Review By Satis Shroff BODY AND Emotion By Robert R. Desjarlais

REVIEW By Satis Shroff:
The book 'Body and Emotion' by Robert R. Desjarlais costs Rs.225 in India, has 300 pages,publishers Motilal Banarsidass (c) 1992 University of Pennsylvania. It is a study of the relationship between culture and emotional forces that interact, influence, reveal and heal severe illnesses.

The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas among the Yolmo Sherpas. The cultural account is finely written and shows not only the limits of the shamans but also those of the anthropologist--who has entered a world of good and malevolent spirits and learns how to go about with them.
Much like Larry Peters, who lost his son because he didn't want to have his sick son treated by the local jhakri under whom he worked on his thesis as an assistant shaman, Rober R. Desjarlais gives insight into the workings of the Yolmo Sherpa minds, as well as his own, during which he cites from sources based in Western libraries.

The Yolmo sherpas live in Helambu, north central Nepal. He speaks of soul loss and the shaman's search for the lost soul in caves, in mountains, lakes in his shamanic journey. The remedies of the shaman are akin to Plato's pharmakon. He speaks of a culture in which alcohol is regarded as a medicine tht changes the human physiology, and the readers learns tht witches mix 'medicine' in food to do harm to others. There is a play between symptom and cause that related to the Asian condition of illness.
The capital on epiphanies in Nepal is very interesting because a lot of Neplese ethnic people have epiphanies in ordinary lives. My mom had them often and they had inevitably the nature of an oracle. He speaks of the torma offerings, the forest shamans and serpent deities in the Hindu culture. Yolmo, the shaman's, divination, like Nietzsche's art, is 'applied physiology.' He recalls also Bateson's epistomology of the self:'The total self corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, 'thinks' and 'acts'and 'decides' is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the 'self' or 'consciousness.' We find Yolmo's 'self-systems' more expansive than western versions.

The song of the shaman is compared with Charles Ollson's 'Projective Verse' and Martin B. Heester's theory of poetic metaphors and among others Paul Ricoeur's 'bound images' and Schieffelin's 'Kalili.'

Like in the case of the Hindu jhakris, bijuwas and other healers of Nepal, he talks about 'dasa graha' during conflict situations within the family, or with the neighbours. Graha lagyo is a favourite expression when people are affliicted with illness caused by the inauspicious constellation of the stars, depending upon when one is born and one's astrological sign of zodiac. Normally, in such cases, the Brahmin astrologers educated and well-versed in Sanskrit in Varanasi (old Beneras, India) are consulted to find out auspicious days to carry out a puja, a ritual ceremony, by consulting the patro that all Hindus receive from the astrologer after the nauran initiation ceremony.

The soul-calling rites can be diverse in the case of the Hindus from the foothills of Nepal and the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhists. The latter lure vital souls by delienating what exists 'here,' in the immediacies of the patient's world.The Nepali shaman's song comprises 100 flowers, bushes and trees which are recalled in the long song recital, and the ritual is not only imaginistic but also sensorial in the shaman's attentiveness during the searching of the lost soul. The shaman beckons the deuta (deity) and he becomes possessed, and lies unconscious before his unconscious patient.

Even Hitchcock mentioned evil spirits used plants as hiding places. During epiphanic dreams the shaman, as well as the patient, see the patient's soul is hiding among the the plants mentioned in his song, and he battles with spirits to wrest the soul of the patient away. This can happen on earth, below the earth or among roots. Dreams play a big role in the Nepalese psyche and they reveal whether malevolent spirits have taken hold of a patient's body: The omen's of illness appear in dreams in the form of a person gowing downhill, seeing a fragmented moon, wearing tattered clothes, deilapidated houses.

Desjarlais aims at an ethnography of the tactile, visceral and unspoken and emphasises the role of aesthetic sensibilities in daily living. It's a good buy if you're interested in anthropology, psychology, Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Asian studies.