Cultural Geography per se is one of the marginal sub-disciplines of Geography in India and contributed mainly by practitioners from other disciplines like Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Architecture, etc. Due to this reason, the sub-fields of Cultural Geography did not grow in this land of rich cultural heritage and traditions. One such field is the Geography of Music. The objective of this brief editorial note is to demonstrate the potential of folk music as a source of knowing the changing trends and patterns in society, culture, and economy and their spatiality. The examples cited are mainly from the Middle Ganga Valley, a region in which Bhojpuri is the language of the common populace, in which the author is currently based.
As we live and die through the continuing pandemic, one particular affect that relates us globally is of the dead awaiting their funerary repose. Assessing the pandemic, Arif (2020) in an early reflection proposes that we might benefit in our assessment of the 'bio-social' of the pandemic by admitting to the sovereignty of the virus. Borrowing this premise, I suggest further that the sovereignty of the virus is acutely manifested in the commingled presence of the living and unreposed dead in the temporary, improvised morgues. Although the continuing pandemic is quite unprecedented, it can be partially recognised in knowledges gained in mourning that register how disasters force a 'descent' (Das 2006) and 'fall' (Rosaldo 2014) into accepting improvisation of life and death forms. This descent and fall can be towards an abyss risking the very continuum of life, but what we also gain from discerning the relation of mourning with knowledge is that life can be regained at many levels of the fall. Just as the unreposed dead manifest the sovereignty of the virus, I suggest this descent and fall can be ethically attested in improvisation as the social surface of regaining life. It is my contention that this full-time improvisation, which in turn must be its own source, energy and end, must operate facing the unreposed dead. Deriving and extending from my own work of studying the dead, the present essay shows this improvisation and regaining of life through two brief assemblages of bacteriophage virus and media morgue. The relation of mourning and knowledge is built through the essay to arrive at the conclusion that the classic trope of life cycle in anthropology has to be seen as part of a complex texture of the social where vitality and the unreposed dead are concurrent and overlapping.
The article seeks to redraw some key discussions on death in Banaras by focusing on the subject matter of the 'dead' rather than that of death. Pitched in the shadow of select earlier works on anthropology of death pertaining to Banaras, the general probing centres on the query whether the three realms of dying, death and dead can be delinked and thus seen in a certain relative autonomy from each other. Further, how do the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at intertwined field sites of the home and the hospital, manual and electric cremation ghat and the shaivite aghorashram (hermitage) in relation to the river Ganga, the descriptions involve discussion over declaration of death versus discovery of the dead, distinction between touching and handling of the dead and latent implications of the varied names of the dead. The core concern of the article is to explore the nature of the social vis-à-vis the dead. I show how, unlike the anthropology of death that very often reiterates communitarian restoration (pravah), an anthropology of the dead may haltingly resist such reading and seek a continual searching of the indefinite social (parvah).
A persistent concern of social anthropology of death has been to map dying and death within the meaningful matrices of myth, ritual actions and communitarian regeneration. This article embedded within the said legacy, departs from the convention in minor ways. It seeks to locate the agency of the dead as a specific kind of subject–object, focusing on the newly dead rather than on the dying and the fresh ancestors. The newly dead are those for whom the transition from the material–spectral state into a new embodiment must be observed through the proper processing of the dead. The article maps this realm of the newly dead in relation to the institutional practice of cremation in Denmark, Europe. The entry into the ethnographic understanding of the Danish context is informed by my previous fieldwork on the subject of cremation at Banaras, India. This article mainly borrows from my fieldwork at Aarhus, while Banaras serves as an alert backdrop. The specific object of enquiry that guided my research in Aarhus was to locate the controversial initiative to redirect the heat generated during the cremation process, for civil, municipal use. Locating the controversy, I argue, enables one to address the nature of institutional imaginaries involved in the processing of the newly dead. It further helps us to show how these imaginaries persist within a multiplicity of shifts such as new scientific inventions, Nazi use of cremation techniques, aestheticisation of funerary objects and the availability of commercial merchandise as funerary objects. In the ethnographic contextualisation of this multiplicity, the emphasis is on highlighting both the imaginaries of the proper processing of the dead and the doing of the proper. In this regard, the article poses the question: Is there any link between the myth and the proper observance of funerary procedures? It argues that the biblical version of singularity appears integral to the institutional imaginary of processing of the newly dead in Aarhus, just as scientific vision and communitarian sentiments are constitutive of it.
