Nevertheless, nowadays Garhwalis are not only local ritual subjects. They are at
the same time mobile actors, living in an interconnected world and exposed to translocal
discourses about modernity and progress. Consequently people’s embodied
sense of self is simultaneously shaped by different local practices and discourses.
Now, more and more locals start to feel that it is not only more efficacious but also
more prestigious to undergo biomedical treatment, vis-a` -vis their integration in the
larger national context. Conversely, the experience of the body as imbued with power
given by the territorial god and dependent on the moral conduct of all community
members is increasingly linked, in people’s everyday perception, with the stereotype
of their marginality and supposed backwardness in the eyes of the wider society.
Ritual healing becomes at times embarrassing or inappropriate in the changing social
field. But this practice, with the bodily experience that it produces, is nevertheless
part of people’s everyday experience. A form of ‘hysteresis’ (Bourdieu 1972) may be
produced in people’s lives by a discourse that confers on ritual healing, namely their
everyday experience, a status of superstition. This perception may contribute to the
emergence of the critical discourses that have been analyzed here, which focus on the
neglect of deities by the people and the consequent weakening of their bodies. These
discourses show that, while making use of biomedicine, social actors perceive and
express in religious and somatic terms the destabilizing effect that the encounter with
92 S. Bindi
biomedicine is producing, not only on local politics but also on their bodily
knowledge and experience.