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Modernity and Spirit Worship
inIndia
This book investigates the entangled relations between people’s daily wor-
ship practices and their umwelt in South India. Focusing on the practices
of spirit (būta) worship in the coastal area of Karnataka, it examines the
relationship between people and deities.
Based on extensive eldwork, this book links important anthropologi-
cal theories on personhood, perspectives, transactions, and gift-exchanges
together with the Gestaltkreis theory of Viktor von Weizsäcker. First, it ex-
amines the relations between būta worship and land tenure, matriliny, and
hierarchy in the society. It then explores the reexive relationship between
modern law and current practices based on conventional law, before exam-
ining new developments in būta 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 rela-
tions with the realm of sacred wildness, as well as the formations and trans-
formations of the umwelt in perpetual social-political transition.
Modernity and Spirit Worship in India will be of interest to academics in
the eld 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 environ-
mental 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
inIndia
An Anthropology of the Umwelt
Miho Ishii
First published 2020
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© 2020 Miho Ishii
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List of illustrations vii
Preface ix
1 Introduction: towards an anthropology of theumwelt 1
PART ON E
Humans and the wild śakti of deities 33
2 The land of paddy elds, forests, and deities 35
3 The būta shrine and deities in Perar 48
4 Pāḍdana: the oral epics of deities 60
5 Dances, oracles, and blessings in the ritual 70
6 The transaction of wild śakti 82
7 Playing with perspectives 94
PART TWO
Social transformations and the emergence of a new umwelt 107
8 Būta’s agency in conicts over the village shrine 109
9 Historical changes in land tenure in South Kanara 135
10 Modern law, customary law, and the reexive imagination 164
11 Land reforms and deities as the ‘owners of land’ 183
12 Būtas in the midst of the development project 209
Contents
vi Contents
13 The new umwelt in the industrial plant 236
14 Conclusion: being, pathos, andthe umwelt 248
Glossary 263
Bibliography 275
Index 291
Illustrations
Figure
6.1 The transactional network between humans and būtas 87
Tab le s
2.1 The number of households based on religion in Mudu
Perar and Padu Perar 37
2.2 The number of households based on caste group in Mudu
Perar and Padu Perar 38
2.3 Land use in Perar 41
2.4 The crop calendar and yearly rituals in Perar 42
3.1 The prominent families in Perar in relation to būta worship 53
9.1 Land holding and land tax assessment of paṭṭadār in Mudu
Perar (Fasli1312) 151
9.2 Caste/type of paṭṭadārs 152
9.3 Total number of registered paṭṭadārs corresponding to
assessed plots 153
9.4 Total number of registered paṭṭadārs belonging to Baṇṭa
(by family) 154
10.1 Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu family property partition plan 177
11.1 Types of applicants and landlords 185
11. 2 Types of Baṇṭa landlords 186
11.3 Types of land applied for rights in the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu 186
11.4 Caste/group of households and population 187
11.5 Number of (a) landlord households, (b) tenant households,
(c) domestic labourer households, and (d) other households
by caste/group 188
11.6 Families of Baṇṭa landlord households 189
11.7 Area of land holdings of landlord households (2008) 190
11.8 Classication of holdings of landlord households
according to manner of acquisition 190
11.9 Landlord households that lost land due to land reform 195
In a sense, this book follows an established line of anthropological prede-
cessors focusing on the dynamism of religious practices and/in modernity. It
is, after all, primarily a book about būta (or spirit) worship in South Kanara,
a coastal area in Karnataka, India. Būtas are generally considered to be
deities or spirits that dwell in forests and embody the realm of sacred wild-
ness. 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 būtas, amidst social-political
transitions such as colonisation, changes in land tenure systems, and devel-
opment 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 pre-
sented by Viktor von Weizsäcker, who uniquely developed Jakob von Uex-
küll’s 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, na-
ture, and būtas 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 eld, 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 pub-
lished 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, mycolleague
Preface
x Preface
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 nal stages of publication of this book. Without their
support and encouragement, it would not have been possible for me to com-
plete this work. Nick Kasparek and Dr Yumiko Tokita-Tanabe made great
efforts to improve the quality of this book. Their sensitive and deep knowl-
edge 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 wor-
ship in Ghana, I rst visited South India in 2008, in search of a new eld site.
It was Dr Chinnappa Gowda at Mangaluru University who rst introduced
me to the fertile world of būta worship in South Kanara. Since the start of
my eldwork, 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
difcult tasks in the eld. Without their support and friendship, I could not
have accomplished my research.
Finally, I would like to thank Kenta Funahashi and our two daughters,
Hina and Sui. They accompanied me on my eldtrips and shared my joy and
wonder through the entire process. They provided me with great inspiration
and encounters that would not have been possible if I were alone in the eld.
Therefore, I would like to dedicate this book, a fruit of our collaborative
eld life, to them.
Some of the chapters in this book are based on previously published pa-
pers. All have been extensively revised for the present volume. An early ver-
sion of Chapter 6 was published as a paper entitled ‘Wild sacredness and the
poiesis of transactional networks: Relational divinity and spirit possession
in the būta ritual of South India’ in Asian Ethnology in 2015. Chapter 7 is
based on a paper entitled ‘Playing with perspectives: Spirit possession, mi-
mesis, and permeability in the buuta ritual in South India’ published in Jour-
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2013. Chapter 10 partly overlaps
with a paper entitled ‘Traces of reexive imagination: Matriliny, modern
law, and spirit worship in South India’ published in Asian Anthropology in
2014. Chapter 12 is based on conference papers presented at the ninth and
tenth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) in 2015 and 2017.
Chapter 13 has evolved from the papers below: ‘The chiasm of machines and
spirits: Būta worship, megaindustry, and embodied environment in South
India’ published in 2014 in a volume entitled Ecologies of Care: Innovations
through Technologies, Collectives and the Senses, edited by Gergely Mohácsi;
‘The ecology of transaction: Dividual persons, spirits, and machinery in a
special economic zone in South India’ published in NatureCulture in 2015;
and ‘Caring for divine infrastructures: Nature and spirits in a special eco-
nomic zone in India’, which appeared in Ethnos in 2017.
Preface xi
The research on which this volume is based was nancially supported by
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers
21720321, 24251017, and 26370949).
Miho Ishii
Kyoto
July 2019
In the month of māyi during the hottest and driest season, būta rituals
are held in many villages in South Kanara, a coastal area in Karnataka.1
Accompanied by drums and wind instruments played by Puruṣa musicians,
spirit mediums of the Pambada or Nalike castes dance around the precincts
of local shrines, issue oracles, and interact with people.
As apotheosised local heroes or heroines or as the spirits of wild animals
dwelling in forests, būtas are generally regarded as deities. While būtas may
travel across regions, they are generally believed to be closely linked to the
land and nature of localities. Though normally invisible, their power, or
śakti,2 lls the deep forests, hangs over the bush and ponds, and circulates
through the woods, agricultural elds, and villages. Consequently, būtas are
considered to originate from—and embody—a realm of sacred wildness.
Fieldwork for this monograph was mainly carried out in the two adjoin-
ing villages of Mudu Perar and Padu Perar in Mangaluru taluk, Dakshina
Kannada district.3 Until administratively separated in 1904, these villages
used to be a single entity called ‘Perar’, and are still collectively called ‘Perar’
by the villagers.4
In Perar, būta rituals are conducted in the geographical area that con-
sists of houses surrounded by paddy elds, palm and areca nut farms,
and deep forests and hills. As will be elaborated upon later, būta rituals
are closely related to the ranks and duties of families, matriliny, and land
tenure. In village society, būta worship is a sophisticated system that links
people to land and nature. Embodying the realm of the wild,5 būtas medi-
ate the relationships villagers have with elds and forests, and būta rituals
facilitate the smooth succession of both lands and ofces within families.
Moreover, through the transaction of offerings and blessings (prasāda)6
in rituals, the būtas authorise the hierarchies and relations among village
families.
Direct encounters and interactions between people and deities is an
essential element of būta worship. Villagers directly present offerings at
altars and small shrines in their houses, and they receive oracles and bless-
ings from possessed mediums at village shrines. While būta śakti is gener-
ally perceived as an invisible, fertile, and dangerous power that inuences
1 Introduction
Towards an anthropology of
theumwelt
2 Introduction
the lives and destinies of villagers, through spirit possession it can also tran-
siently manifest in dreadful, androgynous forms.
Drawing on the results of my observations of everyday practices in vil-
lages and considering villager relations with what they characterise as ‘the
wild’, a realm actualised through interactions with būtas, this book explores
how all these various relations create and recreate the social, religious, and
ecological milieu, or in effect the umwelt, of village residents.
Before examining the notion of the umwelt in detail, it should be noted
that rather than being static, the village communities studied in this book
have been constantly adapting to changes since time immemorable. As de-
scribed later, since the nineteenth century, rural society in South Kanara
has been transformed through the development and penetration of modern
legal and administrative systems. Since the mid-1990s, massive development
projects in Mangaluru have also caused disruptive changes in rural areas,
including the destruction of farmland and the eviction of villagers from the
land they had farmed or otherwise had access to. Faced with these changes
which can generally be called ‘modernisation’, people have tried to maintain
or recreate their way of life by reorganising their relationships with others
and by negotiating with strangers. Entangled as they are with various in-
tentions and social relations, these endeavours are beset with conict and
difculty. Moreover, for the villagers, relationships with būtas have always
been central to their practices and decision-making. These relationships
help them confront the challenge of incessant social change, both to keep
what they have and to leverage the transitions as opportunities.
When we investigate the mutual formation and transformation of people’s
everyday practices and their umwelt in their reexive interactions with mod-
ern laws and systems as well as in transactions with the realm the wild and
deities, three mutually entangled subjects of study become clear: humans, the
wild, and modernity. In the following section, I will examine previous studies
that have focused on modernity and the occult, as well as on ontology.
Theories of modernity and the occult
Magical-religious phenomena such as witchcraft, magic, and spirit pos-
session have long been important subjects in anthropology, and since the
1980s, many writers have considered how the occult in non-Western socie-
ties relates to modernity (e.g. Comaroff 1985; Geschiere 1997; Comaroff &
Comaroff 1999).7
In his early work, Taussig analysed Bolivian miners’ worship of Tio, the
spirit owner of the tin mines, as a cultural response of neophyte proletarians
towards the capitalist mode of production. According to Taussig, peasants
working in the mines understood wage labour and the new socio-economic
system as evil and unnatural, and the devil gure of Tio strikingly articu-
lated this interpretation. Devil worship thus represented both the predica-
ment of the peasants and their critical consciousness and struggle against
Introduction 3
the exploitative modern capitalist economy (Taussig 1980, pp. 17–22, 144–
145, 232–233).
Geschiere, by posing the idea of ‘the modernity of witchcraft’, has also
presented a fresh viewpoint for analysing the relationship between moder-
nity and the occult. According to Geschiere, in postcolonial Cameroon
and other African societies, discourses about witchcraft have burgeoned in
modern sectors such as politics, sports, institutions of formal education,
and so forth. Such rumours and discourses expose concern about the prolif-
eration of novel forms of witchcraft, but they also reveal the popular interest
in various hidden opportunities to acquire and accumulate new forms of
wealth. In Africa, rumours and practices related to witchcraft are evidence
of people’s efforts to interpret changes brought by modernity and to gain
control over them. Thus, Geschiere argues that we should focus on the ‘mo-
dernity’ of witchcraft, rather than considering witchcraft in contraposition
to modernity (Geschiere 1997, pp. 1–9; Ciekawy & Geschiere 1998).
Likewise, using the concept of ‘occult economies’, Comaroff and Co-
maroff (1999) analysed the relation between the rise of occult phenomena
and social economic conditions in postcolonial South Africa, where there
has been a dramatic rise in fear and suspicion of occult phenomena such as
witchcraft, Satanism, zombies, and ritual murder. According to the Coma-
roffs, these occult phenomena express the discontent and despair of people
distressed by the mysterious mechanisms of the global market economy,
but they are also symptoms of an occult economy waxing behind the civil
surfaces of the ‘new’ South Africa. The practice of witchcraft and other
mystical arts in postcolonial Africa was ‘a mode of producing new forms of
consciousness; of expressing discontent with modernity and dealing with
its deformities’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999, p. 284, emphasis in original).
Focusing on modernity and the occult in non-Western societies, many
observers argue along the same lines. When discussing transformations of
traditional societies under the pressure of modernisation, people’s occult
practices are held to be signicant in modern situations. They are often inter-
preted as distinctive responses to, or critiques of, changing social conditions.
Such an analytical frame may be embedded in the conventional meth-
ods and practices of anthropology, wherein anthropologists from Western
societies have long felt impelled to study ‘pre-modern’ occult practices in
non-Western societies and to publish the results to their own reading pub-
lic. In this context, magical-religious phenomena such as witchcraft, magic,
and spirit possession in non-Western societies have often been collectively
regarded as a reference point not only to antithetically dene ‘the modern
West’, but also to disclose what ails the West through difference or meta-
phoric connection. Regarding this, Sanders wrote,
Anthropologists have thus foregrounded resistance and critique in
many forms, from large-scale revolts and revolutions to their everyday
and more spectral manifestations. Anthropological explanations here
4 Introduction
suggest that occult forces and discourses can be seen as offering a sus-
tained critique of the genesis or intensication of capitalism, modernity,
neoliberalism and globalization, specically, of the novel inequalities
and exploitations these things engender. Through the occult, the argu-
ment goes, Others in faraway places expose unsettling truths about our
contemporary world and its woeful workings.
(Sanders 2008, p. 111)
Perhaps it was inevitable that anthropologists—tasked with studying the
lives of non-Westerners and representing values and logics different from
those in the West—would tend to analyse magical-religious practices in
non-Western societies as critiques of or alternatives to a value system based
on rationality, individualism, material possession, market economy, ex-
change value, and concepts understood to constitute modernity. Similar in-
terpretations of the occult, however, predate anthropology and were already
in evidence in mid-seventeenth-century Europe:
Discourses and legal actions naming and constraining “spirit posses-
sion” over the past four centuries helped to create the dual notions of the
rational individual and the civil subject of modern states. The silhouette
of the propertied citizen and free individual took form between the idea
of the automaton—a machine-body without will—and the threat of the
primitive or animal, bodies overwhelmed by instincts and passions.
(Johnson 2011, p. 396)
Johnson observed that according to the early modern philosophy of Europe,
a person in the modern West who was overwhelmed by spirit possession was
seen as the inverse of the rational, autonomous individual. This tendency to
compare and contrast images of the self in Western and non-Western socie-
ties has persisted in recent studies of spirit possession and personhood. For
instance, Smith (2006, pp. 19, 74–75) argues that spirit possession, as the ex-
posure of the uid and permeable nature of personal identity, coincides with
features of South Asian personhood, which are uid, divisible, and perme-
able. Here the possessed, or indeed the South Asian person, is construed in
contrast with the ideal, autonomous, Western person.
More recently, however, interpretations of occult practices have gone be-
yond the simple inversion of idealised images of society and personhood in
the modern West; rather, occult practices are now seen as exposing ‘unsettling
truths about our contemporary world and its woeful workings’ (Sanders 2008,
p. 111) or as critiques of modern Western values which presume the impor-
tance of individualism and material possessions (see Johnson 2011, p. 417).
Since the 1990s, when new notions such as the ‘modernity of witchcraft’
and ‘occult economies’ were introduced by some anthropologists, it has be-
come common to interpret informant discourse on the occult as evidence
of ambivalent attitudes towards modernity. For example, analysing occult
Introduction 5
narratives of the Mawri about roads in postcolonial Niger in terms of the
materialisation of people’s experience of modernity, Masquelier argues that
roads are part of a complex economy of violence, power, and blood— objects
of both fascination and terror. Thus, their tales linking roads with the occult
should be understood as ‘creative efforts to articulate local understandings
of mobility, morality, and marketing in all their literal and metaphorical
meanings’, which brings to light people’s troubled encounters with moder-
nity (Masquelier 2002, pp. 829, 831–834).8
These recent studies have examined new dimensions and meanings of the
occult in non-Western societies by considering it in relation to comprehen-
sive modern phenomena, such as globalisation and neoliberalism. Even so,
taking the occult in non-Western societies as a reference point that both
enables a denition of what is modern and Western and provides an op-
portunity to critique problems with the West, most writers are still tied to
the general viewpoint of previous studies. In other words, magical-religious
practices in non-Western societies continue to be analysed in terms of their
relation with, and response to, powers and social economic changes origi-
nating in the West. Such an analytical framework has led some anthropol-
ogists to refer to the occult too generally, without a deep analysis of the
particular history, specicity, and locality of each phenomenon.9
Moreover, as is obvious in discussions of occult economies (Comaroff &
Comaroff 1999), studies of the occult in a non-Western context tend to as-
sume that the modern values and systems that cause radical change in local
society are beyond the understanding of local people, and consequently, oc-
cult practices are an imaginative expression of people metaphorically inter-
preting these changes. Framing magical-religious practices as imaginative
interpretations or metaphorical critiques of modernity seems to obscure an
understanding of how these practices are entangled with modern values and
systems in concrete situations.
Before considering this aspect in more detail, in the next section I will
examine a recent trend in anthropology which also focuses on magical-
religious phenomena in non-Western societies, but provides different ideas
and methods for their analysis.
Ontological questions and ‘the reality of the other’
Since the end of the 1990s, a host of new anthropological studies conducted
through t he lens of ontology have been publ ished. Researchers have tur ned to
ontology in order to criticise the anthropocentrism of modern social science
and to complicate and invert the nature–culture dichotomy and its assump-
tions of the universality of nature and particularity of culture. To transcend
these issues, multinaturalism, radical essentialism, the ontological self-
determination of the other, and other alternative frames have been proposed.
Leaving aside the varied anthropological studies approaching ontology
through philosophy, phenomenology, and science andtechnologystudies,10
6 Introduction
in this section I will mainly examine the arguments concerning what has
been called the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology (Henare, Holbraad &
Wastell 2007). It should be noted that the theoretical trend examined here,
hereafter called the OT, does not cover all anthropological works that are
‘ontologically attuned’ (Kohn 2015, p. 323), that is say, that deal with onto-
logical questions as an underlying theme; rather, this section is more nar-
rowly concerned with recent discussions of the ontological turn.11
In addition to criticising the modern dichotomy of nature and culture,
advocates of the OT also see it as means of freeing anthropology from the
shackles of epistemology. Since the goal is ‘taking things encountered in the
eld as they present themselves’ (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, p. 2),
proponents of the OT take issue with focusing epistemologically merely on
people’s worldviews and with the reductionism entailed in describing eld-
work observations through modern rationality. Accordingly, following the
OT, rather than elaborating on worldviews, anthropologists should engage
with the ontology of the people in the eld. Consequently, peoples who are
assumed to have different ontologies, such as Euro-Americans and Amer-
indians, are understood as not just perceiving the same world in different
ways, but as living in different worlds (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007,
pp. 10–12; Holbraad 2009). In the OT, the concept of ‘ontology’ thus sug-
gests a multiplicity of worlds and is inseparable from difference and alterity
(see Gad, Jensen & Winthereik 2015, p. 70). Here, these concepts do not
refer to epistemological differences between worldviews, but are reserved
for denoting ontological differences between lived worlds. A central tenet
is radical alterity (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, p. 8), which cannot
be reduced to modern rationality. Proponents of the OT often use magical-
religious discourses and practices in the eld as their main evidence of this
radical alterity, focusing on myths, divination, animism, shamanism, and
other things which have been looked upon as ‘apparently irrational beliefs’
(Sperber 1982).12
While the way the OT focuses on magical-religious practices in non-
Western societies may seem similar to conventional approaches in the an-
thropology of religion, there are some critical differences between them.
As seen in discussions of rationality,13 most previous studies have tried in
various ways to portray beliefs and practices in non-Western societies both
as some variety of distinctive logic or function incompatible with modern
rationality and as rationally apprehensible by Westerners despite their
uniqueness. By contrast, proponents of the OT are critical of such attempts
to transform the phenomena of a different ontological world into something
else by interpretation and rationalisation.
The starting point of the OT—to take things in the eld as they are—
is motivated by an advocacy of ‘the ontological self-determination of the
world’s peoples’ (Viveiros de Castro 2003, 2011a, 2014a). In other words, the
OT does not attempt to interpret or represent its objects of study; rather,
it wants to leave room for the people themselves. Specically, Viveiros de
Introduction 7
Castro has stated that, since the ontological turn, anthropology is obliged to
‘make room for the other’, that is, to create the conditions for the ontological
self-determination of the other. For him, the role of anthropology ‘is not
that of explaining the world of the other, but rather of multiplying our world’,
and as such, anthropologists should avoid ‘explain[ing] too much’ or ‘try[ing]
to actualise the possibilities immanent to others’ thought’, but instead, ‘en-
deavour to sustain [these possibilities] as possible indenitely’ (Viveiros de
Castro 2014a; see also Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014).
Critiques of the OT
The fresh, radical ideas of the OT have greatly inuenced academia. This
stimulation has also given rise to criticism. While most commentators ap-
preciate the endeavour to reconsider the modernist view of humans and the
nature–culture dichotomy, they question notions such as radical essential-
ism and ontological alterity, and also wonder about the methodology of tak-
ing things in the eld as they are.
For instance, expanding on his argument supporting the motion tabled
at a debate on anthropological theory that ‘ontology is just another word
for culture’ (Venkatesan 2010), Candea pointed out that ‘many accounts of
ontology specify as their subjects human populations, broadly geographi-
cally conceived’ (177), and that the outline of disparate ontologies tends to
map onto what would previously have been called cultural groups. Thus, the
idea of ontological alterity is not free from the ‘difcult conundrums which
dogged the anthropological study of cultural difference’ (Venkatesan 2010,
p. 179; see also Laidlaw 2012).
Vigh and Sausdal (2014) have also criticised the OT notion of ‘radical
alterity’ owing to the methodological problems of translation and com-
munication it brings, and because it diminishes the possibility of mutual
understanding across ontologies. They also wonder how it could be possible
to take things in the eld as they are. By promoting the idea of accepting,
without interpretation, what people tell us about their world, they say that
the OT ‘becomes an argument for pure indexicality with an almost one-
to-one relationship between signiés and signiants’ (Vigh & Sausdal 2014,
p.61). Consequently, this kind of ‘ontic’ argument that ‘things are what they
are’ can be fundamentally undermined ‘by people’s frequently expressed
doubt and ambivalence about the nature of the real they inhabit’ (Vigh &
Sausdal 2014, pp. 56–57, 61; see also Graeber 2015).
Gad, Jensen, and Winthereik (2015, pp. 73–75) have similarly pointed
out that while proponents of the OT insist on the importance of ‘things’
to understand the ontological world of the other, they largely rely on dis-
courses recorded during eldwork or culled from other sources. The precept
of ‘taking things in the eld as they are’ may help researchers avoid con-
jectures and interpretations, but this approach also encourages researchers
to take the discourses of their informants at face value and to regard their
8 Introduction
accounts as indicators of a unique ontology (Graeber 2015, p. 20).14 It is also
suggested that these problems are rooted in the premises of the OT, which
assumes that people in a particular locality partake of a unique ontology
and asserts the importance of ontological self-determination and the value
of indenitely sustaining the world of the other (see Venkatesan 2010, pp.
172 –179; Grae b er 2015).
How can we understand the ontological reality of the other?
As mentioned above, one of the critical points raised by arguments about
the OT is how anthropologists should deal with the ontological reality of the
other. This issue poses a long-standing fundamental question in a fresh way:
what kinds of anthropological enquiry and description are possible when
one is faced with realities that seem incompatible with modern rationality?
To understand the directions that the OT might take anthropological theory
regarding this question, it is necessary rst to examine alterity and difference
in more detail.
When proponents of the OT use ‘radical alterity’ and ‘different ontology’,
alterity means alterity to modern rationality and difference refers to differ-
ence from modern Western ontology. This is evident when Viveiros de Castro
writes that ontology came to the fore at a moment when ‘the ontological
foundations of our civilisation—and the unquestioned cultural supremacy
of the peoples who founded it—are seen as starting to crumble’ (Viveiros
de Castro 2014a). In other words, at a time of crisis, the ontological gaze
fell on those seen as generating realities other than those of the modern
Western world. Similarly, Vigh and Sausdal (2014) point out that propo-
nents of the OT dene alterity and difference in relation to the notion of ‘the
Euro-American’:
The notion of ‘the Euro-American’ appears to be essential for the onto-
logical turn as it frames the ontographer’s object of study by providing
the background against which ontology and alterity can be dened.
(Vigh & Sausdal 2014, p. 66, emphasis original)
As discussed in the previous section, in anthropological studies of religion,
the occult in non-Western societies has often been analysed contrastively
or metaphorically as a point of reference for dening ‘the modern West’. At
the same time, by interpreting the occult in non-Western societies in terms
of modernity, these studies tend to reproduce an analytical framework that
highlights the inuence of power and systems from the West and presents
the occult as an alternative to them.
In contrast, while the ontology of ‘the other’ in the OT, exemplied by
occult practices in the eld, is similarly demarcated by reference to, and
dened through difference from, notions such as ‘the Euro-American’, it is
never interpreted in relation to modernity or the Euro-American, but rather
Introduction 9
is conserved as it is. In other words, proponents of the OT try to avoid trans-
forming the ontology they nd in the eld—the reality of the other—into
something else, and thereby reducing it to modern rationality. Presenting
the occult as a dening feature of local life, they also refrain from analysing
the occult as a mere response to modernity.
In this light, Pedersen (2011) criticises the ‘modernity of witchcraft’
(Geschiere 1997), ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999), and
other symbolic-functionalistic characterisations in previous studies, and at-
tempts to describe shamanism in Mongolia in a different way:
Darhad shamanism, and particularly in its variations “without sha-
mans,” is not an occult economy “of” postsocialist transition; it “is” a
distinct ontological condition in its own right.
(Pedersen 2011, p. 40)
Here, it is worth noting that proponents of the OT do not try to describe
the ontology of the people in the eld as a static cosmos separate from the
outside world. Pedersen (2011), for instance, focuses on the relationship
between shamanism and drastic social and political changes in northern
Mongolia. Yet for Pedersen, Darhad shamanism is not something that only
symbolises the local response or resistance to social change; rather, it is a
uid and multiple ‘ontology of transition’, just as post-socialist Mongolian
society is (2011, pp. 35, 79).
Such arguments seem to succeed in proposing an alternative to the
symbolic-functionalist views of previous studies. Even so, by representing
shamanistic practices as the ontology of the other, a reality too uid and
indenite to be captured by modern rationality, it repeats the conventional
interpretations of the occult in non-Western societies as that which has es-
caped the inuence of colonial and postcolonial states, and that which re-
sists the categories of Western social science (e.g. Comaroff 1985, p. 263;
Rosenthal 1998).15
To reiterate, while attending to social change, proponents of the OT at-
tempt to describe the phenomena in the eld as ontologically discrete, as
things to be taken on their own terms without being reduced to responses
to, or resistance against, modern social changes. This effort by proponents
of the OT to take things in the eld seriously, to restrain investigators from
explaining phenomena using their own theoretical frames, and to make
one’s own world multiple by exploring the world of the other has been of
great import in recent anthropology.
Proponents of the OT seem to take a position similar to that of the ‘rela-
tivists’ in the rationality debate (see Tambiah 1990), who asserted that no-
tions in modern rationality could be revised and expanded by understanding
the thought of non-Western peoples.16 The OT is more radical, however, in
that proponents attempt to take alterity, which is regarded as incompati-
ble with modern rationality, as it is without trying to render it into what is
10 Introduction
understandable for people in the West (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007,
pp. 11–12; cf. Viveiros de Castro 2004a).
Meanwhile, the endeavours in the OT to emphasise the importance of the
‘ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples’ and strive for a ‘per-
manent decolonization of thought’ (Viveiros de Castro 2011a; Holbraad,
Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014), along with criticisms of excessive in-
terference in the ontological world of the other, seem to indicate a sort of
strategic essentialism (Gad, Jensen & Winthereik 2015, p. 78; see also Ven-
katesan 2010, pp. 172–179; Candea 2011). Few would deny the ethical merits
of this stance, especially when we reect on how anthropological research
represents the lives of local people in places where pervasive power, values,
and systems serve to strengthen the hegemony of the West. The appeal of
this ethical impulse is all the more reason to carefully examine the issues
arising in the attempt to nd radical alterity in the magical-religious prac-
tices of the people that anthropologists study and to describe them as indi-
cators of a radically different ontology. In the next section, focusing on the
notion of existence, or being, I will consider in more detail relations between
modernity and magical-religious phenomena.
Rethinking being/existence
As suggested in the previous section, proponents of the OT have often fo-
cused on magical-religious practices in their eldwork, and then character-
ised them as ontologically unique and incompatible with Western ontology.
Critics have pointed out that this approach may lead to an emphasis on
those parts of discourse and practice that suggest alterity, a simplication
of people’s realities due to an insufcient grasp of complicated relationships
involving various differences and divisions in their lives, and a blindness to
ambiguities in the realities in life as it is lived (Venkatesan 2010, pp. 172–179;
Candea 2011; Vigh & Sausdal 2014; Graeber 2015).
Furthermore, by presuming that the people under study live in a radi-
cally different ontological world, the OT severely limits analysis of how peo-
ple engage with ‘modern’ systems and orders. The previous section of this
chapter cited recent anthropological studies of religion in which the occult
was characterised as a means of imaginative interpretation of modern situ-
ations beyond the common knowledge of its practitioners (e.g. Comaroff&
Comaroff 1999; Masquelier 2002). Taking issue with this, proponents of the
OT consider the occult as evidence of worlds based on unique, radically dif-
ferent ontologies. In privileging alterity, however, proponents of the OT pay
insufcient attention not only to how people engage with systems, logics,
and ways of life that embody ideas and values predominant in the West, but
especially to how magical-religious practices and ‘modern rationality’ are
entangled with each other.17
Rather than essentially unknowable, ontologically different worlds, what
most anthropologists encounter during their eldwork today seem more
Introduction 11
likely to be situations in which familiar modern Western logics, values,
styles, and systems have permeated and now signicantly constitute people’s
everyday lives. This is not to say that a coherent ‘modern rationality’ unilat-
erally blankets their lives or that in their engagement with change, everyone
or anyone completely ‘gets with the program’. Rather, local people adapt to
changing circumstances with logics, values, and ideas that mesh with mod-
ern rationality and that have the power to create and recreate the realities
of people. We see evidence of this in objects, concrete systems, plans, vo-
cabularies, styles, and social relations. Meanwhile, logics, values, and ideas
that differ from modern rationality are also locally embodied in objects,
concrete systems, vocabularies, social relations, and behaviours, and these
continue to have a role in creating and recreating local reality.
In such circumstances, people may hold and situationally switch between
multiple logics, values, and modes of being, and also coordinate and recon-
stitute relations with others to maintain and recreate their lives. Magical-
religious practices and narratives, which have been regarded in the OT as at
the core of different ontologies, are not outside the processes of reconstitu-
tion and transformation; rather, they are key focal points of these processes.
And if people do create and recreate their lives in processes that are entan-
gled in various logics, values, and modes of being that together comprise the
lived ‘reality’ of people, anthropologists should then carefully observe and
ethnographically describe those processes. Important elements such as these
evade ontography, the attempt to record worlds that are based solely on rad-
ically different ontological premises. At the same time, no careful ethnogra-
pher would simply assume that logics, values, and modes of being familiar
in the modern West are totally harmonious or commensurable with those
encountered during eldwork. The aim of ethnography is instead to present
processes in which multiple logics, values, and modes of being—each with its
own different history and impetus—are embodied and expressed in different
systems and social relations, and to describe how they encounter each other,
conict, and interrelate, while they nonetheless continue to diverge from each
other and retain discrepancies. The ethnographer also aims to describe the
diverse actions and relationships of the people who are involved in various
conicts and entanglements, and to understand the thoughts and emotions
arising from these actions, relationships, conicts, and entanglements.
From this perspective, the lives of the local people studied by anthropol-
ogists can be seen as involving both constraints and contingency, as they
constantly shift between several modes of being with different logics, values,
and histories. This perspective urges us to analyse the processes that form
and transform the lives of local people in their encounters and interactions
with various others. The ends of this analysis thus differ from those of the
OT, which assumes that the people in the eld always confront indenite
contingency, or live in a unique ontological world that enables them to form
and transform themselves through a unique relationship with others (e.g.
Viveiros de Castro 2004b).
12 Introduction
Furthermore, to deeply comprehend the relational and variable dimen-
sions of people’s lives—another goal mentioned by proponents of the OT,
that is, the relation to the other and alterity from oneself (Viveiros de Castro
2011b; Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014)—it is necessary to
reconsider the central notion of being, or existence, which has moved into
the limelight through an accumulation and circulation of arguments in the
OT. In the following section, I will therefore consider this concept from a
different angle.
The constraints and contingency of life: rethinking being/existence
Intending to take seriously the things they nd in the eld, proponents of the
OT set out to describe—as they are, without reductive interpretation—the
ontological worlds in which magical-religious phenomena such as spirits,
deities, and witchcraft can exist. Then, through the repetition and circula-
tion of arguments arising from this intent, they performatively centralise
the notion of being, or existence, in their ontographic anthropology. The
relationship between reality and virtuality in the OT illustrates this point.
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (2007) have declared that one of the sig-
nicant methodological propositions of the OT is to ‘take things in the eld
as they are’. Here, things are not merely tangible objects, but also concepts.
For instance, when a Cuban diviner says that the powder used in a séance
is power, rather than interpret the statement as a peculiar cultural belief,
it is important to view the powder as actual power. When adopting this
radical constructivist approach, no ontological distinction is made between
discourse and reality or concepts and things:
We argue that in order for difference to be taken seriously (as ‘alterity’),
the assumption that concepts are ontologically distinct from the things
to which they are ordinarily said to ‘refer’ must be discarded. From this
it follows that alterity can quite properly be thought of as a property of
things—things, that is, which are concepts as much as they appear to us
as ‘material’ or ‘physical’ entities.
(Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, p. 13, emphasis in original)
In the OT, the world in which powder is power is not a new fantastical region
of ‘our own’ world (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, p. 12); it is simply a
different world. Moreover, proponents argue that to form a conception of
a different powder (or a different world) is to actually conceive it, to think
it into being. When the distinction between things and concepts collapses,
‘thought here just is being’, and ‘conception is a mode of disclosure that cre-
ates its own objects’ (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, pp. 14–15). There-
fore, when we conceive of a different powder, we create thing-concepts such
as ‘powerful powder’, as does the Cuban diviner who creates new objects by
enunciating new concepts (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, pp. 3– 6, 12–15;
see also Holbraad 2007, 2012, pp. 157–161; Holbraad & Pedersen 2017).
Introduction 13
Such assertions in the OT clearly challenge previous rationalistic ap-
proaches to ‘apparently irrational belief’ taken as simply unrealistic fan-
tasy. By reiterating such assertions, however, proponents of the OT seek
to take each thing and each notion encountered in the eld into the sphere
of being. While remaining virtual and indenite for ‘us’, these things are
considered to be extant forces or entities to the extent that they are consid-
ered by the ontographer to really exist for the people (see Viveiros de Castro
2011a, 2013, 2014a).
On this point, through comparison with the traditional use of the term
ontology, Graeber (2015) has drawn attention to the distinctive use of the
notion in the OT. He explains that, in ancient Greek, the word meant ‘a
discourse (logos) about the nature of being’, and that this has remained the
core meaning; for ontographers, however, it is used as a synonym for ‘way
of being’ or ‘manner of being’ (Graeber 2015, p. 15). Similarly, Vigh and
Sausdal have pointed out that the meanings of ontic and ontological are
conated in the arguments of the OT; even while emphasising the notion
of virtuality based on Deleuze, proponents of the OT are mostly indifferent
to the perils of essentialising objects by dening what ‘is’ (Vigh & Sausdal
2014, pp. 51, 63).
As discussed earlier, proponents of the OT assert that anthropologists
should, indenitely and as far as possible, maintain the ontological world
of the other as the potential for how things could be otherwise (Viveiros de
Castro 2011a, 2014a; Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014). As
Vigh and Sausdal (2014) observe, this intention seems to conict with taking
things in the eld as they are and describing them in the ontic state of what
is, as opposed to what might be.
In the OT, however, these two intentions do not necessarily pull in dif-
ferent directions. By way of illustration, in Viveiros de Castro’s discussion
of Amerindian perspectivism, he observes that the statement ‘animals are
people’ often occurs in Amazonian ethnographies. In the world of the in-
digenous people described in these ethnographies, a jaguar might regard
itself as a human and see humans as animals (i.e. as prey). At the same time,
an ordinary human regards itself as a human, and sees animals as animals
(Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2014b, pp. 56–57). From the ordinary human per-
spective, the world seen by a jaguar is potentially an alternative world, a
world in which a human cannot directly live.
In Viveiros de Castro’s work, corresponding to the relationship between
humans and animals in Amerindian ontology, the relationship between ‘we’
in the modern West and ‘they’ as the other for the Western self is presented
in terms of ontological differences with each other: ‘their’ ontological world
signies a possible world which is different from ‘our’ world, one that should
not be actualised by ‘us’, but should be realised as virtual:
To maintain the values of the other as implicit does not mean celebrat-
ing some numinous mystery that they enclose. It means refraining from
actualizing the possible expressions of alien thought and deciding to
14 Introduction
sustain them as possibilities … The anthropological experience depends
on the formal interiorization of the “articial and special conditions”
to which Deleuze refers. The moment at which the world of the other
does not exist outside its expression is transformed into an “eternal”
condition—that is, a condition internal to the anthropological relation,
which realizes this possibility as virtual .
(Viveiros de Castro 2011a, p. 137, emphasis in original;
see also Viveiros de Castro 2014b, p. 196)
The meaning here may be clearer if we consider Deleuzian distinctions be-
tween reality, possibility, actuality, and virtuality:
The only danger in all this is that the virtual could be confused with
the possible. The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone
by the possible is therefore a ‘realisation’. By contrast, the virtual is not
opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it
undergoes is that of actualisation.
(Deleuze 1994, p. 211)
According to Kimura (1997), in the philosophy of Bergson and Deleuze,
object, or the objective, denotes that which has no virtuality, and thus it is
considered either as possible or as real. On the other hand, the subjective is
virtual, that is, in the process of being actualised; at the same time, it pos-
sesses a reality of its own (Kimura 1997, pp. 95–96; see also Deleuze 1991,
pp. 41–43, 96–97).18
With these things in mind, Viveiros de Castro’s statement could be para-
phrased: the world of the other signies a ‘possible world’, precisely because
it seems to have no existence beyond its expression. We should maintain it
as indeterminate and virtual, and at the same time, we should deal with it as
real, without trying to explicate or actualise it.
When such a claim is made with the ideals of the ‘ontological self-
determination of the other’ (Viveiros de Castro 2014a) and the radical
essentialism of taking thing-concepts in the eld as they are, there is an
unexpected effect: a phenomenon which has no existence outside of being
expressed by people—what is subjective, or virtual for us—is realised as
objective for them. This effect emerges when the notion of the Deleuzian
Other is projected upon the people in the eld. For instance, Viveiros de
Castro writes,
The Other thus appears as a condition of the eld of perception: the
existential possibility of those parts of the world that lie beyond actual
perception is guaranteed by the virtual presence of an Other that per-
ceives them: what is invisible to me subsists as real by being visible to an
other.
(Viveiros de Castro 2013, p. 478, emphasis added)
Introduction 15
It is noteworthy that, according to the terminology of Bergson/Deleuze on
which these assertions are based, the object/objective does not have virtual-
ity (Deleuze 1991, p. 41). Here, the realm of the virtual for the people under
study, which is suggested by the mention of such things as a jaguar’s per-
spective that cannot be perceived by ordinary humans or virtual person-
hood in animals (Viveiros de Castro 2014b, pp. 57–58; see also Holbraad
2007, 2012, pp. 163–172), is subsumed to the objective reality of the people.
Moreover, it is subsumed to the realm of the ontic being/existence as an in-
dex of the radical alterity of the ontological world of the other.19
The centrality of being/existence in the OT, however, must be reconsid-
ered when we turn to the contingency, inscrutability, and limitation of the
state of being. It leads us to rethink the relationship between humans and
the realm of the virtual that has yet to appear, or has already disappeared,
as something.
This does not mean that things such as spirits, witchcraft, and jaguar–
humans simply exist in one ontological world, but remain virtual in another.
Rather, it points to the fundamental contingency, transience, inscrutability,
and uncontrollability of the state of being in a particular time and space,
not only for ‘us’, but also for the people in the eld. In a sense, ontological
self-determination is a promise that can never be fullled for anyone.
If we take seriously the fundamental contingency, incomprehensibility,
and fragility of being, then to understand the magical-religious practices
of the people we study, it is necessary to nd a new analytical dimension
that differs from the one that examines relations of various beings on the
presumption that they all exist. One such dimension is that which does not
exist in the same sphere as ontic being, and yet enables things to appear con-
tingently in a unique way and to interact with each other. To introduce new
dimensions that allow consideration of a ‘reality’ in which various beings
relate and interact with each other, it is necessary to create a new theoretical
frame.
To investigate the mutual interactions and transformations of entities and
forces beyond the sphere of ontic beings, in the next section I will examine
the ideas proposed by Viktor von Weizsäcker, who developed the concept of
umwelt, which enables us to explore the lives of humans and other organisms
in processes of mutual formation within milieus, and moreover, to consider
their formations and transformations in phase and timescale beyond the
ontic being/existence.
Exploring umwelt studies
As originally proposed by von Uexküll, umwelt is a means of examining the
uniqueness of the world lived by each creature, which is inseparable from its
way of being, including its perceptions, bodily form, and patterns of behav-
iour. This insight, that is, that each creature exists in a unique world totally
appropriate to its form of life, contrasted with the Darwinist presumption
16 Introduction
that each creature was, more or less, adapted to the world as a totality, in-
cluding all creatures (von Uexküll 1921). Putting the organism at the centre
enabled the conceptualisation of plural worlds (Welten) and the relativisa-
tion of the anthropocentrism of Darwinist accounts. Next, I will examine
the work of von Weizsäcker, especially the Gestaltkreis theory he elaborated,
to explain the relations between an organism and its umwelt.
Gestaltkreis theory
While von Weizsäcker incorporated von Uexküll’s basic conception of
umwelt, unlike von Uexküll, who tended to characterise the relation be-
tween an organism and its umwelt as harmonious and self-sufcient, von
Weizsäcker focused on instability and crisis, that is, the dynamic relations
between an organism and its umwelt. Viewing the organism as a subject that
creates and recreates itself in relation to the umwelt, he paid particular at-
tention to interactions and coherence in encounters between organism and
umwelt.20 Below, based on his main work entitled ‘Der Gestaltkreis: Theorie
der Einheit von Wahrnehmen und Bewegen [The Gestaltkreis: Theory of the
unity of perception and movement]’ (1997[1950]), I will present a broad out-
line of his theory.21
Literally translated, the term Gestaltkreis means ‘circle of form’. Accord-
ing to von Weizsäcker, it refers to the emergence of a movement-form of an
organism through mutual, circulative interaction with its umwelt:
The emergence of the form [of an organism] must be a closed circle in-
sofar as there is no given order of rst and next in its coming together …
Thus, we will call the emergence of the movement-forms of organisms
Gestaltkreis.
(von Weizsäcker 1997, p. 254, emphasis in original)
Thus, in Gestaltkreis, perception, body-form, patterns of movement, and
other things that constitute the mode of being of an organism are created
through encounters and interactions with the umwelt. Meanwhile, as an
organism encounters its umwelt, an order coherent to the mode of being
emerges between the organism and the umwelt. I shall refer to these general
concepts of von Weizsäcker (1997), such as the circulative interactions of an
organism and its umwelt and their coherent relations and co-existence, as
Gestaltkreis theory.
‘Subject’ and crisis
In Gestaltkreis theory, an organism’s life-form, or mode of being, is regarded
as undergoing incessant creation and recreation through encounters and inter-
actions with its umwelt (von Weizsäcker 1997, pp. 235–236, 304–305). While
an organism is predisposed to maintain a stable life-form, it can undergo
Introduction 17
transformations in response to encounters with its surroundings. At the
same time, these encounters and interactions also transform the emerging
order between the organism and the umwelt. Gestaltkreis theory thus offers
insight into how a coherent relationship between an organism and its um-
welt is created performatively through their interactions and, at the same
time, how the life-form of an organism may be easily transformed through
accidental encounters and uctuations in coherence.
In the course of its lifetime, an organism may experience tension between
ongoing stability and the need for self-transformation in relation to its um-
welt. Namely, when a coherent relationship between an organism and its
umwelt endures, it is experienced by the organism as the stable condition of
itself. The balance, however, is easily upset by new encounters and changes
to the organism and to its surroundings. In such a situation, the organism
strives to preserve the coherent relation with its umwelt by partly transform-
ing its mode of being.22
If we focus on an individual organism, this process could be interpreted as
a sublation (Aufheben) of its life-form. If we expand our view to encompass
the continuity of life beyond individual organisms, the entire process would
then be considered the continuation of life itself through life-form renewal by
each organism. von Weizsäcker considered life, which succeeds through the
repetition of organisms’ birth and death, as a recurring cycle. He referred to
this continuity as the circle of life (Lebenskreis) (von Weizsäcker 1997, p. 321).
von Weizsäcker developed his thought on this issue through two concepts:
subject and crisis. In this frame, rather than connoting psychological func-
tions or states, subject refers to the unity of an organism, which persists or
is endangered in relation to its umwelt (1997, pp. 300–301). For an organism
that has maintained a unique relation with its umwelt, a crisis is a critical
event in which identity and continuity are no longer viable. In a crisis, when
the coherent relation with the umwelt is broken, an organism is brought to a
critical juncture: either it transforms its life-form and survives or it does not
meet the challenge of vicissitude and disappears (von Weizsäcker 1997, p.
298). von Weizsäcker did not assume, however, that something like a united
subject existed autonomously and stably before the crisis. Rather, the life-
form of an organism as a subject is constituted and reconstituted through
incessant encounters with vicissitudes and crises.
We recognise the subject correctly when it is threatened with its dis-
appearance in a crisis … The subject is not a xed possession; rather
one must be constantly procuring it in order to possess it. The unity of
the subject forms the counterpart to the unity of the object. Just as the
unity of various objects and events in our umwelt can be constituted
in perception and action only through a functional change, so too is
the unity of the subject constituted in the recovery repeated incessantly
throughout the discontinuities and crises.
(von Weizsäcker 1997, pp. 300–301)
18 Introduction
This insight sheds light on the contingency and discontinuity of the life-
form of an organism as a subject, which temporarily appears in its relation
to the umwelt. Here, the paired concepts of Pathisches and Ontisches also
come into play.
Pathisches and Ontisches
For von Weizsäcker, the crisis that an organism undergoes in relation to its
umwelt shows Pathisches of life. Pathisches, which can be glossed as pathos,
is discussed in more detail below.
While each organism behaves actively in relation to its umwelt, it is also
passive in the sense that whether it receives life or suffers the burden of
life, it just happens to exist (1997, pp. 312–313). In particular, uctuations in
and ruptures of coherence with the umwelt caused by out-of-the-ordinary
changes force an organism, at the risk of its life, to transform its life-form.
von Weizsäcker characterised this state as Pathisches, which contrasts with
and sublates the state of Ontisches, or the ontic (1997, p. 314). Here, Pathis-
ches refers to the visceral drives that enable an organism to relate to its um-
welt. It also denotes the passive state of being of an organism that not only
lives its life actively, but also is lived by impersonal life itself in its body (see
Kimura 2010, pp. 555–556).
According to von Weizsäcker, the fundamental basis of organisms’ exist-
ence can never be grasped through biological experience. Kimura explained
this basic relationship (Grundverhältnis) (von Weizsäcker 1997, p. 336) as the
relationship between each organism and life itself. Namely, an organism is
individualised as a limited being by its body, while its life dissolves into the
fathomless depth of life itself (Kimura 2005, pp. 8–9).
Ontisches is thus a state of being as an organism comes to be individual-
ised, an unstable and transitory form of life based on its unique relationship
with its umwelt. Meanwhile, Pathisches denotes the passive and visceral re-
lations of Ontisches, or a life-form which eetingly appears, with life itself
forming the basis for the emergence, transformation, and disappearance of
an organism (see von Weizsäcker 1997, p. 337).
In Anonyma, von Weizsäcker (1946, pp. 10–12) posits Pathisches as a ba-
sic attribute of organisms: animate beings are pathisch (the adjectival form
of Pathisches) and inanimate beings are ontisch (the adjectival form of On-
tisches). In this schema, ontisch merely denotes pure being or bare existence
(das nackte Sein), or in other words, that someone or something just is (see
Nausner 2008, p. 196). Meanwhile, pathisch connotes existence that is re-
ceived (erlitten) rather than assumed. For von Weizsäcker, Pathisches also
has personal or subject-bound attributes.
Although von Weizsäcker conceived of only organisms as pathisch, this
concept can be developed in new directions when we consider animism, a
frame that allows for the life of inanimate beings and for the personhood of
nonhuman beings. Things that are invested with life or personhood, even
Introduction 19
while they remain inanimate or nonhuman beings, can be characterised as
pathisch rather than ontisch in that their existence is received rather than as-
sumed. In other words, these beings are thought to appear and to stay (iru, in
Japanese) transiently in particular time and space, rather than just to exist
(aru)23 in the ontic state of things.
While thinking through the OT seems to bring everything observed in
the eld into the sphere of ontic being/existence, von Weizsäcker’s concepts
enable a better-dened characterisation of being; as a pathisch form of life,
being can emerge transiently like a light ickering momentarily from the sea
of life itself.
The temporality of being and its potential for transformation
Although each organism is contingent and transformable, each is none-
theless inuenced and limited by the orders that have formed naturally
in relation to its umwelt. The life-form of any organism is thus formed
through temporality, which includes the accumulation of the organism’s
encounters and interactions with its umwelt. At the same time, the pa-
thisch attribute of an organism leads to the potential for its form of being,
which arose in a particular emergent order, to be dynamically sublated
into something else.
In effect, any encounter of an organism with its umwelt may lead to
transformation, and yet, the encounter is oriented by the life-form as it has
already been lived by the organism. While an organism’s perceptions and
movements enable the emergence of an umwelt coherent with itself, its life-
form has been prescribed by the order in which life beyond the individual
organism has continued. Regarding the temporality of the life-form of an
organism, von Weizsäcker wrote,
We should establish the process of the movements [of an organism] …
as a proleptic one. How this happens will be fundamentally dened
through its relationship to time. Namely, what happens now must be
described as what is coming from a past that has already happened and
thus cannot be changed, and is also going into a future that has not yet
happened … and thus has not yet been determined.
(von Weizsäcker 1997, p. 264, emphasis in original)
This describes the fundamental thrownness (Geworfenheit) of an organism
as a united subject that was originally thrown into the continuity of life and
therefore oriented by the order of the umwelt, which was coherent with its
life-form.24 At the same time, it allows that each subject, living within its co-
herent order of life and umwelt, can transform and renew both its life-form
and the umwelt through new encounters and interactions.
Even though the basic model for this theory was derived from the rela-
tions between the organism and its umwelt, Gestaltkreis theory can also
20 Introduction
help elucidate how a person encounters others (see von Weizsäcker 1997,
p.273). Here, issues arising in the encounters and interactions between an
organism and its umwelt can be reformulated both as issues arising in the
encounters and relations of individual persons with other persons and as
relations between historical social orders and the life-forms of people.
Although von Weizsäcker only suggested the possibility of investigating
the social dimensions of Gestaltkreis (1997, pp. 316–317),25 I nd the appli-
cation of his concepts in this way useful because they provide important
ideas for grounding the inquiry of how a person encounters others. In the
next section, by examining encounters and interactions between people and
deities in South Kanara, I will attempt to suggest the usefulness of Gestalt-
kreis theory for anthropology.
Inquiring into how a person encounters other beings
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this is an investigation into
the relationships among humans, deities, and the realm of the wild, which
are embodied both in būta worship and in the mundane social relations and
practices of the people in rural South Kanara. Focusing on concrete events,
I will examine these entangled relations, their historicity, and their trans-
formations, starting with the fundamental question of how a person creates
and recreates a world and his/her life-form through encounters and interac-
tions with others, including nonhuman beings.
Ideas and concepts presented in Gestaltkreis theory—the mutual forma-
tion and transformations of an organism and its umwelt, Pathisches con-
trasted with Ontisches, and the unknowable life itself forming the basis an
organism’s life—are useful tools for considering this question. Referring to
these ideas, I will illustrate the relationships among people, deities, and the
realm of the wild in South Kanara.
For people living in rural South Kanara, the dense forests and hills that
provide ample headsprings and are lled with the signs and sounds of vari-
ous creatures are both the source of life and the realm of the unknown. The
śakti (divine power) of deities exemplies this multifarious quality, as over-
owing from the depths of the forest and owing into the realm of humans,
this śakti is thought to bring fertility into agricultural elds and thus enable
people to sustain their life, while simultaneously endangering them either
through its excess or through its exhaustion.
The relationship between people and the realm of the wild corresponds
to the relationship of an organism with its umwelt, and to the pathisch re-
lationship of a subject with life itself. In a sense, in their relationship to the
realm of the wild through būta worship, people are passive and contingent
beings who entrust their forms of life to their relations with the wild and
deities. At the same time, through intimate relations with land and nature in
their daily life, and by interacting with deities in rituals, they form affective
relationships with the realm of the wild and act towards it.
Introduction 21
The realm of jōga and māya
In Tu ḷu, the native language in South Kanara, the realm of ‘reality’ in-
habited by humans and other beings is called jōga, while the realm of the
unknown lled with śakti is called māya.26 If we consider these two realms
in reference to the pathisch relationship of people with the realm of the
wild, they can be seen as follows: the realm of jōga is regarded as the phase
of the tangible or actual, where humans and nonhuman beings appear,
encounter each other, and interact; whereas the realm of māya lled with
śakti is regarded as the phase of the virtual, where the individuality of
each being merges into impersonal life itself in the depths of the wild. Be-
yond human control or consciousness, śakti as wild divinity in the realm
of māya ows into the realm of jōga, manifesting itself, for example, in
spirit possession and through oracles. The time and space in which śakti
appears before people can be considered as a uid threshold between the
tangible and intangible, or the actual and virtual.27 Through temporary
appearances of śakti in the form of būtas, people are able to interact with
the realm of māya.
The umwelt for the people: exploring the fringe
As I hope to show in this book, social relations in rural South Kanara have
been formed and oriented based on the pathisch relationship of the people
with the realm of the wild, which is embodied in encounters and interac-
tions with būtas. This is evident in the way that most of the customary laws
and the social organisation in the village society—including ranks, ritual
duties, land holding by manors, the matrilineal succession of the houses,
and the rituals themselves—are based on the worship of būtas that embody
the sacred wildness. At the same time, the laws and social organisation have
evolved to support the pathisch relationship of the people with the realm of
the wild.
The transaction of offerings and blessings between people and deities
shapes customary laws and social relations. Linking the village, paddy
elds, būta shrines, and forests and hills, gift-exchange between deities and
people who belong to various castes and houses embodies the circulation of
śakti from the realm of the wild to that of humans, and vice versa.
For these people, who live in villages surrounded by vast agricultural
elds ensconced in deep forest, their experiential umwelt is a realm of vari-
ous beings whom they encounter and interact with in their daily lives. They
create and recreate their forms of life through encounters and interactions
with various others. These others are both human and nonhuman, extending
from creatures in the forest to būtas, who temporarily manifest themselves
in rituals. At the same time, similar to an organism that embeds itself into
the pathisch relation with life itself, one’s life has its roots in the depths of the
realm of the wild, a phase different from that of the ontic being/existence.
22 Introduction
Consequently, the umwelt that most people directly perceive as their milieu
can be imagined as having a uid, vague border, gradually extending from
the realm of jōga, with its various tangible beings, to the dim and unknown
realm of māya lled with śakti.
However, even in the realm of jōga, or the experiential umwelt, villagers
are not fully free of uncertainty, because they cannot foresee when and what
sort of changes and crises will happen to them, and hence cannot completely
control their lives. In terms of the Gestaltkreis theory, this contingency and
uncontrollability reveals the pathisch attribute of their lives.
At the same time, as will be described later in this book, when encounter-
ing events and vicissitudes in the realm of jōga, people often become aware
of the possibilities that these vicissitudes emerge from their relationship
with the realm of māya. Therefore, people try to undertake and deal with the
power of māya by ritually appeasing the wild śakti, consulting astrologers,
and interacting directly with būtas in rituals. Through these performances,
people sense that the dim edge of the realm of jōga is not the end of the
world, but is connected to the realm of the unknown; and at the same time,
they endeavour to look into the depths beyond the fringe.
Sensitivity to the realm of māya, fear of and care for the wild divinity
that forms and orients their lives, and actions towards śakti that appear
at the border of tangible and intangible—all entangled with daily social
relations—are part of the formative relationships between people and the
umwelt.
As will be described, jostled by things such as the introduction of modern
legal systems, land reforms, and massive development projects, village com-
munities in South Kanara have been undergoing changes. In the process of
historically recent change, which is usually glossed as ‘modernisation’, the
villagers encounter and interact with various new actors who have appeared
in their daily lives. This process has also led to changes both in the custom-
ary ways of doing things and in the daily social relations among villagers,
creating new systems and organisations which embody unfamiliar logics
and values.
In the long historical process, these jostling events are regarded as the
crises that transform relations among various beings in the realm of jōga,
and that transform the umwelt and the lives of villagers. The villagers have
created and recreated their forms of life within historical circumstances.
Using what they know, they have reconstructed and adapted familiar forms
of life while encountering and interacting with other forms of life based
on new logics, systems, and ways of doing things. All the while, however,
their relationship with the realm of māya, even though it has also noticeably
changed, has remained signicant in their daily lives. In the ethnography
that follows, focusing on the practices of people who in the wake of crises
have maintained, temporarily lost, or newly created relationships with the
wild and with deities, I investigate the mutual formation and transformation
of people’s lives and their umwelt.
Introduction 23
The organisation of this book
This book comprises two parts. Before summarising each chapter, I will
provide an overview of these two parts.
Part One: the relationships between būtas and villagers
In the rst half of Part One (Chapters 2–5), I describe the daily life of
villagers, their customary laws and social organisation, and the features of
būta worship in Perar. Būta worship in South Kanara has developed as a
sophisticated system closely linked to hierarchy, matriliny, land tenure, and
the distribution of farm products in village society. It is based on oral myth-
ological epics ( pāḍdana) and customary law (kaṭṭụ). At the same time, the
core of būta worship, which creates its actuality, is composed of the direct
encounters and interactions between people and deities.
Following this consideration of the villagers’ umwelt, focusing on the vil-
lagers’ relationship with deities through spirit possession, the second half
of Part One (Chapters 6 and 7) refers to several anthropological studies of
human–nonhuman relations to examine the relationship between būtas and
people in this village society. My primary focus is the transaction of of-
ferings and blessings between humans and deities. Gift-exchange between
humans and deities, which forms the basis of the relations between the peo-
ple and their umwelt, also points to the intersection of the Gestaltkreis the-
ory and anthropology.
As described earlier, one of the important themes of the Gestaltkreis
theory is how encounters and interactions occur between an organism and
its umwelt, and likewise in social contexts, how a person encounters oth-
ers. These encounters have been a central concern of anthropology too,
although in anthropology, the ‘others’ in these encounters and interactions
are not necessarily human. Indeed, ethnography abounds with informants
who mention nonhuman beings such as rivers and mountains, plants and
animals, and deities and spirits as the ‘others’ with whom these informants
have signicant interactions.
The relationship between human and nonhuman beings has been inves-
tigated in anthropological studies on magical-religious practices such as
animism, shamanism, and spirit possession. Studies of gift-exchange and
personhood have also elaborated important arguments about the unfolding
of encounters and interactions between people and others, including non-
human beings.28 Moreover, as seen in the OT, anthropological studies of
unique relations between humans and nature, and of gift-exchange and per-
sonhood, have been invigorated through connections to studies on human–
nonhuman relations in related elds.29
This book begins its theoretical investigation with reference to the works
of Marriott (1976) and Appadurai and Breckenridge (1976), who examined
the characteristics of transactions in South Asian societies and proposed
24 Introduction
a number of inuential concepts such as substance-code, dividual person,
and transactional network. Applying these concepts to the analysis of būta
worship in South Kanara, I discuss their limited usefulness. Casting a wider
net, I also closely examine several studies beyond South Asian societies for
clues to investigating human–nonhuman relations in order to consider the
formation and transformation of one’s self through interactions with būtas.
My discussion includes the work of Strathern (1996), who examined the for-
mation and limitation of networks created by the transaction and circula-
tion of substances, as well as the work of Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004b)
and Willerslev (2004, 2007), who investigated the exchange of perspectives
between humans and nonhuman others.
Part Two: people and deities undergoing social change
In Part Two, the focus shifts to the relationships among people, land and
nature, and deities, through an examination of the multiple practices of peo-
ple who have been dealing with events that have brought about enormous
change in village societies. Through close investigations of various villager
practices, and of conicts and turmoil leading to crises that engender the
reorganisation, transformation, and dismantling of daily social relations,
I seek to explain continuities and transformations in the relationships be-
tween villagers and their umwelt.
As alluded to above, būta worship in South Kanara is a sophisticated
system linked to family ranks and associated duties, matriliny called aḷi-
yasantāna kaṭṭụ,30 and land tenure. Since the nineteenth century, it has been
inuenced by the state administration of religious institutions and, espe-
cially affecting land holding and matriliny, by the transition to modern law.
Regional management of religious institutions in South India, for example,
following the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act of 1927, critically
brought new actors—administrators of the laws of the state—into the prov-
ince of būta worship, where the deities themselves had heretofore been re-
garded as the supreme actors.
Land reform after independence, with its redenition of matriliny in
modern law and its surveys and registration of land held by matrilineal joint
families, also transformed būta worship, which was rooted in land holding
and matriliny. More recently and dramatically, since the mid-2000s, ow-
ing to the construction of petrochemical plants in a designated special eco-
nomic zone, village communities in Mangaluru taluk have been faced with
relocation and destruction.
Most previous studies have looked at events such as the enforcement of
modern law, modication of indigenous systems of land tenure and inher-
itance, and exploitation of land as major elements in the process of social
change caused by modernisation. Studies of institutional changes in Hindu
temples have specically described the collapse of transactional networks
among kings, priests, and deities with the advent of colonial power, which
Introduction 25
brought the ruination of traditional kingship and involved temples in state
administration (Appadurai 1981; Fuller 1984; Dirks 1987). Other studies
examining the inuence of various systems of land tenure introduced in
colonial India have described how these wrought fundamental changes to
traditional social systems based on a ‘system of entitlements’31 (e.g. Tanabe
2006). Regarding the būta rituals in South Kanara, some writers have ob-
served how following the land reforms in the 1970s, a decline in the power
of local landlords who had traditionally played a central role in organising
būta rituals led to a qualitative transformation in how būta worship is per-
formed (Rajan 1986, p. 54; Gowda 1991, p. 18).
Crises also ensue with the closer integration of local societies with national
and global markets: most studies of development projects have described lo-
cal communities being damaged by top-down development projects and en-
vironmental destruction. Within this literature a number of studies have, in
the context of grassroots democracy, analysed popular movements against
exploitation.32
As will be described, people in South Kanara who engage in būta rituals
have experienced historical and institutional changes similar to those described
in previous studies. As mentioned, the state administration of religious insti-
tutions in the colonial period brought new actors into the province of būta
rituals, which had been based on oral epics and direct interaction with būtas.
The appearance of new actors armed with the authority of modern law sparked
numerous disputes over the management of būta shrines. When matriliny and
land tenure were redened and codied by modern law, and when the land re-
forms that followed independence were enacted, systems of land tenure and
matriliny which had supported būta rituals were reorganised. Now, as large-
scale development has given rise to antidevelopment activism, the current crisis
for būta rituals in village societies may mark another major turning point.
With these historical, institutional, and socio-economic changes, the rela-
tions that villagers form with various others have also been reorganised and
partially transformed. As I argue, however, the transformation and dyna-
mism within village society and būta worship cannot be interpreted as simply
a unilateral process, as the dissolution of a traditional society or the decline
of ‘the religious world’ through modernisation. Neither can we assume that
the systems, notions, and modes of being, which embody modern values and
logic, simply subsume or cancel out their traditional counterparts based on
spiritual beings and transform them into a modern political ‘reality’ within
its ensuing narrow ontological limits (cf. de la Cadena 2015, pp. 273–283).
My ethnography explores both the conicts and frictions between cus-
tomary and modern systems and ways of life and the interactions and reex-
ive relations between them. I also investigate the process of the formation
and transformation of transactional networks between people and deities
in crises that ensue when systems and modes of being embodying different
logics, values, and histories encounter each other and thereby precipitate
conicts and negotiations.
26 Introduction
The chapters of this book
Chapters 2 through 5 closely examine the relations among people, land and
nature, and deities in their milieu to begin to elucidate the umwelt of the
villagers living in rural South Kanara.
Covering aspects such as social composition, production, regular voca-
tions, and villager relations with land and nature, Chapter 2 outlines daily
life in the villages in Perar. Chapter 3 focuses on the village būta shrine, the
largest religious institution in Perar. Describing the religious duties of the 16
manor houses, and of the priests and dancer/spirit mediums at the shrine,
Iwill clarify the relevant details of the customary laws and systems that form
the basis for būta worship in the village. Chapter 4 then provides pertinent
information about the pāḍdana, or oral epics, which describe the origins
of the deities and are drawn upon to ascribe the ranks and ritual duties of
Perar families. In Chapter 5, details of the yearly ritual at the village shrine
will be claried through a discussion of the interaction between people and
būtas in the rituals. It will become apparent that while the mutual rights and
duties of the villagers and deities are updated through the transactions of
offerings and blessings, the ranks and rights of the people can be somewhat
destabilised by the būtas, who are the supreme actors.
Chapters 6 and 7 include theoretical explorations of the relationship be-
tween villagers and deities. Chapter 6 deals with an agricultural ritual called
kambuḷa and the annual nēma ritual in Perar. Applied in the analysis of
these rituals are the notions of substance-code, dividual persons, and trans-
actional networks proposed by Marriot (1976) and Appadurai and Breck-
enridge (1976). Referring to Strathern (1996), the formation of transactional
networks between people and deities, the circulation of substance-codes,
and the limitations of the network will also be described. After this, by fo-
cusing on the experiences of spirit mediums who transform themselves into
deities during rituals, Chapter 7 investigates the direct interactions between
people and būtas. Drawing on Gestaltkreis theory and notions of perspec-
tivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004b; Willerslev 2004, 2007), I will con-
sider these interactions as playing with multiple perspectives.
Chapter 8 provides a bridge from Part One, which explains the charac-
teristics of būta worship and its role in people’s lives in a village society, to
Part Two, which examines the dynamism both of village society and of būta
rituals in the face of social change. This examination requires an investiga-
tion of 1930s legal disputes over the trusteeship of the būta shrine in Perar.
I will then examine a series of disputes that occurred in the 2000s between
an inuential family in Perar and a newly established management com-
mittee for the village shrine. Through this investigation, I will explore how
people have attempted to reorganise social relations around būta rituals,
betwixt and between legal rulings from law courts and divine orders from
deities. Chapter 9, as a preparatory step for a close analysis of the relations
among people, land and nature, and būta worship in subsequent chapters,
Introduction 27
will discuss historical changes in land tenure in South Kanara. Following an
overview of land tenure system in pre-colonial South Kanara, I will clarify
the characteristics of the ryotwari (raīyatwārī) system enforced under the
Raj in South Kanara and analyse the assessment of land and registration of
landholders in Perar based on an ofcial document published in the early
twentieth century. Lastly, I will provide a brief overview of the inuence of
land reforms in post-independence South Kanara.
Matriliny, especially how it has been dened under modern law and how
villagers have adapted to its changes, comes under scrutiny in Chapters 10.
As already mentioned, būta worship is closely related to the matrilineal sys-
tem called ‘aḷiyasantāna kaṭṭụ’. The Baṇṭa landlords in the area are the main
organisers of the būta rituals at village shrines, as each generation inherits
ritual duties and worships family būtas within the kuṭuma. While kuṭuma
(kuṭumba, in Kannaḍa) can be glossed as ‘matrilineal joint family’, it is more
than this; it is a complex entity encompassing a core, head family that has
a family būta shrine and several other households, land, and members who
are taken to be matrilineal descendants of common female ancestors. That
is to say, kuṭuma is both a historical notion that reaches back to the origin
and lineage of a matrilineal joint family and a spatial notion which includes
houses and land bound by būta rituals (cf. Moore 1985).
As Chapter 10 will show, in South Kanara since the nineteenth-century
legal redenition of aḷiyasantāna kaṭṭụ, kuṭuma has been reinterpreted in
modern law as an indivisible ‘community of property’. After independ-
ence, rules of inheritance for family property and the rights of individual
successors were regulated by new laws. Baṇṭa landlords, who traditionally
held most of the land, have been greatly affected by this legislation. Focus-
ing on the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu, an inuential family in Perar, I will describe
how village-dwelling Baṇṭa landlords dealt with the changes brought by
the Madras Aliyasantana Act of 1949 and other laws enacted since then.
The 1949 Act required members of a kuṭuma, who had maintained a loose
unity based on the practice of būta rituals and their common ownership of
land, to stipulate the land rights of each member. I will describe the careful
thought given to the ways a Baṇṭa family strove to maintain the kuṭuma as
the comprehensive and integral basis of their life and, at the same time, to
reorganise it to conform with modern law.
In Chapter 11, I will investigate the effects of the 1970s land reforms, fo-
cusing on the responses and experiences of villagers in Perar and on how the
changes have affected būta worship. It is necessary to consider the relation-
ships between ordinary farmers and landlords, whose land rights have been
authorised through their position as the organisers of būta rituals pertain-
ing to particular lands. We also have to investigate how the būtas, regarded
as the fundamental ‘owners of land’, have inuenced villager practices and
decision-making following the land reforms. Land reforms enforced by
the government were more than just an intervention into the conventional
land tenure system in village society; the new laws also affected how people
28 Introduction
related to their families, neighbours, lands, and deities, and they compelled
a reorganisation of existing systems and relations. The reorganisation of
their social relations linked with land makes clear the villagers’ efforts to
maintain and renew their relationship with particular lands and deities
while coping with the demands of modern law.
Chapters 12 and 13 will discuss the inuence of the development projects
around Perar. Since the mid-1980s, a series of such projects have greatly
affected the lives of villagers through their large-scale land acquisition and
destruction of elds and villages. Here, we see how villagers have coped with
deforestation and the fragmentation of village communities. How do būta
rituals gure into villager responses, both positive and negative, to develop-
ment projects? How are the outsiders who implement development projects
related to the land, inhabitants, and deities in the area? Regarding these
questions, the following three topics will be discussed: būta worship in an-
tidevelopment activism, conicts arising from the development projects and
the effects of the būtas’ agency, and the occurrence of būta worship inside an
industrial plant. In Chapter 12, I will consider the ambivalent inuence of
the būtas, who both strongly support antidevelopment activism by ordering
a ‘desperate defence of land and shrine’ and, at the same time, bind people to
their land. Chapter 13 examines new manifestations of būta worship within
industrial plants in the special economic zone. It will be shown that inter-
actions between the deities and industry managers have come into being,
and that new transactional networks between workers and būtas have also
been created in industrial plants. These generally form when the industrial
zone experiences a calamity of some kind, an event that is interpreted as a
manifestation of the būta power that dwells in the land. Finally, Chapter 14
provides a conclusion to the entire book.
Fieldwork particulars
The eldwork for this study was undertaken for a total of about 17 months
and was conducted during periods between May 2008 and March 2015. In
2007, when I made my rst short visit to Mangaluru, I learned of the būta
deities. Visiting Mangalore University, I happened to meet a sociology stu-
dent. Hearing of my interest in indigenous religion and spirit possession, he
showed me a book published at the beginning of the twentieth century. I was
fascinated by a monochrome portrait on one of the pages. It was a photo-
graph of a būta ritual dancer, dressed in a costume made from palm leaves,
looking out from the page with a hard look.33
Although I was unable to observe any būta rituals during this rst trip,
my interest was further piqued when I visited Mangaluru again in June
2008. For the rst two months, try as I might, I could not settle on a suitable
place to study. It was the rainy season, which is not a popular time for būta
rituals. The situation changed for the better when I met Professor Chin-
nappa Gowda, a folklorist at Mangalore University. He introduced me to
Introduction 29
Ms Akshaya Shetty, who had just completed a master’s course in folklore
studies under his guidance. She told me that she was from a village famous
for a unique and historic būta ritual, and that her father’s family was in
charge of it. Soon thereafter, she took me to her village, a place with wide
sweeps of green rice elds surrounded by deep forest lled with birdsong.
I then decided on Perar as the base for my eldwork. During this eld-
work period in 2008, I commuted an hour each way between the city centre
and the village every day. I was unsure about taking up residence in the
village because I was accompanied by my four-year-old daughter. In 2009,
surer about how to live in the village, I stayed in Perar with my daughter and
husband. We were privileged to be allowed to stay in a guest house owned
by the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu family, the matrilineal joint family on Akshaya’s
father’s side, which was located in the same compound as Akshaya’s house.
Since then, I have continued my eldwork in Perar and neighbouring vil-
lages greatly aided by Akshaya, her mother Baarati, and her father Harisha.
Notes
1 South Kanara (Dakṣiṇa Kannaḍa) is a region located between the Western
Gāts and Arabian Sea, which extends across Udupi and Dakshina Kannada
districts in Karnataka state and Kasaragod district in Kerala state (see Bhat
1998, pp.4–6). Though the ofcial language of Karnataka state is Kannaḍa, the
native language of most inhabitants in South Kanara is Tuḷu, and this region has
been called Tuḷunāḍụ. The month of māyi in the Tuḷu calendar corresponds to
between 15 February and 15 March in the solar calendar.
2 Śakti generally denotes the divine power of deities. Specically, it refers to the
power, potency, or activating energy incarnated in goddesses (Tanaka 1997,
p.148; Fuller 2004, p. 44). Also, prakṛti i n Tu ḷu refers to nature, the natural
state of anything, the root, cause and origin (Upadhyaya 1988–1997, p. 2161).
This word originates from the Sanskrit word prakṛiti, which refers to a goddess
as well as to nature, and hence it is synonymous with śakti (Monier-Williams
2008[1899], p. 654). Both śakti and prakṛiti indicate the inseparability of nature
and divinity and the ambiguous power of goddesses.
3 Mangaluru has been called Maṅgaḷūru in Tuḷu and Mangalore in English. On
1 November 2014, the state government of Karnataka changed the rendering of
the ofcial name of the taluk from Mangalore to Mangaluru. Though I gener-
ally use ‘Mangaluru’ in this book, I also use ‘Mangalore’ when quoting previous
studies and ofcial records or to conform with the name of an institute. In this
book, I have changed the names of some places, informants, and families, and
have used abbreviated designations for companies such as ‘SK’ and ‘CS’ to pro-
tect their identities.
4 In this book, ‘Perar’ denotes Mudu Perar and Padu Perar as a whole. As be-
comes apparent in Part One, in many ways, these two villages are regarded as a
complementary pair.
5 The notion of ‘the realm of the wild’ here overlaps with prakṛti which denotes the
power of goddesses. As described later, it is an unknowable realm lled withthe
śakti of deities.
6 The Sanskrit word prasāda indicates serenity, benevolence, and grace; offer-
ings from the deity’s altar is also called prasāda (Monier-Williams 2008[1899],
pp.696–697). In Tuḷu, prasāda indicates blessings from deities; generally,
30 Introduction
offerings such as owers, food, and sandalwood paste which are presented to
deities and then given to devotees are called prasāda (Upadhyaya 1988–1997,
p.2170).
7 For important studies on the relation between modernity and the occult, see
also Comaroff and Comaroff (1992, 1993, 2001, 2002), Behrend and Luig (1999),
Moore and Sanders (2001), Masquelier (2002), and Pels (2003). Boddy (1994) also
reviewed anthropological studies on spirit possession, focusing on the dimen-
sion of ‘resistance’ against oppressive social changes such as modernisation and
colonisation. See also Ishii (2007), as a critique of the theoretical framework of
these previous studies.
8 See also Geschiere (1999) and Meyer (1999). Needless to say, even before the
1990s, there were some studies which considered the occult in non-Western
societies as the expression of people’s ambivalent consciousness towards moder-
nity. See, for instance, Fabian (1978).
9 For critiques of this tendency, see Englund and Leach (2000), Ishii (2005), and
Ranger (2007).
10 For various theoretical trends in anthropology concerning ontology, see Vigh
and Sausdal (2014), Gad, Jensen, and Winthereik (2015), Kohn (2015), and
Jensen et al. (2017).
11 Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (2007) cite Bruno Latour, Alfred Gell, Marilyn
Strathern, Viveiros de Castro, and Roy Wagner as anthropologists who have
indirectly led the ontological turn. In this book, I concentrate on Viveiros de
Castro, who often refers to and leads arguments on the ontological turn, as a
primary proponent of the OT.
12 Naturally, proponents of the OT criticise any consideration of these magical-
religious practices and discourses as mere ‘beliefs’ (see Viveiros de Castro 2011a,
p. 136).
13 The rationality debate involves a series of arguments concerning the criteria for
rationality as well as the differences and compatibility between systems of mod-
ern thought and ‘primitive thought’. See Wilson (1974), Tambiah (1990), Horton
(1993), and Stambach (2000).
14 Viveiros de Castro has offered a refutation of this critique (2011a, pp. 135–137).
15 In contrast to studies that assume the modernity of colonial and postcolonial
states, Pedersen (2011, p. 67) sees the post-socialist Mongolian state as magical,
shamanistic, and non-modern.
16 See, for instance, Asad (1986), who, in discussing the translation of culture, criti-
cised the objectivist view of Gellner (1970). While appreciating the view of Asad,
Viveiros de Castro proposes the idea of ‘controlled equivocation’ as a better un-
derstanding of translation (Viveiros de Castro 2004a, p. 5).
17 As an exception, Henare (2007), one of the editors of Thinking through Things
(Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007), uses the idea of ‘commensurability’ when
considering the life of Maori people, who shift between modern and traditional
registers of value and property.
18 Deleuze writes,
Bergson means that the objective is that which has no virtuality —whether re-
alized or not, whether possible or real, everything is actual in the objective…
Matter has neither virtuality nor hidden power, and that is why we can as-
similate it to “the image”. (1991, p. 41, emphasis in original)
19 Regarding this, Holbraad writes, ‘My central argument turns on the idea that
alterity proper must be construed in ontological rather than epistemological
terms. The questions that alterity poses to us anthropologists pertain to what
Introduction 31
exists rather than what can be known’ (2009, p. 81, emphasis added). Also,
Holbraad (2007, pp. 208–217) considers Cuban divination in which deities move
from transcendent to immanent to communicate with humans, using the notion
of potentiality. This view is similar to my discussion in later chapters of būtas,
which appear at times between the virtual and the actual. Holbraad, however,
focuses on how a diviner makes the transcendent deities manifest as immanent
beings. Likewise, critiques (e.g. Viveiros de Castro 2014a) of the view of those
anthropologists who approach witchcraft, spirits, and other magical-religious
phenomena as if they do ‘not really exist’ are, in effect, making an ethical request
that anthropologists treat these as phenomena that have real being/existence for
the people in the eld.
20 ‘Coherence’ (Kohärenz) is one of the key concepts in von Weizsäcker’s thought
(1997[1950]). The term indicates the chiasmic relation between an actor and its
umwelt, as well as its transformations; the characteristics of the umwelt are spec-
ied and transformed by a certain mode of action, and at the same time, the
mode of the act is specied by the characteristics of the umwelt that emerges in
the action (see Kawamoto 2006, pp. 82–83; Ishii 2012).
21 All following English quotations in this chapter from German sources are my
own translation.
22 Or, as discussed in Chapter 7, an organism may maintain its stability by dis-
regarding or ‘overlooking’ some of the changes of the umwelt (von Weizsäcker
1997, pp. 108–109).
23 Kimura discusses the distinction between the verbs aru (exist) and iru (stay) in
Japanese. According to Kimura, aru corresponds to ‘be’, sein, and être, which
are verbs as well as copulas, and it primarily denotes the existence of things
and abstractions not including animate beings. Meanwhile, iru is a verb which
denotes the ‘staying’ or ‘dwelling’ of humans, animals, and other personied
beings. In this sense, aru-mono (existing thing/being) is considered to be either
real or possible, while iru-mono (dwelling thing/being) is considered to be either
actual or virtual (Kimura 2000, pp. 70–73). From this perspective, a būta which
appears temporarily between the realms of the wild and the human is considered
not as an aru-mono, but as an iru-mono.
24 Therefore, the process of the development of an organism seems to anticipate
the order of its umwelt. This corresponds to the view of Merleau-Ponty that the
actions of an organism are endowed with a ‘reference to the future’. See Hirose
(1997).
25 For the social dimension of the Gestaltkreis theory, see also von Weizsäcker (2005).
26 In general, jōga refers to the physical world, the human form, existence, and
reality, while māya means ‘mystery’ and ‘disappearance’. Also, māyaka denotes
vanishing, eeting, passing away, and disappearing. It is thought that while
būtas belong to the invisible realm of māya, they temporarily manifest them-
selves ( jōga āpini) through spirit possession. Additionally, būtas have the power
to make others vanish (māya maḷpuni). See Upadhyaya (1988–1997, pp. 1339,
2566, 2567), Claus (1978, pp. 9–10), and Brückner (2009, pp. 44, 77, 133).
27 In this sense, būta śakti in the realm of māya is considered to be virtuality, while
what appears in between the realms of māya and jōga is actuality. Kimura (1997,
pp. 98–101) had this to say about the relation between actuality and virtuality:
virtuality is the state in which actuality has not yet been actualised. It denotes
the state in which virtuality has not yet unfolded its virtue. Actuality arises only
between itself and virtuality, or as its difference from virtuality. See also Ishii
(2012).
28 For anthropological studies on personhood, see Carrithers, Collins, and
Lukes (1985), Jackson and Karp (1990), and Lambek and Strathern (1998).
32 Introduction
Onpersonhood in South Asian societies, see Dumont (1965, 1980), Daniel (1984),
Mines (1988, 1994), Busby (1997), Freeman (1999), and Sax (2002). For studies
on gift-exchange in South Asian societies, see Parry (1986, 1989, 1994), Raheja
(1988), Osella and Osella (1996), Laidlaw (2000), and Copeman (2005, 2009, 2011).
29 In addition to the works of the ontological anthropologists discussed in the
previous sections, see Bird-David (1999), Ingold (2000), Willerslev (2004, 2007),
Kohn (2007, 2013), and Candea (2010).
30 Aḷiyasantāna kaṭṭụ, also known as aḷiyakaṭṭụ, indicates the matrilineal system of
inheritance. In Tuḷu, aḷiya indicates ‘nephew’ or ‘son-in-law’, and santāna indi-
cates ‘line’ or ‘family’. See Upadhyaya (1988–1997, pp. 212, 2865).
31 Regarding this, Tanabe writes,
In the pre-colonial “system of entitlements”, members in a local community
were granted various rights to shares of the local products and the royal and/
or community honours and privileges in lieu of performing different duties
and functions for the reproduction of the state and community.
(Tanabe 2006, p. 767)
32 See, for instance, Shiva (1988), Gadgil and Guha (1992), Arnold and Guha (eds.)
(1995), Swain (1997), and Guha (2000).
33 This was one of the pictures of būta dancers in Thurston (1975[1909c],
pp.141–148), with the caption ‘Nalike devil-dancer’.
1 According to a document in the village panchayat in Padu Perar, the size of
Mudu Perar is 896.24 hectares and that of Padu Perar is 829.3 hectares. Though
there is a panchayat ofce in both Mudu Perar and Padu Perar, only the one in
Padu Perar functions as an administrative ofce.
2 Though Mudu Perar and Padu Perar were administratively separated, they still
function as subdivisions of the larger erstwhile village of Perar, which is con-
sidered the basic unit for the villagers. Therefore, I will also refer to Perar as a
‘village’ in this book.
3 In general, guttu refers to the manor houses, or the families responsible for or-
ganising the rituals in a village (Upadhyaya 1988–1997, p. 1109). As we will see
later, there are 16 houses in Perar called the ‘sixteen guttus’, and they play im-
portant roles in the būta worship at the village level. Also, as we will see in Part
Two, in the Vijayanagara period, a guttu was one of the units of administration
and land-tax collection in South Kanara.
4 According to the same document, as of 2001, in Mudu Perar, 66 people (34 males
and 32 females) belong to the Scheduled Castes (SC) and 15 people (8 males
and 7 females) belong to the Scheduled Tribes (ST). In Padu Perar, 142 people
(74males and 68 females) are SC and 46 people (22 males and 24 females) are ST.
5 Tables 2.1 and 2.2 were made by the author based on the house-tax record (Padu
Perar Panchayat Ofce 2008) kept in the village panchayat ofce in Padu Perar.
6 In Guru Kambuḷa, there is a mosque and the mausoleum of a saint, and this
area’s land was the property of the mosque before the implementation of the
land reform legislation in 1974. On the hilly area in the northeast of Mudu Perar,
there is a St Francisco Xavier church.
7 Though most Baṇṭas are landlords in South Kanara, they are categorised as
OBC because most of them living in the rural area are engaged in agriculture.
8 They are also called Bunts in English. Baṇṭerụ means the warrior or servant
of a king, and Okkelakuḷu means agriculturist. See also Thurston (1975[1909a],
pp.147 –172).
9 For additional general information on Kuḍubi, see Thurston (1975[1909b],
pp.99–106).
10 For additio nal general i nformation on Pūjār i (Billava), see Thu rston (1975[1909a],
pp. 243 –252).
11 For additional general information on Ācāri, see Thurston (1975[1909a], p. 61).
12 In this book, I use ‘Brahman’ instead of ‘Baṭṭrụ’ in line with the relative popular-
ity and distinctiveness of each term.
13 According to Thurston (1975[1909a], p. 375), ‘Ahi-Kshētra’ is probably a Sanskri-
tisation of ‘Haiga’, or ‘the land of snakes’.
14 For more general information on Pambada, see Singh (2002[1993], pp. 1028–1031)
and Thurston (1975[1909d], p. 206).
15 For more general information on Maḍḍyelɛ, see Thurston (1975[1909a], p. 16–18).
16 On the correspondence between the Tuḷu calendar and the solar calendar, see
Table 2.4.
17 In general, bākimārụ indicates a eld in front of a house. Also, kambuḷa refers to
a buffalo race held in a paddy eld or river canal, to a eld in which this buffalo
race takes place, and to a ritual performed in a rice eld for fertility (Upadhyaya
1988–1997, pp. 592, 2273). In addition to the kambuḷa, a ritual called the parva
is held in the main hall of the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu’s house. In general, parva de-
notes the auspicious day on which festivals and rituals are held. See Upadhyaya
(1988–1997, p. 1958).
18 Subba himself insists that he is an ‘di Dravid ̣a (or ig i nal Dr av i d ian)’.
19 Pūkarɛ is an ornamental post decorated with owers set in some selected
paddy elds before specic rituals and buffalo races to ward off evil spirits. See
Upadhyaya (1988–1997, p. 2087).
20 According to local legend, in antiquity a person and two buffalo disappeared on
the mountain. The buffalo called by Subba here are supposed to be the būtas of
those missing buffalo.
21 In the past, on the next day of the kambul ̣a, Subba and his family used to visit
each house of the village dancing and playing instruments. Nowadays they
dance and sing only at the guttu house.
22 According to the villagers, a ritual called panikụ kulluni was also performed
during the kambuḷa ritual. In this ritual, while waiting for the kallāla, the male
relatives of the kallāla drank palm wine, had sexual intercourse with each other,
and danced together. This suggests that male sexual vitality was important in
the kambuḷa ritual, which aimed to enhance the fertility and productivity of the
agricultural eld as a ‘bride’. For a general explanation of panikụ kulluni, see
Upadhyaya (1988–1997, p. 1923).
23 Nowadays, shrine worker rewards are paid in cash.
24 Most plots of the land in the name of the village shrine were purchased in the
past by the heads of the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu. In Part Two, I will investigate the
impact of the land reforms in more detail.
25 In general, umbal ̣i refers to rent-free land for the performance of certain services
in temples or other public services (Upadhyaya 1988–1997, p. 342).
26 In addition to these jāgeda daiva, būtas worshipped by the members of a house
called ‘manɛ daiva (house būta)’, and būtas worshipped by the members of a joint
family called kuṭumada daiva (family būta) are enshrined in these small shrines.
1 This is the formal name of the village būta shrine. Brammadēvarụ and Iśtadē-
vate are alternate names of Bramma and Arasu, respectively. Kinnimajālụ is the
general name of the place consisting of Baṇṭakaṁba, village būta shrine, and
treasure house.
2 Kinnimajālụ and the village būta shrine are collectively called Kinnimajālụ
sāna.
3 Though it is believed that the village būta shrine has an 800-year history, these
buildings were rebuilt in 1965. As we will see in Chapter 8, since 2013, the shrine
has again undergone a controversial process of rebuilding.
4 There are altars for būtas in the houses of the higher-ranked guttus, and a Brahman
priest living in the village performs rituals such as the saṅkrāṅti at these altars.
5 Uḷḷākḷụ is the honoric title of a person of high rank. See Upadhyaya (1988–1997,
p. 410).
6 Bramma’s identity and origin are controversial issues among folklorists. See
Padmanabha (1976, pp. 24–39), Upadhyaya (1996, p. 202), and Claus (1978).
7 Srinivas (1952) rst described the concept of Sanskritisation as the adaptation
of Brahmanical rituals, beliefs, and ways of life through which low castes seek
to improve their position in the caste hierarchy. For this Sanskritisation, the
coupled notions of purity and impurity are important as they systematise and
maintain the structural distance between different castes.
8 It is believed that one rank below Balavāṇḍi, Arasu, and Pilicāmuṇḍi, there are
ve more būtas; moreover, under these ve būtas, there are another seven būtas.
This is expressed as ‘one Bramma, three uḷḷākḷụ, ve kāraṇīkerụ (those who can
do anything), and seven māyagarlu (those who are intangible)’.
9 Geographically speaking, these guttu families are selected in order from Mudu
Perar and Padu Perar.
10 Among the 16 guttus, the top ve families have maintained close relationships
through marriage.
11 In the nēma, Balavāṇḍi incarnated by the mukkāldi receives a coconut from the
gaḍipatinārụ and pours its water on the ground.
12 This ritual is generally called kalaśaśuddhi (Upadhyaya 1988–1997, pp. 715, 716).
Pambada dancer-mediums also receive this ritual purication every year.
13 Though the Pambadas are possessed by the royal būtas in the village būta shrine
only in the nēma, they act as the dancer-mediums of other būtas in several other
rituals both inside and outside Perar.
14 It is generally regarded that Paravas occupy the rank between Pambada and
Nalike.
1 The oral epics recorded in this chapter are based on the stories narrated by
Gangādara Rai (interviewed on 3 July 2008), Bālākrishna Shetty (interviewed
on 2 July 2008), and Narasouna Pejattāya (interviewed on 21 July 2008). As dis-
cussed in Chapter 8, part of the pāḍdana regarding the village būta shrine in
Perar was recorded and edited into a Kannaḍa pamphlet by folklorists. I have
also referred to this pamphlet.
2 Brammabermerụ is another name for Bramma. This deity is also called
Nāgabramma.
3 A vow made to perform certain rituals or to offer gifts to deities is called parakɛ
(Upadhyaya 1988–1997, p. 1934). In matrilineal communities such as those of the
Baṇṭa, a maternal uncle often makes a vow praying for the birth of a child for his
sister.
4 Varaha was the standard 3.4-gram gold coin in the Vijayanagara period.
5 Bernoṭṭu guttu is another name for the Brāṇabeṭṭu guttu. Similarly, the
Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu is also referred to as the Muṅḍoṭṭu guttu.
6 Today the 13th guttu is Kuḍubi.
7 There is a shrine to Bramma in Kaje, and the deity is called Manibottu
Brammērụ.
8 Kandettāya is one of the ve būtas one rank below the three royal būtas.
1 The description of the nēma in this chapter is based primarily on participant
observation of the annual ritual in the Perar būta shrine from 11 to 13 March
20 09.
2 According to Jayānanda, he brings the rice and spices received from the muk
kāldi to his home. He and his family offer chicken and roti made from the rice to
the deity and eat them.
3 Since Balavāṇḍi has feminine aspects, saris and jasmine owers are offered to
this deity in the nēma.
4 Mukkāldi-Balavāṇḍi has very little food or drink offered to him. He is said to
receive only the ‘air’ of offerings. This act of pouring the coconut water on the
ground shows that he has received it as an offering.
5 This aṇi is said to be made of 1,001 coconut leaf bones.
6 This is expressed in Tuḷu that ‘patti mānecciḍụ jōga battụdụ kaṭṭina mānecciḍụ
āpɛ (the possession by taking the sword is transferred to the one who is tying
[gaggara or aṇi ] )’.
7 This ritual is called suriya pāḍonuni.
8 During the ritual, only men can enter the precinct of Baṇṭakaṁba. Women
gather outside the Baṇṭakaṁba and observe the ritual carefully.
9 The original meaning of vākụ piripuni is ‘removing āja’. Āja means that a person
who disputes with one of his/her relatives makes a vow that his/her descend-
ants will never contact with the descendants of the opponent. If the descendants
break the vow, it is believed that a curse will fall on them. Vākụ piripuni is the
ritual to abrogate the vow in front of deity and reconstruct the relationship be-
tween the relatives (see Upadhyaya 1988–1997, p. 2791).
10 This ritual is also called ‘kaṭṭụ-kaṭṭụleda āvāra (offering food according to the
custom)’.
1 On the concept of ‘substance-code’, Marriott writes:
Varied codes of action or codes for conduct (dharma) are thought to be nat-
urally embodied in actors and otherwise substantialized in the ow of things
that pass among actors. Thus the assumption of the easy, proper separabil-
ity of action from actor, of code from substance…is generally absent: code
and substance…cannot have separate existences in this world of constituted
things as conceived by most South Asians… Before one begins to think of
Hindu transactions, one thus needs rmly to understand that those who
transact as well as what and how they transact are thought to be inseparably
“code-substance” or “substance-code” (1976, pp. 109–110; emphasis added).
On the issue of the self and personhood in South Asian societies, see also Marri-
ott and Inden (1977), Daniel (1984), Busby (1997), Sax (2002), and Carsten (2011).
2 On gift-exchange in Hindu society, see also Parry (1986) and Raheja (1988).
3 In other words, as Parry (1986, p. 457) writes in his interpretation of The Gift
(Mauss 1990 [1950]), there is no absolute disjunction between persons and things.
4 Strathern also argues, ‘If we take certain kinds of networks as socially expanded
hybrids then we can take hybrids as condensed networks. That condensation
works as a summation or stop’ (1996, p. 523).
5 Concerning the issue of the circulation and boundaries of substance-codes,
arguments on landscape and topology are suggestive. See, for instance, Munn
(1996) and Uchiyamada (1999, 2000).
6 Regarding the consumption of offerings by the būtas, after the ritual for
Pilicāmuṇḍi inside the precinct is complete, the deity is offered both vegetarian
offerings and blood sacrices right outside the shrine building.
7 For instance, in the ritual held at the family level, rst the head of the family
and other male members receive the prasāda and then it is distributed among the
female members of the family.
8 As seen in this chapter, one of the methods of maintaining the boundary in
gift-exchange is to restrict who can participate in the transactional network and
limit the circulation of substance-codes. Another possible way is to refuse to
form the social relationship based on gift-exchange by keeping the gift as ‘pure
gift’ or by impersonalising it. See Laidlaw (2000) and Copeman (2005).
9 On the notions of purity, impurity, and śakti, see Dumont and Pocock (1959),
Harper (1964), Wadley (1977), Fuller (1979), Tanaka (1997, pp. 10–14, 138–139),
and Sekine (2002).
10 If someone dies inside a kuṭuma, the kuṭuma members should not enter temples
or shrines, and should not conduct any auspicious rituals for 16 days. The ritual
pollution brought by death or birth is puried by a ritual called sudda maḷpuni,
in which a Baṇḍāri (barber) man takes on the role of priest.
11 This is the case in purication rituals in Sri Lankan Tamil society presented by
Tanaka (1997, p. 138). According to Tanaka, priests wearing a sacred kāppu cord
containing mantra śakti become immune to death pollution.
12 On the complementary relationship among Hindu deities, see also Fuller (1988)
and Ishii (2015a).
1 For recent studies focusing on animism, in addition to the works of Viveiros de
Castro and Willerslev examined in this chapter, see, for instance, Descola (1996),
Bird-David (1999), and Pedersen (2001).
2 As mentioned in Chapter 1, recent studies on magical-religious phenomena, in
cluding spirit possession, tend to analyse them not as a mere critique of moder
nity, but as components of it (e.g. Behrend & Luig 1999; Comaroff & Comaroff
2002). One can still nd in this new trend the vestiges of the conventional frame
work of recasting these phenomena as political discourses about modernity. For
a critical view of this trend, see Kapferer (2003) and Ranger (2007).
3 This analytical position corresponds to those of the several previous studies ex
amined in Chapter 6, which tend to analyse the individual–dividual dichotomy
as if it corresponds with Western and non-Western personhood (e.g. Busby 1997;
Rasmussen 2008; Mosko 2010). At the same time, as Johnson critically points
out, nearly all ethnographers ‘must now at least address the prospect of their
possession, respond to it, apologize for its lack, somehow account for it, as they
construct their authorial position in relation to the work of spirits’ (2011, p. 417,
italics original).
4 See, for instance, Mead (1927), Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]), Piaget (1954), Schütz
(1970), Husserl (1973), Blankenburg (1991), and Sakabe (1999).
5 See, for example, Pedersen (2001), Kohn (2007), Pedersen, Empson and Hum
phrey (2007), and Swancutt (2007).
6 Holbraad and Willerslev (2007) also present an alternative to Viveiros de
Castro’s model by illustrating the Inner Asian ‘transcendentalist’ model charac
terised bythe asymmetrical, temporal, and generative transformation of one’s
perspective.
7 On the instability and vulnerability of the self and the body, see also Taylor
(1996) and Vilaça (2005).
8 In her investigation of Mongolian games, Swancutt (2007, p. 240) points out that
shifts in perspective bring about long-term changes in personhood. Addition
ally, Santo (2012) analyses spirit mediumship in Cuba as the mutual constitution
of self and spirit, which implies the development of a particular kind of self.
9 Būta worship at the village level is characterised by relatively systematic training
and ritual processes similar to those of other theatrical performances in India
(e.g. Frasca 1990; de Bruin 2006).
10 This ability of the būta medium can be understood through Lienhardt’s (1961,
pp. 151) notion of ‘passiones’ (see also Kramer 1993, p. 58; Lambek 1993, p. 312;
Ishii 2012).
11 In the būta ritual, the deity incarnated in the medium calls out the names of the
16 guttus according to their rank.
12 Ākarṣaṇɛ and āvēśa mean spirits’ ‘attraction’ and ‘possession’, respectively
(Upadhyaya 1988–1997, pp. 219, 277). Possession by būtas is variously described
such as jōga (ecstasy), darṣana (trembling owing to spirit possession), and būta
pattuṇḍu (‘the būta caught…’) (see Claus 1984; Smith 2006, p. 138).
13 In the nēma, the mukkāldi and the Pambada dancer-medium are usually pos-
sessed by turns.
14 Regarding the transformation of perspective, Blankenburg (1991) points out the
importance of one’s ability to play with the various perspectives that one hap-
pens to be given. See also Sakabe (1999) and Ishii (2013).
1 See, for instance, Appadurai and Breckenridge (1976), Appadurai (1981), Fuller
(1984), Presler (1987), and Dirks (1987).
2 Fuller (2003), however, carried out a follow-up survey on the same temple and
claried that the traditionalism of priests and authority of the temple had actu-
ally increased under state policy.
3 On the juristic personality of Hindu deities in terms of religious endowments,
see Sontheimer (1965).
4 On the gift-exchange relationship in Hindu society which does not form a closed
cycle, see Parry (1986).
5 In Tuḷu, darṣana indicates vision or sight, and also means trembling due to pos-
session by deities. See Upadhyaya (1988–1997, p. 1571).
6 Regarding the issue of agency manifested through interactions between humans
and deities, see also Gell (1997), Pinney (2001), and Ishii (2014a).
7 On the participation of government ofcials in Hindu rituals in temples, see
Appadurai (1981, p. 49) and Fuller (1984, pp. 76–77).
8 Because the village būta shrine was located in Padu Perar, the institution was
called ‘the Padu Perar institution’ in the court record.
9 Under the HRE Act, ‘hereditary’ temples (that is, temples whose managers had
not previously been selected by government ofcers) were seen as private institu-
tions and were thus relatively free from any direct outside control. The ‘excepted’
temple category was abolished in 1959 (see Presler 1987, pp. 24, 48).
10 The dispute between the asrāṇṇa and the higher-ranked guttu houses over
the management of the village būta shrine continued intermittently. In 1960,
a judgement was given that dismissed the asrāṇṇa’s rights in the village būta
shrine, except for his right in the guṇḍa (O.S. No. 25 of 1960).
11 In principle, Deputy Commissioner of the Dakshina Kannada district serves
concurrently as Deputy Commissioner for Hindu Religious Institutions and
Charitable Endowments and executes his duties under the Commissioner.
12 ‘Law CR [Court Records] No. 7/2002–2003’ indicates the original order by which
the Deputy Commissioner appointed N. Shetty as the t person for the shrine
management in January 2003. It is also the title of the body of documents about
the disputes regarding this order.
13 The Madras Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1951 had been
in force until the Hindu Religious Institutions and Charitable Endowments Act
came into force in May 2003. See Presler (1987, p. 28, note 32).
14 People in South Kanara often invite astrologers from Kerala who belong to the
community called Poduvāl. This time too the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu family invited
famous astrologers from Kerala, and in addition to the expenditure for the ritual,
the family had to pay all the expenses for their travel and stay in Mangaluru. On
Poduvāl, see also Thurston (1975[1909d]), pp. 203–205).
15 Durgā is one of the great Hindu goddesses, who is believed to be the wife of the
god Shiva and to be a dreadful warrior who kills demons.
1 Paṭṭadār literally means the holder of land deed (paṭṭa) and refers to the land-
holder. However, as I will mention later, paṭṭadār (male) and paṭṭadārti (female)
among the Baṇṭa landlord class in South Kanara were not ‘land owners’ with
exclusive rights to land, but representatives of matrilineal joint families with
joint landholdings.
2 The period of beginning of Āḷupa rule is unclear. References to Āḷupa rulers
appear in inscriptions from the sixth century (Abhishankar 1973, pp. 37–38).
3 The Keḷadi clan emerged in the early sixteenth centur y. Keḷadi Nāyakas continued
to be feudatories of the Vijayanagara Empire even after the defeat of Vijayanagara
forces at the Battle of Rakkasa-Taṅgaḍi in 1565. In 1614, Veṅkaṭappa-nāyaka
I declared independence from the empire (Abhishankar 1973, p. 54; White 2015,
pp.63, 92).
4 See also Bhatt (1975) for a history of South Kanara.
5 I refer to the person who held the land and was responsible for paying land tax as
the ‘landholder’. I also use the term ‘landholder’ interchangeably with paṭṭadār,
who paid land tax after the colonial period. In South Kanara, land was jointly
held by Baṇṭa matrilineal kin groups, and their representatives were registered
as paṭṭadārs. I distinguish between the ‘landholder’ and ‘landlord (guttu)’. Guttu
is the dominant class in village society and have ritual roles. (As I will show, the
landlords and landholders overlap. But not all landholders are guttus.)
6 According to Vasantha Madhava, Jain landlords exercised power in adminis-
trative districts called māgaṇe in the Vijayanagara period (Madhava 1984, p.5).
However, during the rule of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, these Jains lost their
position as rulers and became simply landholders.
7 There are many references to the borders of land owned by guild organisations
in the inscriptions of this period. It was the duty of the managers of land donated
to temples to offer prescribed amounts of crop to the temple deities, irrespective
of good or bad harvest (Ramesh 1970, p. 288).
8 These titles are used today in Perar as names of būta priests and heads of land-
lord families.
9 Such a system can be called a ‘system of entitlements’ centred on the būta shrine
and guttu families, and is important for understanding the nature of landlords
in South Kanara. For details on system of entitlements, see Tanabe (2006).
10 Nāyaka was a title given to Chaudappa Gauda (1500–1540) of the Keḷadi clan by
the Vijayanagara king of the time (Abhishankar 1973, p. 54).
11 Madhava points out that in this period, some of the būtas were seen as ‘second-
ary deities’ and were demoted to the status of deities subservient to sīme deities.
At the same time, the form of būta rituals came to be inuenced by Brahmanical
rituals (Madhava 1985, pp. 21–23, 143).
12 India Ofce Library and Records, London, Madras Revenue Consultations, 19
September 1800, pp. 2239–2248 (quoted in Stein [1989, pp. 67–68]).
13 Kanara is a region corresponding to Uttara Kannada, Udupi, and Dakshina
Kannada districts in the present state of Karnataka, and Kasaragod district in the
present state of Kerala. Munro’s term in Kanara was from July 1799 to October
1800 (Bradshaw 1894, p. 87). Kanara was divided into South and North in Decem-
ber 1800, but was reunited in 1805. It was governed as one of the collectorates in
the Madras Presidency until it was divided into North Kanara district and South
Kanara district in 1859 (Bhat 1998, pp. 4–8). North Kanara (except for Kundāpura
taluk, which was included in South Kanara district) was annexed to Bombay Pres-
idency in 1862, and South Kanara district was part of the Madras Presidency until
it was unied with the new Mysore state in the reorganisation of states in 1956.
Kasaragod taluk became part of the state of Kerala in 1956 (Abhishankar 1973,
pp. 4–5). In view of this history, I refer to the place of Munro’s posting as ‘Kanara’.
14 Zamindar refers to the ‘landlord’ dened by the zamindari system, the system
of land tenure and taxation introduced by Governor Cornwallis in Bengal Pres-
idency in 1793, and practised since then throughout the British colonial period
mainly in northern parts of India.
15 The word seems to have originated from the Sanskrit word varga, or Arabic word
warq, meaning leaf (Sturrock 1894, p. 118; Baden-Powell 1990 [1892], p.147).
16 On the other hand, according to Damle, warg showed the revenue account of
each landholder, and this often included land of unknown size scattered in dif-
ferent villages and regions (Damle 1991, p. 158, note 15). Hence Damle points
out that it is not appropriate to refer to warg as ‘estate’. I will refer to warg as
holding. For details regarding warg, see also Bhat (1998, p. 85).
17 See Maclean (1877, pp. 99–101, 114–115) and Sturrock (1894, p. 118). For details
on surveys and assessments under the ryotwari system, see Baden-Powell (1907,
pp. 199–206).
18 In the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu, the eldest woman of the matrilineal joint family
(kuṭuma) was registered as the paṭṭadārti.
19 ‘Memorandum Relative to Revenue Servants: Extracts of a Letter from A. Read
[then sub-collector in the CD under Munro] to Another Junior Colleague, James
Cochrane’. IOL, MC, F/151/10, f.95 (quoted by Stein [1989, p. 66]).
20 Bhaṇḍāra-sthaḷa more accurately refers not to ‘state land’, but land which is not
tax-free.
21 Against Stein’s view, Chitnis (1974) points out the importance of the survey car-
ried out by Śivappa-nāyaka in the seventeenth century.
22 See Maclean (1987 [1885], p. 154; 1989 [1885], p. 64).
23 In 1831, peasants dissatised with heavy taxes broke out in a ‘no tax campaign’
in Kanara (Sturrock 1894, pp. 104–105; Abhishankar 1973, p. 68; Rao 1991; Bhat
1998, p p. 112 –113).
24 Mudu Perar and Padu Perar were also surveyed in this period. The maps kept
today in public ofces, such as the Deputy Commissioner’s ofce of Dakshina
Kannada and the panchayat ofce of Padu Perar, as maps of these two villages
are based on the lithograph originals marking land zones in 1893.
25 This document is basically a closed document kept in the archives of the Deputy
Commissioner’s ofce.
26 Pējāvara Mutt was registered twice as ‘Rama Vittla Matt of Pejawar’ under reg-
istration numbers 37 and 38. The name of a Brahman mūla gēṇi is registered
under number 38.
27 In SSRM, there are cases where the sex of the registered person is written after
the name of the paṭṭadārti, such as ‘Muṅḍabeṭṭu Poovu (female)’.
28 ‘Sanna Muṅḍabeṭṭu’ means the same as Tidyamuṅḍoṭṭu, namely, the third guttu
family.
29 The state of Mysore was renamed the state of Karnataka on 1 November 1973
(Kamath 1982, p. 388). In 1997, South Kanara district (Dakshina Kannada) was
divided into present-day Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts.
30 According to the Mysore Land Reforms Act, one acre of rst-class irrigated land
was stipulated as the standard acre (Pani 1984, p. 48).
31 According to Thimmaiah and Aziz, the ‘land ceilings’ were cut down to 10
‘standard acres’ (Thimmaiah & Aziz 1983, p. 823), but I think they have mis-
taken it for 10 ‘units’. In the Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, ‘a unit was de-
ned as land with a soil classication of above 8 annas and “having facilities for
assured irrigation from such Government Canals and Government Tanks as are
notied by the State Government to be capable of supplying water for growing
two crops of paddy in a year”’ (Pani 1984, pp. 48–49; emphasis added by Pani).
1 From the 1880s, several judges began to convey their doubts about the authority
of Bhuthala Pandya’s kaṭṭụ, owing to the inuence of Arthur Coke Burnell’s
criticism of the pamphlet. Burnell was the Judge of the District Court from 1872
to 1874 and was the author of the rst English book on būta worship (Navada &
Fernandes 2008).
2 Subba Hegade v. Tongu, (1869) 4 Madras High Court Reports, 196.
3 Yaj amāna and yajamāni are the Kannaḍa words equivalent to yajamāne and ya-
jamāni in Tuḷu, respectively.
4 For instance, in the court case held at the Madras High Court in 1890, the
bench judged that a lunatic woman, Puttamma, who was the last survivor of
an Aliyasantana family, should be entitled to the family property, rejecting
the appeal of the wife and children of the last male survivor of Puttamma’s
family (Sanku v. Puttamma, 1891, Indian Law Reporter 14, Madras, 289).
Also, in a court case held in 1910, the judge stated that it was reasonable to
remove the elder sister, who had only one son, from the position of yajamāni
and instead appoint the younger sister who had numerous children, from the
viewpoint of family interests (Thimmakke v. Akku, 1911, Indian Law Re-
porter 34, Madras, 481).
5 Most research on matriliny in South India has dealt with marumakkattāyam,
the form of matriliny that prevailed among the Nayars in Kerala. In both the
academic literature and legal documents, the aḷiyasantāna kaṭṭụ in South Ka-
nara has often been dened through a comparison with marumakkattāyam,
as its ‘sister system’ (Bhat 2004, p. 11). It is generally considered that in both
aḷiyasantāna kaṭṭụ and marumakkattāyam, descent is traced in the female
line. Also, the basic unit in the matrilineal society is the joint family called
taṟavāṭŭ in Malayāḷam, kuṭumba in Kannaḍa, and kuṭuma in Tuḷu (see Gough
1952, p. 72).
6 See Moore (1985, p. 531) and Menon (1993) on the case in Malabar. It is also
believed that if the kuṭuma do not conduct the būta ritual properly, the family
members who are responsible for the ritual must suffer the curse of the būtas.
7 When the Madras Aliyasantana Act was enacted in 1949, it was determined that
this Act would remain in effect for 15 years and that from that point forward
the per stirpes mode of division would be applied uniformly. In 1962, however,
the Madras Aliyasantana (Mysore Amendment) Act, 1961, was enacted, and the
mode of division was changed to per capita.
8 In Kannaḍa, saṃtati means ‘group’, ‘offspring’, and ‘lineage’, while nissaṃtati
means ‘childless’. See Učida and Rajapurohit (2013, pp. 589, 897).
9 Prior to this Amendment Act, the Hindu Succession Act was enacted in 1956. In
the Hindu Succession Act, it was declared that when a member of a kuṭumba or
kavalu who had rights to the undivided family property died, his/her allotment
should be what the person would have received if the per capita mode of division
had been accomplished just before his/her death; also, the allotment of the de-
ceased person should be succeeded to his/her descendants whether he/she was a
member of a nissaṃtati kavalu or not. In the Hindu Succession Act, even though
the heirs of the deceased person could be entitled to the predecessor’s allotment,
the person concerned could not enjoy his/her allotment during his/her lifetime.
See Bhat (2004, pp. 127–128).
10 Santhamma v. Neelamma, (1956) All India Reporter, Madras, 642.
11 Similarly, Bhat pointed out that people’s rights in family property had been in-
dividualised by the amendment of law, and that under the recent social and eco-
nomic change, the ‘traditional Aliyasantana law is on the wane’ (2004, pp. 164,
189).
12 Kabarụ is the Tuḷu word equivalent to kavalu in Kannaḍa.
13 The manager of the būta ritual at the family level is called the malpāvunāye,
while the one at the village level is called the tūvonunaye.
14 Kaveri v. Ganga Ratna, (1956) 1 Madras Law Journal, 98.
15 ‘Muḍi gēṇi’ is a unit of the weight of paddy paid as rent. One muḍi is approxi-
mately 39.2 kg (1 muḍi corresponds to 3 kaḷasɛ or to 42 sērụ). In the above case,
the total weight of paddy that the Muṅḍabeṭṭu guttu got yearly from all the ten-
ants/cultivators was 600 muḍi (approximately 23,520 kg).
16 This system for the partition of family property is not unique to the Muṅḍabeṭṭu
guttu, but is popular among the Baṇṭa families in Perar even today.
17 Anthakke, from the rst major kabarụ, was the sister of Muttaya Shetty, and
Rukku, from the second major kabarụ, was the sister of Ishwara Shetty. Accord-
ing to the records of land registration (paṭṭɛ) kept in the Deputy Commissioner’s
Ofce, Anthakke from the rst major kabarụ and another Anthakke from the
third major kabarụ were registered as paṭṭadārti, in 1938 and 1950, respectively.
1 The two kinds of gēṇi okkelụ, mūla gēṇi and cāla gēṇi, are generally referred to
as gēṇi. Kāli okkelụ, who live and work on the landlords’ land, are commonly
called okkelụ. I refer to mūla gēṇi and cāla gēṇi as ‘tenant’, and kāli okkelụ as
‘domestic labourer’. For accounts on mūla gēṇi and cāla gēṇi, see Sturrock (1894,
pp. 130–131), Abhishankar (1973, p. 432), Maclean (1989[1885], p. 64), and Bhat
(1998, pp. 86–89).
2 Mūla gēṇi who have secure land rights can be seen as a ‘minor landholder’ rather
than a ‘tenant’. In colonial South Kanara, tax levied on mūla gēṇi’s farmland
was paid either by the mūla gēṇi or the landlord (Abhishankar 1973, p. 434; Ma-
clean 1989 [1885], p. 64). According to the interviews I conducted in Perar, the
landlord paid tax through the patterụ for both mūla gēṇi and cāla gēṇi.
3 Cāla gēṇi were sometimes subtenants of mūla gēṇi. In Mudu Perar, there are
cases of Baṇṭa landlord households being the mūla gēṇi of other more powerful
Baṇṭas and mutts outside the village. In the household survey conducted among
227 households in Mudu Perar, out of the 111 households who used to be land-
lords or tenants, only three households replied that they were mūla gēṇi before
enforcement of the Land Reforms (Amendment) Act of 1974. Out of these three
households, two households were Baṇṭas (out of which one was a landlord house-
hold) and the other one was Kuḍubi.
4 Apart from rice rations, they said they received no aid from landlords even for
family funerals and weddings of domestic labourers.
5 I have equated the number of plots with the number of applicants. For instance,
if one person has applied for two plots, the number of applicants would be two.
Where I have written ‘unknown’ in Table 11.1 are cases where I could not read
the handwritten information on the VRA.
6 Many of the tenants who applied for land belonging to the Catholic Church were
Christians, and many of those who applied for land belonging to Hindu temples
and mutts were Hindus.
7 All the ages of family members in the cases mentioned in this chapter are those
of 2008.
8 Includes households in which the household head was the landlord of one of the
following before land reform: family land of kuṭuma; land purchased by a mem-
ber of matrilineal family; and other purchased land, as well as households in
which the household head managed a part of the family land before and after
land reform. I exclude one Baṇṭa household who is currently a landlord but the
information about them is unclear, and three households (two Baṇṭa households,
one Catholic household) who became landlords by purchasing land after land re-
form. I have indicated those households which were landlords before land reform
and were also tenants of other landlords at the same time as ‘landlord’. Out of the
landlord households, six households were tenants of other landlords before land
reform, and out of these, one household was the mūla gēṇi of Pējāvara Mutt.
9 Include households in which the household head, or his/her parent’s and grand-
parent’s generation were tenants, and households in which the deceased hus-
band of the female household head was a tenant.
10 Include households in which the household head, or his/her parent’s and grand
parent’s generation were domestic labourers, and households in which the de
ceased husband of the female household head was a domestic labourer.
11 Land inheritance from father to child seems to correspond to the extension of
the rights of the natural child due to enforcement of the Hindu Succession Act,
1956 and the Madras Aliyasantana (Mysore Amendment) Act, 1961. However,
we should note that in the survey I conducted in Mudu Perar, all four households
who owned land directly inherited from the father to the child involved inher-
itance from father to daughter. As we see in Case 5, land inherited directly from
the father to the child is inherited matrilineally from the grandmother to the
mother and to the daughter. From this, it is possible that women, and not men,
were prioritised in cases of land inherited directly from the father to the child.
That is to say, once land was inherited by a matrilineal family, it would be main-
tained within the same kuṭuma, and males would be excluded from inheritance.
12 ‘Household number’ in Table 11.9 refers to the serial number I gave to each
household at the time of the survey. As we see in the table, Households 152 and
153 belong to the same matrilineal family, as do Households 196, 197, and 198.
Hence answers about holdings of Households 152 and 153 apply to one matri-
lineal family land, as do those of Households 196, 197, and 198. I have excluded
areas that overlap in the total land area. I have calculated the average by divid-
ing the total land area by 15 households. Households 152 and 153 were landlords
living in Kompadavụ, a village adjacent to Mudu Perar before land reform, but
since they moved to Mudu Perar after losing land due to land reform, they differ
from other households in Mudu Perar.
13 Excludes land yielding 226 muḍi, the area of which is unknown.
14 Out of these, one household employed tenants while the household head was a
tenant of another landlord.
15 Even in cases other than those involving land reform, land belonging to būta
shrines is generally supposed to be transferred only in the form of gifts and not
sold.
16 Kumki usually refers to wasteland without permanent settlers or users. Neigh-
bouring landlord has latent holding rights, but the government can expropriate
it when need arises. In Perar, development of housing plots 5 cents in size began
in the hilly regions around 1977, and migration of landless classes continues till
to day.
1 MSEZL is a combination of both central and state government institutions
and a private nancial company. It currently consists of Oil and Natural Gas
Corporation Ltd (ONGCL), the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development
Board (KIADB), Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS), and
the Kanara Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI). The New Mangalore
Port Trust (NMPT) is also an equity partner of MSEZL (Dhakal 2009, p. 3).
2 The information below is based on interviews with Nitin Hegde and his relatives
on 7 September 2012 and 16 August 2015 at his house in Tenka Yekkar, as well
as an interview with Ragu and other members of the Krishi Bhumi Sanrakshan
Samiti on 17 March 2015 at the Yekkar village panchayat ofce.
3 The BSP, formed in 1984, is mainly supported by the Scheduled Castes, Sched-
uled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and other religious minorities. The SP,
formed in 1992, is mainly supported by Other Backward Classes. The CPI was
formed in 1925, but split into the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the
current CPI in 1964.
4 The BJP is the most signicant Hindu nationalist political party and was formed
in 1980. Its power base is Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Indian right-
wing Hindu nationalistvolunteer organisation. Along with the BJP and Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP), the RSS forms theSangh Parivar, the family ofHindu
nationalistorganisations.
5 If a family evacuate their land, one of the family members can be employed by
MSEZL, in addition to the xed amount of compensation and a residential site
which is of the size from 7 to 23.5 cents. In the early 1990s, when the MRPL rst
started land acquisition in this area, the amount of compensation was 50,000
rupees per acre. As of 2013, the amount has been raised to one and a half million
rupees per acre. Most small farmers, however, are facing difculty after land
transference which means the loss of their permanent livelihood.
6 The information in this section, including the narratives of Kishore and
Lakshman Chowta, is based on interviews with them conducted on 1 and 3
September 2012 and 7 March 2013 at their house in Bajpe.
7 This land acquisition was executed based on the Land Acquisition Act, 1894,
which had been effective until a new law called the Right to Fair Compensation
and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act,
2013, was enforced in January 2014.
8 Mantradēvate is also believed to y into one’s house through sorcery or to be
brought in along with particular objects such as prasāda or accessories.
9 These cases were collected from July to August 2008 in Mudu Perar. The ages of
informants in these cases are as of 2008.
10 The information is based on the i nterview with B. Shetty conducted on 1 September
2012.
11 The description below is based on eldwork and interviews conducted on
9 September 2012 and 14 March 2014 at Kuḍubi Padavụ.
12 In the Karnataka Assembly election in 2008, the BJP held the state government.
B. S. Yeddyurappa held the position of chief minister of the state of Karnataka
until h e resigned at th e end of July 2011. As we w ill see be low, the antideve lopment
movement led by Swamiji developed dramatically when the BJP held power; the
land acquisition plan for the second phase of the MSEZ was withdrawn just be-
fore Yeddyurappa’s resignation. As political background for the success of this
antidevelopment movement, it has been pointed out that Yeddyurappa had close
links with the religious leaders of several mutts in Karnataka (see Gowda 2011).
13 Punarụ pratiṣṭhɛ is a ritual conducted for the opening of a reconstructed shrine;
brahmakalaśa is a ritual for when a deity’s statue is enshrined in a shrine.
14 The information below is based on interviews with Giriya Gowda, R. Rao,
Vidya Dinker, and two other villagers in Permude conducted on 14 March 2014.
1 Regarding the connection of modern technologies with nature, see de Laet and
Mol (2000), Carse (2012), Parry (2015), and Ishii (2017).
2 Interview with Vādirāja Bhat on 1 February 2013.
3 The interview with P. Naik was conducted on 4 March 2012.
4 For more on the relation between ritual and performativity, see Ishii (2012).
5 Previous studies on rituals or exorcism in modern factories have often inter-
preted these rituals as a strategy by the management to placate ordinary workers
(e.g. Ong 1988). Regarding this issue, see also Ishii (2017).
6 Regarding this, see Kimura (2016), who describes the conicts and negotiations
between locals in the Tohoku region of Japan, who recognise the danger of
earthquakes and tsunamis and still long for an intimate relationship with sea,
and the state, which aims to build a gigantic seawall.
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