While the medical landscape in Garhwal is, as elsewhere in rural India, highly pluralistic, there is an important factor that makes the Garhwali case different from medical pluralism described for other Indian and Nepali rural contexts ( e.g.Beals 1980 lambert 1996; Pigg 1990). This is the important role in people’s everyday lives of practices of possession linked to the cult of territorial deitites. Amongst the different categories of local who have an active ‘social life’ through being protagonists of institutionalized practices of possession, it is the village deities (Germ Devta and Gram Devi ) that, by way of healing and divination ritual practices, have the strongest impact on people’s daily life.