The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilisation. By Frederick M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-231-13748-5 (hardback), xxvii + 701, 12 plates. $60.00.
摘要
Frederick Smith's The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature provides a number of groundbreaking insights with respect to conceptualisations of and methodological approaches to the phenomenon of possession (āveśa, praveśa, and samāveśa) in the Indian traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and more broadly in South Asian religion. Smith's analysis of the issues of gender, embodiment, economics, and class in relation to possession demonstrates the complex sociodynamics of adorcism (encouragement of positive possession states) and exorcism (removal of negative possession states), as have been postulated in the larger comparative context. Smith's work also elicits a number of insights into the dynamic spectrum within the traditions of yoga and tantra between world negation and world surmounting that are characteristic of the Indian traditions of bodily and contemplative practice. It provides greater contextuality to the phenomenon of possession on a broad comparative scale and specifically with respect to South Asian religion. As such, it is a testament to the profound transformation of the study of South Asian religions and specifically the study of yoga and tantra over the past two decades. The Self Possessed contributes to a growing range of scholarship relevant to these traditions that is reconfiguring the field and its core set of assumptions. It intersects in numerous ways with the recent works of scholars of tantra within South Asia, most notably Ronald Davidson's Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement and David Gordon White's Kiss of the Yoginī: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian Contexts. One of the central assertions of Smith's work dovetails with a key assertion made by White – just as White asserts that tantric ideology is not to be understood as being …
