Throughout north India, Aghori ascetics are regarded with a mixture of fear, respect and disgust. Their spiritual goal is to achieve a salvific state of nonduality by overcoming quotidian oppositions such as pure/impure and pleasant/disgusting, and to that end they sometimes dwell naked in cremation grounds, and are rumored to engage in antinomian practices such as consuming alcohol, feces, and sometimes even the flesh of the dead.
In the 70s and 80s, the abbot of an Aghori monastery in Varanasi introduced a number of changes, prominent among which was the founding of a leprosy-treatment centre. He also emphasized and strengthened the sect's egalitarian ethic, which opposes gender and caste discrimination. Insofar as leprosy is deeply stigmatized in India, the Aghoris' contact with lepers was consistent with their previous traditions. But in many other respects the new forms of social service were radical innovations. They were also very successful, so that in a relatively short time the monastery became internationally recognized and rather wealthy, presenting the monks with a new set of problems and temptations.
These events are the background to Ron Barrett's ethnographic study of Aghori healing. Chapter I includes his big idea: a model of two different schema for the notion of pollution and its treatment. Under the “transportive” scheme, one washes one's impurities, sins, etc. away by bathing, or passes them along a “gradient of inauspiciousness” to a lower-status person to dispose of. It's like the common Indian practice of fastidiously sweeping all household dirt out the door and into the street, where it can be forgotten about. By contrast, the “transformational” scheme involves the internalization and transformation of sin and pollution, especially by spiritual adepts such as the Aghoris. This is what explains the great popularity of their medicines (a theme about which Barrett has a great deal to say), as well as the logic of the leprosy-care center.
Barrett's account of a particular healing sequence as a rite of “symbolic self-cremation” (p. 77) is plausible, but implausibly he tries to extend this idea to the “social deaths experienced by people with leprosy and leukoderma” (p. 78), and it gets worse when he misleadingly invokes Marriott's notion of dividuality (inaccurately glossed as “collective identity”) to argue that because this “social death” makes people unable to have a family or social life, therefore they lose their “sociocultural identity.” Barrett concludes this confused pseudo-sociology by explicitly conflating it with psychology and then indiscriminately mixing (mostly western) religious, sociological, theological and normative languages to arrive at some very dubious formulations: for example that “poverty, disability” and other “little deaths” are a “pollution of which one must be cleansed” (p. 79).
In addition to such problematic formulations (and there are others as well), the book contains a number of substantive and spelling errors, and is also weakened by Barrett's unabashed personal commitment to the sect. Commendably, he does not attempt to hide this; nevertheless it is inappropriate to employ the language of the proselyte in an ostensible work of scholarship, e.g. “Even the most skeptical observers attested to Sarkar Baba's apparent simplicity in the face of the worldly trappings around him…. Even the most skeptical outsiders reserved their criticisms for the newer generation of householder disciples (p. 97) …no one would deny that his power was great and his reforms far-reaching” (p. 100).
Chapter V concludes with a good explanation of the homology between internal digestive fire and external cremation fire. The homology is well known, but Barrett goes beyond the texts normally cited in this regard to describe the understandings of a variety of informants including Ayurvedic physicians, religious devotees, and others. His discussion of “medicine as a medium of exchange” is very good: here, the personal qualities and emotions of healer are seen as very important and this is why many prefer Aghori medicine to industrially produced medicine.
In Chapter VI, Barrett turns to the sect's antinomian practices, which he seeks to demystify, emphasizing that they are very infrequently performed. In the final part of this chapter, Barrett makes three very interesting propositions: that disease discrimination (e.g. against leprosy sufferers) is itself an illness; that the source of the illness lies in the discriminator, and not in those against whom are discriminated; and that mortality anxiety motivates morbidity discrimination. This is perhaps the most thoughtful section of the book.
Overall, Aghor Medicine does not manage to reach the level of detailed, “thick” description that one associates with the best ethnographies. I would therefore place it in the tradition of religious studies rather than that of anthropology. But despite its numerous flaws, the subject matter is fascinating, and the treatment of religious change stimulating. A good book for advanced students.
