Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern
Kalpana Ram
University of Hawaii Press
In her innovative new book, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit 
possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. 
What is a human subject under the varied conditions commonly associated 
with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place to 
allow such a transformation to occur? How does it alter our 
understanding of memory and emotion if these assail us in the form of 
ghosts rather than as attributes of subjective experience? What does it 
mean to worship deities who are afflictive and capricious, yet bear an 
intimate relationship to justice? What is a "human" body if it can be 
taken over by a whole array of entities? What is agency if people can be
 "claimed" in this manner? What is gender if, while possessed, a woman 
is a woman no longer?<br><br>Drawing on spirit possession among women 
and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South 
India, Ram concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative 
understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of
 a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and 
planning. Instead of relegating possession, ghosts, and demons to the 
domain of the exotic, Ram uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary 
experiences and relationships. In doing so, she uncovers fundamental 
instabilities that continue to haunt modern formulations of gender, 
human agency, and political emancipation. <i>Fertile Disorder</i> 
interrogates the modern assumptions about gender, agency, and 
subjectivity that underlie the social improvement projects circulating 
in Tamil Nadu, assumptions that directly shape people’s lives. The book 
pays particular attention to projects of family planning, development, 
reform, and emancipation.<br><br>Combining ethnography with 
philosophical argument, Ram fashions alternatives to standard 
post-modernist and post-structuralist formulations. Grounded in decades 
of fieldwork, ambitious and wide ranging, her work is conceived as a 
journey that makes incursions into the unfamiliar, then returns us to 
the familiar. She argues that magic is not a monopoly of any one 
culture, historical period, or social formation but inhabits 
modernity—not only in the places, such as cinema and sound recording, 
where it is commonly looked for, but in "habit" and in aspects of 
everyday life that have been largely overlooked and shunned.<br><br><i>Fertile Disorder</i>
 will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in anthropology, 
religion, gender studies, subaltern studies, and post colonial theory.