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At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo‐Himalayan Border Village
Author(s) -
Aggarwal Ravina
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2001.28.3.549
Subject(s) - politics , buddhism , ceremony , citizenship , negotiation , power (physics) , ethnography , sociology , ethnology , gender studies , history , political science , anthropology , law , social science , archaeology , physics , quantum mechanics
I base this article on an event that transpired during a funeral ceremony in the village of Achinathang in Ladakh, India. This incident, which coincided with a period of interreligious conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist communities, led me to question the manner in which margins become sites for the definition and contestation of citizenship and power. Here, I analyze the construction of margins in multiple contexts: in negotiating boundaries between death and rebirth, in coping with and challenging the control exerted by town‐based political reform movements over rural space, and finally, in locating the position of the ethnographer in histories and spaces of domination. [death rituals, social space, politics of location, Buddhism, South Asia]