ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore performative rituals as sensual experiences deeply embedded in social relationships. Possession occurring during the described rituals and connected collective emotions is interpreted as part of a locally shaped repertoire of human existence. I will discuss how movement, as a kinaesthetic sense, in combination with the multisensual experiences common in many ritual traditions of South Asia, is strongly connected to senses of reality and collective emotional responses. These emotions are invoked simultaneously in the moving bodies of the performers, and in the people who take part in the ritual as spectating participants. Ritual performances during which the Divine is called into human bodies, I argue, bring about a special kind of collective emotional and sensual experience. This experience is not only a multisensual one but is also strongly localized, and can only be understood as a part of local people’s embodied cultural repertoire. This cultural repertoire enables a collective embodied interpretation of auditive, olfactory, visual, and other sensual experiences which make up much of the atmosphere produced during highly successful ritual events. In the interpretation of my material, I take up ideas from rasa theory. The material for my case study is data I collected during a festival held at the end of a six month long divine pilgrimage in the Garhwal Himalayas in North India in February/March 2007.
