Darjeeling’s mane mothers: Gender and ethnopolitics in the Indian Himalayas

• In Event: Death, Religion, and Transnational Approaches (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Religion Section)

Abstract

The dominant sociological understanding of funerary rites is that they symbolize a conquering of death by asserting the continuity of life. From eulogies to periods of fasting, death rituals move the bereaved through an experience of loss and liminality using a structured mix of prayer, memorialization, and acts of closure. For this reason, death rituals are thought of as spiritually meaningful carryovers from an older, more communitarian time, often executed in truncated form—or even jettisoned altogether—to fit the exigencies of modern living. I study a death ritual—mane chanting—at Tibetan funerals in which groups of women sing hymns to aid the journey of the departed to rebirth. Mane chanting, however, is curiously circumscribed by time and place. It has emerged only in the last twenty years, and only among the Tibetan Buddhists of Darjeeling, India. I explain this in terms of ethnopolitical conflict at the margins of a postcolonial state, and show the role of gender and ethnicity in shaping death rituals as a politics by other means. Ultimately, I argue that death does not become evermore secular and rational under Weberian modernity, but rather that “enchantment” in death can be a response to the political opportunity structures of late modernity.

Author

• Vrinda Marwah, University of South Florida