A Sonic Vaccine for a White-Collar Disease
Matua Approaches to Covid-19, Rural Pride, and Sonic-Sacred Healing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20237178 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C E Lorea (0000-0003-3593-7023, University of Tübingen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 136-163 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Asian Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1573-420X • E-ISSN: 1573-4218 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/15734218-12341552 |
| OpenAlex | W4401175423 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 15 |
Members of the Matua religion, a displaced Dalit community from Bengal, believe that the coronavirus can affect only the upper-caste/class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Matua devotees, on the other hand, are predominantly part of an agriculturist community inhabiting multiple fringes: the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, the peripheries of unorthodox Vaishnavism, and the social margins of untouchability. Conducting remote ethnography with Matua participants based in West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andamans, one comes across insistent narratives of immunity and recurrent interpretations of the pandemic that fit into the onto-cosmology and sociocultural imagination of the Matua religious movement. I discuss these as dissident tales of immunity that describe COVID -19 as an urban-based white-collar disease. Matua practitioners successfully prevent it through a sonic vaccine – the practice of kīrtan – and a kind of power ( śakti ) accumulated through physical agricultural labor
Bay · BENGAL · Caste · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Law · Medicine · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
Pandemicity, Covid-19 and the limits of public health ‘science’
Contesting Multiple Borders
Southeast Asian Studies
Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance
Citizen Refugee
Health and religious rituals in South Asia
Sounding the Indian Ocean
In Opposition and Allegiance to Hinduism
The Place of Devotion
Religions, natural hazards, and disasters
Is there really such a thing as "one health"? Thinking about a more than human world from the perspective of cultural anthropology
Sonic Theology
Dispersal' and the Failure of Rehabilitation
Sacred sound
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |