Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos

| SHORTLISTED FOR THE KAMALADEVI CHATTOPADHYAY NEW INDIA FOUNDATION BOOK PRIZE 2019 | Praise for the book:This truly magnificent text is a living monument to the strength and elegance of true ethnographic work.--Choice 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... It moved me as much as anything I have read in a literary work of recent years. Living without the Dead is a masterly feat of writing and of the ethnographic imagination.--American EthnologistLiving without the Dead remains a monumental impressive and insightful work of ethnography one that could only be produced by an ethnographer of Vitebskys evident skill self-awareness and endurance.--International Journal of Hindu Studies[Vitebsky] takes us to a world most people dont know existed and whose defeat readers will mourn deeply.--Nandini Sundar Delhi UniversityA haunting and elegiac exploration of attitudes to dying death and grieving among the Sora of Odisha.--Dilip Menon University of Witwatersrand| SHORTLISTED FOR THE KAMALADEVI CHATTOPADHYAY NEW INDIA FOUNDATION BOOK PRIZE 2019 | Just one generation ago the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day they negotiated their wellbeing in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love anger and guilt. Today young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to sects of Christianity or Hinduism. Sacred sites are being demolished female shamans are being replaced by male priests and debate with the dead is giving way to prayer to gods. For some this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy employment and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death. How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and replace it with another? Over forty years anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans pastors ancestors gods policemen missionaries and alphabet worshippers while drawing inspiration from social theory psychoanalysis and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare todays crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments - but also new torments and uncertainties. Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses so we have been losing cultural and spiritual possibilities tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People this is a heartbreaking story of the extinction of an irreplaceable world even while new religious forms come into being.