Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

Religion and ritual
Studies of death may, literally and per definition, include
everything between heaven and earth. Analysing a
Christian context, Sarah Tarlow described the problem
as such: “Beliefs about death are rarely coherent,
consistent and orthodox. People combine elements of
theological teaching with superstitious or traditional
folkloric belief and personal invention. Thus when we
die we are variously understood to go directly to
Heaven, await the Day of Judgement, rot in the ground,
become ghosts, journey to another place, fall asleep and
meet up with friends and relatives who have died before
us. These different versions might be logically
incompatible, but it is nevertheless possible for a single
person to hold many of them at the same time” (Tarlow
1999:103). Moreover, “to talk about death is really to
talk about kinship, inheritance, the fertility of women,
the social power of men” (Seremetakis 1991:13), and to
complicate it even further, in karmic traditions, the death
of a person also involves the re-constitution of cosmos
and the gods. The death rituals are in a way never
ending, but a continuous and mutual, religious
relationship between humans and their ancestors and
gods. This inevitably raises the question: how do we
approach the religious and ritual worlds of death, which
also represent the world of life?
According to Talcott Parsons, Weber’s The Sociology of
Religion is “the most crucial contribution of our century
to comparative and evolutionary understanding of the
relations between religion and society, and even of
society and culture generally” (Parsons 1964:lxvii).
Weber himself says, “To define “religion”, to say what it
is, is not possible at the start of a presentation such as
this. Definition can only be attempted, if at all, at the
conclusion of the study. The essence of religion is not
even our concern, as we make it our task to study the
conditions and effects of a particular type of social
behaviour” (Weber 1964:1). Thus, approaching religion
is a difficult task.
In “Religion as a Cultural System”, Geertz argues that
there have been no theoretical advances of major
importance in the study of religion since Durkheim,
Weber, Freud, or Malinowski, because “no one even
thinks of looking elsewhere – to philosophy, history,
law, literature, or the “harder” sciences – as these men
themselves looked, for analytical ideas” (Geertz
1973:87-88). Thus, according to Geertz, the
anthropological study of religion is a two-stage
operation: 1) it is an analysis of the system of meanings
embodied in religious symbols, and 2) it is an analysis of
Chapter 4:
Paradoxes of purity and pollution
61
how these systems relate to socio-structural and
psychological processes (ibid:125). I will add, however,
a third aspect; namely the material world in which
humans live, because as will be evident, the everyday
world is not only social but also includes ecological
problems and possibilities, or materiality in a broad
sense.
Religion and ritual are often confused. In this work, I
will follow Geertz when he says that religion is a model
of “reality” and a model for “reality” (Geertz 1973:93);
it does not only describe the social order, but it shapes it
(ibid:119). Thus, religion defines the “rules of the
game”, at least in terms of cosmic and final answers and
solutions. “But no one, not even a saint, lives in the
world religious symbols formulate all of the time, and
the majority of men live in it only at moments”
(ibid:119). Most of the time people live in the everyday
world of common sense. It is therefore necessary to
distinguish between an everyday world and a religious
world whether one uses terms such as sacred/profane,
ritual/non-ritual, consecrated/non-consecrated, religious
worldview/ commonsense worldview, etc. As analytical
categories such distinctions are useful; another question
is to what extent these categories are ontological in
nature, which will not be discussed here, although I will
present the problem.
I stated that I will emphasise the moral substance code
approach when analysing caste in Nepal, but I will make
some modifications and clarifications in this regard.
Marriott, Inden and Nicholas have explicitly and
repeatedly argued against the salience of a sacred –
profane dichotomy in the analysis of South Asian
societies. As an example, a Brahman having a cup of tea
in the local tea-shop in his village is a rather mundane
activity. However, he is concerned with who has made
the cup of tea, because an impure person may defile his
purity, and his bodily concerns are a part of his religious
and ritual worldviews. Thus, as indicated, defining
religion is difficult because religious principles may
structure and be interwoven in daily practices without
the activities themselves being religious, as for instance
having a cup of tea.
Mircea Eliade argues that religion as a phenomenon can
only be understood on its own terms. Although this
stance is sympathetic regarding the subject matter, rather
than reducing religion to an epiphenomenon of other
social, psychological, or material processes,
nevertheless, by denying that religion can be understood
from other perspectives one denies that religion has any
ideological function in every day life (Morris 1987:176-
177). Eliade’s solution was to elaborate the differences