The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of Commodities: Representations of Time in "East" and "West"

Abstract

n 1984-85, while doing fieldwork in a small village in northern India that I will call Alipur, I found myself the subject of an unlikely story. At that time, I didn't know quite what to make of it (I still don't), but it proved to be both profoundly unsettling and curiously affecting. The story was told by a young girl who was not quite three years old, perhaps even closer to being two. She was the youngest of four children of a relatively well-to-do highcaste (Thaakur) household of the village. In the course of my fieldwork, especially toward the end of my stay in Alipur, her father Sompal became one of my closest friends. One day, shortly after having started fieldwork, I found myself talking to various people from the Thaakur neighborhood in front of Sompal's house. In the middle of a somewhat difficult conversation (I was still struggling to understand the local dialect), I heard a child's voice saying, My brother Bobby has come. I couldn't see the child's face since she was standing on the win-