Overview

Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing  in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love, anger, and guilt.   Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death.   How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties.   Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.

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Reviews

This fabulous, empathetic and deeply moving account of Sora loss and longing is among the best that anthropology has ever offered. Vitebsky's beautiful prose introduces us to the meaning of conversion not just for faith but for landscapes, old conversations which are silenced and new ones which are beginning. He takes us to a world most people don't know existed, and whose defeat readers will mourn deeply. --Nandini Sundar, Delhi University This is a magnificent contribution to anthropology at once in time and over time--keeping faith with people's continuing lives while traversing the epochs that have transformed them forever. Unswerving in his commitment to the task, Vitebsky brings together compassion, analytical insight and blunt speaking. And the magic of this account is not least in the way his subjects give the world a fresh view on world religions. --Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge A haunting and elegiac exploration of attitudes to dying, death and grieving among the Sora of Odisha. Combining deep ethnography with masterful storytelling, Vitebsky has produced a classic of South Asian anthropology that at the same time speaks to the human condition everywhere. --Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand TA book that offers deep reflections on and insights into fundamental questions about the predicament of human beings in times of change. --Social Anthropology This truly magnificent text is a living monument to the strength and elegance of true ethnographic work... Students of culture, history of religions, India, and, frankly, of any discipline will learn much from this sensitive and powerful approach to inquiry. Essential. --Choice A monumental, impressive, and insightful work of ethnography, one that could only be produced by an ethnographer of Vitebsky's evident skill, self-awareness, and endurance. --International Journal of Hindu Studies Gripping and mind-bending... a deeply fascinating book on many levels that demands attention from the reader, and an ability to change how we think about the spirit world and meanings of modernity. --Telegraph India Brilliant. --Anthropology and Medicine All anthropologists should read this dazzling book. --Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute This is an extraordinary book in two senses: it is an outstanding work of scholarship, and it is a highly original, unconventional piece of writing... the effect on the reader is devastating. It moved me as much as anything I have read in a literary work of recent years... I am hard put to think of anything else quite like it. --American Ethnologist Incomparable. Fortunate are the Sora to have an ethnographer of such surpassing, immersive understanding. Fortunate are the students of history and religion to be shown how animism, shamanism, and conversion to monotheisms are actually experienced and understood. Fortunate beyond words are we all to have Vitebsky's summum for generations of scholars. --James C. Scott, Yale University

This truly magnificent text is a living monument to the strength and elegance of true ethnographic work. Vitebsky's forty years documenting the transition and changes of the Sora people in the hills of central India is a lesson in the proper presentation and investigation of native peoples. His study, beginning in the 1970s, of an elaborate and daily shamanistic communication between the living and dead shows how the culture changed. As the years passed, the children of the original subjects turned increasingly to Baptist Christianity and fundamentalist Hinduism. The older Sora now fear dying as the younger Sora deny them the funerals they hoped for and, even worse, shamanic communication when dead. The study changed to investigate why the younger Sora completely rejected their culture and religion. Vitebsky then takes this as a methodological model for change in culture, with an epilogue on the loss of theodiversity. Students of culture, history of religions, India, and, frankly, of any discipline will learn much from this sensitive and powerful approach to inquiry. Essential. --Choice This is a magnificent contribution to anthropology at once in time and over time--keeping faith with people's continuing lives while traversing the epochs that have transformed them forever. Unswerving in his commitment to the task, Vitebsky brings together compassion, analytical insight and blunt speaking. And the magic of this account is not least in the way his subjects give the world a fresh view on world religions. --Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge This fabulous, empathetic and deeply moving account of Sora loss and longing is among the best that anthropology has ever offered. Vitebsky's beautiful prose introduces us to the meaning of conversion not just for faith but for landscapes, old conversations which are silenced and new ones which are beginning. He takes us to a world most people don't know existed, and whose defeat readers will mourn deeply. --Nandini Sundar, Delhi University A haunting and elegiac exploration of attitudes to dying, death and grieving among the Sora of Odisha. Combining deep ethnography with masterful storytelling, Vitebsky has produced a classic of South Asian anthropology that at the same time speaks to the human condition everywhere. --Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand Incomparable. Fortunate are the Sora to have an ethnographer of such surpassing, immersive understanding. Fortunate are the students of history and religion to be shown how animism, shamanism, and conversion to monotheisms are actually experienced and understood. Fortunate beyond words are we all to have Vitebsky's summum for generations of scholars. --James C. Scott, Yale University

Author Information

Piers Vitebsky is Emeritus Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books and has collaborated on television documentaries on BBC, Channel 4 and National Geographic. His book The Reindeer People won the Kiriyama Prize for nonfiction in 2006.

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