The Recapitation of Young Grooms

Abstract

Abstract The ceremony that incorporates the newly dead into Tamil household devotions should become familiar since it is structurally identical to the pey-exorcism discussed in chapters 5 and 6.1 From beginning to end, it exploits the same tripartite core sequence of actions, the same linguistic and bodily enactments, and is likewise performed by the ritual musicians, known as pampaikkii.rar. But since these family dead are honored guests whose presence is highly desired, their intervention is invested with contradictory significance; the structure of their ritual operations and their objectives stand in binary opposition to those that “make the demon-pey run away. ” Rather than working toward the separation, or what Luc de Heusch terms, the “disjunction ” of human and supernatural spheres, their objective here is to achieve the fusion or “conjunction ” between the living and the dead (1981: 213). In presenting this opposition this chapter will depart from the mode of narration one finds throughout the rest of this book. Rather than describing a particular enactment by specific protagonists in an actual context, here I construct an abstract performance, divorced of social processes and personal interests. I do this because it was when I reduced this ritual to its bare essentials and compared it to the exorcism that I came to grasp its symbolism and the full significance of its climactic sequence. As we will see, such comparative perspectives clearly highlight the fact that this ritual ends up enacting personal transformations that are alike in all ways to those affected by the exorcism except that they are opposed. They also suggest that the ceremonial incorporation of the dead in the household is just as prescriptive and just as coercive on the Tamil self as the ritual which expels the demons from this world.