Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

Death and Life-Giving Waters has been an attempt to
trace the variables by which the deceased’s future is
determined and the reasons why there are differences in
practices when everyone has the same entry into, and
exit from, this world. All of these reasons can be
encapsulated in karma. The normal interpretation of
karma is often in accordance with a quotation from the
Garuda Purana where it is stated that “Man is born
alone; man dies alone; he enjoys his merit by himself, he
reaps the bitter fruits of his sins by himself” (Garunda
Purana II, 12.22), but as seen, an individual’s incarnation
is dependent upon an interplay of factors beyond his
control. The moral-philosophical doctrine is not a
straightforward law regarding rewards and punishments.
Karma works in mysterious ways and various chains of
actions, for instance that my current condition of life is a
consequence of the misery of not having a son who
could cremate me in a former life, which was the penalty
for not being obedient, and so on. This might be true in a
cosmic perspective, but it is not a satisfactory answer in
an analysis. Nevertheless, high religion or scriptural and
priestly exercised religion represents such a kind of
methodological collectivism. The karmic emphasis on
fatalism is the extreme consequence of a methodological
collectivistic approach where a human’s destiny is
determined by external religious principles
overpowering the individual’s free will. Humans have no
autonomous power but they are subdued to external laws
and principles which structure and govern the whole
cosmos. Analytically, whether these structures are
religion or historical materialism have minor importance
because the consequences of the given premise is the
same: the individual is governed and determined by
external forces, and because of the fatalistic belief there
is no need to try to improve or change one’s own
conditions.
Low religion, on the other hand, focuses on what people
do and why they do what they do. The huge body of
anthropological literature has emphasised that there is a
tremendous discrepancy between what people say they
are doing and what they actually do. Even though the
devotees refer to the high religion and the scriptures,
their actual practices differ. The emphasis on practice is
implicitly a focus on the individual’s free will and
capacity to perform and do rituals according to his or her
own ideas of what the right actions and rituals are
supposed to be. Low religion might be approached and
interpreted from the perspective of methodological
individualism. The ritual autonomy whereby the
devotees construct their own rituals and give their own
specific meaning to the rites is the individual’s free will
negotiating high religion and superstructures. The
problem is that these two lines of thought are integrated.
The informants themselves emphasise that the reason
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why they act as they do is because of high religion,
tradition, and fatalism; they cannot act differently
because they are determined to act the way they do, but
in practice their praxises differ. Thus, the extreme
methodological collectivism and methodological
individualism are inseparable – they presuppose each
other and necessitate its counterpart.
The unity of the dualism between determinism and free
will is what Bourdieu has tried to conceptualise with
habitus. On the one hand, habitus represents
deterministic features because “the habitus is a
spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as
much to the mechanical necessity of things without
history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive
freedom of subjects “without inertia” in rationalist
theories” (Bourdieu 1995:56). But on the other hand,
habitus represents also free will because “…practices
cannot be deduced either from the present conditions
which may seem to have provoked them or from the past
conditions which have produced the habitus” (ibid).
Bourdieu combines, therefore, both determinism and
free will with his habitus – “The habitus contains the
solution to the paradoxes of objective meaning without
subjective intention” (ibid:62). Hence, it is possible to
combine both a cosmic and actor perspective, which is
the process of cosmogony, and some of the variables
determining the deceased’s next incarnation can be
summed up. It is important to stress that these variables
are literally seen from a bottom-up perspective; from the
human stance whereby they are a part of cosmos through
various interactions with the gods.
Firstly, strictly karmic consequences. The law of karma
is guidance to an understanding of future rebirth. This
law of causality and the karmic consequences may take
numerous forms and become actualised in this or other
lives. An important premise in this doctrine is that mind
and matter form a unity. A person’s cosmological and
religious status is evident in the being and his body.
Karmic qualities are not only spiritual properties but also
dispositions manifested in the flesh. This has major
implications for the prescribed modes by which the
deceased is disposed of in his or her funeral. One’s
previous lives have enabled an entrance into this world,
which is a point of departure for a human to do good or
bad actions that will influence his or her own life in this
lifetime as well as the next birth. The bodily
transmissions of karmic sins are intergenerational, and
may therefore start even before a person is dead, and
indeed, even before a person is born.
Secondly, the ambivalent character of the flesh. The
deceased’s status, if status is understood as moral
qualities manifested in the body, is reflected in the cycle