A Funeral To Counter Sorcery

Deadly Power: A Funeral to Counter Sorcery in South India
Author(s): Isabelle Nabokov

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 147-168
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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deadly power: a funeral to counter sorcery in
South India
ISABELLE NABOKOV
Princeton University
In this article, I argue that the regenerative potential of Tamil sorcer

countersorcery in South India inevitably depends on destruction; I de
strate what ritual specialists' and sufferers' perspectives can reveal about r
tions of power, death, and regeneration. I take issue with Bruce Kapferer's
cent proposition that sorcery is a creative practice through which hu
beings make and remake their lives. [sorcery, countersorcery, ritual healin
funeral symbolism, South India, Tamil people]
The anthropology of sorcery has changed during the 20th century. T

change occurred when Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of the ethno
method, debunked the prevailing assumption that sorcery was a manifes
primitive irrationality. Instead, what Malinowski discovered among the Trobr

of the Western Pacific was that sorcery was a pragmatic practice, a logical me
overcoming the uncertainties of human life (1922, 1948). His student, E

Pritchard (1937), shielded the practice from Western scientific prejudices by
that Azande sorcery in Africa was, first and foremost, a social fact expressing
conflicts and contradictions in their social system. When anthropologist
that sorcery accusations thrive in times of rapid social change, they proposed
positive function: sorcery (and this applied to witchcraft as well) served to in
forces of disorder and chaos deployed by colonial and postcolonial politic

mies (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Douglas 1970; Marwick 1982; Redfiel
It is Bruce Kapferer who recently launched a radical attempt to remove an

gering charges of primitivism from sorcery (1997). On the basis of extensive
in Sri Lanka, he asks anthropologists to consider sorcery as a creative phe
that defies categorization, a body of practices that is concerned "with the for
man action," "sociality," the "contingency and magicality of human exist

tentionality," "consciousness," "the body," and above all with the ways
which human beings constitute their life worlds (1997:1-8). Whereas late
tury evolutionists argued that sorcery was false knowledge that would be
by science and modern technology, Kapferer maintains, "Sorcery is often fou

a profound grasp of the dynamics involved in the practices of human beings"
fore, it is just as significant, if not more so, as a general comprehension of h
tion as a social science theory (1997:22).
It would be insensitive not to see the desirability of bringing such an orig
spective into anthropological discourse. I, for one, am wholeheartedly in
scrapping the ethnocentrism of the last two centuries and appreciating the co
tive role sorcery may play in empowering other people to make and rem
lives. This is especially important since Kapferer stresses that he is not offeri
American Ethnologist 27(1 ): 147-168. Copyright ? 2000, American Anthropological Association
american ethnologist
148
pragmatism. He argues that the dynamics of intentionality underlying Sinhalese sorcery are not propelled by calculated interest or utilitarian rationale but by a multivalent logic of motives and choices that condenses the plenitude of human action in the
world (1997:5).
The problem, it seems to me, is that in expanding the agenda of sorcery, Kapferer
may be weakening understanding of its local articulations. Since the practice of sorcery fulfills its purported telos (re-origination, regeneration, and reconstitution) of hu-
man beings-the specific realities associated with it, the personal conflicts and torments expressed in the language of spells, the subjective experiences of the sufferers,
and their reactions to a sorcery diagnosis or a prescribed cure, are not important. Indeed, they do not appear important to Kapferer. He minimizes the personal aspect of
sorcery for its sufferers. Experience comes into question when it is construed from cultural representations of spells, often obtained in conversations with sorcery specialists
and through Kapferer's observation and analysis of the countersorcery ritual. As a result, the claim that sorcery empowers and regenerates is not always supported by eth-
nographic evidence. In fact, the claim is sometimes contradicted by participants.

When Kapferer elicits multiple points of view, his readers often realize that the people
concerned with sorcery cannot articulate or are not aware of its alleged powers. In
short, what passes as a Sinhalese theory of human action aligns more with Kapferer's
own summary of Sinhalese social practices: they have impact, they are directed into
the world, and they empower people.
In all fairness, this problem plagues not only Kapferer but also many current an-
thropologists making use of the phenomenological approach. This almost exclusive

focus on general human experience, predominantly physical, as opposed to (intrinsically prevaricating) thoughts and the mind that creates them, seems to diverge from
the need to ask other people what they see, feel, think, understand, and so on. That
would be fine if phenomenology could illuminate the subjectivity of the Other. But to
claim that any engagement with the world is first and foremost "grounded in embodiment," as Thomas Csordas does (1994:7; see also Desjarlais 1992, 1996), seems to
me unsatisfying; it leaves out at least two dimensions that define major parameters of
the human experience, reflexivity (whether as light intimations or deep convictions)
and discursivity.
The failure to attend ethnographically to other peoples' "points-of-view" may
pose another risk. Anthropologists may lose their understanding of the implications of
various forms of social practices they locate. Kapferer himself tries to preempt such
criticism when he writes, "Sorcery is ... neither moral nor immoral . . . ordering or
disordering, creative or destructive ... [but] is specifically the power that human beings exercise" (1997:263). This is a surprising consolation coming from the scholar
who once argued that ritual was "illusory and mystifying of the objective conditions
of human existence" (1983:5), and who also maintained that the rhetorics of Sinhala
Buddhist nationalism behind the 1983 anti-Tamil riots were predicated on the violent
dynamics of the Suniyama sorcery rite (1988). On what grounds can Sinhalese sorcery discourses now escape the totalizing effects of ritual, their connection to ethnic
genocide, and any other complicated, unexpected, or unwanted consequence?

This question is prompted by my research on sorcery and countersorcery in the
south Arcot district of Tamilnadu, South India. My documentation supports many of
Kapferer's insights. The Tamils are quite clear that sorcery is power. Sorcery's complete
cycle-from the initial diagnosis to the successful defeat of spells-opens new forms
of consciousness. While casting doubt on Kapferer's earlier claim that the self of a pa-
tient is simply or automatically reconstituted according to the sequential, objective
a funeral to counter sorcery in South India
149
structure of a healing ritual, like a Sinhalese exorcism (1979a, 1979b, 1983:

1 79-226), Tamil countersorcery rituals verify his current argument that sorcery "highlights that truly extraordinary capacity of human beings... to construct and transform
their life situations" (1997:xi-xii). In Tamil countersorcery, the successive manipulation of symbolic forms does not appear to produce similar inner transformations. Instead, participants infuse the ritual process with highly specific, felt significances cre-
ated from existential predicaments. This free-form engagement, fashioned in direct

relation to personal experience, makes it possible for ordinary Tamil villagers to re-
constitute themselves and their realities.
In the ethnographic case that follows, I detail the complex workings of such
agency. My goal is to show that Tamil countersorcery contains consequences far beyond the freedom to author one's own transformations. Indeed, at the heart of Tamil
countersorcery is a paradox whereby the participants' relatively unrestricted inventiveness is articulated with strong imagery of a predominantly destructive, even self-
destructive, nature. Although creative-everyone makes up his or her own analysis-Tamil countersorcery is not good to "constitute life worlds" as Kapferer implies it
is in Sri Lanka (1997:1-8). The practice aims to exclude or, in Tamil, remove someone
else from social life and may also cause the destruction of one's own personal identity. Such power can result in a form of death for the person who employs it.
the outer configuration of Tamil sorcery

The scarcity of South Indian ethnographic documentation on sorcery may not be
surprising; as Reverend Carl Gustave Diehl noted in 1956, in Tamilnadu the topic
evokes widespread "disgust and hatred" (1956:268).' Much as John Beattie observed,
of sorcery among the Nyoros in Africa, "the less it is spoken of the better" (1963:28).
All this may explain why, in Tamilnadu, drums do what voices should not. A gloss for
the denigrated practice of sorcery is cahatai (the largest of the drums played by Untouchables at death).2 Like that mortuary drum, sorcery and countersorcery in Tamilnadu alert everyone to a form of killing, a presumed action that unleashes mystical,
malevolent forces that aim to disempower or eliminate another person. Even if victims
are not physically killed, their opponents intend them to be rendered socially dead.
Given these dire consequences, it is no wonder then that in my 14 months of

fieldwork I heard no one admit to having paid a sorcerer to harm anyone else. I never
witnessed the execution of a sorcery spell or met a sorcerer (mantiravati: one who
says mantras). Despite the fact that this unidentified sorcerer was always somebody
else, that spells appeared to be wholly imaginary, and that feelings of disbelief, fear,
and abhorrence surrounded the entire subject, I learned that sorcery verdicts consti-
tuted a significant percentage (approximately a third) of the divining seances that

male practitioners, known in Tamil as camis, held on a regular basis. I also observed
that these camis performed countersorcery rituals on an impressive scale, and I tried
to learn why.
These practitioners are independent religious entrepreneurs who have received-from various South Indian goddesses-the ability to interpret the signs (kuri
collutal) beyond ordinary human knowledge. All six camis I worked with obtained
their powers during deep personal crises that culminated in life-changing initiatory vi-
sions.3 This was especially true for a frail, 55-year-old man with clear eyes and a
warm smile whom I shall refer to as Nagaji. One morning, nine years prior to our
meeting, he was on his daily round selling milk. According to him, the following oc-
curred:
150
On that day, I left home earlier than usual to sell milk because my wife and I had had a
fight. Those days we were often not on speaking terms. On my way to town, a beautiful lady appeared to me, asking me to follow her to a clump of thorn bushes. I did, but
she disappeared. I heard a voice that said, "Don't stay here," and I fell unconscious.
When the villagers me and woke me up, I realized that I had been lying in these thorny
bushes for three days.
Returning to the same spot, Nagaji had a second revelation; the goddess Sakti,
creator of the world, disclosed that it was she who had invited him "to follow her."
This time the goddess did not appear in a vision; as Nagaji explained, she "descended" upon his body. She wanted him to "do good for people." By this, he understood
her to mean that he had been chosen to serve her for life. After this second apparition,
Nagaji broke up with his wife, renounced sexual love altogether, and dedicated himself to the service of his new mistress, the goddess. He began to enter trances regularly, which allowed him to fuse with his goddess. This way he could expose matters
hidden to people, identify the causes of any persistent sickness, and prescribe remedial ritual measures. Word of Nagaji's new gift spread throughout the south Arcot dis-
trict and beyond. Soon, his regular clients built a small sanctuary, dedicated to his
goddess, on the spot where she originally appeared to him near the bustling town of
Gingee.
It was at homemade shrines like this one that I observed camis, like Nagaji, informing their petitioners that they suffered from what is known in Tamil as eval. Eival
means command and implies that people are victims of sorcery spells. Over time, I
came to learn that eval always required three participants.
First, the eval involved a sorcerer whose name was not disclosed but whose practices were common knowledge to specialists like Nagaji. The effectiveness of the spe-
cialist's responses depended upon it. In order to cast his command, this sorcerer was
said to shape little effigies in the forms of his victims. To activate these figures with hu-
man life-force (uyir), he dotted their bodies, especially the eyes, with a black substance (mai) concocted from the boiled and charred skulls of first-born sons.4 Observ-
ing ritual precautions and avoiding pollution,5 the original sorcerer directed his
commands into these effigies; this damaged his victim's ability to move, speak, or re-
produce. His commands were quite specific. There was tampanam, the command
that paralyzed; vay kattu, the command that tied the mouth; petanam, the command
that brought marital divorce; or maranam, which could actually kill (see Diehl
1956:269 for other commands).6
The camis told me the sorcerer did not merely activate his malevolence through
the impersonal forces I have described. His true expertise resided in his ability to re-
cruit the services of specific demons known in Tamil as peys. Generally, peys describe spirits of people who are barred from transitioning into the hereafter because
they have met untimely deaths (ahalamaranam) (Caplan 1989; Nabokov 1997; Reiniche 1975). Rather than being ordinary victims of this inauspicious (turmaranam)
fate, however, most sorcery demons are what Gananath Obeyesekere calls-in reference to the Sinhalese yakas-demons, "named beings in the pantheon, with fairly
clear-cut identities and myths of origin" (1981:1 21). Many demons turned out to be of
tutelary lineage who in that respectable role protected the fertility and the health of
the descent group. I was told that the female demons were also avatars of the goddess
KalT. My camis friends agreed that KalT was involved in casting most spells; some
claimed that sorcerers preferred her assistance to that of peys.7
The way the goddess, or her demonic manifestations, took command was reminiscent of her initiatory techniques: she appeared before targeted victims and
151
commanded their line of sight. Although she appeared to cami Nagaji as a beautiful
woman, in the presence of targeted victims of sorcery she became a terrifying, dishev-
eled, blood-dripping creature. She cast no seductive glances; instead, she stared with
the destructive force of the evil eye. I was told that, for a split second victims could
glimpse the malevolence streaming at them. This instantaneous awareness infused

them with fear (payam), a dangerous lapse: in Tamilnadu, as Margaret Trawick noted,
"To submit to payam is to lose control, to come under another's power, to let part or
all of one's life flow away" (1990:190; see also Caplan 1989:55). In the context of sorcery attacks, the fear removes from the self its natural ability to command, so that vic-
tims of the goddess's evil eye, instead of gaining heightened sight and control over the
hidden signs of life, lost focus and sank into a helpless fog and disempowerment.
Sorcery in Tamilnadu incriminated not just a sorcerer and his demons but a third
participant as well, the person or persons who deliberately ordered and paid for the
spell. In their divinations, the camis never identified them publicly, so that the consultants were the only ones who could answer the paramount question, "Who did it?"
The key to this discourse lay in these people who could unlock the mysteries of their
own afflictions; therefore, I will relate the experience of a person who believed she
had been victimized by sorcery. First, I must emphasize that this village woman I call
Laksmi was not a typical target of sorcery spells. Money and property are commonly
at stake in sorcery suspicions, men-particularly well-off, urban men-are the main

protagonists of this discourse.8 But as exceptions can confirm the rule, it was this tall,
thin, and powerless woman with sad eyes and a ragged sari who first revealed to me
the emotional conflicts and personal torment that found catharsis in the conviction
that she was under another's command.
the plight of Laksmi

Laksmi was a low-income, Untouchable (Paraiyan) woman in her late twenties
living in the western part of south Arcot. Nine years before I met her she began experiencing convulsions, jerking and shivering on the dirt floor of her single-room house.
One day they were so severe a neighbor alerted Laksmi's mother, but Laksmi was
soon unconscious. Momentarily, Laksmi returned to her senses; she then collapsed
into a deep sleep-grinding her teeth and suffering from nightmares. In the morning,
when Laksmi refused food, her mother sent for a local priest who whipped her with
freshly-cut margosa leaves-a plant imbued with powers to ward off affliction. The
next day, Laksmi felt better and resumed work in the peanut fields.
Over the next few years, Laksmi continued to suffer from chronic convulsions
and pain in her arms and legs. She grew thin and weak. Three of her four children
died. Alarmed, her father took her to a nearby village where a temple priest made an
amulet (tdyattu)-a thin piece of copper foil that he engraved with protective symbols
and rolled up in a small cylindrical case for Laksmi to tie around her arm. But she continued to suffer. In spite of his fears of the medical bureaucracy, her father took her to
the Tindivanan Government Hospital about seven kilometers from his village. After
waiting for two days, Laksmi was diagnosed with epilepsy (valippu). Over time, prescription drugs were unable to control her convulsions.
For Laksmi's parents, the doctor's failure to cure or help her confirmed their sus-
picion that Laksmi was afflicted with a different kind of illness. In Tamilnadu, it is
common knowledge that bio-medical treatment has no therapeutic effect against af-
flictions caused by supernatural or moral agencies (see Hiebert 1983 for a detailed
taxonomy). In this case, the only cure is a ritual procedure, but one must first identify
152
the cause of the affliction. To do this, Laksmi's parents decided to consult someone to
say kuri and settled on cami Nagaji, who was known for decoding such signs.
Nagaji revealed that Laksmi suffered from a command. Although he did not
name the sorcerer, he blamed a demon named Katteri. Katteri was the ghostly spirit of
a woman who died in pregnancy (or childbirth) and now vented her fury by attacking
other childbearing women, snatching their unborn babies and small children.
During my first visit to her home two weeks later, Laksmi agreed with Nagaji's
explanation of the cause of her suffering. But for her, the real suffering did not come
from any sorcerer or demon. Unlike the cami, she was not concerned with the technical aspects of the original spell. Instead, she was disturbed by the personal and social
ramifications of the cami's diagnosis: someone had tried to hurt her. In the privacy of
her small, dilapidated hut, I learned that she had a good reason for suspecting that
someone did not wish her well.
At age 16, Laksmi had married a drunk who squandered her dowry and beat her.
After three unhappy years, she returned to her parents. She was 20 when she began
seeing another man whom she addressed as "my husband." Over the years, she bore
four children, three of whom died in infancy. Five days after she delivered their fourth
child, the man returned to his wife; he had already been married. It was then that Lak-
smi began experiencing the convulsions.

For Laksmi, the "husband's" abrupt desertion was clear evidence that her jealous
rival, the "husband's" wife, had resorted to sorcery to win him back. But Laksmi never
took advantage of Nagaji's recommended exorcism to remove the spell. Was the diagnosis vindicating on its own? Did she hope the sorcery would weaken, and her
lover would come back without further effort or expense? Why did she seem so passive about her victimization?
A month later, Laksmi visited Nagaji for a second consultation-this time in private. On that occasion, he confirmed that both the rival wife and the "husband" were
plotting against her. To my surprise, this news seemed to energize her. During our initial conversations, Laksmi yearned for the man's return, now she lashed out, "I don't
care whether he dies. I would not cut my marriage necklace (tali; the rite that turns a
Tamil woman into a widow) since he never tied it anyway." Only now did I discover
that Laksmi never married her "husband." She still wore the marriage badge from her
first, legal husband. Although Laksmi's "husband" could have wed her-polygamy
being illegal but not uncommon in Tamilnadu-he did not.
Nagaji's words carried weight with Laksmi because they confirmed what she suspected, that her lover left of his own free will and was not coming back. Laksmi had
no legal recourse; they were not married. Nor could Laksmi have made a case to get
him back. By Tamil standards, she had deprived his true wife of her marital rights.
Only when she fully accepted this finite rejection was she ready to undergo Nagaji's
treatment.
the inner configuration of Tamil sorcery

By following Laksmi's case and seven others like it, I gathered that sorcery suspicions were initially formulated on the basis of known resentments or jealousies. Gen-
erally, the inital suspects were familiar personal enemies-for example, people one
had offended by reneging on financial obligations or marital transactions. Therefore,
it was not surprising that these people were at the root of one's suffering. Such revela-
tions were often met with resignation (Lambek 1993:262-263). The sorts of intolerable victimization that did justify immediate action incriminated loved ones whom it
was too emotionally painful or frightening to suspect. Only when one confronted the
153
agonizing realization that these intimates tried to assume command over the relation-
ship was one impelled to mount a counterattack. The experience of being manipulated and rejected by relatives and lovers provided the necessary level of emotional
pain and strength of conviction for defending oneself.
It was not simply a sociology of insoluble conflicts or a history of unprecedented
changes that seemed to fuel this Tamil sorcery discourse. Rather, it was a private
logic, a psychology of painful revelations. One was forced to see what one suspected
but could not accept or internalize. This state of blindness conforms with what read-
ers have now learned about the key condition of sorcery victimization; these commands grip people, like Laksmi, causing them to feel fear, the emotion that, according
to cami Nagaji, tricks them. This emotion prevents them from seeing the negative
forces heading their way: from discerning, for example, that they no longer existed for
the father of their children and from acknowledging that a person took deliberate
measures to eliminate them from the world. Their inability to face such a personal repudiation becomes the cause of their suffering with such symptoms as paralysis, mutism, frantic trances, convulsions, nightmares, violent head or stomach aches, and in-
fertility. This Tamil logic is clear: what human beings do not or cannot see, what
remains hidden from people, ends up stalking and commanding them.
To arrest this degenerative process and regain the capacity for independent action, victims must be empowered to see what is blocking them. This is precisely what
the camis' decoding seances begin to do. But kuri is only a diagnosis, a first step. Now
I address the ritual that finalizes this drawn-out process that gives people, like Laksmi,
a chance to regain command over themselves.

the countersorcery ritual
The countersorcery rites that I observed were invariably carried out on new or
full moons by the same camis who delivered the diagnoses of sorcery in the first place.
In camis' minds, the ritual I am about to describe was considered to be a counterat-
tack on an opposing sorcerer. To neutralize his spell, they must strike back in precisely the same manner he had operated.9 But neither ritual terminology nor practice
corroborated the camis' suggestion of the cosmological dimension to their confrontations with sorcerers and demons. Normally, the procedure to counteract an evil com-
mand is simply glossed as kalippu, which means removal, casting out, or rejection
(Fabricius 1972[1779]:35). The word also describes rites regularly performed in
households to ward off evil eyes. In the domestic context, circular hand motions draw
the troublesome malevolence into absorbing, purifying substances that either leave
no residue, like camphor lumps lit just outside the home, or that can be discarded,
like cooked rice (Maloney 1976; Pocock 1973). The same logic applies to the countersorcery rite; sorcery victims have been likewise incapacitated through visual
means, by sorcery demons rather than envious neighbors.
Visual assaults by sorcery demons require a more elaborate intervention. Human
eye-focused malevolence is often considered involuntary, a subconscious witching

power, if you will. On the other hand, demons are consciously intent on doing harm.
While the effects of human-cast evil eyes are relatively benign and may be neutralized without help from specialists, demonic gazes can kill. Their removal entails a
complex rite that borrows its process and symbols from the Tamil mortuary ritual.10
To initiate the kalippu ritual, the camis duplicate for each patient one small effigy
(pavai) that, it is believed, the original sorcerer shaped. This occurs at midnight, the
hour the original spell was cast. Because the original commands were personalized
attacks, they require customized counter-procedures. The camis fashion the seven-
154
inch effigies using rice or wheat dough, dung, clay, or ashes from funeral grounds.
Each effigy is encoded with the same iconographic characteristics as the original.
These effegies also share the dominant features associated with demons: protruding
tongues rouged with red vermillion powder, bulging eyes, and oversized sexual organs.
By looking at these incarnations of the invisible forces commanding them, patients can begin to objectify them. A symbolic separation is also encoded into the
crafting of the effigies; many are placed on their backs in a winnowing fan, known in
Tamil as muram, or in a pot with their limbs drooped over the rim. The fans, used
daily to sort grain from chaff, are markers of differentiation between pure and impure.
Elsewhere in India, anthropologists have noted that winnowing fans used in ritual de-
note what Christopher Fuller calls "the separation out of polluting and inauspicious
elements that can then be cast away" (1992:193). During Tamil funeral processions
for caste Hindus, I observed village washermen carrying such fans in order to signify,
as a specialist told me, the living distancing themselves from polluting corpses. In the
context of countersorcery rites, the fans underscore the dissociation between afflicted
and healthy selves.

The camis finish the effigies by dotting them with charcoal paste to open the eyes
(kan ti?appu) and bestow life (uyir) on them; again, this links sight, vitality, and consciousness. After this activating process (known in Tamil as seyvinai seytal),11 the
camis draw, with yellow turmeric powder, a cakkaram, or protective enclosure,
around each patient. What follows is a funeral for the effigy.
First, uncooked rice is poured into a cloth stretched above the effigy; this way the
patient can feed the doll. At a real funeral, this action is performed by living kin on be-
half of their dead. Prior to the formal procession to the cremation grounds, a towel
stretched above the corpse is filled with vaykkarici (literally, mouth rice). Consanguineal and affinal kin each grip a fistful of vaykkarici and circle the corpse to feed it.
"At times of separation," one female consultant said, "one always gives uncooked
rice."12
At exorcisms, however, the cloth is dropped, enshrouding the doll, whereupon a

rupee coin is tied to one corner of the cloth. The knot is then abruptly ripped off. This
seems derivative of funeral symbolism, where the village barber tears off the knot
(mutittuntu) containing a rupee coin (kal panam) just before a cremation or a burial.
As one barber explained, "At birth the god Brahma gives man a knot, the umbilical
cord. On the last day of life that knot must be removed. In doing so, the dead person's
relationships are torn apart."
The next phase is even more suggestive. The camis have their patients carry a
new clay pot full of water on their right shoulders, moving clockwise around the effigy
three times. Before the first circuit the camis punch a small hole in the pot so that
water drips out. By the third circuit, the pot is empty. Then the camis tell patients to
smash the pot on the ground.
At Hindu funeral rites there also exists the breaking of the trickling pot (kalikutam
utaittal) (Good 1991:135). The chief mourner, usually the son, concludes three circles
of his mother's or father's corpse by breaking the pot. A village barber, whose ceremonial duty is to punch holes in the vessel, told me, "At birth we come out of a pot,
our mother's womb. The breaking of this pot symbolizes the end of life" (for a similar
exegesis, see Srinivas 1952:151). In the funeral context, this action preceeds internment or cremation and climaxes the ceremony. Here the camis set the cloth covering
the effigy on fire while its victim stares intensely at the flames. They then invite their
155
patients to work for their own recovery, handing them metal nails to insert into the
doll's arms and legs.

After this, the kalippu ritual is essentially over. The doll is dead, and the spell is
neutralized. The camis light a small lamp near the crucified effigy, reminiscent again
of funeral practices. Once a human death has occurred, an oil lamp burns for 16 days
until all ceremonial responsibilities have been fulfilled to assure the soul a successful
journey to the afterworld. But a larger finale still lies ahead. In Sinhalese sorcery rituals, according to Gananath Obeyesekere, this "is generally achieved by cutting some
object" (1976:205). Tamil camis have their patients crush limes in the northeastern
corner of their enclosures. They light a camphor lump atop a pumpkin and wave the
flame around their faces. After smashing the pumpkin on the ground, the camis have
them chop up the broken pieces with a large knife.
In Tamil rituals, limes and pumpkins are common deflectors of the inauspicious.
Crushing pumpkins concludes beginning rites like consecrations for new houses;
stomping on limes is associated with the blessing of newly purchased vehicles, such
as bicycles and rickshaws. In the countersorcery ritual, such actions seem to protect
patients as they recover the capacity for volition and mobility, since the camis now ordered them to hop three times over the winnowing tray.
Close to dawn, the camis carry the used or dead effigies to the nearby river bank.
Because they insisted that only men could join in this expedition, I never saw what
happened. But the cami Nagaji said that near the water he enclosed the dolls in another rice flour circle. "This cakkaram," he told me, "was a form of arrest. It meant to
say, 'Do not come back!' " Then he lit some dry brush and cremated them all.
interpretations of the funeral symbolism

On at least 36 separate occasions, I watched five different exorcists perform the
ritual described above. All of them followed the same sequence of actions and manipulated the same symbols. The camis first objectified the invisible forces of sorcery
affliction. Then they employed the winnowing tray to dissociate patients from the
negative powers. Next they borrowed from funerary actions like the feeding of the
corpse, the tying of the knot, the breaking of the trickling pot, and the cremation. It
was not merely the exercise of violence against sorcery effigies or their abandonment
in the "jungle" that extirpated their malevolence, as appears to be Sinhalese practice

(Kapferer 1983, 1988, 1997; Yalman 1964:126). It was the fact that kalippu rituals
were richly encoded with mortuary symbolism, consistent with W. T. Elmore's description of one method of exorcism he observed in 1913 from the adjacent state of
Andhra Pradesh. There, an image of dough was placed in a pot that was then interred
in the funeral grounds, with the "usual burying ceremonies" (1984:50, emphasis
added).
But contemporary Tamil removals do not actually incorporate all the usual burying ceremonies. They skip rites that are integral to real funerals in south Arcot. An examination of what is left out confirms that this ritual works to exorcise outlandish and
unwanted forces.
First, the countersorcery rite differs from a funeral by the conspicuous absence of
formalized mourning. Whenever a death occurs, the household's women huddle in

arm-linked clusters near the corpse to sway, moan, weep, beat their chests, and intone their lamentations-a genre of song called oppari, meaning comparison. In
metaphors and hyperboles, their mournful words contrast a happy past before death
with a desolate present. The songs honor the deceased as the prototype of the ideal
kin, deploring his or her absence.
156
Second, the kalippu ritual omits other representations of the social order that
constitute a real funeral. There are no male family members to observe strict pollution
taboos, no grandchildren to circle the corpse ceremonially while holding a torch

(neypantam), no inlaws to make ceremonial prestations, and no sons to perform the
breaking of the trickling pot. It is as if the individual whose funeral is underway were a
complete stranger, with no social identity or kinship role, indeed no kin at all.
What is additionally striking, almost shocking, about this funeral is that, save for
the final lighting of the lamp, it pays no attention to the fate of the soul. This is in sharp
contrast to the prototypical Hindu funeral that adds a second, crucial ceremony,
known in Tamil as karumati, which dispatches the departed (preta) to the hereafter as
an honored ancestor or pir (Hopkins 1992; Knipe 1977; Malamoud 1982; Parry
1994). All preoccupation with re-incorporating the deceased into the extended kinship web of ancestors, which for some scholars constitutes the hallmark of Hinduism,
is missing entirely (Knipe 1990). This facsimile of a funeral that begins with no emotional comparison and no public display from the living kinship community, ends by
abolishing all that the person once was.
But who does this pseudo funeral seek to eliminate? To answer this question
readers must take a second look at the effigies themselves, since it is the dolls that actually undergo the death rites. As readers will see, it is in the variable meanings invested in these symbols that the real effectiveness of this funeral resides.
Although the camis encoded the effigies with distinctive features, all looked simi-
lar: greedy (tongues out), shameless (oversized sexual organs), and scary (bulging
eyes). Save for their size, their iconography was typical of the giant-size, horizontal ef-
figies sculpted out of mud for ceremonial purposes in south Arcot (see Hiltebeitel
1991:321-324; Meyer 1986:167; Nabokov 1995:425, footnote 11). They represent
demons who threaten the order of social and cosmic worlds. The demons must die,
and their anthropomorphic representations are given life for the sole purpose of being
destroyed. Emphasizing this destiny is the fact that their heads, like those of corpses at
funeral rites, generally face south toward the realm of Yama, God of death.
As with the miniature effigies fashioned by sorcery healers, the healing dolls of
the camis are clearly modeled after malevolent powers. In Laksmi's case, Nagaji fashioned her effigy holding a decapitated baby in its right hand-a representation of the
demon Katteri. He also made the demon, Varaiki, identified by her distended belly and
streaming hair, and the demon Kutti Caittan (small Satan) holding his characteristic
fork. Varaki makes her victim's bodys swell and Kutti Caittan is a Christian demon,
who, Nagaji claimed, killed "whomever the sorcerer ordered him to do."
This iconography is consistent with popular knowledge of these demons and
common understanding of countersorcery rituals. Since in Tamil cosmology demons
are beings who have perished before enjoying marriage or childbirth, they have no direct descendants who can perform their funeral and post-funeral rites (Knipe
1990:124). One sure way to hasten the untimely dead from this world, where they
trouble the living through sorcerers' spells, would be mortuary rites. Since the ritual
aims to remove sorcery, it would appear that Elmore was correct when he understood
in 1913 that "the demon has been left buried" (1984[1913]:49-50). His interpretation
also explains why the living remain unmoved by the demons' deaths.
According to both Nagaji and Laksmi, however, the effigy represented someone
other than a demon. Furthermore, their divergent interpretations suggested that ritual
symbols could be invested with contradictory meanings and still have the desired effect.
When I asked Nagaji about the functioning of his countersorcery rite, he told me,
157
That woman was seriously sick. She almost died. The kalippu was her last chance to
return to life. The goddess restored her life .... She [Laksmi] is coming back to us....
She is like a new born. Because she died we had to perform her funeral and give the
things required for a death ritual.... The doll was a representation of the lady....
This ritual was not dangerous for her. On the contrary, it brought relief and a new life.
... The message to the lady was, "Forget about your past! It is dead now, you are entering a new life where things will be better."
The cami made it crystal clear that his ritual action was not simply or primarily con-
cerned with expunging a demon. More importantly, he stood in as primogenitor by

giving life to Laksmi through the doll. In the role of funeral specialist, he officiated over
the effigy's death. Finally, he functioned as mid-wife for Laksmi's rebirth, giving her
the tools (such as nails) to incapacitate the forces that commanded her. He guided her
as she pierced, crushed, smashed, and sliced her own way to recovery and personal
freedom. Through this symbolic process he facilitated her re-incarnation, destroying
her old life and reconceiving her into profoundly altered conditions of existence.
Rather than performing a healing rite, he seemed to have carried out a rite of passage,
a twice-born experience that moves a person into a second existence entirely dissimilar from the first (Van Gennep 1909). Nagaji's own interpretation followed customary
understandings of mortuary rites. For instance, the French Indologist Charles

Malamoud argues that the old Brahmanical funeral rite was "the samskara par excellence" (1982:445). The term, which he glosses as "perfectionement," describes
Brahmanical rites of passage that initiated individuals into purified ontological states
(1982:445). In modern ethnographic contexts, other writers confirm that it is the
timely death that constitutes the truest form of this perfecting (Kaushik 1976; Parry
1994).13
Laksmi interpreted the effigy's symbolic funeral differently from Nagaji. At first,
she claimed to have only a minimal, perfunctory memory of what had transpired. "To
avoid karma [here meaning bad result]," she said, "the cami dealt with the spell in the
appropriate way." Except for chopping the pumpkin, she simply recalled Nagaji saying something like, "Today is your last day of suffering. From now on you won't have
any convulsions." This was a relief, because, at that moment, "I was trembling. I was
experiencing the symptoms that normally come before my convulsions."
When I probed what she made of her participation in what had paradoxically
been characterized by Nagaji as a life-giving funeral, Laksmi snapped at me, "You ask
why I did that death ceremony? I already told you, to break with my 'husband.' I
wanted nothing more to do with him." She needed no decoding of symbols to tell her
that its purpose was the ritualized death of her living relationship with this "husband"
who had never married her and had returned to his legal wife when Laksmi bore their
fourth child. To eradicate the cause of those excruciating negations of her being, she
enacted the only familiar ritual known to provide a sense of meaningful closure. This
funeral gave her permission and power to initiate, retroactively, an end to a relationship that her lover had already denied her.
To effect this separation, she participated in a rite that, in social reality, no Tamil
woman in the south Arcot district would ever be allowed to perform, or even to witness. At real funerals, a woman cannot break the trickling pot or watch a cremation.14
Female mourners are prohibited from entering the funeral grounds and must remain
within the family threshold where their mourning clusters express sorrow over the loss
of relatives or loved ones.15 For her part, however, Laksmi sat alone in the middle of a
circle where she neither cried, nor wailed, nor evoked better times. Instead, she had
american ethnologisl
158
assumed the ritual posture of a male mourner, coolly officiating over her "husband's"
definitive removal from her life.
countersorcery as open-ended therapy

Laksmi was not the only participant to contradict Nagaji's interpretation. Over
time, I elicited radically different exegeses from camis and patients. I also discovered
that the kalippu ritual contained transformative resonances that exceeded its apparent
purpose. It could become an attractive cure for those who were not victims of sorcery.
The morning after having a kalippu done (his second in five years), the son of a village
school teacher told me,
I did the kalippu not because a sorcerer placed a spell on me. He did not. Not because
there was a demon on me. There was none. I did the kalippu because I was getting
crazy. I read too much, I think too much. I needed to forget, to let go (pohavita) of my
thoughts, that's all.
For this young man, the removal rite was not the way to end an unfinished relationship
or the way to rebirth; it was simply a way to obtain release from the command of a selfabsorbing mind.
That ritual symbols do not communicate identical understandings to all participants would not have come as a surprise to Victor Turner who, first and most eloquently, argued that such symbols are multivocal, that is, susceptible of many mean-
ings (1967). This was because they contained formal associative properties and a
special capacity to refer to both sensory phenomena and normative values (also see
Laderman 1987). In the case of Tamil countersorcery rituals, however, I found myself
with such radically different exegeses from camis and patients that they did not seem
reducible to the peculiar multivocal or equivocal characteristics of symbols. In fact,

this Tamil therapy seemed better characterized by Jean-Marie Gibbal's description of
the Ghimbala healing cult in Niger, "To each his or her own truth, almost" (1994:
108).
The symbols invoked during Tamil countersorcery mean different things to different people because participants fill them with meanings drawn from and relevant to
their own individual experiences. In other words, in the Tamil case it is not symbols
that in and of themselves formulate the causes of affliction and shift participants to
new conditions of confidence, integration, or health, as was proposed by Turner.

Rather, it is people who infuse these constructs with highly personal meanings. On
the face of it, this insight is not new. In his research on religious symbols in nearby Sri
Lanka, Gananath Obeyesekere eloquently demonstrated that culture is the creation of
individuals who bestow certain symbols with private significance (1981:18). But, per-
haps because his formulation of culture is as much indebted to Sigmund Freud as to

Max Weber, Obeyesekere concentrates on those personal symbols-matted hair, demons, and so forth-that are said to have their roots in deep psychological dynamics,
thus eluding consciousness (1981:21). Although some Tamil rituals seem to crystallize primordial motivations (Nabokov 1996; 1997), this is not the case in the present
countersorcery ritual, which, as readers have seen, clearly addresses current emotional experiences and interpersonal dramas.
Central to the participants' understandings of how and why this therapy works in
such idiosyncratic ways is Sudhir Kakar's contention that while an Indian shaman
may symbolize symptoms, he does not translate them (1982:82). Let me review his
comparative study of Western psychoanalysis and Indian exorcisms based upon his
observations at the Balaji temple in the north Indian state of Rajasthan (1982).
159
A Western-trained psychoanalyst, Kakar reminds his readers that a customary

psychoanalytic cure is based on the assumption that mental or physical disorders can
be the symbolic expression of a personal or emotional problem that has eluded a patient's consciousness. This is why, Kakar adds, the psychoanalyst must "foster a selfreflective attitude in the patient toward his bodily signs or symptoms," a process that
involves concentrating on what he calls "the text of the mental illness-on its under-
standing, translation and genesis" (1982:81-82; emphasis in original). Kakar himself

is quick to point out that this is not what the Indian shaman does. The healing rituals
he saw performed at the Balaji temple "seem to be more concerned with the context
of the illness . . [with] connecting (or reconnecting) the individual with sources of
psychological strength available in his or her life situation" (1982:81-82; emphasis in
original). For Kakar, this shift in emphasis explained why "the special idiom" underlying the symptoms of sickness treated at Balaji "is left at the symbolic level without any
attempt at translation" (1982:82).

In my experience, however, Tamil sorcery camis were not concerned with re-integrating patients into their social fold, which seems to be the case at Balaji (and elsewhere in India; for example, see Carstairs and Kapur 1976). Working from the assumption that most sorcery victims cannot see or understand what is commanding
them, they concentrated on giving patients a text about their afflicted selves. Another
look at what the cami Nagaji tried to impart through his effigy-making activities makes
this clear.
For Nagaji, the little doll could only represent Laksmi because that was what it
had stood for in the original sorcerer's hands. Yet, Nagaji produced a different effigy;
he not only modeled it after Laksmi's physique but drew upon received demonic ico-
nography to portray her. Nagaji's work was reminiscent of the Cuna shaman whose
recitation of a birth incantation, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, eases difficult labors because it gives parturient women a "mythic language" to predicate and overcome the physiological duress of delivery (1963; see also Laderman 1987). Nagaji's
view of his cure was premised on the patient's receiving, if not exactly the same sort of
"language" Levi-Strauss is talking about, at least an expressive "image" derived from

Tamil mythology. Unlike the Cuna shaman, whose incantation invoked a social myth
that did not correspond to the patient's personal state, Nagaji fashioned his "representation of the lady" herself.
For this reason, I cannot agree with Sudhir Kakar when he writes that the Indian
shaman offers personal resolutions that are less individualistic than those provided by
the Western psychoanalyst (1982:82, 115-11 6). Far from focusing his therapy on the
social context of Laksmi's sickness, on roles she assumed, or her relationship with her
"husband," Nagaji presented her with a symbolic expression of the very problems that
eluded her awareness. In other words, he produced a personalized text about her afflicted self. True, he did not help her reconstruct her individual past with verbal associations, neither did he give a narrative shape to her conflicts. Instead, through his ef-
figy-making he objectified her interior state, causing her greed, jealousy, fear, and
sorrow to become transparently embodied in and to herself. By opening the eyes of
the doll, Nagaji intended Laksmi to see the negative feelings that disempowered and
blocked her from finding a way out. Much like the psychoanalyst praised by Kakar,
from Nagaji's perspective, he tried "to foster a self-reflective attitude in the patient"
(1982:81).
But, similar to Kakar's observation at Balaji, Nagaji did not translate his therapy.
He never told Laksmi, "Look lady! you need to focus on this image because it embod-
ies the kind of emotional motivations and longings you have been denying for too
160
long!" His kalippu ritual entailed no instructions, no intersubjective dialogue, practically no words at all.
This was why I found myself with different exegeses from camis and patients.
Without a didactic gloss, or clear-cut prescriptions as to how this ritual functioned,
patients read its open text from their own perspectives and vested interests. As Edward
Schieffelin might say, they were "completing" the symbols with meanings relevant to
their own experiences (1985:721). In the absence of an all-encompassing hermeneutics, they seemed freer to associate and project whatever commanded them onto the
ritual effigies. In that sense, this countersorcery cure fits Gananath Obeyesekere's
definition of a "standard ritual" that is used by patients in nearby Sri Lanka to express
different psychological conflicts because it "has sufficient flexibility to cope with
them" (1977:289). The Tamil countersorcery ritual symbols did not seem to formulate
the deep psychological dynamics that Obeyesekere found in Sinhalese exorcisms. Instead, they catalyzed hidden motivations that sprang from, and fueled, everyday dramas.
Because the participants were at liberty to infuse and personaliz

specific, felt significances created from their current situations, th
roborate Kapferer's recent argument that in Sri Lanka "sorcery

emphasis in original). Indeed, his contention that sorcery is the
beings exercise" (1997:263) and that it symbolizes "the potencies
change the circumstances of their lives" (1997:20-21) may ulti
open-ended procedures of Tamil countersorcery. This undecod
pragmatic
their own
I must
though he
practice through which people reconstitute their private

place in those worlds.
still disagree with Kapferer on the nature of sorcery pow
notes that myths, ideas, practices, and rituals related to
cated on "metaphors of the political-of violence, authority, com

tainment, division, and transgression" (1997:34; also 1988), he
released by Sinhalese sorcery as neither moral nor immoral. "No
"necessarily ordering or disordering, creative of the social or
(1997:263). As I will now show, in the Tamil case the transformative
power is always destructive; its regenerative capacity is and mu

cated on death and its role in Tamil culture.
the destructive powers of sorcery
The working cosmology reproduced and exploited by Tamil sorcerers and their
language of command draws upon and exerts forces that are fundamentally destruc-
tive and antisocial. Their effigy-making activities clearly abrogate the life-giving
power of the Hindu creator, Brahma. The activating substance of their spells comes
from the disinterment and dismemberment of the corpse of a first-born child, a body
that is a supreme symbol of generational continuity (Nabokov 1996). Their mantras

aim at disempowering and exiling some people from their social milieus. Their recruits are always the untimely dead, like the demon Katteri, who threaten the fertility
of women like Laksmi. Because Tamil sorcery is from beginning to end concerned
with the abortion of biological and social reproduction, it is compared to cahatai, the
funeral drum which, as one ritualist told me, "announces the loss of a human bond."
These details are consistent with a general understanding of sorcery. From my

consultants' perspectives, there was nothing moral about sorcery. It was true, they
conceded, that perpetrators had genuine reason to be frustrated by their victims' actions. But they were also quick to point out that these people's idea of equity was to
161
take command of those who failed to behave according to their expectations. In short,
everyone agreed that sorcery was not about rightful justice but about its dark side,
about exercising the wrong kind of power.
Paradoxically, in Tamilnadu the very people who tap into this commanding
power are not those who commission spells, but those who suffer from them. Readers
must never forget that Tamil sorcery is a speculative discourse with no recourse to ob-
jective reality; it is authenticated only by subjective impressions. Therefore, it is always a given perspective on what happens, on what, in this time and place, specific
people say, do, and what is done to them, on interpretations of the whole business of
real life events and personal dramas.
This perspective begins to crystallize when people are rejected by someone they
had not considered to be an enemy, and they did not wish to have for antagonist.
When at last they see (or as we might say project into) their rejecters in the demoniclooking effigies that are then crucified and cremated, they experience a kind of catharsis. The therapeutic powers derived from such a perspective go without saying.
People take command of their relationships and execute their executioners. Laksmi
realized that her "husband" had tried to erase her from his life and memory; she
sought an identical revenge, expelling him from her life for good.
This fits with Hildred Geertz's observation in Bali, "To fight sorcery you must sor-
cerize" (1995:16). Yet, one can go further, arguing that in Tamilnadu countersorcery
is the only sorcery that is actually commissioned. The perspective I have just described is the only one I was able to elicit: I never met a sorcerer, or anyone else, who
had paid for a spell. The funeral I have just detailed is the only empirical evidence of
removal that I could document. I never witnessed a spell's execution. Those who participated in countersorcery were casting the sole command of this discourse: only
they had activated the drums of death.
These repositional meanings go to the heart of a sorcery cosmology that is volatile itself, but in a bipolar way. The powers recruited by the original sorcerer to enforce his spells were the same as those powers that assisted the camis' destruction of
sorcery. While in the abstract, the distinct personalities of these supernaturals never
joined together-they were either demons or gods-in reality one could never be sure
what they were; they could be easily persuaded to switch sides. In such a worldview,
supernatural entities may be on your side one moment and against you the next. This
may also explain why a young woman could be subdued by her lover one moment
and vanquish him the next.
Even the birth-like transformations performed by the cami Nagaji were not without destructive import. The cami's intervention did not stop with making effigies but
with the unmaking and, more emphatically, with their funerals. To understand the full
significance of this mortuary treatment, let us explore the larger perspective of Hindu
funerals.
Many scholars have noted that Hindu mortuary rituals and their Brahmanical an-
tecedents seek to obliterate not just the physical remains of the dead but their personal characteristics and biographies as well. For example, Charles Malamoud describes the old Brahmanical crematory ritual as a "rite of suppression of the
deceased's worldly person" (1982:443, trans. mine), while Jonathan Parry wrote that
such representations still prevail in contemporary Benares: "No place is made in the
mortuary rites for a celebration of [the dead's] individual achievements; no eulogies
are delivered in praise of his particular virtues, and no recognition is given to the pass-
ing of a unique life" (1994:210). The Tamil funeral also attempts to efface the individuality of the deceased. What is ceremonially lamented is an idealized and some-
162
what stereotypical relative, what is officially commemorated is a member of a kin

group, and what is ritually preserved is an ancestor.
Readers begin to understand that Nagaji premised the rebirth he extended to his
patients on the repudiation of past experiences, previous relationships, and former

identities. This suggests that not merely patients, but camis like himself filled the
countersorcery ritual with meanings drawn from and relevant to their own individual
experiences. This cami personally underwent a rebirth following a death-like separation from his former self. In retrospect, one can see how Nagaji's entire therapeutic
philosophy was predicated on his own initiation as a recruit of the goddess.16 Conse-
quently, those who assimilated his therapeutic text, like the dead who undergo real
funerals, emerged newly born after his kalippu rituals, without biographies, senses of
continuity with the past, or personal memories. The resumption of life that Nagaji's
funeral facilitated, and the new relationships and pleasures that it anticipated in an
ongoing, revitalized existence were dependent upon a complete removal of all a person used to be.
This appeared to be Laksmi's experience. Before I left India, I paid a final visit to
her village. As her father led me to the peanut fields, I recognized her tall silhouette
among the group of women picking pods. She approached us with a broad smile, and
she and I sat under a scrawny tree. For the first time, she did most of the questioning,
asking about my daughter and nodding attentively. She never alluded to the circumstances of our original meeting at which she had been so miserable. Nor did she seem
to recall what had led her to consult cami Nagaji in the first place.
In the end, readers learn once again that sorcery is power. But, when used to re-
position the Tamil self this power is destructive. Its regenerative potential is always
bound up with death-of injurious others, the injured self, and whatever forces hold
people in their thrall. As in most Indian sacrificial rituals, the procuring of vitality inevitably depends on an initial act of destruction, a deadly deed.
My argument is not merely that spells and counterspells kill-that goes without
saying-but that Kapferer's analysis of sorcery assumes too much activeness on the
part of actors. Kapferer's idea that people actively strive to regenerate or reconstitute
themselves does not account for the complex relations of control and situations of
disempowerment that, for Tamil sufferers, constitutes much of the experienced pain
of sorcery victimization. I find his related focus on unified, objective representations
of spells and standard ritual performances questionable, to say the least, especially for
anthropology. In Tamilnadu, the casting of spells involves a wealth of motifs drawn
from relatively consistent representations: from mythology (the demon's biography),
from etiology (the taxonomies of sorcery sickness), and from anatomy (the eyes as the
locus of a person's vulnerability). But what creates the reality of sorcery in the Tamil
world, and activates its language of command, are messy, subjective dilemmas: people who attempt to eliminate others who leave them because they feel hurt and angry
and cannot stand that feeling. What authenticates the removing procedures is no enactment of a generalized will to create, but specific attempts to deal with, and destroy,
painful life situations. Understanding the ways through which human beings constitute their life worlds, as Bruce Kapferer seeks to do, is more like reaching out to discover where others are coming from, so to speak, rather than endowing social life
with generality and unrestricted activeness.
notes
Acknowledgments. Research for this article was conducted in Tamilnadu from Au

1990 through October 1991. It was supported by a Junior fellowship from the American
163
tute of Indian Studies in Chicago, for which I express my gratitude. An earlier version of this pa-
per was presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago and in the Department of Anthropology of Barnard College in 1997. I wish to thank my
colleagues at Princeton University-Vincanne Adams, Emily Martin, and Hildred Geertz-for

their encouragement and perceptive remarks. My thanks also go to the three anonymous reviewers-notably the reader who advised me to consult the work of Sudhir Kakar. I am grateful
to Peter Nabokov for editorial help and critical comments.
1. Save for two dated studies-that of W. T. Elmore's description of an exorcist ceremony
(1984:47-51) and Carl Diehl's review of Tamil printed handbooks on spells (1956:267334)-the topic of south Indian sorcery has gone virtually undocumented in the region's ethnography. Sorcery has been widely discussed in the ethnography of nearby Sri Lanka, however.
But Tamil and Sinhalese sorcery traditions differ in several important respects. While Gananath
Obeyesekere (1975, 1976) and Bruce Kapferer (1983, 1988, 1997) both present real evidence
for the practice of sorcery in Sri Lanka, I was only able to record imputations of sorcery in Tamil-
nadu. I never encountered the songs known as vas-kavi, which Obeyesekere describes as "the
most deadly form of sorcery practice in Sri Lanka" (1975:4). The key myths of Sinhalese sorcery
did not seem to function as chartering narratives for Tamil sorcery either (see Kapferer 1988,
1997). Instead, one of my consultants associated the origin of Tamil sorcery with the version of a
well-known Sanskrit story, relating King Daksa's (or Takkan in Tamil) exclusion of Lord Siva
from his sacrifice (Nabokov in press).
2. There are two other Tamil glosses for sorcery. The first is mantirikam, which Reverend
Diehl translated as "that which has to do with Mantras" (1956:267). Mantras are syllables,
words, formulas, names, curses, prayers, invocations, or songs that, when properly uttered, cre-
ate power (Padoux 1989). This power can be used for benevolent or malevolent ends. On the
one hand, mantras can help people secure a good marriage alliance, transfer to a better job, retrieve stolen property, and so on. On the other hand, mantras can destroy property, cripple an
enemy, or separate lovers. Although mantras can be learned by anyone from widely available
handbooks sold in train stations and bus stands, they are, as Diehl also observed, generally "in
the hands of professional people" (1956:268).
The second Tamil gloss for sorcery is pillicuniyam, which Diehl translated as "black
magic" (1956:267). The word is actually a compound derived from two foreign words. Pilli is
the Malayalese term for sorcery. It literally means embryo child (Wijesekera 1989:181), suggesting that the South Indian sorcerer's power derives not only from words or mantras but also from
substances, such as the corpses of unborn babies or infants. Cuniyam is the other word. It comes
from the Sanskrit sOnya, which means destruction, confirming that the sorcerer's activities are
indeed lethal.
3. For a detailed discussion of these specialists' initiatory visions, see Nabokov in press.
4. This belief is so entrenched that the corpses of first-born sons are not buried, as is the
case with most Tamil Hindus, but cremated instead. Early in the century, however, Edgar Thurston, the Superintendent of the Ethnographic survey of the Madras Presidency, observed that,
"among the Paraiyan (Untouchables), and some other castes, a first born child, if it is a male, is
buried near or even within the house, so that its corpse may not be carried away by a witch or
sorcerer, to be used in magic rites" (1906:271).
5. For instance, I was told that the sorcerer utters his commands at night while standing na-
ked in a water tank. Thurston reports a similar practice among the Pulluvan caste of Malabar
(1987[1909]:231). For another reference to sorcerers standing in water, see Diehl 1956:293.
6. For all of these spells the underlying principle is what James Frazer termed "sympathetic
magic," the notion common to many ritual traditions that "like produces like," that whatever is
said or done to the effigies affects their human targets (1965[1911-1915]:301). There is another
category of Tamil spells that corresponds to what Frazer called "contagious" magic, operating
on the principle that affliction is transmitted via physical contact. Known in Tamil as vaippu
(deposit), these spells involve infusing certain organic substances (egg, lime, copper foil) with
sickness or affliction and secretly placing them in the house of the victim or at a nearby crossroad. When human targets come into contact with these objects, the malevolent power begins
to work. The result is a slow but steady decrease of the victim's life-strength. Although this
164
procedure is by far the best known to Tamil lay people, it is eval, or the control acquired by the
sorcerer over his victims' images, which is the most common sorcery technique identified by
the camis.
7. Western readers may find the goddess's implication in this sorcery puzzling because
our dualist Western cosmologies forbid any possible confusion, or even collusion, between
God and evil (Russell 1977), but numerous scholars have observed that the Hindu worldview
tolerates such ambiguities. The noted historian of religion, Wendy O'Flaherty Doniger, characterizes the Hindu pantheon: "The opposition between the gods and demons is purely structural;
they are alike in all ways except that, by definition, they are opposed" (1976:64). In such a cosmology, the notion of deities as channels of sorcery is not a contradiction in terms (see also Tur-
stig 1985:71).
8. This is also the case in Sri Lanka, see Kapferer 1983:76; Obeyesekere 1975:12-14,
25-51.
9. When I pointed out that they had not actually witnessed the evil sorcerer's ritual,
camis replied that they would be guided step by step by their tutelary goddesses-man
whom, like KalT and Ankalaparamecuvari, were known throughout Tamilnadu for heroic ba
against demons. In this healing context, however their supernatural assistants were not the
desses who regularly spoke through them during their divining seances. For instance, Naga
terpreted signs with the help of Sakti twice a week, but the goddess KalT inspired
countersorcery rites. When acting as an exorcist, Nagaji did not attempt to identify with KalT
retained his own consciousness and personality.

10. Another example of how Tamil rituals may borrow from others involves the investi
of the family deity that, as I argue elsewhere, is predicated upon the key scenario of mar
(Nabokov 1996).
11. This is a metalinguistic phrase commonly used in Tamil grammar books; it literally
means: "making a verb active."
12. I never observed this prestation in contexts other than death, but I presume that the rice
is cooked and eaten by the recipient.
13. Nagaji's exegesis confirmed Margaret Trawick's recent observation that most Tamil
healing systems are rooted in the "idea. .. that there cannot be birth without death" (1992:1 32).
14. According to Louis Dumont, however, among the Piramalai Kallars of Madurai it is a
woman-either the widow or daughter of the deceased-who performs the breaking of the
trickling pot at the center of the village. The rite is repeated at the cemetery by the chief male
mourner (Good 1991:162).
15. I observed that, among low castes, close female relatives (especially daughters) were
allowed to follow the funeral procession to the village's boundary.
16. Nagaji may have predicated his countersorcery on the model of the prototypical
Hindu renouncer, or sannyasin, who, at the time of his initiation, performs his own funeral serv-
ice (Bloch and Parry 1982:13; Hopkins 1992:151).

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accepted February 22, 1999

final version submitted September 1, 1999
Isabelle Nabokov
Department of Anthropology
100 Aaron Burr Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1011

inabokov@princeton.edu
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Deadly Power: A Funeral to Counter Sorcery in South India

Author(s): Isabelle Nabokov

deadly power: a funeral to counter sorcery in

In this article, I argue that the regenerative potential of Tamil sorcer

cent proposition that sorcery is a creative practice through which hu

The anthropology of sorcery has changed during the 20th century. T

primitive irrationality. Instead, what Malinowski discovered among the Trobr

overcoming the uncertainties of human life (1922, 1948). His student, E

conflicts and contradictions in their social system. When anthropologist

forces of disorder and chaos deployed by colonial and postcolonial politic

It is Bruce Kapferer who recently launched a radical attempt to remove an

in Sri Lanka, he asks anthropologists to consider sorcery as a creative phe

man action," "sociality," the "contingency and magicality of human exist

by science and modern technology, Kapferer maintains, "Sorcery is often fou

tion as a social science theory (1997:22).

It would be insensitive not to see the desirability of bringing such an orig

spective into anthropological discourse. I, for one, am wholeheartedly in

American Ethnologist 27(1 ): 147-168. Copyright ? 2000, American Anthropological Association

nographic evidence. In fact, the claim is sometimes contradicted by participants.

thropologists making use of the phenomenological approach. This almost exclusive

genocide, and any other complicated, unexpected, or unwanted consequence?

tient is simply or automatically reconstituted according to the sequential, objective

a funeral to counter sorcery in South India

structure of a healing ritual, like a Sinhalese exorcism (1979a, 1979b, 1983:

ated from existential predicaments. This free-form engagement, fashioned in direct

constitute themselves and their realities.

the outer configuration of Tamil sorcery

Given these dire consequences, it is no wonder then that in my 14 months of

tuted a significant percentage (approximately a third) of the divining seances that

a funeral to counter sorcery in South India

glimpse the malevolence streaming at them. This instantaneous awareness infused

at stake in sorcery suspicions, men-particularly well-off, urban men-are the main

the plight of Laksmi

someone did not wish her well.

smi began experiencing the convulsions.

the inner configuration of Tamil sorcery

a funeral to counter sorcery in South India

a chance to regain command over themselves.

eye-focused malevolence is often considered involuntary, a subconscious witching

and healthy selves.

At exorcisms, however, the cloth is dropped, enshrouding the doll, whereupon a

a funeral to counter sorcery in South India

doll's arms and legs.

interpretations of the funeral symbolism

in the "jungle" that extirpated their malevolence, as appears to be Sinhalese practice

formalized mourning. Whenever a death occurs, the household's women huddle in

taboos, no grandchildren to circle the corpse ceremonially while holding a torch

a funeral to counter sorcery in South India

cerned with expunging a demon. More importantly, he stood in as primogenitor by

understandings of mortuary rites. For instance, the French Indologist Charles

definitive removal from her life.

countersorcery as open-ended therapy

reducible to the peculiar multivocal or equivocal characteristics of symbols. In fact,

new conditions of confidence, integration, or health, as was proposed by Turner.

haps because his formulation of culture is as much indebted to Sigmund Freud as to

a funeral to counter sorcery in South India

A Western-trained psychoanalyst, Kakar reminds his readers that a customary

standing, translation and genesis" (1982:81-82; emphasis in original). Kakar himself

attempt at translation" (1982:82).

"language" Levi-Strauss is talking about, at least an expressive "image" derived from

Because the participants were at liberty to infuse and personaliz

roborate Kapferer's recent argument that in Sri Lanka "sorcery

practice through which people reconstitute their private