Birth, Entity and Responsibility : The Spirit of the Sun in Sora Cosmology - article ; n°1 ; vol.20, pg 47-70

Piers Vitebsky

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L'Homme - Année 1980 - Volume 20 - Numéro 1 - Pages 47-70
24 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

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• Publié par: L-HOMME0
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1980
• Nombre de lectures: 13
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

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Piers Vitebsky
Birth, Entity and Responsibility : The Spirit of the Sun in Sora
Cosmology
In: L'Homme, 1980, tome 20 n°1. pp. 47-70.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Vitebsky Piers. Birth, Entity and Responsibility : The Spirit of the Sun in Sora Cosmology. In: L'Homme, 1980, tome 20 n°1. pp.
47-70.
doi : 10.3406/hom.1980.368026
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/hom_0439-4216_1980_num_20_1_368026ENTITY AND RESPONSIBILITY: BIRTH,
THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN IN SORA COSMOLOGY
by
PIERS VITEBSKY
The Sora are a "tribal" people who live mostly on the borders of Ganjam and
Koraput Districts in the State of Orissa in India. The Sora language is classified
as Austro-Asiatic (Munda branch) and it seems that the original cultural links of
the people are with South-East Asia rather than with Hinduism. They number
some 200,000 in all, and their various groups form a continuum from the most
isolated who still live largely by shifting cultivation in hilly areas, to those in the
plains who are at various stages of assimilation to the surrounding non-tribal
Oriya and Telugu populations. Many of the plains Sora have lost the use of the
Sora language, and though I have not studied them, their religion seems very
close to that of the popular Hinduism around them. My fieldwork was carried
out in the most isolated, least "Hinduised" villages, those around Puttasing, in
Koraput District. The only substantial previous work on the religion of the
Sora was by Elwin (1955: for critiques see Dumont & Pocock 1959; Turner 1967),
who also visited this area. However, the approach adopted here differs consider
ably from his. I shall not embark on the vexed question of how far the shaman-
istic practices described here should be considered a part of Hinduism (see e.g.
Dumont & Pocock 1959). *
This paper arises out of an attempt to interpret a statement which is consist
ently made by the Sora and is supported by an elaborate body of ritual, and which
puzzled me for a long time in the field, namely that people who die by murder,
1. Fieldwork was carried out for eleven months during 1976-77 while a research student
in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain who financed a large
part of it, and also to my supervisors, Professor C. von Fiirer-Haimendorf and Mrs. Audrey
Hayley. I am also grateful to the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative
at Nanterre, Paris, for an opportunity of reading an earlier draft of this paper at a seminar
in March 1978.
L'Homme, janv.-mars iq8o, XX (1) , pp. 47-70. PIERS VITEBSKY 48
suicide, or through falling out of trees, are "taken" by the Spirit of the Sun and
are said to reside after death in the Sun. Such people are called usungdaijen, or
"fall-climb" people. Another fact to be explained, one of behaviour rather than
explicit statement, is the tendency of the Sora to impute to those who die in this
way negative qualities of character. Often this judgement comes into play only
after the event; and in the cases known to me during my stay in the area, I was
able to observe that this happened even when other sources of information about
the deceased suggested that such moral slurs were not in fact justified.
The class of fall-climb is only one among several categories of deaths which
are linked in this way to Sun-Spirit. I hope to demonstrate from an analysis of
the internal logic of the symbolism of the Sun that all kinds of Sun-deaths are
radically distinguished from deaths linked to any of the many other possible
categories of spirit; and that this distinction is based on the imagery of the
process of birth, which is also said to take place in, and through the agency of,
the Sun. No other spirit is associated with birth in this way. At the end of the
paper I shall try to place the Sun alongside certain other spirits in order to illus
trate how the entire Sora pantheon serves as a system of metaphors for certain
kinds of experience. In this system, meaning is derived from contrasts and
oppositions between spirits.
Before going on to the distinctive features of deaths connected with the Sun,
it is necessary to sketch in the Sora theory of death in general. The Sora say that
all deaths without exception are caused by a spirit. Of these there are numerous
categories, some of which will be discussed as we proceed. The language consist
ently used suggests that they have a very clear image of the quasi-physical
process involved. The dead person has "gone to" the spirit because he has been
"taken" or "eaten" by it. What the spirit consumes is in fact the person's
soul-substance, and it does this ostensibly out of a need to nourish itself. So the
relationships between person and spirit expressed by these terms are those
of spatial coexistence ("go to") and of absorption, expressed by the image of
consumption. The latter amounts eventually to a total loss of the victim's
identity. After his death, someone who succumbs in this way (which means of
course eventually everyone) both is an ancestor-spirit in the Underworld under
his own name and identity, and at the same time is part of, that is, has been
absorbed by, the spirit responsible for his death. Thus, to take an almost
absurdly literal example of absorption, a person who is eaten by a tiger "goes to"
or "becomes" Tiger-Spirit. In all cases the absorption becomes more and more
total over time, and within about three generations his individual identity as an
ancestor will have been forgotten. This idea of absorption of identity or of the
entire self should be borne in mind when I come later to discuss Sora ideas of the
creation of new identities through the process of birth. In principle, the choice
of the spirit which is believed to have taken a person is dictated not by heredity THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN 49
but by the circumstances of his own death. Thus the two halves of a person's
dual role as an ancestor-spirit and as some other kind of spirit, are essentially
independent.
This simultaneity of two different modes of existence after death presents a
curious paradox: they are clearly spatially incompatible, since most classes of
spirits reside in trees, streams, mountains, in fact almost anywhere except the
Underworld, where they must also reside in their capacity as ancestors. Thus
most people on dying, unless they are "taken" by an actual ancestor as such in
his role as a particular "Ancestor-Spirit", or by Earth-Spirit, must have a double
existence in two different places. The Sora express this not by a term of continu
ous simultaneity (I do not even know if this would be possible in the Sora
language), but by saying that the deceased "wanders" or "oscillates" (goro'te)
between the two states, and that his spirit may turn up during a shaman's trance
in either capacity, that is either under his own identity or under that of the spirit
which has taken him. I shall suggest at the end of the paper that the paradox
of oscillation and the double mode of existing after death is an integral part of the
Sora way of thinking about their dead through the metaphor of spirits.
Death, whether sudden or preceded by a disturbance of health which is judged
to be "illness" (asu), takes place within the context of signs which allow it to be
interpreted. We can best approach the link between any given death and a
particular spirit through the interpretation of illness, since each person experiences
death only once but illness many times over throughout his life. Every case of
the latter, except the most trivial, is the consequence of an attack by a spirit, but
not every case is fatal: it represents the early stages of being consumed by a spirit,
and most ritual activity consists of buying off the attacking spirit with an animal
substitute. A shaman who knows the technique of divination divines the
identity of the spirit, and a shaman who knows the ritual appropriate to that
spirit then offers it the animal's soul to feed on, in the form of its blood. If the
spirit accepts the substitute, the patient recovers; if not, he dies. In fact, the
procedure is considerably more complicated, since divination is itself a matter of
interpretation. A patient may fail to recover and second and third opinions will
contradict the initial diagnosis; or for malicious reasons of their own, spirits may
commonly conceal their identity and pretend to be other spirits, and so on. If
the patient dies, the true cause of his death will be revealed only in the final one
of a long series of post-mortem divinations.
What do the Sora achieve by a classification of spirits? One of the first
things which strikes a visitor is not only that they are constantly talking about
spirits, but that these spirits are ascribed innumerable names and properties, so
that their classification is clearly a matter of some importance. In Sora thought,
spirit is active. It effects change by disturbing health and bringing about death.
Thus it is known only from what it does, through th