Local Deities Research Articles

Harvesting the faith on “Local Deities” to make folks in remote villages of Himachal shun Tobacco use!

Harvesting the faith on “Local Deities” to make folks in remote villages of Himachal shun Tobacco use!

Inscribed and sculptured stones seen at the Roman fort of Auchendavy on the Antonine Wall in 1825

In September 1825 two Roman inscribed and sculptured stones were recorded at Auchendavy fort on the Antonine Wall in Central Scotland by the Revd John Skinner, an Anglican clergyman, in the course of a walk along the Roman frontier between Forth and Clyde. The publication in 2003 of Skinner's journal of his walk, illustrated with his own watercolour sketches, has allowed a better understanding of both stones, which are long since lost. One may be a dedication by soldiers in garrison at Auchendavy to a group of Roman deities, and the other a representation of a local Romano-Celtic god.

Perceptions of health and illness among the Konso people of southwestern Ethiopia: persistence and change

BackgroundCross-cultural studies indicate that every culture has its own particular explanations for health and illness and its own healing strategies. The Konso people have always practiced indigenous medicine and have multifaceted accounts or multiple dimensions of illness perceptions and health-care beliefs and practices. This paper describes how perceptions of health and illness are instrumental in health and treatment outcomes among the Konso people in southwestern Ethiopia. Results may provide an understanding of the perceptions of health and illness in relation to the local cosmology, religion, and environment.MethodsThe ethnographic method was employed to generate evidence, complemented by focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and direct observation. Thematic analysis was employed to categorize and interpret the data.ResultsFindings indicate that the Konso people’s worldview, particularly as it relates to health, illness, and healing systems, is closely linked to their day-to-day lives. Older people believe illnesses are caused by a range of supernatural forces, including the wrath of God or local gods, oritta (spirit possession), and karayitta (ancestral spirits), and they use culturally prescribed treatment. Young and formally educated members of the community attribute causes of diseases to germitta (germs) and factorta (bacteria) and tend to seek treatment mostly in modern health facilities.ConclusionPerceptions of health and illness as well as of healing are part of Konso people’s worldview. Local communities comprehend health problems and solutions within their cultural frame of reference, which has changed over the years. The Konso people associate their health situations with socio-cultural and religious factors. The individual’s behavior and interactions with the social, natural, and supernatural powers affect the well-being of the whole group. The individual, the family, the clan leaders, and the deceased are intimately linked to one’s culturally based health beliefs and are associated by the Konso with health problems and illnesses.

9. A Stylistic and Chronological Assessment of the Footprint Petroglyphs from Humayma

The archaeological site of ancient Hawara (modern day Humayma), located in Southern Jordan, consists of occupational phases extending from the Neolithic period until present day. The site represents many diverse cultural groups, including Nabataean, Roman, and Byzantine. During a 2014 field survey, more than 150 petroglyphs were discovered in the mountainous area to the west of the ancient site. These petroglyphs included rock carvings of bovids, humans, and of particular interest to this research project, footprints. Since early humanity, man has been carving footprints all over the world, with various meanings and reasons for doing so. The goal of this research project was to analyze the footprint petroglyphs found surrounding Hawara, in order to determine what each carving was meant to represent, and what general time period each carving came from. This was accomplished by focusing on the artistic style and representation of each footprint, as well as the stratigraphic layering of the carvings. By organizing photographs taken of each footprint into a database, and cross-analyzing them against each other, as well as against other known petroglyphs from Southern Jordan, the study showed that humans have been carving footprints into the hills surrounding Hawara since ancient times, presumably as a way to mark their presence in the area. Over the course of the site’s history, humanity’s motivation for wishing to leave their mark on the land differs, from religious or spiritual reasons to personal. It is hypothesized that over the centuries people carved the footprints around Humayma as offerings to their local gods, most likely to ensure a healthy rainfall and successful harvest in the desert climate.

Divine Epiphany and Pious Discourse in Plato's Phaedrus

Divine Epiphany and Pious Discourse in Plato’s Phaedrus ANDREA NIGHTINGALE In this essay, I will focus on the divine epiphany of the Forms in Plato’s Phaedrus. As Plato indicates in his middle dialogues, the Forms are “divine” (theios).1 Indeed, they are ontologically higher than the gods and thus could be called “ultra-divine.” To set forth the soul’s epiphany of the Forms in the Phaedrus, Plato incorporated the terminology of poetic narratives of divine epiphanies and also ritualistic discourses used in religious festivals to evoke the epiphany of a god. By analyzing Plato’s use of epiphanic discourses and rituals, I show that he created an epiphanic narrative in his account of the philosophic soul’s vision of the Form of Beauty. To set up this argument, I examine two key passages in the Phaedrus that focus on a god who seizes and/or inspires a human: first, Socrates and Phaedrus ’ conversation about the myth of the wind-god Boreas ravishing Oreithuia; and second, Socrates’ claim that the local divinities inspired his discourse in the palinode. I then analyze Socrates’ assertions that he must speak “piously” and “truthfully” about divine beings, both the gods and the Forms. Given Plato’s radical claim that the gods are rational and good, and that the Forms are “divine,” he must offer a new mode of discourse for speaking about divinity. Just as the Greeks paid careful attention to speaking “piously” about the gods, Plato showcases the right and wrong ways of talking about divine beings. In this essay, I take seriously Plato’s claim that the Forms are divine beings. In my view, we cannot fully understand Plato’s metaphysics—his ontology and epistemology—without acknowledging its theological aspects. arion 26.1 spring/summer 2018 DIVINE ENCOUNTERS in the opening scene of the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss a traditional story of a god who ravished a human being. This discussion sets up later scenes that focus on a god seizing, inspiring, or manifesting itself to a human being. We must therefore look closely at the opening scene. Here, Socrates and Phaedrus leave the city and find a “beautiful ” (pankalon, 230b) spot along the Ilissus River. They enter a “sacred place” that has a shrine for the nymphs and the river:2 as Socrates observes, “based on the female figurines (korai) and statues (agalmata), this place appears to be sacred (hieron) for the nymphs and the river Achelous” (230b). Socrates also notes that there is an altar nearby of Boreas, the wind god that snatched and ravished Oreithuia (who, according to the myth, gave birth to the winged “Boreads”; 229c). Thus, this natural area has been ritually marked out as sacred to various deities. As Susan Cole has shown, for the Greeks, “the landscape was a living world, alive with the possibility of divinity.”3 Indeed, many places in ancient Greece were marked as belonging to the gods by way of shrines and mythic narratives: Geographically based narratives, probably as old as the institutions they claim to explain, locate the individual community in its landscape and connect it to mythic representations of the larger universe . Anthropomorphic representations of divinity and personifications of features of the natural world encouraged the belief that the world of the gods and the world of nature were parts of a single continuum.4 In the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus sit down in a holy spot that features this “continuum” between the gods and nature. Indeed, upon arriving in this place, Socrates and Phaedrus launch into a discussion of the story of the wind god Boreas snatching up the maiden Oreithuia. We should note that the Athenians had set up the altar for Boreas on the 62 divine epiphany and pious discourse Ilissus River because the god had responded to their prayers during wartime, providing divine aid in two important battles (Herodotus 7.189.3). The story of Boreas and Oreithuia had particular importance for the Athenians: in their civic theology, Boreas had “married” the Athenian maiden Oreithuia and was thus a divine relative (and helper) of Athens (Herodotus 7.189; Pausanias 1.19.5). Indeed, Aeschylus wrote a satyr play on Boreas and Oreithuia...

제자리를 떠난 지역신 : 동경(東京) 두두리(豆豆里)를 중심으로

제자리를 떠난 지역신 : 동경(東京) 두두리(豆豆里)를 중심으로

The Yoni Cult at Kamakhya

In ancient Assam the mythology of Daksa's sacrifice and the consequent suicide of Sati was transformed, in order to incorporate the yoni (vulva) symbol in the Brahmanic context. According to the North-eastern Puranas the limbs of the dismembered goddess's corpse fell to the earth, originating the sakta pithas (seats of the goddess); in particular, the yoni of Sati fell on Kamagiri, a place that became well known as either the place where Siva and Sakti met to make love, or the goddess's tomb. Before Brahmanic cultural contact with the local traditions of Kamarupa, the autochthonous religion was the kirata dharma (religion of Kiratas), and it was already developed within the Kamakhya cult, later absorbed in the Brahmanic religious fold. In her shrine, Kamakhya has been worshipped in the shape of a yoni-stone. This non-anthropomorphic cult is the result of cross cultural dialectic between autochthonous tribes and the Vedic and heterodox Brahmanic traditions, which led to the fusion of local deities and the mainstream Hindu goddesses, resulting in the goddess Kamakhya. Later, Kamakhya was raised to the rank of royal tutelary deity to integrate local tribes and the Hinduized kings of Kamarupa. Using inter-textual and intra-textual analysis as well as ethnographic data, this essay aims to demonstrate that tribal traditions strongly influenced the sakta-tantra developments of the yoni cult at Kamakhya.

大山喬平著, 『日本中世のムラと神々』, 岩波書店, 二〇一二・三刊, A5, 五六四頁, 一二〇〇〇円

大山喬平著, 『日本中世のムラと神々』, 岩波書店, 二〇一二・三刊, A5, 五六四頁, 一二〇〇〇円

State formation and religious processes in the north–south corridor of Chhattisgarh (from first century bc to eighth century ad)

Chhattisgarh in central India, a hilly and forested region, offered passages connecting the Gangetic basin with the Deccan, which opened it to influences from both the north and the Deccan. This made possible a secondary stage of state formation, marked by royalty, bureaucracy and army, with offices and practices influenced by those in vogue in the established states in the surrounding regions. The paper examines the process in the light mainly of epigraphic evidence. Such state formation created superior landed classes, mainly through land grants. The dynastic rulers patronised Vishnavism and Śaivaism, which were Brahmanical intrusions into the area, rather than any local deities or cults.

Potent Places in Central Vietnam: ‘Everything that Comes Out of the Earth is Cham’

Set apart from the so-called ‘Hinduisation’ process, the Cham country is characterised by the presence of many sites or shrines dedicated to local deities. This paper—based on the analysis of archaeological and anthropological evidence—aims to identify these cults, to clarify the associated practices and to demonstrate how the local cults map out the entire local geography. Moreover, in central Vietnam, it is possible to precisely examine ‘potent places’ in order to achieve a better understanding of the local cults and the persistence of those cults from antiquity to the present. In ancient times, each local deity was connected to a political power, which ‘exhaled’ it and, at the same time, put a mark on the territory. The diversity of potent places allows a better understanding of puzzling territories. The continuity of ritual practices performed at Cham potent places, centuries after the disappearance of any form of Cham political power, shows the link between the first occupants of the land and the following Viet inhabitants.

Making God Present: Place-Making and Ritual Healing in North India

This article examines how deities are known, experienced, and made present in small-scale, domestic divination and healing rituals in Garhwal, a region in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand. While possessed by local gods and goddesses during these rituals, ritual specialists known as bakkyās diagnose and treat individual clients suffering from social, psychological, or bodily afflictions by offering sthān (place) to, or making sthān for, divinities. Through a detailed ethnographic description of a healing ritual in which the author participated, the article traces acts of ritual “place-making,” including moments when space is made for a deity, a deity is transported from one location to another, and a deity is emplaced, that is, limited or contained in specific ways. Place-making is thus both literal, in the sense of making a divinity present in a material site such as a home or temple, and metaphorical, in that it signifies a long-term, reciprocal commitment between a divinity and a worshiper, in which both make place for each other in their lives. By showing how person, place, and divinity are brought together in ritual interactions, the article contributes to possession studies, the anthropology of space and place, and the study of ritual performance traditions in North India.

A Shrine of Pepi I in South Abydos

As part of the 2010 season of the Ahmose and Tetisheri Project in South Abydos, the author led a brief archaeological survey in the low desert south as far as Sinki. Among other archaeological sites found during this survey, the most interesting discoveries included two rock-cut chambers on the limestone escarpment. Two repeating inscriptions were found in the northernmost chamber. An ỉr.n=f m mnw=f formula and a label identify all or part of this site as a ‘shrine’ ( zḥ) built by Pepi I for the local god Khentiamentiu. The inscriptions use Pepi’s ‘Son of Hathor of Dendera’ name, which may help to date the shrine’s construction to the early part of his reign. The article describes this archaeological site, discusses the inscriptions and offers some interpretation for their historical and archaeological context as part of the activities of the Sixth Dynasty in Abydos.

Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins

Reviewed by: Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins Graeme Counsel Fela: Kalakuta Notes. By John Collins, with a foreword by Banning Eyre, discography by Ronnie Graham. 2d ed. (Music: Interview.) Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. [xii, 330 p. ISBN 9780819575395 (paperback), $24.94; ISBN 9780819575401 (e-book), $19.99.] Music examples, illustrations, chronology, discography, bibliography, appendix, index. Fela Anikulapo Kuti, or “Fela”, as he is known to millions, was one of Africa’s most influential and successful musicians. An uncompromising figure who promoted Pan-Africanism, he elevated music to the status of the voice of the people, declaring that “music is a weapon of the future” (Frank Tenaille, Music Is the Weapon of the Future: Fifty Years of African Popular Music [Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002], 76). His “weapon” of choice was Afrobeat, a new musical style that he created in the early 1970s. It both challenged authority and set a new musical direction. A challenge in writing about this larger-than-life figure is to separate the myth from reality. Fela attracts the kind of adulation that is the provenance of rock stars, and indeed, in his life he experienced the kind of awful tragedies and miraculous achievements that make for a sensationalist account. Yet Collins presents a scholarly and sober reflection written by one who not only knew him but who was a fellow musician. Few biographies of musicians are written by performers, and here lies one of the great merits of Collins’s text. Fela’s music was sparked by a complex mixture of influences and styles, amidst political upheaval, and it takes a deft hand to provide clarity and depth. Collins is a Professor of Music at the University of Ghana and is one the foremost experts on highlife music. A music archivist, producer, and engineer, he is also a remarkable musician in his own right, having recorded extensively with Ghanaian musicians in the 1970s. This close contact and exposure to African musical styles led to his friendship with Fela, for Ghanaian music was a strong influence on Afrobeat. The early chapters of Collins’s text provide a clear account of the musical milieu that the young Fela Kuti experienced. Fela grew up listening to a wide range of styles, and his Afrobeat had its antecedents in earlier African and African American popular music. As a youth, Fela listened to and sang Christian hymns courtesy of his father and grandfather, who were both Anglican priests. Part of a musical family, his grandfather, Rev. J. J. Ransome-Kuti, recorded over forty songs for Zonophone/EMI in the mid-1920s. Traditional Yoruba music was also pervasive in Fela’s early years, and this music, which both praised and placated local deities, was played on drums such as the dundun and featured call and response vocals, the latter a prominent feature of the Afrobeat style. New recording technologies such as the radio and the 78-rpm disc, coupled with the advent of World [End Page 516] War II, which saw thousands of U.S. and British soldiers arriving on the shores of West Africa, created appetites for jazz and the highlife musical styles that were sweeping Ghana. In the 1960s, Fela brought these influences together and mixed them with soul and funk. This complex fusion of styles is articulated confidently by Collins, who provides insightful contexts and explanations of the local African musical styles. Indeed, his text is significant as it goes beyond presenting a biography of Fela, featuring excellent sections on Ghanaian highlife music and Nigerian apala and juju, for example. Thus, it is a text that contextualizes Fela’s life within the wider sociopolitical developments that were occurring in West Africa and the African diaspora in the 1960s and 1970s. Collins offers a cogent case through interviews with prominent musicians of the era and with those in Fela’s bands. From the text it soon becomes apparent that Afrobeat was much more than a musical style: it was more akin to a musical revolution. It directly challenged governments, promoted Pan-Africanism, and decried the politics of corrupt elites. It celebrated its Africanness while criticizing those who pandered to Western styles and tastes. Afrobeat was unapologetic, and...

Heritage as Weapon: Contested Geographies of Conservation and Culture in the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area, India

Mountains are one of the last refuges of biodiversity worldwide. As the global discourse on nature conservation becomes prominent within sustainability debates and local populations continue to be blamed for environmental destruction, projected territorial expansion of protected areas will likely lead to high levels of conflict and contestation around mountains of the world. At the same time, deeper penetration of transnational advocacy networks and wider connections of civil society will bring new tools of resistance to bear on this conflict. We propose that democracy plays an increasingly critical role in assisting local opposition to thwart new restrictions on access to natural areas prioritized for conservation. We illustrate this larger argument through the case of the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (GHNPCA), recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Indian Himalayas. In their opposition to exclusion, local communities have employed heritage as a weapon, successfully marshaling the representation of the region as the “Valley of the Gods” and putting their cultural heritage to work against global conservation agendas. Tourism posters depicting the sacred geography of numerous local deities allow local communities to justify opposition to the conservation status that restricts access to their gods, while channeling their demands through elected representatives. The state navigates this complex territory between global and local heritage uneasily, primarily through a series of compromises at the local level. This article focuses on the ways in which mountain heritage—local and global, cultural and natural—is negotiated in the crucible of democracy.

Divine Politicking: A Rhetorical Approach to Deity Possession in the Himalayas

In North India, political leaders are referred to as netās, and the term netāgirī is broadly and pejoratively used to describe the self-promotion, political maneuvering, and public rhetoric in which politicians engage. However, my ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Uttarakhand, India, shows that local divinities can also be netās: they vie for their constituents’ support, make decisions that materially impact people’s lives, and threaten to use force in implementing those decisions. These “political divinities” are routinely encountered as possessed dancers in large-scale public rituals in this region. In this article, I focus on how political divinities affect, and are affected by, audiences in tangible and far-reaching ways. I argue that public possession rituals open up a highly charged zone for inherently fluid, situational, and pragmatic negotiations between humans and divinities. While anthropological studies of possession view it as a sociopolitical event that trades in power relations, this article calls for a rhetorical approach to possession, which foregrounds possession as a way of persuading particular audiences of certain ways of thinking and acting in matters of collective importance.

Khumbi yullha and the Beyul: Sacred Space and the Cultural Politics of Religion in Khumbu, Nepal

Many parts of the Himalaya are at once indigenous people's homelands, national parks or conservation areas, world-renowned trekking and mountaineering destinations, and the sites of ongoing ecological and socioeconomic development interventions. In addition, for many residents, protective territory deities reside in nearby peaks, and valleys between provide sacred places of refuge. Like in mountain regions elsewhere, these meanings represent overlapping and entwined claims of authority and territory from the state, indigenous communities, development agencies, and religious institutions. In this article I consider the ways in which resident Sherpas in Khumbu, Nepal, negotiate the overlapping spaces, authorities, and territories associated with understandings of the region as Khumbi yullha's—a local deity—territory and the Nyingma Buddhist institutional claim to the region as a beyul—a sacred, hidden valley refuge, which development actors, both inside and outside the Khumbu Sherpa community, have attempted to mobilize as a sacred landscape supporting environmental conservation initiatives. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in 2009 to 2010 and 2013, I focus on the spatiality of the cultural politics of religion in Khumbu in competing claims of territory from the Buddhist monastic institution and localized practices and the ways in which such constructions shape the outcomes of intervention programs.

Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi by Cong Ellen Zhang

Reviewed by: Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi by Cong Ellen Zhang Ying Wang (bio) Cong Ellen Zhang. Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 2018. xliii, 113 pp. Paperback $16.00, ISBN 978-1-62466-684-1. Cong Ellen Zhang's Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi is the third selected English translation of Hong Mai's (1123–1202) Yijian zhi after the Chinese-English bilingual version of Selections from Record of the Listener (2009) and Alister Inglis' Selection from Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi) (2010). Zhang's translated collection contains one hundred stories that focus on five major thematic subjects, including (1) natural, political, social and economic conditions; (2) beliefs and practices; (3) people of all walks of life; (4) marriage and sexuality; and (5) family relationships and family matters. The one hundred translated stories included in this 2018 publication contain a small portion of Yijian zhi. Yijian zhi is one of the largest story collections published in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), second only to Taiping guangji (Records of the Taiping Era). Hong Mai's original work had 420 juan or volumes (totaling over 4,000 entries), but only 207 juan survived. A representative work of the zhiguai genre (records of anomaly), Yijian zhi is famous for its extensive and inclusive content that reflects all aspects of contemporary social life and cultural phenomena of the Song Dynasty. This famous twelfth-century text was continuously written by Hong Mai during a period of nearly four decades,1 mainly based on the stories that he had heard or had been told by his informants. It serves as an important and meaningful resource for historians, as it focuses on the lives of ordinary people and includes what is ignored in [End Page 394] official history. It is also credited with becoming the thematic source of more than thirty vernacular stories of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Although only sampling a small part of Hong's magnum opus, Cong Ellen Zhang's translation attempts to reflect the general features of Hong's original. In the Introduction, Cong Ellen Zhang indicates that "[t]he one hundred stories included in this translation volume aim to provide students and the general English-language reader with a representative sample of Hong's work" (p. xiii). Such a representativeness can be observed from the broad scope of the stories' themes included in Zhang's selection. Zhang's inclusive intention in subject matter is also highlighted by the "Thematic Guide to the 100 Stories" appearing at the end of the book, which, in addition to the five major thematic categories aforementioned, includes numerous subsubjects. For example, under the rubric of "People of All Walks of Life," Zhang indicates that the personalities peopled in her collection include Buddhist monks, butchers, Daoist masters, ritualists, exorcists, diviners, fortune-tellers, geomancers, doctors, maids and wet nurses, merchants, runners and clerks, scholar-officials, servants, students and examination candidates, thieves, robbers, and bandits. Zhang's selection reflects that, in paying close attention to the lives of ordinary people, Hong Mai gave more weight to their beliefs and practices, as indicated by Zhang that "[f]irst and foremost, the Record2 stories are unique and valuable sources for the understanding of the religious ideas and experiences of both the educated elite and their illiterate and semi-literate counterparts. They demonstrate, among other things, a profound belief in the existence of gods, ghosts, and animistic spirits and the rise of local cults and local deities" (p. xxxi). In the first available English monograph on Hong Mai, Alister Inglis lists three major themes of Yijian zhi: retribution, destiny, and anti-Jurchen theme. Retribution and destiny—belief in divine power to punish or reward people's immoral or moral behavior and one's predetermined lot due to his/her debt or credit of previous life—are really the "religious ideas and experiences" that Zhang refers to above. Therefore, evidently, both Inglis and Zhang believe that a major contribution of Yijian zhi is to reflect people's religious and popular...

Book Review: <em>Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India</em>

Book Review: <em>Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India</em>

Authoritative Modes of Speech in a Central Himalayan Ritual

Authoritative Modes of Speech in a Central Himalayan Ritual John Leavitt (bio) Introduction1 Among the most striking aspects of the culture of the Central Himalayan region (this includes the Indian state of Uttarakhand and the westernmost part of Nepal) are the development of bardic narration and the social role played by rituals of divine possession. These practices interact variously in different sub-regions (for examples, see Lecomte-Tilouine 2009; Hitchcock and Jones 1976).2 My concern here is with one of these configurations: that of a set of rituals known as jāgar (in colloquial Kumaoni jàg), since they take place at night, which are performed in the central part of Kumaon, the former kingdom that makes up the eastern section of Uttarakhand. The purpose of the Kumaoni jāgar is to manifest one or several local divinities. This is done either for the good of a family, in which case the ritual is held in the family’s home, or for the good of the village or this “whole created world” (yo sṛṣṭi sansār), in which case it takes place in a temple or courtyard, both called dhuṇi, dedicated to the legendary sage Guru Gorakhnāth. In the case of a house jāgar, which is what interests us here, the ritual is organized by the family concerned and actually run by a semi-professional singer/drummer—since his primary role is to perform narrative, I will be calling him a bard—in this case called a jagariyā. Under the jagariyā’s direction, the god in question, one of a regional set of gods held to be subordinate to the great Hindu gods, enters into the body of a medium, called ḍaṅgariyā, “beast of burden,” or ghoṛi, “little horse.” The god then dances in the medium’s body, distributes sacred ash to the assembled people, and speaks out of the medium’s mouth in a dialogue with the jagariyā and members of the household. The whole configuration of the jāgar, then, offers two highly authoritative voices. One is that of the controlling singer and drummer, who has immediate responsibility for the proper running of the ceremony for the benefit of the host household. The other is that of the god himself or herself, as transmitted through the medium. In the case of the bard this is a specialist authorized to carry out this particular activity; in the case of the divinity, this is an entity with far wider authority. But beyond these foci of authority, both figures in fact use language that is highly patterned, apparently producing both aesthetic and persuasive effects. In other words, the operative dimensions here are not only who is doing the speaking, but also how the speaking is being done. To try to put some order into the multiplicity of language effects, I will be using the model of six functions of language proposed by Roman Jakobson (1981 [1960]) based on earlier work by Karl Bühler and the Prague School.3 The sextifunctional model is well known, but I will summarize it here. Every act of language involves six elements (in no particular order of importance): a speaker or emitter, a hearer or receiver, a message transmitted between them, a referent that the message is about, a shared code that makes the message intelligible, and the fact that emitter and receiver are in contact. Any given language act will fulfill functions related to each of these elements. Jakobson labels the correlate functions: emotive, conative, poetic, referential, metalinguistic, and phatic. The functions may be hierarchical so that one can usually identify a dominant function, the one that is “foregrounded” (Mukařovský 1977 [1938]; Hasan 1989), while the others remain active as well. Language Functions in Ritual The key functions for this discussion are the emotive, conative, poetic, and phatic. Jakobson’s term “emotive” seems too narrow to cover what is conveyed about the speaker in an utterance, since there is so much more is going on than the mere expression of emotions. This is why many authors (for example, Yaguello 1981) have preferred the earlier term “expressive” (Bühler’s Ausdrucksfunktion) to “emotive.” We can here...

The Relationship Between Buddhism and Indigenous Beliefs and People as Reflected in the Names of Lokapālas in Early Buddhist Literature

The purpose of this article is to analyze aspects of the relationship between Buddhism, indigenous beliefs and people through the names of lokapālas in early Buddhist literature, and especially the names of the three great kings, Dhataraṭṭha, Virūḷha (or Virūḷhaka), and Virūpakkha. The study revealed that the name of the three great kings, Dhataraṭṭha, Virūḷha (or Virūḷhaka), and Virūpakkha, may reflect traces of earlier or contemporaneous indigenous beliefs and people who had cultural encounters with Buddhism. The indigenous beliefs consist of the nāga cult, belief in spirits, early practice of urn-burials and belief in the soul or spirit of the dead rising from the grave, primitive beliefs of Aryan people and, nāga as a tribe. Buddhism shows an attempt to incorporate these beliefs and people into the Buddhist cosmology by elevating some local gods, indigenous beliefs and tribal people to divine status, such as lokapālas, who become chieftains of the gandhabbas, the nāgas, and the kumbhaṇḍas, in order to show acceptance of earlier or contemporaneous indigenous beliefs and tribes. These findings may help to improve understanding more of the sociology of early Buddhism.