Notions of Life in Death and Dying: The Dead in Tribal Middle India
Contents: Prologue. 1. Introduction. 2. The issue of the tribe in middle India. 3. Notions of death and dying. 4. Relations between the living and the dead in tribal middle India. 5. Communicating with their ancestors: The Ho of Singhbum and Mayurbhanj. 6. Conclusion. Appendices. Bibliography. Index.
“This anthropological study, sparked off by fieldwork among the Ho of Orissa and Jharkhand, is about ‘The dead in tribal middle India’ who continue to be involved in the lives of the living.
The structured ceremonious treatment of corpse and soul of the dead and the symbolic interaction of the mourners-kin and affines- provide for the actors’ orientation and guidance from ritual. The public expression of the emotional response towards the ‘organic event’ in grieving is socially informed and life-oriented as much as death-centred. It is indicative of a culture-specific concept which conceives of death as a drawn out transformative process and of the dead as integrally linked to the living and rooted in a known cosmic-societal perspective. The social obligations enacted in the drama of death and life contribute to reproducing tribal society, revealing marked difference from the radically decentred western notion of the human condition with its focus on the individual as representing the supreme value.
This volume explores the cultural logic surrounding the conceptual unity and continuity of life, death and afterlife by examining the social and ideational setting of tribal middle India. The main body of the study is an analysis of the meaning of death as conveyed in the ethnographic literature on the hill Juang of Keonjhar, the Sora in Eastern Orissa, the Koya of Malkangiri, the Muria Gond of Bastar, and the Ho of Singhbum and Mayurbhanj. The material on the ho discussed here has so far not been published or is only locally accessible. Apart from anthropologists and sociologist, this volume will be of considerable interest to South Asian scholar, especially those working on Orissa and Jharkhand.” (jacket)
