140 chapter
I show how people I met in Kerala mediate experience through a particular
phenomenological orientation consisting of aspects of the person—including
śariram (body), manas (mind), bōdham (consciousness) and ātman (true self/
soul)—that lie along a continuum of increasing intangibility ranging from the
gross, tangible body to the abstract and disembodied ātman.
Rather than focusing on the body or examples of mind-body transcend-
ence, it would be more productive for researchers to examine local, culturally
and historically shaped phenomenologies which are constellations of various
parts of the person that mediate people’s experience of the world. One may
still wish to consider the role of the body in a social setting, but developing an
understanding of local phenomenology—which may be shaped by trans-local
ideologies and practices—provides an indispensable context for assessing the
status and role of the body and embodied experience. Th is exploration into
Kerala phenomenology gives us a more complete depiction of the experience
of people suff ering “mental” distress and provides insights into universal and
variable features of human experience.
Focusing on the Body
Research on the body and embodiment in anthropology and other disciplines
has been prolifi c in the last two decades. Perhaps analogous to the tendency
for anthropologists to assume the distant Other to be living in a remote time,
the excitement about fi nding alternatives to the allegedly mentalistic West has
led researchers to locate the Other more fi rmly in the body.^1 Ethnographers
have asserted that peoples in New Guinea locate emotion and moral issues in
the heart or the skin (Strathern 1996), that “consciousness... cannot be dis-
embodied,” sorcery is always “body seeking” in Sri Lanka (Kapferer 1997: 44)
and that “[t]he Yaka [of Zaire] perceive of the body as the pivotal point from
which the subject gradually develops a sense of identity” (Devisch 1993: 139).
People in Kerala, however, do not seem to experience things this way. Th ey do
to some degree live through the body, but they are also emphatically concerned
with the mind, with “consciousness,” which is distinct from the mind, and with
the intangible self.
Ethnographic studies of the body and embodiment focus primarily on people
outside Europe or North America. Work on the body the United States has
focused on non-Western immigrant groups, while research on Latin America
looks to pre-Hispanic culture for evidence of embodied modes of experience.
When one also considers that much of the contemporary research on the body
in Western culture outside of anthropology focuses on women and oppressed