- jectivity,rationality over other forms of comprehension, the Man of Reason (Lloyd1985) over the feminized submergedcontinent of the psyche. Each of these antinomies acts as an affective drive for the institution of aproject.Repre- senting the psyche as unknown and dark has been the pretext for Men of En- lightenment to map and bring the psyche to light,mediated by women’sbodies as bearers of hysterical symptoms (Koffman 1985). In turn, idioms of mapping and exploring dark continents,orofbringingprogress and democracytoauthor- itarian and decadent dominant groups have functionedasalanguageshared be- tween the projects of amodernizing patriarchyand of colonialism, which is why gender and the rescue of women can emerge effortlesslyatthe heart of the lan- guageofwestern interventions in the Middle East,and more generallyinwhat is now termed the global south. Each of the binariesbetween order and disorder, Enlightenment and darkness, subject and object has been realized as projects:of doctors,missionaries, colonial administrators,scholars and artists. As colonial projects,they create what Fabian described as ‘temporal distanc- ing’ between the time of the enquiringobserver and that of the object of study (Fabian 1983, 61). This distance is itself internallyhierarchized. So while India was distancedasasociety run entirelyonprinciples thatwerenot simplyreli- gious but fatalisticand irrational, Hinduism and Islam wereafforded recognition as ‘religions’.Bycontrast,the anthropologist workinginrural villages encoun- ters phenomenathat have never made the grade as ‘religion’ since they fit into the most distantzone reserved by modernity for extreme superstition. Euro- pean categories such as magic, witchcraft and possession mayentail more than simple transpositions of European categories to other places.Some, such as the historian Kathleen Davis, would arguethat the ‘idea of an irrational, violent,su- perstitious,feudal “Middle Ages”… came into being as and through colonialism.’ (Davis2015,70):

Colonisers could not have mapped and administered foreign lands and bodies as they did without the simultaneous process of imaginingtheir own ‘Middle Ages’.Vice versa ‘the Mid- dle Ages’ could not have been conceptualised as such, apartfromEuropeans’ attempt to theorise their relations to the people over whose lands they would layclaim. This holds par- ticularlytrue for India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. … The linear narrative that the ‘idea of the Middle Ages spread unevenlybut was generallyaccepted’ by the

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time of the nineteenth century not onlyobscures the colonial history of the becoming me- dieval of the ‘the Middle Ages’–which was also the condition of possibilityfor the ‘denial of coevalness’–but it also quietlyaffirms the displacement of this history upon the ‘Ren- aissance’,ostensiblybeforeEurope’scolonial struggle. (Davis 2015,70. 71)

2Postcolonial histories of India and religion as the limit case

The kinds of critiques Ihavealluded to are able to produce cogent critiques of modernity’sexclusions. But how far do they allow us to produce an account of that which has been excluded?Herethe results are less than satisfactory,al- though manyadherents of such critiques in the broader field of cultural studies would regard even the attempt to produce an account of the excluded ‘Other’ as almostaxiomaticallyromantic and essentialist.Such an undertaking would hardlybeworth the risk. But while practices such as possession maynot gener- ate much of value when viewed in terms of the dominantepisteme, they do for those engaged in such practices. Once duringmyfield work in 1991, Iasked a local potter to make me an imageofIcakki, such as Ihad seen at the temple of Muppandal. Iwished to take it back to Sydney so Ihad something tangible to have in front of me while Iwrote. The potter taught me alesson about the dif- ferencebetween my own stance and thatofthe people who worshipped her:

The potter keenlyobserves me, and asks me if Ihave nampikkai (faith). Isay Ido, alittle, in the goddess. Next question: have Ihad anubhavam or experience of her.Iam stuck for a response. He tries to help me by givingmeexamples of such experience: have Ihad an ill- ness cured by her?has she ever spoken to me in adream?Isay, no, she has not.Then how, he asks me, can Isay Ihavefaith?Herelents and tells me to come back in four days.But when Ireturn to the potter,the version he produces for me to take home is of ademuresari- clad female, hair neatlycoiled in abun, responsiblyholdingachild in her hand – nothing at all like the Icakkiwho made me gape in the temple at Muppandal. Therethe infant would be morelikelytoemerge mangledfromher mouth. It would not be nurtured. Evi- dentlythe potterhas decided Iwould be ill equipped to handle the powers of the image Isoblithelycommission. She is a kōpakkārī (a habituallyangry female), not to be messed with. (Field notes, November 1991).

Imay still not have nampikkai/belief or direct anubhavam of possessing deities, but my book is in one sense an extended response to the potter’squestions. But how have postcolonial historians responded to such questions?While they may never have been questioned as directlyasIwas, religion has been addressed in some form by virtuallyevery foundational memberofthe influential Subaltern Studies group of historians.Religion recurs in theirwork as that which, lying

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 200 Kalpana Ram outside the framework of modernhistoriography, must be re-integrated into an account of Indian history.But the impulseissplit by apoliticized hermeneutics of suspicion. The politics of the group is described by Chakrabartyasemerging from aseries of events and social movementsinIndia that ‘made official nation- alism sound hollow’ (Chakrabarty 2002,6). The task taken on by this group of historians was thereforeextraordinarilywide ranging. They sought to reconstruct the history of Indian modernity not onlyfrom adecolonizing perspective but also from a ‘subaltern’ non-elite perspective that would be critical even of anti-colo- nial nationalist paradigms.Nocritique can undermine all the assumptions of the discourse it inherits and it is not surprising to find that certain parts were left standing intact. What is significant is thatitisthe domainofreligion which proves to be the recurrent point of instability. Iwillbeable to referhere onlytoafew examples. In his landmark studyof peasant insurgency in the colonial period, ElementaryAspects of PeasantInsur- gency (1983), Guha follows the Italian revolutionary Marxist Gramsci in two cen- tral respects. On the one hand, we are treated to amore imaginative readingof peasant consciousness.Onthe other hand, that consciousness is described as ‘rather hesitant,inchoate and disjointed perception’.Inthis inchoate state it can- not but continue to borrow and clothe itself in the receivedlanguageofthe rul- ing class (Guha 1983, 28). Such aconsciousness can onlygosofar,succeeding in describing ‘empiricallysome aspects of the peasant’sconditions of existence’, but ‘falling far short of conceptualizing the structure of authority which made such conditions possible’ (Guha 1983, 28). Idonot question the assertion thatsuch aknowledge is not present in peas- ant rebellions, or indeed in most subordinategroups – although it is doubtful as to whether any intellectual frameworkcould deliversuch full knowledge.What is more to the point here is that it is the religious consciousness of the peasant lead- er which is singled out as the ‘inherited and uncriticallyabsorbed material of the ruling culture’ (Guha 1983, 11), causing an erosion of the radical potential of such rebellion. Religious consciousness marks the peasant leader as both amember of asubordinategroup as wellaslessthan afull subjectofrevolution:

He is still committed to envisagingthe coming war on the Rajasthe project of awill inde- pendent of himself and his own roleinitasnomorethan instrumental. ‘Kanoo and Seedu Manjee arenot fighting. The Thacoor [Master,God] himself will fight’ stated the parwana in which the authors did not recognise even their own voice, but heardonlythat of God: ‘This is the order of the Thacoor’.(Guha 1983, 28)

The implicit set of contrasts is between the inherited and the newlygenerated; between the uncritically absorbed and the conscious systematic critique of the past; between attributing agency to others, and claiming it as entirelyone’s

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times 201 own. In each case, religion is understood entirelyinthe terms of the first set of terms. My next example comes from Pandey’scorpus of work. It is centrallycon- cerned with religion. His earlywork sought to show how communalism – the supposedinability of different religious groups,particularlyHindus and Mus- lims, to co-exist without violence – was in fact acolonial discourse (Pandey 1990). Subsequent work on the PartitionofIndia (Pandey 2002;Pandey 2006) has been directed at nationalist assumptions in Indian historiographythat ren- der Partition and subsequent communal violence either as acts of natural ca- lamity,orasdiscreteepisodesthatcan never be integrated into the Indian story of nationhood. But the discourse he wishestoabandon, and the one his meticulously historicizingtraining produces,both ultimatelyoverlap in certain key respects.The discourse he wishes to leave behind is one in which the ‘culture and interests, inclinations and “passions” of religious community are already known from the start.They appear as frozen entities, which are deniedthe pos- sibility of internal difference, political agency and change, even as they become objects of political manipulation and governmentality in anew way’ (Pandey 2006,183). The contrasting politicized account of religious communities differs in one crucial respect: such ‘frozenness’ has been politically produced. Since the nineteenth century,religious communities have been taking over all other forms of difference, so that religious identity has become one of the main mark- ers of difference. The result of this process is a ‘freezingofcommunities’ (Pandey 2006,185). Both accounts give us apicture of religious communities as devoid of agential political change. In the first account this is the resultofanessentialist colonial understanding of India as areligious society.Inthe second case it is the resultofhistorical processes since the nineteenth century.Although Pandey con- cedes that thingsweredifferent in the past,heparts companywith Nandywho, as we have noted, regards religious communities as stillable to generate adiffer- ent form of cooperation to that posited by secularism. ForPandey on the other hand, these are politicized communities.The onlyagencyhenow sees left in re- ligious communities is of adecidedlynegative kind, as objects of governmental- ity.Inthe process it is not onlynationalism thatstands indicted of having lost its ‘imaginative moment’ (Pandey 2006,182). It is religion as well. The work of Chakrabarty differsfrom the others in acrucial respect.Tracking the response of his peers towards religion, much as Ihave, he concludes that Marxist traditions that seek to ‘de-mystify ideologyinorder to produce acritique that looks forward to amorejust social order’ are inadequate for understanding India as well as more generallyasamethod.Instead, it is equallyimportant to represent non-European ‘normative and theoretical thought enshrinedinother existing life practices and their archives’ (Chakrabarty 2000,20). European cat-

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 202 Kalpana Ram egoriesare indispensable, he acknowledges, but one needs to ‘release into their space’ what might be learned through ‘close and careful attention to languages, practices,and intellectual traditions present in South Asia’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 20). He turns for inspiration to the hermeneutictradition that ‘produces aloving grasp of detail in search of an understanding of the diversityofhuman life- worlds’ (Chakrabarty 2000,18). ‘Hermeneutical loving grasp of detail’,the ‘understanding of diversity of life worlds’,the ‘careful attention to languageand practice’:all these descriptions belong as much to anthropology as they do to the phenomenological traditions. If these phrases describe the domain of phenomenologywithin the traditions of philosophy, then they describeanthropology’sproject in the domain of the em- pirical disciplines. Thisisnocoincidence. Ihaveargued elsewherefor the sub- stantial overlap between the two (Ram2013,2015). The phenomenological prin- ciple of describing alife world before moving on tooquicklytoproducing amore abstract account of it – let alone one thatbegins with the presumption of critique – is one that is shared with central aspects of anthropology. Chakrabarty’scon- clusion has been resoundingly prefiguredinforthright statements by anthropol- ogists such as Sahlins, who finds in ‘different culturalorders their own modes of historical action, consciousness, and determination – their own historicalprac- tice’ (Sahlins 1983, 518).

3The cleaving of time and place: canweput Humpty Dumpty together again?

We have come full circle in the argument.Apostcolonial or de-colonizingcri- tique of anthropology instructed anthropologists to turn to history in order to in- tegrate time into its account.Historians similarlymoved by de-colonizingim- pulsesfound history to be basedona‘singular historicalconsciousness, which is that of modern,professional, Western, or now global historicity’ (Bal- lard 2014,102). Postcolonial critique helpedtolocate the reasons whyreligion suffersfrom interpretationsthat basedthemselvesonsuch amodernhistorical consciousness.However,the politics of critique has itself been too reliant on cer- tain categoriesofmodernity to be able to accord anypositive capacity for con- scious critical changewithin religious consciousness and religious communities. Historians troubled by this have called for ahermeneutical phenomenology which, particularlywhereitentails involvement with non-European languages and practices,isvirtuallyadescription also of anthropology.

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We are in effect witnessinganoscillation between adiscourse that concerns itself with time and adiscourse that concerns itself with place. The absences in each, taken together, point to adeeper underlying problem which is the artificial cleaving of time and place. The problem of the colonial politics of knowledge does not lie within one discipline. It is rather located in the division of labor in which bothhistory and anthropology participated. By the late nineteenth cen- tury,time and place became the subject matter of twodifferent disciplines. Both disciplinesshared an orientation towardsacritique of universalism. In this sense, yetanother disciplinary demarcation wastaking place, one which separat- ed the relativizing disciplines of history and anthropologyfrom philosophy. Henceforth, the universalisms of philosophywould be subject to relativizingcri- tique basedeither on historicity or the particularities of place. Both are to some extent impoverished by this divisionoflabor,asindeed is the bifurcation be- tween utter relativism and aprematureuniversalism. Thus if anthropology is in- terpreted exclusivelyasarelativizing discipline, then it does indeed encouragea tendencytocontinuallypresuppose and separate the west and the rest.Once the domains are separated in this manner,the best we can arguefor is an ethical attitude of respect and tolerance for alterity and of critical reflection on one’s own differencesfrom the ‘Other’. One of the reasons it is possiblefor both ahistorian and an anthropologist to turn to phenomenologyatthis point is because it offers away of recapturing what phenomenologywould describeasamore ‘primordial’ unity of time and place. Phenomenologyalsoorients us to recognizingcontinuities of experience – neither identitynor the polarized ‘us’ and ‘them’ of relativism. Temporalityis no more the prerogative of one discipline than place is aprerogative of another. Rather,both time and place are embedded and embodied in the synthesiswe createthrough our practical involvement with wider ecologies that entail the non-human environment as much as the human. These ecologies constitute pla- ces in their concreteness,unlike the abstractions of space derivedfrom geometry and science (Casey 1996). But such syntheses are themselvestemporal. This is true both across generations and in the course of an individual’slifetime. We in- herit ecologies, we are born into them, and these ecologies we inherit are nothing other than the syntheses alreadyeffected by previous generations, bequeathed to us both as material culture and the practicesthat enable us to inhabit that ma- terial culture. There is also temporality in the synthesisweeach of us effect in our embodied activitiesoveralifetime, making it uniquelyindividual as well as part of atradition. In this sense, temporalities are as varied as our activities and practices.The time of music making is as distinctive as the time of gardeningorofwriting a paper.And these rhythms will vary accordingtothe degree to which we have per-

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 204 Kalpana Ram formedthat synthesis between body, tasks and environment – the rhythm of a skilled musician is very different to that of anovice, the rhythm of the final draft of apaper is very different to the awkwardness that afflicts every fresh be- ginning. What does this mean for the scholarofreligion?How does one gain access to synthesesone is not born into nor has acquired by adulthood?The question is one Ifaced in relation to spirit possession. But let us note that the waywe have posed this question alreadymoves us away from the domain of asking whether we have to believeand consent to the beliefs of others. Istill do not have nampikkai or belief in the sense that the potter spoke of. But understanding is something that can proceed without necessarilyentailing belief and in fact can happen even without choosing to do so. Agreement,faith and belief maycount for less ultimatelyinthe relationship between the non-religious scholar and the worshipper,than for the scholartoarrive at aslow incorporative mode of under- standing which is born of the other dimension the potter questioned me about, namely anubhavam,experience. Even if Ihavenot had the direct anubhavam of the goddess – although Iamnot sure even of thatany longer – Ihavecertainly had direct experience of manyothers who have.And some elements of this un- derstandingpass over into one’sown embodied activities. Over aperiod of time, Iknew which parts of the village held ghosts,which routes wereshorterbut meant passinganold temple of the fiery goddess. Guided initiallybythe fear and circumspection of my companions,bythe end Idid not need others to guide me – my feet would steer me away from there. To recover and value the full potential of anthropological practice requires moving away from the model of knowledge thatisdescribed as objectivism by phenomenologists, and which has prevailedwithin anthropologyaswell as history.Writing of an- thropology from an existential phenomenological perspective,Jackson liststhe legacies of this tendency:

Subjectivity was conflated with roles, rules,routines….And just as the natural sciences cre- ated the appearance of objectivity through specialized, analytical language, so the social sciences cultivated an image of objectivity by reducingpersonstofunctions and identities: individuals filled roles, fulfilled obligations,followed rules,performed rituals and internal- ized beliefs.(Jackson 2013,3)

The chargestake us back to the critique of overlystatic account,though Jackson is less concerned with historical time and more with existential time in all its ed- dies and flux. On the other hand, the same discipline that can objectify knowl- edge also provides us with the wherewithal for quite adifferent conception of what it is to know something.And the same phenomenologythatcan be used to locate omissions in anthropology can alsobeusedtoinstead ‘uncover’,or

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‘disclose’ as Heideggerwould put it,avery different understanding that already exists in anthropology of what it is to understand something initiallyforeign to oneself. That understanding lies not so much in the strictly hermeneuticalmo- ment of trying to interpret another cultureasif it wereanalientext (Bourdieu’s trenchant critique of this model remains unsurpassed, Bourdieu 1977), but rather in the practice of living with others over aprolongedperiod of time. Thisisalsoa processthat creates shared time,not just in terms of largerevents that the an- thropologistparticipates in along with others, but in the shared time of doing everydaythingstogether. Buried under the rather prosaic and naturalistic title of ‘field work’ is athoroughlyphenomenological understanding of ‘being’ as ‘being-with’.This is one of Heidegger’scentral theses in Being and Time,such that ‘Even Dasein’sBeing-alone is Being-with in the world (Heidegger1962, 156–157). This understanding exists in apractical form in anthropology. But it might be strengthened by the explicit framework supplied by aphilosophical al- ternative to along standing epistemologicaltradition, such as we encounter in Heidegger’sopeninginBeing and Time or in Merleau-Ponty’sradical integration of bodily activity and sensory perception into philosophiesofsubjectivity in Phe- nomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1986). Forinrelation to field work we stand at what Foucault describes as the cusp of adiscourse that has just ceased to be ours. It is preciselythe temporality of research, as long term engagement and involvement in the livesofothers, which is being rapidlywhittled away,certainlyinAustralia, by the rise of the market model within university researchfunding.Weare speaking here of the mere three and ahalf years allotted for Ph.D.s in Australia, allowing no time even for acquiring language. Being on such acusp affords the opportunityto make explicit what has often remained implicit.Ofthe manydimensions one could discuss,Ifocus on the one involving change. Reformulations of fieldwork as ‘inter-subjective’ constructions obscureanumber of aspectsofthe interaction. Ihaveelaboratedonthis elsewhereinterms of the need for aconcept like the ‘habitus’,which indicates that thereisalreadyahistory flowing into the present moment of inter-subjectivity (Ram 2015,41–42). Forthe very same reason the changethat occurs in the interactions of field work is not equallydistributed – it is far more radical for the researcher than for those around her.She is there without the supports of her wider social and physical ecology (another wayofdescribing the habitus) while others continue to enjoy those supports. It is she who must adapt – or suffer further isolation,and the more radical the differencebetween her current situation and her past,the more she must changeand adapt to the subjectivity of others. Ethnographygives us manyinstances of such alterations, although giventhe centralityofthe process for anthropology,there should be alot more. In apiece

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 206 Kalpana Ram publishedin1990,Hastrupdescribes her experience of field work in Iceland as involving months of ‘loneliness,ofsexual assaults,loss of identity,and offensive enemyspirits’–yetone of her greatest shocks was, ‘to be reminded about her own world’ (Hastrup 1990,46). At the end of ayear,she receivesletters ad- dressed to an academic called Kirsten Hastrupshe no longer recognizes. While she acknowledgesthat thatisjust what she had to return to, she nevertheless insists on the radical nature of field work which ‘implies that the well-establish- ed opposition between subjectand object dissolves’ (Hastrup 1990,46). My own experience of field work in afishing community on the west coast of Kanyakumari was much happier.Ispoke the language, though Idiscovered that what Ithought of as an undifferentiated Tamil was in fact markedbymycaste background as well as the particular parts of Tamil country my parents came from. Ilived with an affectionate family, with whom Idevelopeddeep bonds and through them, with their relativesinthe village as well. But an earlyintima- tion of the changes Ihad undergone came after Ihad been living in the fishing community for nearlyayear.AyoungNordic couple pulled up in their sailing craft in the neighboring largerport town of Colachel. My companions,some younger than myself, werevery curious and Iwent along with them. Ifound my- self pushed to the foreground to act as an intermediary,atwhich point Idiscov- ered Iwas goggling at the visitors like anyvillager – as ‘white’ people, utterly exotic and alien – as if friends and my own husband backinAustralia were not ‘white’ and ‘western’.Ifelt nothing like an intermediary,although Iforced myself to chat and translate for the benefit of others. Afew years later it happened again. Thistime Ihad come back to catch up with my adoptive family.Atthe time Ifelt they werecloser to me thanmyown familyinIndia, and Iwas very emotional about seeing them again in their new home near Chennai.Iwas with youngteenagers Sheela and Babu – their mother had shooed us out for the daysoshe could prepareaspecial dinner for my re- turn – and we were at the seashore town of Mahabalipuram, whose splendid Pal- lava dynasty rock carvingsmake it anotable tourist attraction. SuddenlySheela averted her eyes, abashed by something she had seen. When Ienquired, she pointed to tourists who were, in her eyes, wearingnext to nothing.Ifound myself invaded by ashared sense of embarrassment and indignation at white tourists with no sense of propriety.MySydney self, utterlyused to the beaches and beachwear,had disappeared. Such responses point to apermeability,aporosity in us, which meansthe ‘social’ in social science succeedsinradicallyre-defining what it means to be ascience at all. This does not mean we have ‘gone native’,asthe colonial phrase had it.The shared identityIfelt at these moments might easilybereplaced by a sense of being quite alien in another context.Indeed, how else can we explain

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times 207 the fact that ‘possession’–preciselythe quintessential situation wheresubject and object completelycollapse into one – remained aprovocation for me for so manyyears. Yetitisworth emphasizing these moments wherethe subject/ob- ject dichotomydissolves, however temporarily, since they are easilyobscured by intellectualist theories of knowledge.Amethod which integrates mitsein as a central feature allows for modes of understanding that are not simplyamatter of cognitive comprehensionofinitiallyunfamiliar categories employed by oth- ers. We movemagically, as it were, into adopting the gesturesand orientations of the social group we are with. Such magic is not merelyamatter of ‘perform- ance’ in the conventional sense since there is abodilymovement into the situa- tion of others. Nor is it amatter of empathysince it entails aslow alteration and changeonthe part of the researcher to the point whereshe can moveinto the stance and orientation required by those she is with at the time. Herewemight connect the longue duree of changeinthe researcher herself to the distinctiondrawn by phenomenologists between knowing about some- thing and understanding something.The formerpreserves aradical distinction between the enquiring subjectand the object of enquiry. ‘Understanding’,in contrast,presupposes aperiod of bodily involvement and familiarization on the part of the ethnographer.Wemight then call this formoftemporality the em- bodied time it takesfor amodicum of human re-socialization to take place. Such re-socialization is not confined to the time spent ‘in the field’–it carries over into the practices of sustained writing,teaching, readingand ongoingreflection; all of which are part of anthropological practice. In my book Icall the work done by the spirit mediumaprocess of ‘makingroom’ for the alien spirit.What the ethnographer performs over alifetime is not so different.But the sign of absorb- ing and ‘understanding’ aphenomenon, even aradicallyalien experience such as spirit possession, lies not in being able to sayone now ‘believes’ in it – aques- tion my students frequentlyask me. Rather it lies in being able to place one’s own experiencesonacontinuum with that which initiallyseemed utterly alien. In my book Iwrite about the manyintermediary states we all inhabit from time to time, states in which it is hardly appropriatetodescribe ourselves as asubject facing an entirely external object.We‘lose ourselves’ in creativity,in writing,making music but also in thosequotidian moments of flow such as driv- ing along awell-known route. In bothcases, if we are asked to formallystate how we ‘gotthere’,wewould be at aloss.Inall these cases, the loss of self-con- sciousnessisnot the opposite of agency, it is the very essence of acertain kind of agency. These are not just analogies with possession. They are located on acontin- uumofexperiencesthat are not simply statesofconsciousness, since they rad- icallyinvolve bodilyskills, aptitudes and orientations.Moreover we could be

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 208 Kalpana Ram propelled at anypoint to alesser or more extreme end of that continuum – in extreme states of loveand grief, for instance.The ancient Greeks thought of loveasaform of possession by the deity Aphrodite. Death too can generate a state wherepossession can seem amore aptdescription than many others. At the time when Iamwriting this paper,myhusband has just died, onlyafew months ago. He died very reluctantlyand sadly, since his whole being was bur- geoning with fresh and potential projects for new novels, essays,writings of all kinds, as well as his lovefor his wife, daughter and friends. He died keenlyaware that his skills as anovelistwerenow honed to afine craft,and at the peak of the powers he valued the most.Ihavelearned that there is injusticenot onlyina ‘bad death’ such as the ones that led to possession, there is alingering sense of injusticeindeaths such as his. Perhaps there is asense of injusticeinall death insofar as it extinguishesthe potentiality we all carry with us to varying degrees right until the moment of death. Irealizethatall such unspent potential has the potential to haunt and to possess the living who are closelyintertwined with the dead. In the time imme- diatelyfollowing his death, Ifound myself attending the plays and films he would have attended, readingpoetry hewould have read. SuddenlyIslam, some- thing he spent alifetime reflecting on since his period in Pakistan as avery young man, meant agood deal to me as well in anew way. Iwroteanew lecture on Islam in South Asia, following the footprintshehad left in the sand into his library.Ithas been much more than away of feeling close to him, although that is part of it.His tastes and preoccupations werecomingthrough as urgent needs on my part.Nodoubtthe ground for shared tastes had been laid slowlyfor both of us over thirty five years together.But it was now happeninginaparticularly dramatic and urgent fashion. What is equallynotable is that it has also simulta- neously been an expansion of my agency – not in the sense of an expansion of deliberate choices,for Iexperienced it as simplybeing drawntohis kind of films, books, and plays.Itisanexpansion in the sense that it is adilation of my older self and new experiences and tastes are being born out of the experience.Asitis with Tamil villagers, such experience opens up more than just an experience of the dead – the actions they prompt lead in turn to an expandedrangeofpossi- bilities for the living,aswellasacurtailment of others. My arguments about possession and agency are no longer an ethnographic argument.They are no longer adescription of something outside myself. They have become integrated into my own experience,myanubhavam,oflife and death. And out of that integration can come new possibilities – of reflecting back more deeplyonthe existential truths in the widespread tendencyfound in cultures around the world to link violent death with possession. Equally,

Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM Gaining Accesstothe Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times 209 the possibilities generated mayspill outside of the subjectmatter of possession, and extend into anew phenomenological interest in death and bereavement. Understandingreligion if one is not religious, or indeed understanding any framework that is initiallyalien, does entail temporality.But it is not the tempo- rality of progress and evolution, or the decisive temporality of choice, but rather the slow time that is more akin to acquiringataste for unfamiliar cuisines.

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Kalpana Ram DepartmentofAnthropology Faculty of Arts Macquarie University NSW 2109 Australia [email protected]

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