List of Maps, Diagrams, and Figures
Dramatis Personae
Introduction
1 To the Underworld with Ononti the Shamaness
2 Leopard Power and Police Power, the Jungle and the State
3 What the Living and the Dead Have to Say to Each Other
4 Memories without Rememberers
5 Young Monosi Changes His World Forever
6 Doloso Complicates the Future of His Mountaintop Village
7 Shocked by Baptists
8 Christians Die Mute
9 Redeemers Human and Divine
10 Youth Economics: Life after Sonums
11 Dancing with Alphabet Worshippers: Once and Future Hindus?
Interlude: Government Kitsch and the Old Prophet’s New Message
12 Six Remarkable Women and Their Destinies
Epilogue: Spiritual Ecosystems and Loss of Theo-diversity
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Ethnic Groups and Communities
References
Index
Choice
This truly magnificent text is a living monument to the strength and elegance of true ethnographic work... Students of culture, history of religions, India, and, frankly, of any discipline will learn much from this sensitive and powerful approach to inquiry. Essential."
American Ethnologist
"This is an extraordinary book in two senses: it is an outstanding work of scholarship, and it is a highly original, unconventional piece of writing... the effect on the reader is devastating. It moved me as much as anything I have read in a literary work of recent years... I am hard put to think of anything else quite like it."
International Journal of Hindu Studies
"A monumental, impressive, and insightful work of ethnography, one that could only be produced by an ethnographer of Vitebsky’s evident skill, self-awareness, and endurance."
Social Anthropology
"TA book that offers deep reflections on and insights into fundamental questions about the predicament of human beings in times of change."
James C. Scott, Yale University
“Incomparable. Fortunate are the Sora to have an ethnographer of such surpassing, immersive understanding. Fortunate are the students of history and religion to be shown how animism, shamanism, and conversion to monotheisms are actually experienced and understood. Fortunate beyond words are we all to have Vitebsky’s summum for generations of scholars.”
Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
“This is a magnificent contribution to anthropology at once in time and over time—keeping faith with people’s continuing lives while traversing the epochs that have transformed them forever. Unswerving in his commitment to the task, Vitebsky brings together compassion, analytical insight and blunt speaking. And the magic of this account is not least in the way his subjects give the world a fresh view on world religions.”
Nandini Sundar, Delhi University
"This fabulous, empathetic and deeply moving account of Sora loss and longing is among the best that anthropology has ever offered. Vitebsky’s beautiful prose introduces us to the meaning of conversion not just for faith but for landscapes, old conversations which are silenced and new ones which are beginning. He takes us to a world most people don’t know existed, and whose defeat readers will mourn deeply."
Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand
"A haunting and elegiac exploration of attitudes to dying, death and grieving among the Sora of Odisha. Combining deep ethnography with masterful storytelling, Vitebsky has produced a classic of South Asian anthropology that at the same time speaks to the human condition everywhere."
Telegraph India
"Gripping and mind-bending... a deeply fascinating book on many levels that demands attention from the reader, and an ability to change how we think about the spirit world and meanings of modernity."
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"All anthropologists should read this dazzling book."
Anthropology and Medicine
Choice Magazine: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Awards
Won
New India Foundation: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize
Short Listed
Society for Humanistic Anthropology: Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing
Honorable Mention
Second place.
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Recent Awards page for more award winning books.
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