[INDOLOGY] Special Issue on Magic, Supernatural and Danger in South and Southeast Asia

[Paolo Eugenio Rosati]

Dear Indologists,

I am looking for one or two article's proposal that will discuss folk
and/or vernacular and/or tribal and/or tantric traditions in Southeast Asia
for a special issue I am going to edit, (provisionally) entitled: *"Magic,
Supernatural and Danger: Religions at the 'Periphery' of South and
Southeast Asia"*.

It would be great if you could circulate this informal call to anyone that
could be interested. The special issue is planned to be published in a
double-blind peer-reviewed journal. The first manuscript draft should be
submitted by September/October 2022.

Sincerely,
Paolo

*Special issue's summary (draft):  *

South and Southeast Asian folk and indigenous religions share several
socio-cultural and religious traits with Tantra. Indeed, through processes
of ‘parochialization’ and ‘universalization’ (Marriott 1955), Tantra
succeeded in adapting pan-Indian cults to the religious needs of local,
low-caste, and often illiterate societies and *vice versa*. Tantra, then,
is a cultural bridge that can link mainstream pan-Indian traditions with
local, vernacular, low-caste, folk and indigenous traditions. These
societies, which often rely on the oral transmission of their belief
narratives, have too often been mislabelled by colonial rhetoric as
‘little’ in contraposition to the ‘great’ Indic traditions (Redfield 1955;
Singer 1972). Instead, local religious phenomena underscore a complex
polymorphism whose origins are to be found in the intersection of primitive
religious systems—such as the ‘proto-Śākta tradition’ (Samuel 2008) and its
worship of mother goddess—and pan-Indian religions.



Several folk, low-caste and indigenous religions such as Tantra are very
often involved in the worship of fierce female deities (alone or in
conjunction with a male partner) through the ritual use and consumption of
substances, which the Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical socio-cultural
mainstream designated as defiled, contaminated, and therefore
prohibited—such as blood, semen, vaginal discharge, menstrual fluid, bone
marrow, urine, faeces, ashes, bones (and skulls), raw meat, liquors,
intoxicating herbs, etc. However, these substances, according to the
high-caste Sanskrit literature and oral narratives, are an invaluable
source of power that was associated with and, in a sense, generated by the
liminality, transgression, and impurity of the ‘margins’ of society (Urban
2009).



In the ‘peripheries’ throughout monsoon Asia, magical, shamanic and
supernatural milieus have been attested since early history, although all
pre-colonial evidence was provided by a self-proclaimed socio-religious
‘centre’. The colonial ideology of a ‘centre’ against the ‘margins’ is a
misleading understanding of Indic religious phenomena. Indeed, medieval
kings were often involved in performing extreme and dangerous rituals that
had the secular purpose of strengthening their social position against
internal and external enemies (Rosati 2017). Nonetheless, magic-shamanic
religious practices and supernatural experiences were deliberately placed
outside of mainstream Indic religions during the colonial period due to
their intrinsic danger. On the other hand, several magic-shamanic practices
were reformulated as elements not belonging to the magic-shamanic milieu
but to the religious mainstream. From both Buddhism and Hindu traditions
there are several examples of  misleading interpretation. Among these
practices, we could enumerate the dream experiences and visions of the
Bodhisattva, which are avoided to be interpreted as shamanic dreams, or the
*siddhi*s which are defined by the textual scholars in every sense, but not
in connection with the word magic (e.g. Sanderson 1988), although they are
powers that overcome the laws of nature (Rosati [forthcoming]).


This special issue analyses ecstatic possession, shapeshifting or
therianthropy, healing abilities, apotropaic and harmful magic, alchemy,
flying ability, and many other phenomena related to the magical and
shamanic tradition are analyzed. The aim of this special issue is to
examine the overlap, intersection and superimposition between vernacular,
folk, tribal, tantric, and pan-Indian religions in order to outline the
role of magical-shamanic and supernatural phenomena in the monsoon Asian
periphery and in mainstream socio-religious milieus.

-- 
*Paolo E. Rosati*

*PhD in Asian and African Studies*
*https://uniroma1.academia.edu/paolo
<https://uniroma1.academia.edu/PaoloRosati/>**er**osati/
<https://uniroma1.academia.edu/PaoloRosati/>*
paoloe.rosati at gmail.com
Mobile/Whatsapp: (+39) 338 73 83 472
Skype: paoloe.rosati
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