Modernity and Spirit Worship in India
This book investigates the entangled relations between peoples daily worship practices and their umwelt in South India. Focusing on the practices of spirit (bta) worship in the coastal area of Karnataka, it examines the relationship between people and deities.
Based on extensive fieldwork, this book links important anthropological theories on personhood, perspectives, transactions, and gift-exchanges together with the Gestaltkreis theory of Viktor von Weizscker. First, it examines the relations between bta worship and land tenure, matriliny, and hierarchy in the society. It then explores the reflexive relationship between modern law and current practices based on conventional law, before examining new developments in bta worship with the rise of mega-industries and environmental movements. Furthermore, this book sheds light on the struggles and endeavours of the people who create and recreate their relations with the realm of sacred wildness, as well as the formations and transformations of the umwelt in perpetual social-political transition.
Modernity and Spirit Worship in India will be of interest to academics in the field of anthropology, religious studies and the dynamics of religion, and South Asian Culture and Society.
Miho Ishii is an associate professor at Kyoto University, Japan. Her current research focus is on the relationship between spirit worship and environmental movements in South India.
Routledge New Horizons in South Asian Studies
Series Editors:Crispin Bates, Edinburgh University; Akio Tanabe, Kyoto University; Minoru Mio, National Museum of Ethnology, Japan
Democratic Transformation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India
Edited by Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Akio Tanabe and Shinya Ishizaka
Cities in South Asia
Edited by Crispin Bates and Minoru Mio
Human and International Security in India
Edited by Crispin Bates, Akio Tanabe & Minoru Mio
Rethinking Social Exclusion in India
Castes, Communities and the State
Edited by Minoru Mio and Abhijit Dasgupta
Modernity and Spirit Worship in India
An Anthropology of the Umwelt
Miho Ishii
For a full list of titles please see https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-New-Horizons-in-South-Asian-Studies/book-series/RNHSAS
Modernity and Spirit Worship in India
An Anthropology of the Umwelt
Miho Ishii
First published 2020
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2020 Miho Ishii
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In a sense, this book follows an established line of anthropological predecessors focusing on the dynamism of religious practices and/in modernity. It is, after all, primarily a book about bta (or spirit) worship in South Kanara, a coastal area in Karnataka, India. Btas are generally considered to be deities or spirits that dwell in forests and embody the realm of sacred wildness. In this book, I investigate the endeavours and struggles of people in village communities, who create and recreate their relations with the realm of sacred wildness through transactions with btas, amidst social-political transitions such as colonisation, changes in land tenure systems, and development of mega-industries.
However, I also attempt to introduce a novel twist to this anthropological genre. The theoretical core of this book is the notion of the umwelt presented by Viktor von Weizscker, who uniquely developed Jakob von Uexklls ideas on the existence of entangled and inseparable relations between an organism and its environment. By linking anthropological theories on personhood, perspective, transactions, and gift-exchanges to the theory of the umwelt, I attempt to consider the relations among villagers, land, nature, and btas as part of the dynamic and creative interactions between humans and their life-worlds, including nonhumans.
If this book successfully presents a perspective that exceeds, even a little, the limits of a monograph sticking to its discipline and geographical field, I owe it to the members of a research project titled Kansekai no Jinbungaku (The Studies of Umwelten), undertaken at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, since 2015. Discussions and conversations with colleagues from various academic backgrounds in the course of this project provided great inspiration in the writing of this book.
These discussions also inspired an earlier version of this volume published in Japanese under the title, Kansekai no Jinruigaku: Minami Indo ni okeru Yasei, Kindai, Shinreisaishi (An Anthropology of the Umwelt: Wildness, Modernity, and Spirit Worship in South India), by Kyoto University Press in 2017. Though the core of the argument has remained consistent, through the long process of rewriting, this volume has become not a mere translation, but a fresh creation. I deeply thank Dr Masakazu Tanaka, my colleague and former supervisor, for his precious comments on the earlier version of this book.
Drs Crispin Bates, Akio Tanabe, and Minoru Mio, the series editors of Routledge New Horizons in South Asian Studies, gave me great support from the earliest to the final stages of publication of this book. Without their support and encouragement, it would not have been possible for me to complete this work. Nick Kasparek and Dr Yumiko Tokita-Tanabe made great efforts to improve the quality of this book. Their sensitive and deep knowledge of English greatly helped me construct the whole argument in English. I am also very grateful to the editors at Routledge, Dorothea Schaefter and Alexandra de Brauw, for their support in the publication of this volume.
After completing my doctoral and postdoctoral research on spirit worship in Ghana, I first visited South India in 2008, in search of a new field site. It was Dr Chinnappa Gowda at Mangaluru University who first introduced me to the fertile world of bta worship in South Kanara. Since the start of my fieldwork, Akshaya Shetty, her mother Baarati, and her father Harisha always provided me with warm and generous support. Vidya Dinker not only gave me wise advice, but also instilled the courage I needed to pursue difficult tasks in the field. Without their support and friendship, I could not have accomplished my research.
