Abstract
Frederique Apffel-Marglin’s Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa is a collection of nine, minimally revised anthropological essays published between 1985 and 2007 that focus on vernacular religion and female sexuality in Orissa. The edition’s essays combine multidisciplinary theoretical nuance with subtle ethnographic insights culled from years of immersive research in Orissa to produce new conceptual frameworks based on ecological rhythms, principles of complementarity, regeneration and renewal. Apffel-Marglin argues against the dismissal of popular ritual practices as unthinking re-enactments of outmoded traditions and affirms the ‘agency of parts of the non-human world’ (p. 11), the ritual performances that are necessary for the ‘regeneration of the world’ (p. 11) and ‘the entanglement of humans and the cosmos’ (p. 21).
‘Are goddesses real?’, Apffel-Marglin asks, drawing the reader’s attention to the question of alternative ontologies. Her response is that they are, however, ‘the nature of this “real” is quite different from the notion of the real bequeathed to us by the scientific revolution and the enlightenment’ (p. 4). She argues that because the discipline of anthropology is wedded to a modernist ontology that views ‘deities, gods and goddesses as either anthropomorphizing aspects of nature or society, or as metaphors referring to some reality to be found elsewhere’ (p. 11), anthropologists have been thus far unable to sufficiently comprehend the cultural and ritual experience of people in coastal Orissa. To correct anthropology’s problematic ontology, the volume’s essays ethnographically detail two sets of rituals and their attendant myths—devadāsīs’ rituals at the Jagannātha temple and the Raja Parba festival in Bali Haracandī.
The essays in the first section of the volume treat ethnographic data from the beginning of Apffel-Marglin’s career, yet demonstrate the author’s movement away from structuralist anthropology which characterised her earlier work. To overturn the Dumontian axiom that all forms of social hierarchy in India derive from the binary opposition between purity and impurity, close ethnography in ‘Types of Opposition in Hindu Culture’ details the co-extant axes of purity/impurity and auspiciousness/inauspiciousness in devadāsīs’ rituals (p. 35) and the simultaneous existence of birth/death present in the Naba Calabra ritual of the Jagannātha cult (p. 49). Continuing this line of thinking, in ‘Female Sexuality in the Hindu World’, Apffel-Marglin argues that a modernist binary paradigm ‘coloured by Western and Christian belief in the danger of uncontrolled female sexuality’ (p. 71) inhibits realisations about the co-existence of apparently contradictory moral valuation of the same phenomenon and is subsequently unable to apprehend that female sexuality in the context of Hinduism, although possibly impure, is an auspicious and powerful source of regeneration and renewal.
In one of the volume’s most striking essays, ‘Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge’, Apffel-Marglin challenges both the entire project of modernisation and claims that western science is a superior form of knowledge able to render obsolete more traditional systems of knowledge. The author argues that knowledge of smallpox variolation, a vernacular form of medical practice incorporated into the worship of goddess Śītalā, enabled Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination, showing that, in fact, these two practices are continuous. Apffel-Marglin’s observation that the goddess Śītalā, ‘who is both the presence and the absence of the disease’ (p. 108), is not simply a metaphysical entity but is, in fact, ‘a continuation and refinement of the natural’ (p. 120) and erases distinctions between natural/supernatural and nature/culture that have long troubled anthropologists. Despite the similarity between variolation and vaccination, vaccination was resisted by Indians because, the author argues, it was viewed as the ‘government’s mark’ (p. 124) which embedded an ‘opposition between man and his culture on the one hand, and the environment on the other’ (p. 149). And further that displacing native practices insulted goddess Śītalā. The author concludes that colonial hierarchies of knowledge prevented the dispersal of useful technologies and destroyed local patterns of knowledge and practice which, along with associated people, were demonised.
The second section more closely deconstructs modernist categories widely used in the study of popular religious practices in India which, the author argues, impede the realisation of alternative ontologies—the ‘subaltern’, the ‘third world woman’, the ‘sacred’ and ‘history’. Apffel-Marglin’s close ethnographic study of the Raja Parba in ‘Gender and the Unitary Self: Looking for the Subaltern in Coastal Orissa’ foregrounds the need to contextualise studies of women in India by considering the degree to which communities are enmeshed in the market economy. The search for a dominated ‘subaltern’ assumes a hierarchical society where categories of market commoditisation have already enclosed individualised persons. In societies that are less enmeshed in market economies, such as those in coastal Orissa at the time of writing, the social structure is dynamic and the relative positions of women and men shift according to the position of the listener/interlocutor: there is no ‘subaltern’ to be found (p. 206). ‘Feminist Orientalism and Development’ turns to paradigms of development to suggest the need to move away from a ‘Women in Development’ model which posits the existence of the ‘Third World Woman’ and privileges a development expert’s construction of reality to a ‘Women, Environment, and Development’ model which opens possibilities ‘for the voices of non-modern, non-commodified, and usually non-western women to be heard in a new way’ (p. 211). The author finally takes aim at temporality and the notion of linear histories in ‘Rhythms of Life: Ritual Time and Historical Time’. In a striking, yet not fully developed, turn towards creating a new paradigm for thinking about ritual and sustainability, Apffel-Marglin argues that seasonally reiterated ritual performances enable village communities to actively ‘make’ a new kind of time which promises the continuity of ‘the good life’ (p. 271).
I would like to point to a few areas of the volume where additional exposition might have drawn out important implications. First, the arguments which focus on aspects of ritual regeneration and renewal might have engaged questions about the role of ritual in cultural preservation and sustainability practices. As development projects continue to unroll themselves across India, putting pressure on the survival or improvisational continuation of local communities and cultural patterns, the author might have said more about how her work is useful in addressing these increasingly important anthropological issues. Second, the introduction could have benefited from an elaboration of the political stakes underlying the arguments, especially with regard to the author’s gesture towards the importance of rescuing the worlds of gods and goddesses from the dogmatic realm of Hindu fundamentalists. Finally, although the volume’s essays, when taken together, claim that vernacular ways of enacting the world are frequently more conducive to regeneration and sustainability than modern developmental methods, indeed that ‘moderns’ have largely lost the way, the volume seems to produce uneven ethnographic analyses that prioritise a particular construction of vernacular Orissa as un-modern. This overall arc of argument risks reifying the familiar antinomy of modern versus un-modern without attending to the many ways in which vernacular worlds produce their own modernities and the ways in which ‘modernity’ harbours subterranean currents of traditionalism.
Overall, this volume is a brilliant addition to knowledge about vernacular religious practices in Orissa and to understanding the broader anthropological questions about female sexuality and religious praxis.