The Politics of Madness and Spirit Possession in Northern India.

Abstract

Being a medium of a god is common and normative in the Western Himalayas. In this article I present a case of three mediums who were regarded with mixed feelings by society, because their mediumship strongly criticized religious practices and the caste system. The villagers in the study area have cultural-religious practices that help them cope with deviant forms of mediumship - patterns such as ignoring a person or gossiping about them to express skepticism or to label the possession as inauthentic. These approaches were not effective in these cases. As a result, the biomedical concept of madness was invoked by some members of the community to put an end to what they regarded as deviant mediumship.