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Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos
Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love, anger, and guilt.
Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death.
How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties.
Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People , this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.
Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death.
How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties.
Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People , this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.
380 pages, Paperback
Published October 19, 2017
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About the author
Piers Vitebsky
25 books16 followersPiers Vitebsky is an anthropologist and is the Head of Social Science at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, England.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 25, 2022
I first read this book a couple of years ago when I was taking courses in anthropology for my minor in university. Back then, it already made a great impression on me. At the time, I had to finish it fairly quickly in order to write an assignment on it, leading me to skip certain chapters and passages. Ever since, the book remained firmly planted in the back of my mind, and recently I have bought my own copy in order to re-read at my own pace simply for my own enjoyment. I am therefore writing this review as a layperson.
In this book, Vitebsky describes his ethnographic fieldwork among the Lanjia Sora in southern Odisha from the 1970s onwards, and especially the abandonment of the animist religion and way of life by the younger generations of Sora.
Despite the scientific nature of the work, Vitebsky writes in an accessible style which is for the most part easy to follow. Large sections read almost like a novel, and even when reading it for the second time around, I desperately wanted to keep on reading. Some passages of thorough analysis are of course present, and take some more careful reading to follow the train of thought. Despite this slowing my reading, Vitebsky’s account is striking.
The first part of the book especially, which deals with Vitebsky’s early fieldwork in Soraland in the late 1970s, speaks to the imagination, as he describes his gradual integration in and his understanding of this culture, language and religion. In addition to the text, the photographs taken by the author bring this world, remote in terms of both space and time, intimately close to the reader.
In a way, the book feels like a tragedy, as the culture that the author had come to understand and love no longer exists today as it did then. The second part of the book deals with Vitebsky’s return to the Sora after a long absence from 1992 onwards, and discusses much of what has changed since. This was more difficult for me to read the first time around, both because I shared the author’s sense of loss, and because it seemed I had also slowly come to understand this culture while reading, and now having to learn yet another worldview was perhaps too much. This second time around, the animist way was already familiar to me, which made reading about the new more manageable.
Personally, I think that this book brings much more than knowledge about this remote tribe in India. Coming to understand a worldview so distant from one’s own is a valuable experience, and shows us the wonderful diversity of our world, as well as a mutual understanding between human beings. In fact, I think this book could be a positive experience for almost anyone, whether they know they are interested in anthropology or not.
Vitebsky writes at the end of the book that it has been a privilege to be accepted into the lives of so many Sora over the years. Likewise it feels like a privilege to be led by the author through his experiences among the Sora, and get to know so many people’s lives intimately through his words.
In this book, Vitebsky describes his ethnographic fieldwork among the Lanjia Sora in southern Odisha from the 1970s onwards, and especially the abandonment of the animist religion and way of life by the younger generations of Sora.
Despite the scientific nature of the work, Vitebsky writes in an accessible style which is for the most part easy to follow. Large sections read almost like a novel, and even when reading it for the second time around, I desperately wanted to keep on reading. Some passages of thorough analysis are of course present, and take some more careful reading to follow the train of thought. Despite this slowing my reading, Vitebsky’s account is striking.
The first part of the book especially, which deals with Vitebsky’s early fieldwork in Soraland in the late 1970s, speaks to the imagination, as he describes his gradual integration in and his understanding of this culture, language and religion. In addition to the text, the photographs taken by the author bring this world, remote in terms of both space and time, intimately close to the reader.
In a way, the book feels like a tragedy, as the culture that the author had come to understand and love no longer exists today as it did then. The second part of the book deals with Vitebsky’s return to the Sora after a long absence from 1992 onwards, and discusses much of what has changed since. This was more difficult for me to read the first time around, both because I shared the author’s sense of loss, and because it seemed I had also slowly come to understand this culture while reading, and now having to learn yet another worldview was perhaps too much. This second time around, the animist way was already familiar to me, which made reading about the new more manageable.
Personally, I think that this book brings much more than knowledge about this remote tribe in India. Coming to understand a worldview so distant from one’s own is a valuable experience, and shows us the wonderful diversity of our world, as well as a mutual understanding between human beings. In fact, I think this book could be a positive experience for almost anyone, whether they know they are interested in anthropology or not.
Vitebsky writes at the end of the book that it has been a privilege to be accepted into the lives of so many Sora over the years. Likewise it feels like a privilege to be led by the author through his experiences among the Sora, and get to know so many people’s lives intimately through his words.
March 2, 2021
Really interesting and overall readable (not jargony) capture of a dying belief system, the desires to change to Christianity and Hinduism, and the author’s own relationship to everything as an outsider who fell in love with an animist tradition he now knows more of than the practitioners’ children and grandchildren.
May 15, 2025
Read for a religious studies/anthropology class. Really enjoyed the narration and exploration of the Sora! Definitely bordering salvage anthropology, but still a very good read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews