Multiple Voices and A Single Body: Spirits’ Embodiment, Speech, Discourse, and Historiography in an Old Ritual Community of Bhutan

In a Bhutanese village with established religious pluralism, shamanic mediumship serves as both a formulaic, mimetic retention of history and an indeterminate, fluid improvisation. Mediums become sites for multisensory communicative dramas between ontologically distinct but relational spirits who negotiate their standing with the community. The phenomenal and phantasmal beings remain present in the village lifeworld, entangled in an ethics of care requiring dedication from both spirits and community. The paper unpacks the poetics, poiesis, and politics of metaphorical, cryptic, silent, and gestural codes through which charismatic mediums reinforce social order, examining how the lifeworld of Chungsekha village is lived, experienced, and discursively reconstructed through phantasmal and multisensory dialogues.

Study at a glance

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.