At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo‐Himalayan Border Village

Abstract

I base this article on an event that transpired during a funeral ceremony in the village of Achinathang in Ladakh, India. This incident, which coincided with a period of interreligious conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist communities, led me to question the manner in which margins become sites for the definition and contestation of citizenship and power. Here, I analyze the construction of margins in multiple contexts: in negotiating boundaries between death and rebirth, in coping with and challenging the control exerted by town‐based political reform movements over rural space, and finally, in locating the position of the ethnographer in histories and spaces of domination. [death rituals, social space, politics of location, Buddhism, South Asia]

The Social and the Religious in the Making of Tibetan Societies

“…Such generalised ancestor cults are ethnographically attested among neighbouring populations in the PRC, such as the Naxi(McKhann 1992: 289-297), Premi(Wellens 2010: 120-122) and of course Han Chinese (e.g.,Watson 1982 and contributions inWatson and Rawski 1988). The ethnography of Ladakh, too, has produced some evidence of such cults (e.g.,Aggarwal 2001. (Note that, reporting on Zanskar, seems to conflate pha lha "ancestral gods," i.e., gods of the ancestors, with the ancestors themselves; cf.…”

Patriarchy through lamentation in Azerbaijan

“…Therefore, although death rites tend to be societies' most conservative rituals and, thus, the slowest to change (Danforth 1982), participants can nevertheless transform the ritual and their community within the context of such rites. For example, in many patriarchal societies, death rituals are the only places in which women can express their social grievances publicly and exhibit their resistance to authority (Aggarwal 2001; Graeber 1995; Johnson 1988; Worobec 1994). Some scholars have investigated how women emerge as spokespersons for the community by voicing their complaints in funerary laments (Bourke 1993; Briggs 1992; Caraveli‐Chaves 1980; Crain 1991; Honko 1974; Urban 1988).…”