Bitan: Oracles and Healers in the Karakoram

0.0

The Hunzakutz, a high mountain people in the western Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan, possess a shamanistic tradition centered around religious specialists known as bitan. These practitioners inhale the smoke of burning juniper branches, dance to a special music, drink blood from a freshly severed goats head, enter into ecstatic trances, and converse with supernatural beings. An ethnographic and historical analysis of this little known shamanistic tradition is offered, focusing on the rituals, beliefs, and practices of Hunzakutz bitan, their place in the traditional ritual and politico ideological apparatus of the former Hunza state, and their role as healers and soothsayers. About Author : Dr. H Sidky is an American anthropologist specializing in cultural ecology and the anthropology of religion. He is currently affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and Sociology Miami University, Oxford USA. Contents : List of illustrationsForewordPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroductionHuna: A Brief IntroductionThe arrival of Islam and Beliefs in the Mountain SpiritsBecoming a BitanThe Bitan Oracular PerformanceBitans as Healers and expeller of DemonsDecline and CommercializationRituals and Ecological regulationsShamanism: Problems of Definition in Cross cultural researchBibliographyIndex