Overview

The isolated valleys of Rawain in the Western Himalaya are ruled by local gods who control the weather, provide justice, and regularly travel through their territories to mark their borders and to ward off incursions by rival gods. These, identified with Karna and Duryodhana from the great Indian epic Mahabharata, are regarded as divine kings whom local persons serve as priests, ministers, patrons, soldiers, and servants. Each divine king has an oracle, who is regularly summoned, enters into a trance, and speaks with the god's voice, appointing and dismissing officers, confiscating property, levying fines, and ratifying the decisions of councils of elders. The gods hear civil and sometimes criminal cases and, through their oracles, enforce their judgments through fines and penalties, or by compelling disputants to reach a compromise. In the Valley of the Kauravas seeks to describe how this system functions by closely examining the myths, legends, rituals, and folklore associated with it, and above all by providing a detailed ethnographic description of its day-to-day workings. It contextualizes this system by comparing it with 'divine kingship' throughout history, in both South and Southeast Asia, and seeks to embed this historical and ethnographic analysis in a theoretical discussion of the nature, goals, and limits of anthropological knowledge of 'multiple worlds'. The chapters of the book are organized in terms of the 'seven limbs' of the classical Indian kingdom as described by the political philosopher Kautilya: king, land and people, minister, army, treasury, ally, and enemy.

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9780198879350

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William Sax, the leading ethnographer of the Western Himalayas, has produced a work of remarkable depth, maturity, and conviction, weaving together possession, polity, agency, and local Mahabharata performance in a definitive statement on divine kingship a Himalayan area known as Rawain. Adroitly mixing ethnography and theory, Sax shows how local deities like Shalya, Duryodhana, and especially Karna, rule as kings, are woven into local oral literature and performance, mediated through oracular possession and shamanic vision, and manifested in everyday religious interaction. The result is a unique culture that is grounded in intertwining historical and mythological moments. Sax has written a tour de force that will immediately become the standard work for understanding this unique mountainous region. * Frederick M. Smith, Professor of Sanskrit & Classical Indian Religions *

Author Information

William S. Sax was born in a small town in eastern Washington State, studied in Seattle, Wisconsin, and India, and earned his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1987. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (where he lived for eleven years), and Germany, where he has been Professor of Anthropology at Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute since 2000. Altogether he has spent about fifteen years in India, and produced three monographs, seven volumes of collected essays, and dozens of articles on theater, healing, ritual, mental health, spirit possession, and psychiatry in South Asia.

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