ABSTRACT
This chapter has been greatly inspired by recent conversations with Anastasia Piliavsky. In looking at changes in funeral practice among the Sora of tribal India, the chapter distinguishes two types of material presence: one is the memorial stone, the other the body of the shaman in trance, prefers to call fleshliness or physicality. The inert materiality of stones has limited scope when compared with the physicality of the shamans through whom the dead speak. Though pastors make a lengthy speech at the drop of a hat, they do this in the genres of sermons, weddings and church rallies. The chapter makes short visits up to the present, and witnesses how Baptist Christianity has consolidated its hold. Thus it uses the ethnographic present, it should be remembered that the pagan culture it describes, and in which it has so immersed, has become virtually extinct in the time it knows the area.
