Divine Śakti and Human Power Relations: Studying the Embodied and Enacted Feelings of a Himalayan Hindu Goddess

Abstract

Concepts such as power, affect, intensity, and attention tend to be depicted as “flowing,” “channeled,” or “evoked.” Schaefer, in his response, speaks of materialized, embodied affects as “singeing,” “electrifying,” “amplifying,” “enfolding” and “surging,” and has written extensively about the “currents of illocutionary force” (Schaefer 2022, 62), or the “embodied flows of religious attention” (Schaefer 2015, 90). This metaphor use is surprisingly close to what local informants in the Indian Himalaya told me about the power (śakti) of their goddess, its “outburst” (prakop) and its “heat.” Can I, thus, treat academics as “informants” in the same sense as local storytellers and ritual specialists? It seems that Conceptual Metaphor Theory has a point in assuming that the metaphors we depend on to speak about feelings are as much based on near-universal bodily experience as on cultural construction: People speaking unrelated languages can still understand, for instance, anger as a hot or pressurized “fluid in a container” (Kövecses 2000, 139–81). Metaphor theory is, therefore, useful to understand how religious aesthetics and dramaturgies work to govern human bodies, senses, and emotions (see Grieser and Johnston 2017, 2; Mohr 2020). In my research on the Himalayan Hindu Goddess Nain. ī Devī, I study the feelings arising in the course of her ritual journey. From 2016 to 2017, a group of devotees (bhaktjan) carried her around from village to village, for half a year. During this time, she was embodied in a bamboo pole (see Figure 1) to visit her human “sisters”—the dhyān. īs, women who had married into other villages, and their offspring. Their relation to their goddess is intensified by the general situation of women who have to find their place in a new family—a situation which they also attribute to the goddess. This made me focus my research on the feelings ascribed to the goddess herself—or rather, what local people feel her to feel. I pursued this question by asking people what they felt and what they suppose the goddess to feel, why I also tried to “capture” some more unspoken aspects of the emotional interactions with the goddess by means of filming and editing. Both methods, to be sure, do not convey what people “really feel,” but may “grasp” feelings as enacted, embodied practices (see Scheer 2012). In the rituals I took part in, drumming, mantra recitals, burning of incense and other stimuli appealed to nonhuman senses, inviting deities and ghosts to possess human bodies. Of course, human bodies and feelings were also stimulated on the way. The dramaturgy of these rituals works to animate and activate human, social, and nonhuman forces, but is itself channeled by power relations: only men may walk alongside her and only those upholding strict celibacy and a fast may touch her bamboo body. Only Brahmans have the power to control the Goddesses’ movements with their mantras and songs. On the other hand, only “low-caste” drummers have the power to animate her movements (and the collective mood), and to summon other gods and goddesses from their respective “worlds” (lok) with specific drum patterns. This is, ironically, because they are regarded as “lowborn” (nīceyonī) and, qua birth, “impure” enough to touch the leather of the drum skin (see Figure 2). In every village we visited, women gathered around the goddess and kept singing songs of affection, which intensified whenever we were leaving for the next village. Their songs resulted, in local terms, in ākars.an, both an emotional force of “attraction” and a quasi-physical “magnetism” Material Religion volume 19, issue 1, pp. 85–86 DOI:10.1080/17432200.2023.2170112