Rituals combining healing with spirit possession and court-like proceedings are found around the world and throughout history. A person suffers from an illness that cannot be cured, for example, and in order to be healed performs a ritual involving a prosecution and a defense, a judge and witnesses. Divine beings then speak through oracles, spirits possess the victim and are exorcized, and local gods intervene to provide healing and justice. Such practices seem to be the very antithesis of modernity, and many modern, secular states have systematically attempted to eliminate them. What is the relationship between healing, spirit possession, and the law, and why are they so often combined? Why are such rituals largely absent from modern societies, and what happens to them when the state attempts to expunge them from their health and justice systems, or even to criminalize them? Despite the prevalence of rituals involving some or all of these elements, this volume represents the first attempt to compare and analyze them systematically. The Law of Possession brings together historical and contemporary case studies from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, and argues that despite consistent attempts by modern, secular states to discourage, eliminate, and criminalize them, these types of rituals persist and even thrive because they meet widespread human needs.

About the Author
William S. Sax is Head of the Department of Ethnology at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Helene Basu is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Muenster.

Reviews
"This is an exciting, well organized and written volume about the controversial, unresolved, and often unexpected interconnection between possession, healing, and the law in contemporary India, Africa, and China...I thoroughly enjoyed reading this volume from the very start."--Raquel Romberg, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft "[B]eautifully conceived and competently executed Most of the eight essays are crafted with care, and their ethnography is extraordinarily suggestive."--Erik Mueggler, American Ethnologist "It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and ethnography of unorthodox forms of vernacular healing and the state."--Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft "'Modern' states tend to force a division between the domains of law and medicine, and to separate both, as 'secular' institutions, from the sacred. Yet people everywhere persist in bringing the three together in their search for justice and healing. Why should this be? And how might the phenomenon of 'spirit possession' provide an answer? This provocative set of essays brings rich, comparative insight to such conundrums, to the enchantments that remain integral to lived modernities everywhere."-Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Harvard University



Book Information
ISBN 9780190275754
Author William S. Sax
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 340g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 234mm * 15mm