‘When there were only gods, then there was no disease, no need for doctors’: forsaken deities and weakened bodies in the Indian Himalayas

Abstract

In this study the author analyzes the relationship between the individual body and the body politic in a region of the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in connection with social changes occurring at the local and trans-local level, which are impacting the status of the different healing systems. By investigating these issues, this paper aims to shed light on some of the complex ways in which practitioners and patients who take part in a local method of healing, in this case ritual healing through possession, respond to the expansion of biomedicine.

Keywords:

• individual body
• body politic
• Garhwal
• healing
• possession
• Uttarakhand
• India
• social change

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Elisabeth Hsu, Caroline Potter, Federica Fratagnoli and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts of this paper. Funding for this research was generously provided by a fellowship of the University of Siena and by a grant of the French-Italian University (Université Franco Italienne UIF). The author followed the ethical guidelines of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

The text is based on a paper given at a conference funded by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Wellcome Trust and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.

Conflict of interest: none.

Notes

1. Scheper-Hughes and Lock mention also a third kind of body, the social body, namely the body as a symbol or map with which people shape or understand their environment (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).

2. This complex system of divine jurisdictions is found in several nearby areas of the central Himalayan region. See also Berti (2001), Bindi (2009), Sax (2002: 157–85), Sutherland (1998), Vidal (1988).

3. Interview with Sajal Panwar, Dharali, 09-2006.