Living Without the Dead ─ Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos

Over forty years ago, when Piers Vitebsky first conducted ethnographic fieldwork among them, the Sora, a tribal group that lives in the highland jungles of southeastern India practiced a highly advanced form of shamanism central to which were trance rituals that continuously connect the living to the dead. Today, after decades of marginalization and hardship, the Sora are imbued with evangelical Christianity which has eroded their traditional beliefs while giving them the uncertain benefits of state-sponsored modernization. An entire society has abandoned a way of thinking, feeling, and relating to each other which,” writes Viebsky, I had felt was a great achievement of the human mind and spirit . . . For me the change feels like a great loss. How can the Sora themselves now feel it as a great liberation? And when new systems bring relief from old dilemmas, why do they also bring new, unanticipated torments?” The central question of this work is: how do people in the world cope with love and loss? Indeed, how does the ethnographer cope with them? Loving and Forgetting is not an arcane text about exotic religious practices. Its focus on the things most deeply humanfear, love, courage, and lossmakes this a work of universal application, a text that aims to deepen our comprehension of the human condition.

Piers Vitebsky is the Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including Dialogues with the Dead and The Reindeer People, and has collaborated on television documentaries on the BBC, Chanel 4, Canal Plus, and National Geographic.
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