William S Sax
Biographic Data
| ID | 80728 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William S Sax |
| GIVEN NAMES | William S |
| FAMILY NAME | Sax |
| SIGNATURE | SAX W S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canterbury |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 90 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Possession and the Modern Soul in Bali and India
Trance possession is attested and sometimes even cultivated in many human societies past and present. Its rejection as “deviant” in modern Western thought leads to medicalization or exorcism. Yet it is not the existence of trance possession that needs theoretical explanation but rather its radical repression and displacement as a legitimate discourse and part of public life in modern Western societies. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam it is of…
In the Valley of the Kauravas
This chapter addresses the question, “How is radical alterity best understood?” and answers it by discussing “three problematic terms” in anthropology: culture, ontology, and ritual. It criticizes the “ontological turn” for failing to take seriously the idea of “multiple worlds” and, following the philosophers Mol and Hacking and the ethnosociologist Marriott, argues that these can be theoretically grasped only when sufficient attention is given …
The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess
Not so very long ago, ethnographic writing sought to convey an air of scientific objectivity by means of a number of rhetorical devices that served to distance the ethnographer from those about whom s/he wrote. This was counterproductive on many levels, not least because the ethnographer’s own embodied experiences, feelings and intuitions play a very important role in what s/he writes about ‘the natives’. These days, expectations are quite differ…
Himalayan Histories
Chetan Singh is former Professor of History at Himachal Pradesh University and was Director of the Indian Institute for Advanced Study from 2013 to 2016. The book Himalayan Histories consists of a number of republished essays plus two new chapters at the beginning. There are two main areas of focus in the book: the pre-eminent role of regional gods (deota) in traditional and contemporary politics, and the complexities of Himalayan pastoralism. In…
The Law of Possession
This volume interrogates the great divide introduced by modernization theorists between the “rational,” “scientific,” or “modern,” on the one hand, and “irrational,” “ritual,” or “nonmodern,” on the other. But there are places throughout the world where the relationship between modernity, as represented by the legal and medical institutions of the secular state, and traditional forms of healing and justice, is unsettled. The chapters offer ethnog…
Ritual healing and mental health in India
Ritual healing is very widespread in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and is by far the most common option for those with serious behavioral disturbances. Although ritual healing thus accounts for a very large part of the actual health care system, the state and its regulatory agencies have, for the most part, been structurally blind to its existence. A decade of research on in this region, along with a number of shorter research trips to healing…
Politics of Scale in a High Mountain Border Region
Pastoral mobility in mountain environments always implicates indigenous forms of agency vis-à-vis the surrounding states with which people are interlinked, for instance through trade relations, contested border demarcations or natural resource regulations. In this paper, we analyse such interactions in terms of an ongoing 'politics of scale', that is to say a politics of the spatial dimensions structuring social life. Our case study focuses on th…
The Royal pilgrimage of the Goddess Nanda
Once every twelve years, when it is thought that some calamity has taken place because of the curse of the goddess Nanda Devi, a four-horned ram is born in the fields of the former king of Garhwal, an erstwhile Central Himalayan kingdom in north India (see map of Garhwal). This four-horned ram leads a procession of priests and pilgrims on the most dangerous and spectacular pilgrimage in all of India: a three-week, barefoot journey of one-hundred …
Gesten
Gesten gehören zu den frühesten und wichtigsten Darstellungs- und Ausdrucksformen. Sie sind allen Menschen gemeinsam und sind zugleich historisch und kulturell unterschiedlich. Gesten sind Handlungen ohne Worte. Als soziale und ästhetische Darstellungs- und Ausdrucksformen bringen sie den Körper in Erscheinung. Sie sind dynamisch und performativ; sie spielen eine zentrale Rolle in: bildender Kunst, Film und Musik; Theater, Performance und Tanz; s…
God of Justice
This book deals with ritual healing in the Central Himalayas of north India. It focuses on the cult of Bhairav, a local deity who is associated with the lowest castes, the so-called Dalits, who are frequently victims of social injustice. When powerless people are exploited or abused and have nowhere else to go, they often turn to Bhairav for justice, and he afflicts their oppressors with disease and misfortune. In order to end their suffering, th…
Landscape, Memory, and Ritual
This chapter focuses on healers, specifically oracular consultations and the major healing rituals. Local notions of place and landscape are of fundamental importance in oracular consultations as well as in healing rituals. These are used as a kind of lens through which to observe and understand the healing cult in general. The experience and transmission of the cult of Bhairav is inseparable from local understandings of place and landscape, espe…
Rituals of Family Unity
Families and Their Ghosts
A truism of ethnology is that death rituals and related practices are oriented more toward the living than the dead; that they seek to re-organize social relationships that have been damaged by the death of a loved one. This chapter shows how Garhwali beliefs and practices relating to death, ghosts, and exorcism accomplish this task. Fundamentally, they do so by transforming the ambivalent, dangerous ghost into a beneficent, auspicious ancestor.
The Ills of Marginality
Social marginality and ill health can form an unholy dyad: firstly, groups who suffer from chronic or infectious diseases often find themselves pushed to the margins. Secondly, people who are already on the edge of society tend to suffer more from illness than those at the centre. In development discourse, marginal people are defined as those who are ‘not yet’ on the same level as the developed mainstream and are in urgent need of aid from the ce…
Healing rituals
This paper poses a theoretical question: how, if at all, can 'critical medical anthropology' and 'performance theory' be combined? More specifically, the author discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, with respect to a healing cult in the Central Himalayas of North India. The paper has four parts: first, an ethnographic description of the cult itself; second, a brief introduction to critical medical anthropology; third, a sho…
In Karna's Realm
Hiltebeitel, Alf, Rethinking India's Oral and Classical Epics
No Abstract
Conquering the quarters
Worshiping Epic Villains
A Rāma Temple in Nineteenth-Century Nepal
The Hall of Mirrors
Anthropologists specialize in human difference and thus cannot escape the dialectics of sameness and difference. Yet studying Others has been the object of attack in recent years, most notably by Edward Said, who sees the mere postulation of difference as dangerous, as a dehumanizing activity that valorizes Self and vilifies Other. In fact the situation is not so simple: the Other may be a model to be emulated or a mirror of the shadow side of th…
A Politics of Virtue
Fathers, Sons, and Rhinoceroses
Pāndav [Skt. pāndava] līlā is a ritual dramatization of Mahābhārata that is performed in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas. A central episode in this tradition is the slaying of Arjuna by his son Nāgārjuna, a tale that parallels the well-known battle between Arjuna and Babhruvāhana in the Sanskrit versions of the Mahābhārata. Goldman has interpreted that version in Freudian terms, as a positive oedipal narrative at the heart of Mahābhārata. I p…
Victory to the Mother
The Gods at Play
The Hall of Mirrors
Anthropologists specialize in human difference and thus cannot escape the dialectics of sameness and difference. Yet studying Others has been the object of attack in recent years, most notably by Edward Said, who sees the mere postulation of difference as dangerous, as a dehumanizing activity that valorizes Self and vilifies Other. In fact the situation is not so simple: the Other may be a model to be emulated or a mirror of the shadow side of th…
Ritual healing and mental health in India
Ritual healing is very widespread in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and is by far the most common option for those with serious behavioral disturbances. Although ritual healing thus accounts for a very large part of the actual health care system, the state and its regulatory agencies have, for the most part, been structurally blind to its existence. A decade of research on in this region, along with a number of shorter research trips to healing…
Conquering the quarters
The Ills of Marginality
Social marginality and ill health can form an unholy dyad: firstly, groups who suffer from chronic or infectious diseases often find themselves pushed to the margins. Secondly, people who are already on the edge of society tend to suffer more from illness than those at the centre. In development discourse, marginal people are defined as those who are ‘not yet’ on the same level as the developed mainstream and are in urgent need of aid from the ce…
Healing rituals
This paper poses a theoretical question: how, if at all, can 'critical medical anthropology' and 'performance theory' be combined? More specifically, the author discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, with respect to a healing cult in the Central Himalayas of North India. The paper has four parts: first, an ethnographic description of the cult itself; second, a brief introduction to critical medical anthropology; third, a sho…
Village daughter, village goddess
In the Garhwal Himalayas, as elsewhere in South Asia, persons and the places where they reside are thought to have strong mutual effects upo-indeed, to be parts of-each other. What happens, then, after a new bride is obliged to move to her husband's place after marriage? Men and women have different perspectives on this question. Men (and the classical moral treatises of Hinduism) tend to assert complete transformation of the bride, and the stand…
In Karna's Realm
In the Valley of the Kauravas
This chapter addresses the question, “How is radical alterity best understood?” and answers it by discussing “three problematic terms” in anthropology: culture, ontology, and ritual. It criticizes the “ontological turn” for failing to take seriously the idea of “multiple worlds” and, following the philosophers Mol and Hacking and the ethnosociologist Marriott, argues that these can be theoretically grasped only when sufficient attention is given …
Politics of Scale in a High Mountain Border Region
Pastoral mobility in mountain environments always implicates indigenous forms of agency vis-à-vis the surrounding states with which people are interlinked, for instance through trade relations, contested border demarcations or natural resource regulations. In this paper, we analyse such interactions in terms of an ongoing 'politics of scale', that is to say a politics of the spatial dimensions structuring social life. Our case study focuses on th…
Fathers, Sons, and Rhinoceroses
Pāndav [Skt. pāndava] līlā is a ritual dramatization of Mahābhārata that is performed in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas. A central episode in this tradition is the slaying of Arjuna by his son Nāgārjuna, a tale that parallels the well-known battle between Arjuna and Babhruvāhana in the Sanskrit versions of the Mahābhārata. Goldman has interpreted that version in Freudian terms, as a positive oedipal narrative at the heart of Mahābhārata. I p…
The Ramnagar Ramlila
The Ramnagar Ramlila
Village daughter, village goddess
In the Garhwal Himalayas, as elsewhere in South Asia, persons and the places where they reside are thought to have strong mutual effects upo-indeed, to be parts of-each other. What happens, then, after a new bride is obliged to move to her husband's place after marriage? Men and women have different perspectives on this question. Men (and the classical moral treatises of Hinduism) tend to assert complete transformation of the bride, and the stand…
Victory to the Mother
The Gods at Play
A Politics of Virtue
Fathers, Sons, and Rhinoceroses
Pāndav [Skt. pāndava] līlā is a ritual dramatization of Mahābhārata that is performed in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas. A central episode in this tradition is the slaying of Arjuna by his son Nāgārjuna, a tale that parallels the well-known battle between Arjuna and Babhruvāhana in the Sanskrit versions of the Mahābhārata. Goldman has interpreted that version in Freudian terms, as a positive oedipal narrative at the heart of Mahābhārata. I p…
A Rāma Temple in Nineteenth-Century Nepal
The Hall of Mirrors
Anthropologists specialize in human difference and thus cannot escape the dialectics of sameness and difference. Yet studying Others has been the object of attack in recent years, most notably by Edward Said, who sees the mere postulation of difference as dangerous, as a dehumanizing activity that valorizes Self and vilifies Other. In fact the situation is not so simple: the Other may be a model to be emulated or a mirror of the shadow side of th…
Worshiping Epic Villains
In Karna's Realm
Hiltebeitel, Alf, Rethinking India's Oral and Classical Epics
No Abstract
Conquering the quarters
Healing rituals
This paper poses a theoretical question: how, if at all, can 'critical medical anthropology' and 'performance theory' be combined? More specifically, the author discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, with respect to a healing cult in the Central Himalayas of North India. The paper has four parts: first, an ethnographic description of the cult itself; second, a brief introduction to critical medical anthropology; third, a sho…
The Ills of Marginality
Social marginality and ill health can form an unholy dyad: firstly, groups who suffer from chronic or infectious diseases often find themselves pushed to the margins. Secondly, people who are already on the edge of society tend to suffer more from illness than those at the centre. In development discourse, marginal people are defined as those who are ‘not yet’ on the same level as the developed mainstream and are in urgent need of aid from the ce…
God of Justice
This book deals with ritual healing in the Central Himalayas of north India. It focuses on the cult of Bhairav, a local deity who is associated with the lowest castes, the so-called Dalits, who are frequently victims of social injustice. When powerless people are exploited or abused and have nowhere else to go, they often turn to Bhairav for justice, and he afflicts their oppressors with disease and misfortune. In order to end their suffering, th…
Landscape, Memory, and Ritual
This chapter focuses on healers, specifically oracular consultations and the major healing rituals. Local notions of place and landscape are of fundamental importance in oracular consultations as well as in healing rituals. These are used as a kind of lens through which to observe and understand the healing cult in general. The experience and transmission of the cult of Bhairav is inseparable from local understandings of place and landscape, espe…
Rituals of Family Unity
Families and Their Ghosts
A truism of ethnology is that death rituals and related practices are oriented more toward the living than the dead; that they seek to re-organize social relationships that have been damaged by the death of a loved one. This chapter shows how Garhwali beliefs and practices relating to death, ghosts, and exorcism accomplish this task. Fundamentally, they do so by transforming the ambivalent, dangerous ghost into a beneficent, auspicious ancestor.
The Royal pilgrimage of the Goddess Nanda
Once every twelve years, when it is thought that some calamity has taken place because of the curse of the goddess Nanda Devi, a four-horned ram is born in the fields of the former king of Garhwal, an erstwhile Central Himalayan kingdom in north India (see map of Garhwal). This four-horned ram leads a procession of priests and pilgrims on the most dangerous and spectacular pilgrimage in all of India: a three-week, barefoot journey of one-hundred …
Gesten
Gesten gehören zu den frühesten und wichtigsten Darstellungs- und Ausdrucksformen. Sie sind allen Menschen gemeinsam und sind zugleich historisch und kulturell unterschiedlich. Gesten sind Handlungen ohne Worte. Als soziale und ästhetische Darstellungs- und Ausdrucksformen bringen sie den Körper in Erscheinung. Sie sind dynamisch und performativ; sie spielen eine zentrale Rolle in: bildender Kunst, Film und Musik; Theater, Performance und Tanz; s…
Politics of Scale in a High Mountain Border Region
Pastoral mobility in mountain environments always implicates indigenous forms of agency vis-à-vis the surrounding states with which people are interlinked, for instance through trade relations, contested border demarcations or natural resource regulations. In this paper, we analyse such interactions in terms of an ongoing 'politics of scale', that is to say a politics of the spatial dimensions structuring social life. Our case study focuses on th…
Ritual healing and mental health in India
Ritual healing is very widespread in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and is by far the most common option for those with serious behavioral disturbances. Although ritual healing thus accounts for a very large part of the actual health care system, the state and its regulatory agencies have, for the most part, been structurally blind to its existence. A decade of research on in this region, along with a number of shorter research trips to healing…
The Law of Possession
This volume interrogates the great divide introduced by modernization theorists between the “rational,” “scientific,” or “modern,” on the one hand, and “irrational,” “ritual,” or “nonmodern,” on the other. But there are places throughout the world where the relationship between modernity, as represented by the legal and medical institutions of the secular state, and traditional forms of healing and justice, is unsettled. The chapters offer ethnog…
Himalayan Histories
Chetan Singh is former Professor of History at Himachal Pradesh University and was Director of the Indian Institute for Advanced Study from 2013 to 2016. The book Himalayan Histories consists of a number of republished essays plus two new chapters at the beginning. There are two main areas of focus in the book: the pre-eminent role of regional gods (deota) in traditional and contemporary politics, and the complexities of Himalayan pastoralism. In…
The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess
Not so very long ago, ethnographic writing sought to convey an air of scientific objectivity by means of a number of rhetorical devices that served to distance the ethnographer from those about whom s/he wrote. This was counterproductive on many levels, not least because the ethnographer’s own embodied experiences, feelings and intuitions play a very important role in what s/he writes about ‘the natives’. These days, expectations are quite differ…
Sociology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Ancient history (10 works) · Indian and Buddhist Studies (10 works) · Art (7 works) · Politics (7 works)