School of Behavioral Sciences, Peres Academic Center, Rehovot, Israel.
Centre for Himalayan Studies (CEH), Aubervilliers, France.
Med Anthropol. 2021 Feb-Mar;40(2):182-195. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2020.1807540. Epub 2020 Aug 31.
Being a medium of a god is common and normative in the Western Himalayas. In this article I present a case of three mediums who were regarded with mixed feelings by society, because their mediumship strongly criticized religious practices and the caste system. The villagers in the study area have cultural-religious practices that help them cope with deviant forms of mediumship - patterns such as ignoring a person or gossiping about them to express skepticism or to label the possession as inauthentic. These approaches were not effective in these cases. As a result, the biomedical concept of madness was invoked by some members of the community to put an end to what they regarded as deviant mediumship.
在西喜马拉雅地区，作为神灵的媒介是常见且规范的。在本文中，我介绍了三个被社会持矛盾态度的媒介的案例，因为他们的媒介身份强烈批判了宗教实践和种姓制度。研究区域的村民有文化宗教实践，可以帮助他们应对异常形式的媒介身份——例如忽视某人或对其进行八卦以表达怀疑，或者将附身标记为不真实。但这些方法在这些情况下并不奏效。因此，一些社区成员援引了生物医学的疯狂概念，试图结束他们认为的异常媒介身份。
