Image via Oxford UP website

Out this November 2015 from Oxford University Press is an edited collection by William S. Sax and Helene Basu entitled The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State. The text presents both contemporary and historical case studies of the relationship between spiritual conflict and judicial exchanges across cultures. While rituals to exorcise spirits from the afflicted are typically characterized solely as acts of healing, they are also scenarios in which spirit healers do justice by the possessed by driving out a spirit who has committed an act of evil against the person they inhabit. Spirit possession may similarly provide valuable opportunities for members of a community to contact restless spirits through a human oracle. These otherworldly entities may then offer evidence to the living as to how to avenge or appease them, thereby restoring social harmony. Healing, justice, cosmic order, and religion are thus closely integrated within these culturally meaningful negotiations.

The authors of the text challenge the assumption that these spiritual encounters– which have consequences for both medicine and the law in many societies– are antiquated and do not belong in modern societies or in secular governments. By drawing on examples from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, the authors assert that spiritual healing and law nevertheless persist in the contemporary age as a way to meet social and religious needs in many cultures.

Learn more about the book (in paperback) by clicking here.

Link to the hardcover copy: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-law-of-possession-9780190275747?cc=us&lang=en

About the editors: William Sax teaches at the University of Heidelberg, where he serves as the Chair of Cultural Anthropology at the South Asia Institute. Helene Basu is the director of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Münster University.