Seeing the eyes of god in human form: iconography and impersonation in african and hindu traditions of trance performance in the southern caribbean

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article links analysis of the body and of visual culture within religious studies through comparative examination of two southern Caribbean ritual traditions: Shango, or Orisha Worship (African), and Shakti Puja, or Kali Worship (Hindu). Both are centered upon subaltern ceremonies of trance performance and spirit mediumship. The article examines a primary difference in the impersonation of divinity evident between the two traditions—performing with one's eyes open on the African side versus closed on the Hindu side—and accounts for this contrast in terms of inverse relations between religious iconography and use of the body as a vehicle of ritualized form, referred to here as inverse conventions of “iconopraxis.” However, this level of differentiation is built upon a deeper, but no less cultural use of the body as a tool of entranced ritual praxis shared by each tradition. Each tradition therefore exploits similar phenomenological affordances of the human body in order to cultivate alter-cultural experiences of ceremonial ecstasy that, in turn, are modulated by differing conventions of iconopraxis. The analysis highlights the polymorphous nature of embodiment in accounting for similarities and differences of cultural symbolism in the ritual arts of trance.