A Sonic Vaccine for a White-Collar Disease
Matua Approaches to COVID-19, Rural Pride, and Sonic-Sacred Healing
In: Asian MedicineSearch for other papers by Carola Lorea in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
Members of the Matua religion, a displaced Dalit community from Bengal, believe that the coronavirus can affect only the upper-caste/class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Matua devotees, on the other hand, are predominantly part of an agriculturist community inhabiting multiple fringes: the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, the peripheries of unorthodox Vaishnavism, and the social margins of untouchability. Conducting remote ethnography with Matua participants based in West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andamans, one comes across insistent narratives of immunity and recurrent interpretations of the pandemic that fit into the onto-cosmology and sociocultural imagination of the Matua religious movement. I discuss these as dissident tales of immunity that describe COVID-19 as an urban-based white-collar disease. Matua practitioners successfully prevent it through a sonic vaccine – the practice of kīrtan – and a kind of power (śakti) accumulated through physical agricultural labor.
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A Sonic Vaccine for a White-Collar Disease
Matua Approaches to COVID-19, Rural Pride, and Sonic-Sacred Healing
In: Asian MedicineSearch for other papers by Carola Lorea in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Members of the Matua religion, a displaced Dalit community from Bengal, believe that the coronavirus can affect only the upper-caste/class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Matua devotees, on the other hand, are predominantly part of an agriculturist community inhabiting multiple fringes: the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, the peripheries of unorthodox Vaishnavism, and the social margins of untouchability. Conducting remote ethnography with Matua participants based in West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andamans, one comes across insistent narratives of immunity and recurrent interpretations of the pandemic that fit into the onto-cosmology and sociocultural imagination of the Matua religious movement. I discuss these as dissident tales of immunity that describe COVID-19 as an urban-based white-collar disease. Matua practitioners successfully prevent it through a sonic vaccine – the practice of kīrtan – and a kind of power (śakti) accumulated through physical agricultural labor.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 188 | 188 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 6 | 6 | 2 |