The Sources of Authority for Shamanic Speech: Examples from the Kham-Magar of Nepal

Among the Kham-Magar, an indigenous population of West Nepal, shamans end their long ritual chants with the promise to keep to the terms of the contract that bind human beings to the supernatural entities. In this paper I identify the sources of authority that allow the ritual specialists of this community to act as its spokespersons toward invisible partners. Taking up the debate initiated in the introduction to this special issue, I begin by confronting the notion of "social magic" that Bourdieu (1982:97-161) sees as the source of all authority, with the "discourse of magic" proposed by the linguist Tzvetan Todorov (1978:246-82), showing that the two approaches are less inconsistent than might first appear to be the case: both suggest that the efficacy of ritual speech rests on deception. The second part of the paper turns to Kham-Magar ethnography; it examines the staging of the sources of shamanic authority in the ceremony of consecration of a new shaman. I partly challenge Bourdieu's (1982:20) vision that ritual techniques are mainly techniques of domination, ensuring that the dominant power is reproduced, rather than being a source of authority for ritual specialists: "Rituals represent the limit of all situations of imposition1 where, through the application of a technical competence, however imperfect, a primarily social competence is exercised: the competence of the speaker who is authorized by his or her group to speak with authority." The third part looks precisely into the "competence of the speaker," shamanic speech itself, for possible sources of his or her ritual authority. I explore the pragmatic effects of the ritual use of language, including a reflexive definition of the performer. I argue that these techniques set up the conditions for the emergence of a transcendent authority.