Tucked away in the eastern Himalayas, the narrow Apatani valley is a fertile realm of bamboo forests and carefully tended paddy fields, home to an eponymous tribe circumscribed not only by the mountains that border its valley but also by an acute sense of itself as a people. Folklorist Stuart Blackburn's latest is the second of two major monographs he has written on oral culture in the Apatani valley. In this closely focused follow-up to his more comprehensive 2008 Himalayan Tribal Tales: Oral Tradition and Culture in the Apatani Valley (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Blackburn provides a translation and interpretation of the Subu Heniin, a day-long chant performed by a shaman-like officiant (the nyibu) on the first day of a sponsored sacrifice called the Murung. In order to elucidate the significance of this oral performance, Blackburn provides, in addition to his translation and transliteration of the Subu Heniin, thorough discussion of the Apatani landscape and way of life, the ritual speech of the nyibu, the complexities of the lengthy Murung ritual, and the subject matter and structure of the chant itself. Throughout, Blackburn frequently visits the unifying themes of ritual exchange and fertility.
Blackburn's stated methodological goals are two-fold. First, he aims to demonstrate the importance of assaying themes expressed through oral performance when analyzing large-scale rituals such as the Murung. Second, he wishes to demonstrate the value of comparative analysis (p. 279). Blackburn accomplishes both of these goals, interweaving accounts of ritual, text, actor, and community so holistically that only when one reaches the end, does one fully comprehend the beginning. His use of comparative material from the Naga and Chin Hills, upland Southeast Asia, and Southwest China, is a model of carefulness and precision, evidencing how alert and critical comparison across localities can nuance the scholar's understanding of his own subject matter. Blackburn's richly descriptive book is a testament to his ethnographic prowess. His fluid translation of the nyibu's chant is especially impressive.
Though expensive, this volume would make an excellent assignment for a graduate anthropology or folklore studies seminar, especially if read together with sections of Blackburn's first book on the Apatani valley, as he transparently describes his strategies of data collection, translation, and interpretation. It is also of obvious interest to specialists in Himalayan cultures or the indigenous communities of Eastern India, the Southeast Asian uplands, or Southwest China. More broadly, this volume extends Blackburn's previous work on narrative and oral performance and their relationship to culture, taking his theses beyond the realm of South Indian Hinduism into the testing ground of comparative analysis. This book will fascinate any folklorist, ethnographer, or historian interested in issues of orality.
This volume is of somewhat less interest to more general readers in part because it does not sufficiently address every topic advertised by its subtitle. The “shaman's chant” is the raison d’être of this work, and “ritual exchange” also figures centrally, but Blackburn's discussion of “fertility” is impoverished and never adequately related to the other two topics. Despite a dismissive and tantalizingly brief reference to James George Frazer's problematic interpretation of the Nemi grove rites, Blackburn refrains from discussing the value of fertility as a broadly applicable hermeneutic category. His cautious comparative method does lead him to make certain perceptive distinctions with respect to Apatani ideas of fertility. According to Blackburn, for instance, the Apatanis do not symbolize fertility as a magical power inhering in the sacrificial sponsor, but as a quality common to married clanswomen, full granaries, and spreading bamboo. He does not, however, press on to the question of why such a distinction is significant, or revealing.
While less laconic, Blackburn's discussion of ritual exchange also has its limits. He elucidates the shaman's chant in the wider context of Apatani life, mounting a convincing argument that Apatanis, while not immune to resentments and competition, perform Murungs in order to foster valley-wide cooperation through gift exchange. He ignores, however, one factor in exchange fundamental to most ritual systems: that of gender. Women are exchanged in marriage, and patterns of ritual gift giving are themselves gendered. This omission would be less significant had fertility not been so central a theme of the book. But Apatani ideas about creation flowing forth from a dismembered procreative female body, the image of the greening earth as a pregnant woman, and the tableau of adorned, rice-bearing married women standing opposite the chanting nyibu, are tropes to which Blackburn returns again and again. This latter problem may stem from the all but pioneering nature of Blackburn's work in the Apatani valley. Perhaps there is simply not sufficient data on the ritual and social roles of Apatani women to support an analysis of gender in Apatani oral performance. Perhaps we may look forward to further exploration of these topics in the next book by this scrupulous researcher?
