Soul(s) retrieval’: a Sherdukpen healing ritual (West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh) - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2024

Soul(s) retrieval’: a Sherdukpen healing ritual (West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh)

Résumé

The Sherdukpens occupy a rather large territory, situated in West Kameng district in Arunachal Pradesh. Traditionally, they lived off farming and breeding, but also hunting, fishing and gathering. But today half of the population has government or business jobs. Shertukpens are listed as Buddhists in the Indian Census and described as such in the literature. The propagator of Buddhism is said to be a Tibetan lama who came in the beginning of the 18th century in the Shertukpen country and founded there the first Buddhist temple. Despite the patent influence of Buddhism, the Shertukpens have maintained their own religion with its own specialists. In this paper, I will describe one of their rituals, yung luba, “retrieval the life force(s)” and compare it with similar ceremonies as performed among the Tibeto-Burman populations of the Himalayan regions and Tibet. Every human being, indeed, possesses seven ‘souls’ or rather ‘life forces’, yung sit. These yung are conceived as active principles that animate the body. They are indispensable for life but vulnerable to attacks by spirits. The absence of a soul(s) leads to great weakness, a loss of consciousness and other illnesses. A zizi (diviner, exorcist and healer) or a raoma, regarded as more powerful than a zizi, therefore has to be called upon to find the place where the yung has disappeared to, the spirit responsible for its capture and then to ask, sometimes at the expense of a tough combat, for its restitution and finally its reincorporation into the body of the patient.
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Dates et versions

hal-03023455 , version 1 (25-11-2020)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03023455 , version 1

Citer

Pascale Dollfus. Soul(s) retrieval’: a Sherdukpen healing ritual (West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh). Seiji Kumagai, Anna Balikci-Denjongpa, Francoise Pommaret, Miguel Alvarez-Ortega, Lobsang Tenpa. Traditional Neighbors, Different Modernities in the South-Eastern Himalayas: Bhutan, Sikkim, and the Mon Region., Kyoto University Press, In press. ⟨hal-03023455⟩
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