Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world
populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through
shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing in
heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love,
anger, and guilt. Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of
their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of
fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors
is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are
replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to
prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle
spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics;
others despair for fear of being forgotten after death. How can a
society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see
the world in a totally different way? Over forty years,
anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans,
pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet
worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory,
psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare
today's crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical
reform can bring new fulfillments--but also new torments and
uncertainties. Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as
one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our
wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural
and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning
author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of
cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even
while new religious forms come into being to take its place.
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