The Sun Rises

by Blackburn, Stuart

• ISBN13: 9789004175785
• ISBN10: 9004175784
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-01
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

At the centre of this study is a shamans chant performed during a three-week long feast in the eastern Himalayas. The book includes a translation of this 12-hour text chanted in Apatani, a Tibeto-Burman language, and a description of the events that surround it, especially ritual exchanges with ceremonial friends, in which fertility is celebrated. The shamans social role, performance and ritual language are also described. Although complex feasts, like this one among Apatanis, have been described in northeast India and upland Southeast Asia for more than a century, this is the first book to present a full translation of the accompanying chant and to integrate it into the interpretation of the social significance of the total event.

Author Biography

Stuart Blackburn, Ph.D.(1980) in Folklore and South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He has published several books on oral tradition and culture in India, including' (with Michael Aram Tarr) Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859-2006 (Brill, 2008) and Himalayan Tribal Tales: Oral Tradition and Culture in the Apatani Valley {Brill, 2008).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xi
Note on Orthography	p. xiii
Figure and Charts	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Chant, ritual and performer	p. 2
Outline of the book	p. 5
Apatani valley	p. 5
Text	p. 6
Ritual	p. 7
Performer	p. 8
Translation	p. 9
Conclusions	p. 14
Apatanis and their Valley	p. 17
The shape of place	p. 19
Agriculture	p. 19
Village, house and family	p. 23
Clan	p. 26
Ritual platform	p. 28
Conceptual schemes	p. 30
Ethnic categories	p. 30
Cosmology	p. 33
History	p. 37
Tilting toward Assam	p. 37
Blackmail payments and trade fairs	p. 38
European visitors and colonial contact	p. 41
Imposition of external authority	p. 43
Christoph von Fiirer-Haimendorf	p. 45
Armed resistance, 1948	p. 46
A moral landscape	p. 48
Conclusions	p. 50
The Subu Heniin Text	p. 53
Comparative perspectives	p. 53
Chant as genre	p. 53
Apatani categories	p. 54
Ritual dialogues and recitations	p. 55
Austronesian parallels	p. 56
Eastern Himalayan parallels	p. 58
Variation and structure	p. 61
Textual sections	p. 64
Themes	p. 66
Fertility	p. 66
Ritual journey	p. 74
Exchange	p. 77
The Murung Festival	p. 81
Murung in Apatani society	p. 81
Forms of Murung	p. 82
Popular perceptions of Murung	p. 85
Three key days	p. 88
Tableau and sacrifice	p. 88
Rice donations	p. 92
Meat distribution and procession	p. 95
Comparative perspectives	p. 102
Feasts of merit	p. 102
Murung as feast of merit	p. 105
Fixed series	p. 105
Prerogatives	p. 106
Fertility	p. 108
The living and the dead	p. 110
Ritual exchange and ceremonial friendships	p. 113
Affines	p. 116
Non-kin	p. 117
Maternal uncles	p. 119
Voluntary assistance	p. 120
Valley-wide exchange	p. 121
Conclusions	p. 124
Competition and cooperation	p. 125
Individual and group status	p. 126
The Nyibu Performer	p. 129
Apatani religious system	p. 129
Spirits	p. 129
Ancestors	p. 131
'Ghosts'	p. 132
Animism	p. 132
Nyibu and shaman	p. 134
Nyibu in Apatani society	p. 139
Nyibu in a Murung	p. 143
Performance on the lapang	p. 146
Audience	p. 147
Ritual speech	p. 149
Parallelism	p. 151
Noun-pairs	p. 153
Noun phrases, verb phrases and repetition	p. 157
Conclusions	p. 161
Ritual speech and society	p. 162
The Subu Heniin in Translation	p. 165
Conclusions and the Future	p. 275
Conclusions	p. 275
The future	p. 280
Appendices	p. 283
Outline of Murung Events	p. 283
Number of Murungs, 1944/1945-2009	p. 291
Sacrificial Shares for Spirits and Humans	p. 293
Transcription of the Subu Heniin	p. 297
Mudan Pai's Life-History	p. 385
Feasts of Merit in the Extended Eastern Himalayas	p. 389
Bibliography	p. 391
Index	p. 399
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