Multiple Voices and A Single Body: Spirits’ Embodiment, Speech, Discourse, and Historiography in an Old Ritual Community of Bhutan
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft September 1, 2024 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1353/mrw.2024.a957210 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
In a Bhutanese village with established religious pluralism, shamanic mediumship serves as both a formulaic ritual for retaining history and a fluid, improvisational channel for multisensory communication between spirits and community members. The ritual reinforces social order through metaphorical, cryptic, silent, and gestural codes. Phenomenal and phantasmal beings remain present in the village lifeworld, entangled in an ethics of care that requires dedication from both spirits and the community to honor their bond.
Study at a glance
| Design | ethnography |
|---|---|
| Population | Chungsekha village in Western Bhutan |
| Key finding | Shamanic mediumship in a Bhutanese village functions as both a formulaic tradition for mimetically retaining history and a dynamic, indeterminate practice for negotiating relationships between spirits and community members through multisensory communicative dramas. |
Abstract
Abstract:Focusing on a detailed ethnography of mediumship in a Bhutanese village with a well-established religious pluralism, this paper examines the sociality and ‘indigenous historiographic’ tradition of a marginal ritual as a way of deconstructing sedimented and forgotten histories. It argues that the shamanic ritual is both formulaic, allowing for mimetic retention of history, and indeterminate and fluid, allowing for dynamic improvisation as mediums become a site and channel for multisensory communicative dramas between ontologically distinct but relational spirits who negotiate their standing with members of the community. The phenomenal and the phantasmal beings are never absent but unfailingly remain in the lifeworld of the village. They become entangled in an ethics of care that requires dedication and capability on the sides of both the spirits and the community to honor the bond played out in the communicative drama of the medium. The paper unpacks the poetics, ‘poiesis’ and politics of the metaphorical, cryptic, silent, and gestural communicative codes through which charismatic mediums reinforce the social order and their place in it. It also examines how the lifeworld of Chungsekha, a village in Western Bhutan, is phenomenally lived and experienced by the people, and how it is discursively represented and re-constructed through phantasmal and multisensory dialogues.