ABSTRACT
Heidelberg is a beautiful town with a character all its own. A place in history, it offers a rare site to discuss realms of knowledge and deliberate boundaries of disciplines. The marvelously restored Wissenschaftsforum, located at a quiet end of the Hauptstrasse, in the shadow of the Schloss that dominates the old town, overlooks the “philosopher’s way” on the other side of the river Neckar. On the afternoon of the second day of the colloquium on eastern India, there were two immaculately presented papers. The first was on communication with ancestors among the Soara indigenous group, and the second was on ritual and reincarnation among the indigenous Gadabas. For a very long time now, in Western spaces and in non-Western arenas, dominant understandings of patterns of the past and influential conceptions of designs of societies have been shaped by their separation of traditional communities, on the one hand, from modern societies, on the other.
