Since my earliest fieldwork in coastal villages of Kanyakumari in the 1980s (Ram 1991b), I have found myself in the thick of all manner of programs and interventions in the lives of villagers, undertaken by professionals of various kinds. Such a sense of being surrounded by programs was no doubt shaped by my own background and dispositions, which mark me as a member of the broad grouping I attempt to characterize in this chapter. From subtle forms of “mutual recognition” that enabled easy access to others from this group, to my own need for certain basic forms of material comfort,...

Living in and moving around Tamil villages affords the middle-class intellectual an opportunity to become aware of phenomena that fall outside the range of what she knows or even quite recognizes. Anthropology has simply systematized and elaborated the kind of reflexivity by which that intellectual, or any sojourner in a foreign land, can compare and contrast new understandings with those familiar to her from her own primary socialization. But this method yields very different results depending onwhereone was socialized. I grew up in India, and my family migrated to Australia when I was fourteen. We made frequent visits...

I met Vijaya in 1983.¹ She was then a young bride. She and her husband, James, lived in a somewhat makeshift fashion with her married sister and the sister’s household in the coastal village of Katalkarai Ūr in Kanyakumari District, Tamil Nadu. Villagers who knew of my interest in possession referred me to Vijaya since she was known to have been suffering spirit attacks. The following account was pieced together by me on the basis of what I heard from Vijaya, her husband, and James’s sister.

Vijaya’s first spirit attack had come one year after the death of her father....

The material in this chapter is based primarily on my relationship with a woman called Santi, who had experienced possession episodes ever since moving to her affinal village as a young bride. I first became acquainted with her in the early 1980s during my initial period of fieldwork in a coastal fishing village of Kanyakumari District (Ram 1991b). Santi was widely and simply referred to in the village aspēykkāri,or “demon-infested woman.” Her spirit attacks had occurred over so many years that young women of the village recalled seeing her possessed when they were children. They recounted the way...

In this chapter I explore a category of women mediums who “heal” while possessed.¹ Such healers, called spirit mediums in the anthropological literature, have been widely noted in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (Trawick Egnor 1982; Hancock 1999; Kapadia 1995; Obeyesekere 1981; Kapferer 1991).² In introducing these women, I am not confronting the reader with an entirely new category. For they are basically no different from the women we have already encountered. Like Santi and Vijaya, these women have experienced afflictions that are due to spirits.Unlike Santi and Vijaya, however, they go on to act as mediums. It is...

Spirit mediums are typically incorporated in anthropological discourse into the general category of “healers.” However, anthropology must also contend with the currents of meaning that are set in motion when the term “healing” is invoked and that carry it swiftly away from the world of rural Tamil spirit mediums. As they circulate today in popular culture, the terms “spirit” and “healing” spontaneously evoke a version of “spirituality” that is abstracted from any particular cultural context, even while they simultaneously accrue cultural capital from invocations of a grounded “indigeneity.” At a recent forum held in Sydney after the screening of an...

Mediums such as Mary and Mutamma are both agents and instruments in the conduct of a Court of Divine Law. The people who attend them are petitioners. But what is the nature of the complaint? I take the term “complaint” from Wilce’s (1998) fine ethnography of “troubles talk” among rural Bangladeshi women. In particular, I use his distinction between “complaints as symptoms, as reified signs of disease” and complaint as “the social and discursive dynamics of complaining, or troubles telling” (15). However, as we shall see, though complaint is not the reified sign of disease, neither is it purely discursive....

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 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...