I should say a few words here about the study of possession. In India and elsewhere, the field has been dominated by compartmentalized ethnographies and, less often, by histories of possession in specific lineages or local cultures. No syncretic history or synoptic account of possession in India has been attempted.1 While my intention here is to locate and capture such a history, I have tried to keep in mind the problems associated with “master narratives” and endeavored to avoid them. Even if I were dedicated to a single theoretical model (and it will soon become obvious that I am not), two things would still parry any attempt to create such a master narrative: the sheer variety of the textual and ethnographic source material, and the delicacy with which the layers of their connections must be handled.(4) I have been constantly aware of the pitfalls of both subjectivity and objectification that confront both scholars and participants who think about and live with possession. This inspires in me a certain trepidation, because it sharpens rather than occludes the necessity to define and delimit, to construct and deconstruct, to know when to intervene and when to leave alone, to know how strongly to invoke situated histories, to know when to allow tradition and imagination to merge, and to feel comfortable if all my data and conclusions are not scrubbed clean of contradiction. Nevertheless, I take full responsibility for lapses in clarity, errors in judgment, and oversights in the use of material.
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The nearest attempt so far has been in the collection of articles edited by Assayag and Tarabout (1999). As good as this collection is, it lacks a general historical context and the syncretism that only a single-authored study can provide. The same is true for possession studies elsewhere in the world. For Africa, see Behrend and Luig 1999; for Indonesia and Oceania see Mageo and Howard 1996. ↩︎