Ecstasy and Agony in Sri Lanka.

A Review Article
MICHAEL LAMBEK
University of Toronto

A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka, by

Bruce Kapferer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983)
Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, by
Gananath Obeyesekere (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, by Gananath Obeyesekere (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Much of the vital work in contemporary social theory is concerned with

transcending the dichotomy between the domains of objectivity and subjec-
tivity and the alternate modes of explanation such a dichotomy proposes. The
three splendid books under review, each of them building from a specific
ethnographic corpus within the vast complex of Sri Lankan medicoreligious
belief and practice, are characterized by this general aim of linking experi-
ence, symbol, and institution, although the strategies advocated within each
differ. In brief, where Gananath Obeyesekere attempts to break down me
division between the social and psychological dimensions of reality charac-
teristic of Durkheimian anthropology, Bruce Kapferer, operating at the outer
tip of a particular branch of this school, extends and enriches the case study
approach to ritual action with a phenomenological analysis of the conse-
quence of ritual's aesthetic forms for the experience of the participants. Kap-
ferer thus provides one of the most original extensions of Victor Turner's
formulation of ritual as social drama.
Both authors give central place to the cultural idioms through which the
worlds of their subjects are constructed. Sri Lankan Buddhists (at least of the
lower classes) on occasion believe themselves to be harmed by demons.
Resolution is achieved by the performance of elaborate exorcism ceremonies
which restore balance to the patient and his or her household (in the situation
examined by Kapferer) or by a more personal and painful "working through"
process in which the demons are transformed into parental deities who lead
the individuals they possess into entirely new life courses (in the situations
described in Medusa's Hair). The Goddess Pattini illustrates elaborate cere-
monial dramas very similar in form to exorcisms but different in meaning. A
comparison of the three works shows the Sri Lankan cosmos to be an ex-

0010-4175/85/2593-0924 $2.50 1985 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

291

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 292 MICHAEL LAMBEK

tremely rich and complex system which can be played, whether in collective
ritual or in personal career, to produce subtle and diverse effects. Each book
admirably demonstrates this complexity, although each also shows that the
others have not been able to capture the whole picture.
Given the similarities in ethnographic grounding and sense of problem, the
differences among the worksin content, theoretical perspective, and, per-
haps most tellingly, in styleare astonishing and instructive. Where Kap-
ferer sticks to public culture, collective ritual, social context, and the typical
case, Obeyesekere executes various Freudian forays into the unconscious.
Most notably, in Medusa's Hair he pursues the active role of the deeply
motivated individual in creating his or her own religious career and identity
through the cultural idiom available and in contributing to the collective store
of symbols which constitute that idiom. The major theoretical difference
between the authors is that whereas Kapferer is concerned with the ways in
which symbolic activity shapes social "reality," including the experience of
the self, Obeyesekere is interested primarily in how psychic experience, gen-
erated in particular social and familial contexts, is expressed in symbolic
activity. It should be noted that these are not necessarily antithetical interests;
from a number of theoretical perspectives, such as the dialectical approach of
Berger and Luckmann, where they are labelled internalization and exter-
nalization, respectively, or Giddens' theory of structuration, they can be seen
as complementary. Where all of Kapferer's cases begin and end in roughly the
same way, thereby indicating exorcism as a social institution worthy of study
and suggesting it has certain standard effects upon the social contexts in which
it is typically invoked, Obeyesekere is concerned with how symbols, medi-
ated through affect, individualize. Kapferer never mentions those individuals
who reject exorcism for a more permanent relationship with the gods or
demons (perhaps, in the localized kind of fieldwork he carried out he never
ran across them). But Obeyesekere's data suggest that there is more to a
successful exorcism than the aesthetics of performance. On the other hand,
Kapferer's subtle discussion of the potential transformations between demon-
ic and divine levels of cosmic hierarchy fills a significant gap in understand-
ing the outcomes of Obeyesekere's ascetics' careers, and his model of ritual
process helps to organize the mass of material presented by Obeyesekere in
The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. So, having asserted that these books provide
complementary and mutually enhancing arguments, let us turn to a closer
examination of each in turn.

A Celebration of Demons is an account of exorcism performances among

urban Sri Lankans in and around Galle. Kapferer is careful to elaborate the
social context, analyzing, in the first few chapters, how demonic possession
has become a lower-class phenomenon, how diagnoses of possession and

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 ECSTASY AND AGONY IN SRI LANKA 293

decisions to hold exorcisms are made, and why it is that women are more
frequently possessed than men. The question of women, which he develops in
a brilliant critique of reductionists like I. M. Lewis (and which, incidentally,
is quite different from the class analysis of the earlier chapter) leads him to the
system of ideas (Kapferer prefers "typifications") through which Sri Lankan
understandings of demonic possession and exorcism, and hence the phe-
nomena themselves, are constructed. Kapferer then presents an admirably
detailed description of a typical Mahasona exorcism (he has seen some 80 of
them!). This is an elaborate night-long performance, filled with comedy and
pathos, costume, music, dance, trance, and all kinds of striking images, a
kind of super-opera in which all the sound and action is directed at the hapless
patient. The remainder of the book is Kapferer's attempt to elucidate the
effects on the participants of this onslaught of aesthetic forms.
What is particularly impressive in Kapferer's work is the very high level
and thoroughness of argument sustained throughout. As a fellow student of
possession phenomena (though in a different part of the world), I appreciated
the clarity with which Kapferer shows that the preponderance of female
demonic victims is a function of the cultural typification of women as more
polluting and more attached to worldly matters than men, hence more attrac-
tive and vulnerable to demons. As the culturally conceived predominant
human agents of disorder, female victims form central symbols of general
Sinhalese concerns rather than the expression of narrowly female interests per
se. This explains too that male exorcists dance in female attire in order to
"ensnare demons in their own demonic natural passion, and make them
prisoners of their own lust" (p. 106).
Moreover, despite the tendency to view individual cases of possession as a
product of household rather than individual dynamics, functioning, in Turn-
erian terms, to realign the relations among family members, Kapferer does
not make the mistake of seeing demonic illness as merely reflective of social
or biopsychological reality. In the key last section of Chapter 4 he argues
cogently that "illness demonically conceived is not reducible to terms inde-
pendent of the demonic conception. . . . physical, mental, and social disor-
ders can be themselves metaphors of the demonic" (p. 87). Thus, "no partic-
ular theoretical orientation of . . . a western medical, psychological, psycho-
analytic or sociological kind, is privileged in the explanation of demonic
illness" (p. 88) and "the diagnosis of demonic attack, while constituted in
context, is also constitutive of context" (p. 89).
These are points which are still not widely understood. Likewise, Kap-
ferer's discussion of the roles of music and comedy in ritual are to my
knowledge unsurpassed in the literature, though they do not necessarily ren-
der obsolete, as Kapferer would seem to wish, either Rappaport's arguments
concerning the formal properties of ritual (Kapferer's own informant consid-
ers the mantra the main element of his practice, p. 43) or the approach which

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 294 MICHAEL LAMBEK

likens ritual to a text to be interpreted. To make a long story very short,

Kapferer argues that while music and dance unify object and subject, comic
drama in turn provides reflexive distance. He shows that the sequence or
progression of aesthetic effects in ritual performance is intrinsic to its mean-
ing. In criticizing the notion of text, Kapferer rightly points to the fact that we
must not attempt to reproduce artificial distinctions between art and life. But
the contrast between "text" and "performance" is managed by conflating
the Geertzian or Ricoeurian conceptions of the text with a structuralist one,
and by ignoring work on text production (e.g., by Alton Becker). To speak of
ritual as performance is partly to extend consideration to the rhetorical aspects
of the text and to the medium through which it is manifested, though I would
agree with Kapferer (and Rappaport) that in ritual the medium contributes a
good deal to the message.
These quibbles aside, the major flaw in this excellent work lies in its style.
The complex, often redundant prose could have been heavily prunedper-
haps enabling Indiana Press to enlarge the type face to reasonable size. In the
Foreword, Victor Turner praises Kapferer for capturing the "life, smack, and
color of exorcist rituals," yet this is precisely what is missing. We never learn
how the exorcists integrate trance into their own lives or how the patients feel
at the end of a ceremony. Real events are swallowed up in a sea of abstrac-
tions; Kapferer manages to talk about "experience" in the virtual absence of
persons, himself included.

Here enter Obeyesekere, native anthropologist, psychoanalytically en-

lightened, empathetically attuned, extremely gifted as a stylist. Medusa's
Hair is a text about, and constructed by means of, individuals. But in order to
appreciate it we have to begin with The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. This is an
authoritative, sprawling piece of scholarship which, seemingly, encompasses
anything and everything concerning Pattini that the author has learned in some
twenty years of intermittent research on the subject. While focussed on the
southwest of Sri Lanka, it incorporates material from the entire country and
significant portions of south India besides and moves easily between ethno-
graphic observations, textual translation and analysis, and historical recon-
struction. No doubt Richard Gombrich and Wendy O'Flaherty are correct
when they tell us on the dust jacket that the book's comprehensiveness and
innovativeness mark it as essential reading for the South Asian specialist.
Indeed, many of Obeyesekere's arguments seem directed to showing textual
scholars how an anthropological perspective can broaden their understanding
and lead to new conclusions. Thus, for example, he extends Eliade's model of
the mythicization of historical event to a critique of contemporary "de-
my thicization," i.e., the rationalization of myth as history so that it can be
continued to be believed. The anthropologist or historian whose regional

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 ECSTASY AND AGONY IN SRI LANKA 295

specialty lies elsewhere might benefit from these arguments as well, but will
undoubtedly be frustrated by the book's apparent lack of direction and con-
tinual renewal in more detail. The descriptive passages, with their valiant
attempt to include the whole range of local variation, have the kind of decon-
textualized flavor of "salvage" ethnography. In particular, what is lacking is
closer attention to social systematics: What, in the Sri Lankan context, is a
"cult" and how does it fit into an overall pattern of worship, Buddhist or
Hindu, in a South Asian community? And how has the disappearance of
Pattini worship which has occurred over the course of the author's investiga-
tions in Sri Lanka been rationalized by the believers?
A central organizing feature of at least a portion of the narrative is the
corpus of 35 ritual texts as it is manifested in several local traditions. The texts
include the fascinating myth of the Goddess Pattini, female yet pure, virginal
yet married, maternal yet barren, as well as stories concerning heroic kings of
south India and Sri Lanka (Karikala and Gajabahu, respectively). Obeyeseke-
re provides multifaceted interpretations of each of the various myths as well as
the ritual enactment of the Pattini story and associated performances. Pattini
worship intends to remove the afflictions (dosa), collective and individual, of
the congregants. It is partly, but not merely, a curing rite, yet a form of lay
activity in the Buddhist view, calling upon the pity and strength of the god-
dess, as epitomized in the way she resurrected and revenged her erring human
husband slain by the evil king of Pandi. Despite the fact that she is female,
Pattini worship is primarily a concern of men. The male priests often dress in
the costume of the goddess. This is impersonation rather than possession; the
priest is her instrument rather than her vehicle. (A comparison with Kap-
ferer's argument still leaves one puzzled at the prevalence of ritual cross-
dressing.) Other gods are invoked and sent home again as well, often in comic
scenes reminiscent of the exorcisms described by Kapferer. While
Obeyesekere is excellent at interpreting the references in the poetic texts,
Kapferer would help to give a sense of the overall coherence and direction,
the rhetorical thrust of the various segments within the total sequence of ritual
events, that is, in treating the ritual as ritual, rather than merely the recitation
of mythic content.
Obeyesekere's approach is primarily twofold, psychological and historical.
The myths symbolically reflect upon historical processes, especially the ab-
sorption, legitimization, and transformation of foreign elements into Sri Lan-
ka. Obeyesekere's historical pursuits are thus, in a sense, a continuation of
one of the major concerns of the myths, namely the relationship of Sinhalese
culture and polity to south India. Thus, he argues that one ritual reflects
Buddhist protest against the Hindu model of royal divinity; the texts parody
cosmic kingship and contrast it with their own image of just rule. Moreover,
because the texts are associated with ritual protest in Sri Lanka, Obeyesekere
assumes that the related south Indian texts must also have once been accom-

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 296 MICHAEL LAMBEK

panied by ritual; hence, counter to most scholars, the exploits of Karikala and
Gajabahu are to be interpreted as myth rather than literal history. Ultimately,
it is to interpretations of the great Tamil epic, the Cilappatikaram, that
Obeyesekere turns his critical eye, arguing that "the epic is firmly rooted in
the [then existing] popular ritual traditions of the cult of the goddess Pattini"
(p. 607) instead of codifying historical truths which were subsequently re-
flected in ritual. He also counters the received wisdom of Pattini as originally
a Hindu goddess, seeing her origins in a south Indian Buddhist or Jaina deity
strongly influenced by the West Asian cults present in Kerala in the first few
centuries A.D. Obeyesekere sees his analysis as an interpretive history that
moves beyond the restricted evidence of documents toward more anthropolo-
gical conceptions of historical process. For him, ritual is closer to actual
social experience than is myth or the pseudohistory derived from rationalizing
myth alone.
In his psychological interpretations, Obeyesekere really shows his flair.
Based on such factors as the position of women, marriage patterns, and the
like which affect the emotional dynamics of mothering, he infers the "ideal
typical" personality. Myths and rituals are projective systems, symbolic and,
in certain (but not all) kinds of performances, relatively direct, expressions of
key personality problems. Obeyesekere is able to make a very nice link
between his model of the South Asian personality, based on idealization of the
parent of opposite sex, and the content of the projections. In the more ex-
treme, Brahmanic case the mother image is polarized as the placid, nurturant
cow and the terrifying, unpredictable Kali. Sri Lankan Hindus find Pattini
capable of causing misfortune as well as curing ithence, much of their
ritual centres on "cooling" her ragewhereas Buddhists view Pattini as
entirely benevolent. With the increased repression of women throughout Sri
Lanka due to the absorption of both Brahmanic and Victorian values, Pattini
is giving way to Kali.
In contrast to both Hindu and Christian idioms which clearly distinguish
between wives and mothers, in Buddhist practice Pattini is both. The erotic
fixation on the mother in turn generates strong anxiety concerning potency. In
the Sri Lankan interpretations of the Pattini myth (as evidenced in ritual
behavior and commentary) Palanga realizes the fantasy of marrying his moth-
er yet is unable to have sex with her. Obeyesekere would agree with Levi-
Strauss that myths attempt to resolve contradictions; yet he sees the source of
the problems to be resolved, as well as the choice of mediators, to be gener-
ated by the dominant psychological constellation. Thus, it is the particular
emotional disposition of Sri Lankans which explains why the cognitive prob-
lem of wife as virgin arises and why it is solved by means of the husband's
impotence rather than in some other fashion. Castration anxiety is also bla-
tantly expressed in the ritual competition of pulling apart two locked wooden
hooks (ankeliya) common throughout Sri Lanka. The team whose hook,

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 ECSTASY AND AGONY IN SRI LANKA 297

representing either Pattini or Palanga, breaks first suffers obscene insults from
the victors. The psychological vulnerability of men is displayed and, as in the
myth, the humiliation of the male is held to bring about fertility.
Perhaps there are also universal Freudian themes which Obeyesekere ig-
nores. For example, he never considers the evil king of Pandi as the father. To
do so would be to discover the full Oedipal triad in the Pattini story (with the
difference from the Greek version that it is the father who kills the son and the
mother who remains alive to mutilate herself by tearing out a breast rather
than an eye). The phallic father is also implicated in the story of the birth of
Pattini from the mango, which, in at least one of the ritual performances, is
likened to a swollen testicle. The fantasy of males giving birth, while it would
resolve the contradiction between female purity and its violation in sex and
parturition, is shown to be ridiculous and impossible since it would require
sacrifice of the male.
Any Freudian argument is sure to receive criticism from certain quarters,
but the subtlety of Obeyesekere's approach should be noted. First of all, he is
careful to point out that the psychological theme is only one among many to
be found in the material. More important, he suggests that the form a projec-
tive system takes is shaped and constrained by the culture. Culture and per-
sonality are not collasped into one another. With a different cultural idiom at
their disposal, Westerners are more likely to idealize their actual spouses than
their symbolic, deified representations. Depending on the cultural context,
collective cultural defense mechanisms may predominate over individual ones
or not. Thus the ankeliya ritual disppears with the suppression of "obscenity"
in a bourgeois setting, yet the individual motives behind the ritual may remain
intact.
Thus, without eschewing the determinism that underlies Freudian theory,
Obeyesekere presents (with an occasional lapse, such as his passing remarks
on Australian subincision) an interpretive and historically grounded analysis.
His rejection of a rigid layered model is analagous to the alternative Raymond
Williams, for example, provides to scientific Marxism.
In the Goddess Pattini Obeyesekere states that "the task of the anthropolo-
gist is to document and analyze the expression of motives through symbol
systems" (p. 489). What this entails, in theory and in practice, is realized in
Medusa's Hair, a book which, although published before Pattini, was written
after, and in some reaction to it. Medusa's Hair is an enormously appealing
work, much lighter in touch than Pattini, often moving, and always thought-
provoking. Here we turn from the psychological problems of men to (mostly)
those of women and from a relatively isolated rural existence to the urban
margins and the transient population that attends the pilgrimage center of
Kataragama. Centered around the detailed and sensitive portrayal of portions
of the life histories of 9 ascetics located on the shifting borderland between
Buddhism and Hinduism, the book is nevertheless intended primarily as a

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 298 MICHAEL LAMBEK

contribution to the theoretical debate on the nature of symbols. I will regret-

fully restrict my comments to the theoretical issues and leave for the reader
the pleasure of working through the case studies.
Obeyesekere is concerned with the process of externalization, that is, the
human tendency to impose or create meaning, and hence with the link be-
tween fantasy and culture. The main theoretic shift from Pattini is the drop-
ping of collective projections for the analysis of individuals. Obeyesekere's
uneasiness with the former was already apparent in his careful distinction
between "ideal typical" and "modal" personality. Here, his empiricism
wins out. Psychoanalytic theory is most appropriate for the study of indi-
viduals, and the question of the articulation of culture and psyche must remain
open. The result is a brilliant foray in the emerging genre of what could be
called psychoethnography.
"Medusa's hair" refers to the matted locks of the female ascetics, the
associations to which lead Obeyesekere from phalluses to fallacies in the
British structural-functional conception of symbols. It might refer as well to
the theoretical "can of worms" this investigation opens up. Finally, the title
is a direct challenge to positivism, exemplifying how the investigator always
mediates, through countertransference, the object of study.
Obeyesekere asserts that the origin of symbolic imagery lies in the psychic
processes of individuals. Yet he also recognizes that as symbols become
collectivized they may lose contact with their source. Hence the key meth-
odological question: how do we know when symbols hold particular meanings
for individuals? In Obeyesekere's view, psychoanalysis has tended to avoid
the problem by not recognizing itmeanings remain universal; contra Freud,
a cigar is never just a cigar. On the other hand, British social anthropology has
declared the question none of its business. Following Durkheim's maxim not
to pollute social facts with psychological explanation, affect disappeared from
explicit consideration. Leach rationalized this position by classifying symbols
as either private or public. The former have no social significance and are thus
irrelevant to social scientists, whereas the latter express social status and have
no psychological relevance. Ironically, by focussing on the communicative
aspect of public symbols Leach seems to forget Durkheim's primary con-
cernnamely, social sentiment. Indeed, Obeyesekere, too, forgets this side
of Durkheim (and the whole question of the role of ritual in generating
sentiment evident in writers of the British school from Radcliffe-Brown
through Turner to Kapferer). Moreover, as has often been pointed out, the
denial of holding a psychological theory merely conceals what is taken for
granted. In the British case, evident in some of Leach's work and, for exam-
ple, in Lewis's analysis of spirit possession, this is the view that motivation is
essentially competition, Homo politicus. Even at the level of public symbols,
the major message for Leach (at least in his prestructuralist phase) concerns
the relative status of individuals.

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 ECSTASY AND AGONY IN SRI LANKA 299

Harnessing Freud and Weber as his allies, Obeyesekere does battle with
this Gorgon and escapes relatively "intact," but, I think, not without an
extra, unwanted lock or two. The key question he poses is, given the wide gap
between private and public symbols, how then do cultural meanings articulate
with personal experience? The answer is clear: There must be an intermediate
category of symbols which are shared yet which convey personal meaning for
individuals. These "personal symbols" can communicate social and emo-
tional messages simultaneously. Personal symbols are those "cultural sym-
bols whose primary significance and meaning lie in the personal life and
experience of individuals" (p. 44). The matted locks of the Hinduizing as-
cetics are thus contrasted with the shaved heads of Buddhist monks. In both
cases, the symbolism derives from the unconscious, but whereas in the Bud-
dhist case the psychological motivation has long since become irrelevant,
since shaved heads are the rule for monks, in the Hindu case the psychologi-
cal motivation must recur in every individual with matted locks since the hair
style is optional. In contrast to both the Buddhist public symbol and the Hindu
personal one are private symbols, symbolic vehicles carrying idiosyncratic
meanings. This is the realm of fantasy and, in extremes, of psychosis.
Obeyesekere has a very neat method for distinguishing personal from pub-
lic symbols: the former are optional, the latter not. But what a Durkheimian
solution: pure social facts are identified by their compulsory nature! Leach is
correct about some symbols but not about all.
The problem here lies in turning dimensions of meaning which are probably
always present to some degree into a rigid typology. Even when mediated
these ideal types are too far from reality. Obeyesekere's ascetics are extreme
cases, choosing a difficult path rare in their own society. But ultimately we
always have a choicewhether to die for our country or against it. If moti-
vation is anywhere, it is everywhere. We still have to ask why some Sri
Lankans choose the path of monkhood while others choose asceticism.
From Obeyesekere's perspective, Buddhism, with its monks and exor-
cisms, is the Sinhalese norm; Hinduistic devotional ritual, asceticism, and
divine possession are departures from it. Individual cases are explained in
terms of their personal histories, but (in this work) Obeyesekere neglects both
the social forces that are affecting the general shift in religious orientation
within the society as a whole and the factors that influence some individuals
to maintain a conservative Buddhist orientation against the tide of change.
Surely, conservatives are as impelled by psychic forces as are innovators?
Certainly Obeyesekere does not mean to imply that Freudian explanations are
only relevant when dealing with "deviants" or the emotionally troubled. And
on the other hand, would he want to have to choose to classify a contemporary
phenomenon such as punk hairdos as simply a product of individual experi-
ence? Here the problem presented by following the Durkheimian view of
society as an undifferentiated whole becomes evident.

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 3OO MICHAEL LAMBEK

Thus, while I accept the argument that optional symbols are likely to have a
personal component, I would hold the nature of this component in question.
And I would reject the implication that "obligatory" symbols must lack
individual psychological significance. The key to personal meaning cannot lie
in the institutional context. Obligation is no sounder a measure of psychologi-
cal irrelevance than Leach's collectiveness. Choice does not seem a useful
distinctive feature; all symbols are personal to a degree. Perhaps the problem
lies in that in arguing the question of the source of symbols in individual
usage, he tends to neglect the symbol's social force. Symbols focus and
generate emotions (Geertz's "moods and motivations," Turner's bipolar arc)
as much as they express them, and this is certainly as true of public symbols
(like flags and crucifixes) as of personal ones. The monk's shaven head is a
public directive to chastity rather than the expression of an underlying castra-
tion complex, but we can still ask, What does his enforced chastity then come
to mean for the individual monk himself. Obeyesekere confuses the issue of
the direction of symbolic motivation (internalization vs. externalization) with
the question of its presence.
In keeping with the double nature of personal symbols, Obeyesekere fol-
lows two avenues of interpretation of the ascetics' matted locks. According to
the "Weberian" one, in which the locks are viewed in terms of Hindu ideas
of asceticism and sexuality, they are likened to the lingam of Siva, a focussing
of undissipated energy. According to the "Freudian" interpretation, the locks
are the (father's?) penis. Poor or nonexistent sexual relations with men are
transposed into idealized relations with a powerful and protective deity/paren-
tal figure. Whether or not one finds one of these interpretations more convinc-
ing than the other, what is so striking is their convergence. It is this con-
vergence which is the source of Obeyesekere's second, and more promising,
major argument. Having established the nature of personal symbols, he pro-
ceeds to show how various individuals articulate their life experiences by
means of them.
Obeyesekere contends that the gap between custom and emotion perceived
by Leach et al. is itself a cultural product. Both Buddhist Sri Lanka and
Habsburg Vienna produced sexually repressed individuals, but in the former
context a cultural idiom, a set of collective symbols, is available through
which psychic conflict can be expressed, objectified, and rendered socially
significant, whereas in the latter (at least until Freud), such conflict could only
be suppressed and privatized. In Sri Lanka, psychic symptom is converted
with ease into cultural symbol and a context is created in which conflict can be
resolved and private experience integrated with public meaning. Thus, for
example, guilt and ambivalence toward parents is dramatized in the publicly
meaningful attack and repulsion of demons. Dreams and myths coincide, or
rather, dreams are interpreted by means of myth, and myths are revitalized by
dreams. Where "myth models" are absent, psychic meaning remains private

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 ECSTASY AND AGONY IN SRI LANKA 3OI

fantasy, psychological experience that has little cultural meaning. Here we

approach the world of the hysteric and finally the psychotic.
Not only does South Asian culture provide idioms which articulate psychic
experience, it is also more tolerant of fantasy than the West. Instead of
devaluing fantasy as a sign of faulty socialization, it incorporates it as valued
insight: there is no gap between fantasy and "reality." Questions of ortho-
doxy and power do not arise in this argument. Thus religion seems more
aligned with the id than with the superego (though Obeyesekere is clear that
he is not claiming an absence of primary repression).
The symbols provide both a public message, thereby integrating the suf-
ferer into society, and a profoundly personal one. Social integration occurs in
two ways: first, by locating the sufferer's experience firmly in reality
indeed, a person possessed by a demon is in closer touch with reality than is
an ordinary member of society (p. 104)and second, by healing social
relations and creating a professional niche for the sufferer, now become
priest. Psychic pain becomes the basis for a new career; Obeyesekere's infor-
mants become what Levi-Strauss has called "professional abreactors." (One
might speculate that for the lowest classes their trauma might become their
most valuable productive resource.) The sufferer's life becomes reoriented
around the divinities she serves. Personally, the idiom serves to reintegrate
the personality and resolve unconscious guilt. By communicating in a public
idiom, psychic estrangement and its consequences, such as cognitive disori-
entation, are reduced. Thus, the idiom can operate simultaneously on the
intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural levels.
This model provides us with a powerful vehicle to understand the personal
life courses of individuals in their cultural context and to compare the way
religions facilitate or hinder externalization. Nevertheless, a few problems
still remain. First, despite his recognition of the relative autonomy of the
objectified cultural idioms, Obeyesekere tends to slip into psychological re-
ductionism. His informants are not playfully and creatively constructing
meaning, they are driven to it. They act not according to the rationalized aims
proposed by their world view but because they must. For example, diagnosis
of possession by the demon Kalu Kumara "almost invariably implies" (p.
121) that the young female patient is sexually frustrated. Yet surely there is no
direct connection between sexuality and the possession ritual? The demon is
merely a cultural model, typically applied in certain contexts (cf. Kapferer,
above). Possession may or may not allow the sufferer to work through her
problems, whatever they are. Moreover, we have no right to assume that her
"symptoms" were not symbols in the first place, i.e., that they were moti-
vated as much by her cognitive understanding of the model as by her psychic
distress. Weber is eclipsed by Freud here. Yet symbols too can motivate:
Obeyesekere's case studies represent the search for religious meaning as
much as the flight from trauma. Pretas (deceased ancestors whose suffering

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 302 MICHAEL LAMBEK

can only be decreased by merit-making on their behalf) induce guilt as much

as they express it. The psychological state is not the precondition for the
cultural solution; both are constructed in the context of experience, con-
strained by both external and internal factors.
The psychological bias causes Obeyesekere to tend to ignore the reg-
ularized ritual contexts and patterned sequences in which periods of trance are
embedded. Rather than describe his informants in trance, he tends to give us
their recollections of it. Much of what Obeyesekere views as the expression of
inner conflict may in fact be the standard means by which the "otherness" of
the demon is manifested and its legitimate appearance in a particular host
established.
The significant point in Obeyesekere's argument is that contexts are avail-
able in which the satisfaction of the drives is also the reproduction and
production of a cultural world of meaning. He is careful to avoid the notion of
collective projection here. God is no longer the Father, but may be used that
way by people with particular Oedipal problems. Psychological problems are
individual ones. He makes the subtle but important point that guilt is repre-
sented through rather than by demons (p. 119). As the various case studies
admirably show, this is an active process. And, while many cases are resolved
according to the model, others are not. Objectification does not necessarily
imply resolution.
Nevertheless, there is an incipient and unnecessary functionalism. If I
understand Obeyesekere correctly, he views possession as a resolution of
hysteria, both by symbolic means and by physiological ones: The trance
experience is a form of orgasm. Moreover, he suggests a kind of symbiotic
relationship between personal symbols and psychic conflicts. Personal sym-
bols depend on unconscious motivation to be activated, unconscious moti-
vation depends on personal symbols to be articulated. He goes so far as to
remark that "the ideal goal of the symbol system is the integration of the
individual on the three levels of personality, culture, and society" (p. 123).
This Parsonian synthesis is a far cry from the more dialectical view presented
elsewhere and cannot explain why there are so many troubled individuals in
Sri Lanka.
I will conclude with a few remarks about Obeyesekere's text. While he
makes much of his knowledge of the language, and the subtlety of his rela-
tions with his subjects, for which I have the greatest respect, what he in fact
gives the reader are mere capsule life histories, highly abstracted from the
original conversations. While this conforms to a certain style of psycho-
analytic writing, insight is the product of a much more subtle examination of
the informant's discourse. Crapanzano's Tuhami is a better model for the
psychoethnographic text, even though I suspect that Obeyesekere has a much
more solid understanding of his subjects than does Crapanzano. One must
wonder at what expense the completeness of inscription is achieved, and

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 ECSTASY AND AGONY IN SRI LANKA 303

where the balance between informality of interviewing and accuracy of record

should lie. A failing of both authors is that they shy away from presenting any
psychoanalytic credentials. If we are to take psychoanalytic arguments se-
riously, as I believe we should, then we ought to be given a sense of the
authority with which the proponents speak.
Medusa's Hair is an extremely significant book in both its ethnographic
substance, about which I have said little, and its theoretical arguments, about
which I have said perhaps too much. It argues eloquently for the introduction
of the personal into our understanding of religious phenomena and it shows
how the vulnerability we find in our subjects can bring forth an honest and
equanimous response in ourselves.

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