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Sinhalese Astrology, South Asian Caste Systems, and the Notion of Individuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Steven E. G. Kemper
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Abstract

Astrology is a neglected cultural form in the study of South Asian society. It is also one which pays attention to the individual in ways that seem to fly in the face of scholarly understandings of Asian societies as places where individuality has little importance. The ideology of caste, the institution most often taken as an analytical entry to South Asian societies, gathers people into groups on the basis of their gross similarities and fixes a person's condition for life. Astrology treats individuals as distinguished by subtle differences and liable to momentary changes. The paper argues that caste ideology and astrology have a common vocabulary and logic, one which is genealogical and combinatory, and suggests in turn several conclusions about the relationship of individuals and society in South Asian cultures.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 477 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1979

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References

1 The fieldwork upon which most of this paper is based was carried out in Sri Lanka between September 1969 and July 1971. That research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, was supplemented by five more months of research in Sri Lanka in 1974 and 1976 on shorter trips supported by Bates College Faculty Research grants. I have profited from the advice of McKim Marriott, Michael Fischer, Dennis McGilvray, Brenda Beck, Ronald Inden, and Gananath Obeyesekere. I thank them, as well as the Selection Committee of the Yonina Talmon Fund, which awarded me the fifth Yonina Talmon Prize for an earlier draft of this paper. A still earlier draft was presented at the 1973 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans.

2 That approach derives from many sources but can be assessed most easily in Clifford Geertz's inchoate classic, “Religion as a Cultural System,” first published in the A.S.A Monograph Series, No. 3, Anthloropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock, 1966), pp. 1–46.Google Scholar

3 “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 360.Google Scholar

4 Ray, H. C., History of Ceylon, 1, 2 (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Ceylon Univ. Press, 1959), p. 44Google Scholar. The complexity of the diffusion of astrological knowledge is suggested by the fact that although early Sinhalese contact with astrologers and their craft was with South Indians, modern Sinhalese horoscopes (see Figure 1 for diagram) are laid out in a counter-clockwise manner, as are North Indian and European horoscopes, while South Indian horoscopes proceed clockwise.

5 Rahula, Walpola, History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Colombo, Sri Lanka: M. D. Gunasena, 1956), pp. 46–47Google Scholar. The South Asian practice of astrology in the restricted sense of casting horoscopes is borrowed from the Greeks of the first and second centuries A.D., but the casting of horoscopes is surrounded by a penumbra of associated practices, such as the ones Rahula describes for Sri Lanka, long before that date.

6 The stratificatory aspects of the use of cultural forms like astrology have intriguing connections with social change, especially as such forms transfer the ideas of one social class or age to another. A comparative example is the working class fascination with phrenology in Victorian England. It was through the medium of phrenological instruction, which Victorian working men often received at Mechanics' Institutes and from the popular press, that their class came to understand many of the assumptions and implications of eighteenth-century rational and materialist philosophy. For example, the phrenological notion that one can, by evaluating the bumps on one's skull, learn of and thereby cultivate one's strengths, is a neat application of the Enlightenment confidence in the perfectability of man. Sinhalese astrology is a similar working out of abstract notions about reality and human nature, namely the leeway a person has to alter his karmic destiny. What is important is that both phrenology and astrology reduce cultural notions to practicable schemata for directing human action and evaluating it, and thus bridge a substantial gap for actors, not to say social scientists. For the source of much of my thinking on phrenology, see MacLaren, Angus, “Phrenology: Medium and Message,” Journal of Modern History, 46: 1 (March 1974), 86–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See, for instance, Obeyesekere, Gananath, “The Impact of Ayurvedic Ideas on the Culture and the Individual in Sri Lanka,” in Leslie, Charles, ed., Asian Medical Systems (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 201–26.Google Scholar

8 When a Sinhalese peasant explains some downturn in his fortune by saying, “Eka magē vēlāva” (literally, “It is my time,” meaning something like, “It is my destiny”), he is making a statement that has both astrological and karmic connotations: the bad fortune has happened because his planets have entered an inauspicious stretch of time (apalē). Those planetary influences, in turn, are determined by the residuum of the individual's actions in this life and in previous ones—in other words, his karma.

9 Dumont, L. and Sainsbury, Mark (trans.), Homo Hierarchies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 109–29Google Scholar; Yalman, N., “On the Purity of Women in the Castes of Ceylon and Malabar,” Journal ojthe Royal Anthropological Institute, 93: 1 (1963), 25–58.Google Scholar

10 “Dual Organization in Central Ceylon? or The Goddess in the Treetop,” JAS, 24: 3 (1966), 441–47.Google Scholar

11 Marriott, McKim and Inden, Ronald B., “Caste Systems,” Encyclopaedia Btitannica, Macropaedia (1974), III, 982–91.Google Scholar

12 The best indigenous treatment is of course The Laws of Manu, ed. Buhler, George, Sacred Books of the East, 25 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886)Google Scholar. An instructive recent analysis of the theory of the jātis is Tambiah, S. J., “From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions,” in Goody, Jack, ed., The Character of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973).Google Scholar

13 The accommodation of Indie concepts such as caste in a Buddhist society is treated in my doctoral dissertation, “The Social Order of the Sinhalese Buddhist Sangha,” University of Chicago 1973.

14 The notions of “substance” and “code for conduct” derive from the work of Schneider, David; see American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968)Google Scholar, which serves as a paradigm case of a “cultural analysis.”

15 Marriott and Inden, pp. 982–91.

16 Astrologically, it is possible to match the groom's signs to the bride's or the bride's to the groom's. But as a matter of propriety, negotiating a marriage requires the initiative to come from the male side.

17 Having said that horoscopes do not reveal the owner's gender, I now make the apparently contradictory claim that astrology provides information about “maleness” and “femaleness.” It is not, however, that women or men have horoscopes that point to any distinguishing female or male features: both potential spouses are treated astrologically as persons, as if they were without gender—or more accurately, as if one's sexual nature and orientation were more complicated than simple “male” or “female.” Males have both male and female qualities; so do females.

18 Astrological varna has no direct correspondence with social varna. The Lord Buddha's astrological varna, for instance, is Sudra, although by tradition he was the son of a Ksatriya prince.

19 The derivative character of Sinhalese astrology is evident in the fact that the asta kuta porondams follow the same method for making marriages as described in the companion piece to The Kamasutra, the Hindu Art of Love, Burton, Richard, trans. (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1976), pp. 111–19Google Scholar. The thirty-six points in the Sinhalese method stand for the thirty-six gunas (qualities or requisites), unevenly distributed in eight categories; thus, where a Sinhalese astrologer insists upon at least fifty percent similarity between the pair, an Indian astrologer might insist that their marriage have at least eighteen gunas.

20 The other great source of astrological information is the individual's näkat (lunar mansion). The celestial näkats—twenty-seven in number—constitute a kind of lunar zodiac, measuring in equal intervals the monthly progress of the moon. Although of extraordinary underlying importance in marriage considerations, the näkat of the time of birth is not written on the individual's horoscope copy, but can be calculated from the astrologer's tables, given the moment of birth.

21 Both skills are vital. Skillful astrologers are both technical and artistic virtuosos.

22 Under the Bo Tree (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 136–42.Google Scholar

23 Yalman, pp. 138–39. I would amend the argument for the patrilineal emphasis among aristocrats only by adding that all males in Sinhalese society are regarded as inherently superior, more auspicious, and more valuable than females; this bias reinforces and at the same time complicates that elite emphasis on patrilineal descent.

24 Yalman, p. 139.

25 Yalman, p. 139.

26 There is always risk in running together cultural systems that may have no logical relationship to each other, but it would be instructive if kinship theorists interested in the cultural engineering implied by prescriptive marriage systems in India turned from the semantics of kin categories to consideration of how marriage systems in the various parts of South Asia correlate with regional differences in the cultural forms like astrology.

27 Obeyesekere has suggested that there is a direct relationship between Buddhism and astrology: the more Buddhism, the more astrology. He argues that the more a person knows of the doctrine of karma, the greater his anxiety about his destiny and thus the greater his interest in both Buddhism and astrology as ways to improve that destiny. Quoted in Gombrich, Precept and Practice, p. 148.

28 A similar argument is worked out more fully by Inden, Ronald and Nicholas, Ralph in their book, Kinship in Bengali Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977)Google Scholar. They argue, for instance, that Bengalis conceive of love as if it were an “essence” (rasa), something substantial in and of the blood and body. That fusion of the spiritual and physical is less clear in Sinhalese culture, but certainly not in astrological thought and lore in South Asia generally. To cite a case that appears to be more substantial, Ayurvedic medicine speaks of food transformed into food juice as rasa.

29 Marriott, McKim, “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism,” in Kapferer, Bruce, ed., Transaction and Meaning (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), pp. 109–42.Google Scholar

30 See, for example, his “The Individual as an Impediment to Sociological Comparison and Indian History,” in Dumont, Louis, Religion/Politics and History in India (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 133–35.Google Scholar

31 Dumont, Religion/Politics, p. 111.