Loving and forgetting: moments of inarticulacy in tribal India*

Vitebsky, Piers

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00500.x

Cited by 23 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…In his later visit, Vitebsky (2008) found that there were no longer any practicing shamans. The young had converted to Baptist Christianity.…”

Section: Extensions Of Haunting Memory: the Soramentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The first case relates to a shamanic people, the Sora, who live in contemporary India and whose lives have been studied by Piers Vitebsky (1993), who stayed with them in 1976-1977 and 1979, with return visits in later years including a much later visit (Vitebsky 2008). The Sora live high in forested hills in an area on the border between the states of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh on India's eastern seaboard.…”

Section: Extensions Of Haunting Memory: the Soramentioning

confidence: 98%

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Haunting Memory: The Extension of Kinship Beyond the Nation

Feuchtwang¹

2014

Transnational Memory

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There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being . . . (Conor Cruise O'Brien in Tóibín 2012) The memory evoked in the passage quoted above is what I propose calling 'haunting memory.' This is what we are induced to remember as our own memory even though it is the story of our intimate forebears extending and haunting our recollection. In what follows, I develop this concept and, in doing so, offer a critique of discussions of cultural memory which seem premised on a fundamental opposition between intimate (usually family) relations and larger social formations. In particular, I shall challenge the distinction between milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire advanced by Pierre Nora, and his claim that in the last two hundred years we have witnessed the emergence of a new kind of society in which collective memory is ceasing to exist, having been replaced by a state-driven cultivation of a network of memory sites.I want to stress instead the co-existence, within contemporary society, of different if not incompatible collective memories that often involve linkages of transnational sites of memory. In the current condition of people-states, a coercive and persuasive politics elicits the idea of a 'people' through mediated mobilizations of communities of descent (ethnicity and race), tradition (including regional), language and faith, even though each and any of them extends spatially in ways that do not coincide with the others. I want to point out that there is another kind of memory, focusing on families and the intimate sphere, that transgresses or extends across national borders.These intimate transmissions become part of the memory of the bearer even when they were not part of personal experiences (other than those of their telling). I shall remark on how some of them are recorded in personal archives, as well as how these archives relate to more public archives. Most of what is remembered personally is not transmitted and most of what is transmitted to children disappears. But my main contention is that some of what is transmitted through kinship and the most intimate relations of adulthood can be pinned down and reinforced Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/2/15 3:37 PM 272 | Stephan Feuchtwang in personal archives, rituals and other kinds of commemoration that are alternative to those of the nation state. Starting again from scratch: the formation of memory by the interpenetration of selvesThis could be the moment to assert against Pierre Nora that religious and familial milieux de mémoire coexist with lieux de mémoire and that history does not, as he argued, condemn them to death. But in one respect I agree with him -that in Europe 'memory' as a philosophical and psychological object emerged at the same ...

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“…In his later visit, Vitebsky (2008) found that there were no longer any practicing shamans. The young had converted to Baptist Christianity.…”

Section: Extensions Of Haunting Memory: the Soramentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Extensions Of Haunting Memory: the Soramentioning

confidence: 98%

Haunting Memory: The Extension of Kinship Beyond the Nation

Feuchtwang¹

2014

Transnational Memory

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“…In this ritual transformation of the dead from a family member into ‘a paradigm of sociological foreignness’ (Taylor : 654), forgetting and remembering are dialectically constituted. They are also accompanied by a transformation in emotional roles from those of parents and children to those of ancestors and descendants (Vitebsky ).…”

Section: Disrupted Genealogy Forgetting and Uheermentioning

confidence: 99%

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

Buyandelger

2018

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article argues that memories that come from contexts that are adversarial, and that are not always based on communication and sociality, should be better integrated within the existing theories of social memory. Shamans in postsocialist Mongolia claim that previously suppressed origin spirits demand that their descendants become initiated as shamans in exchange for ceasing to harass them for forgetting and abandonment. Some clients refuse to become initiated as shamans and thus choose to sever their relationship with their past. In this article I explore one such refusal, which led to a disintegration of existing social ties, while also yielding unexpected memories. These memories are different from the shared memories that emerge in the context of organized shamanic rituals. Circulated through rumour and supposition instead of positive sociality and sharing, these ‘asocial’ memories also act as a particular kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, prompting each individual to withdraw from the network as a way of avoiding the alleged harm from unattended spirits. Owing to divergent subject positioning, where one person's remembering is another's forgetting, the haunting by unwanted memories continues, as resolution through unifying communal ritual is not possible.

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“…Ethnographic accounts detailing ritual treatment of the dead give rise to the realization that varied immortalities of the recently deceased are in play. Connection may be desired and cultivated as people become ancestors, or it may be feared or fled from as they become ghosts who haunt the living (Kwon 2008;Vitebsky 2008). Rituals occurring at death typically undertake the physical disposal of the corpse and negotiate the separation of whatever it is that is believed to have once animated the person: a soul, spirit, character, life, and so forth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%