Enchantingly Modern: Whispers of the Occult in Popular Psychic Healing Practices of Early 20th-century Bengal

Autor:	Runa Das Chaudhuri
Rok vydání:	2020
Předmět:	060101 anthropology History Modernity media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences 06 humanities and the arts General Medicine Ancient history Occult 0506 political science Psychic BENGAL 050602 political science & public administration 0601 history and archaeology media_common
Zdroj:	The Oriental Anthropologist: A Bi-annual International Journal of the Science of Man. 21:86-103
ISSN:	0976-3430 0972-558X
DOI:	10.1177/0972558x20975649
Popis:	Early 20th-century Bengal witnessed the budding of a constituency of spiritually inclined psychic healers who provided miraculous treatment to ailing patients through practices widely referred to as sammohan. Practicing healers seemed to recklessly borrow from Western healing therapies of mesmerism and hypnotism, on the one hand, and simultaneously appear, on the other, to vigorously harp, albeit covertly on the mystical kernel of indigenous occult tantric knowledge. This, I argue, had the marks of an unsure modernity, which produced its own enchantment ironically in the public discourse by retaining the mystical essence of occultism under the shell of popular healing. This article explores whether practices of sammohan placed between the medically sober and the erotically intoxicated provide a way to unravel the complexities of the “Bengali modern.” It also investigates whether the occult turn of psychic healing constituted an enormous, complex, and internally complicated phenomenon yet posited simultaneously a coherent response to the dilemmas of modernity.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_________::5e8677a4da1190bca0cd237fe4d441ff https://doi.org/10.1177/0972558x20975649 Zobrazit plný text záznamu