Spirit possession rituals called jāgar in the Kumaon region of the Himalaya are complex institutions that address more than healing. Although often triggered by a person's illness, a jāgar provides a stage for active discourse on past, present, and future community affairs. The ritual resembles a journey where an actual problem is just the starting point; oracular communication with deities reveals misdeeds unrelated to the sufferer's symptoms. Divine justice, voiced through local deities, shapes concepts of responsibility and guilt. Ambivalences about justice and truth make jāgars a medium where divine messages enter worldly argumentation. The power of individuals is strongly gendered, but identity, power, and responsibility are ultimately tied to territory and landed property.
Spirit possession challenges the dominant Self-Other binary in social theory by offering an alternative paradigm for understanding selfhood, inter-ethnic relations, and culture. Based on ethnography of two shaman women in rural Ajmer, Rajasthan, the paper shows how a Hindu woman possessed by the spirit of a Muslim martyr and a Muslim woman possessed by a Hindu goddess embody a permeable self where the other substantially takes over. This practice enables healers to intervene in mundane desires and weave complex cosmographies. The creative imaginary of the shrines contrasts with polarized ethnic identity politics of groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and VHP. The client-healer relationship creates a speech community across caste and ethnic lines, while gender performativity renegotiates gender relations but also exposes communal fractures.
In late-modern Kerala, spirit affliction and possession reveal how formerly separate social groups have become mixed. The traditional bond between person, descent group (kuṭumpam), and ancestral soil—expressed in mortuary rituals—conflicts with modern state-defined land relations. New wealthy families have moved into village border areas once exclusively inhabited by Untouchables, places believed haunted by ghosts and malevolent deities. A case history describes an Īḻava moneylender's wife possessed by Untouchable ancestors. These possession cases serve as a window into how multiple boundary processes now shape personhood, self, and territory.