Living without the Dead: Drastic Religious Change Among Adivasis in Odisha

RSVP is required if you are external to King's College London. Please RSVP on india-institute@kcl.ac.uk.

Speaker: Dr Piers Vitebsky, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge  

What is going on when a community suddenly abandons one understanding of reality and re-visions the world in a new and seemingly quite different way?  Just one generation ago, the animist Sora tribe in India believed that their lives were determined by the dead, with whom they negotiated their wellbeing in dialogues held through shamans in trance.  Today, young Sora have abandoned all this to become Baptist Christians or fundamentalist Hindus.  As sacred sites are demolished and female shamans give way to male priests, communion with the dead is banned and debate with ancestors is displaced by prayer to gods.  For some, this shift is a liberation as they turn from an overwhelming intimacy with kin to the more distant emotionalities of literacy, employment and the nation-state; others despair, for fear of being deprived after death of articulacy and love.

Dr Vitebsky's talk is based on his new book Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos