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The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba. By SUSAN VISVANATHAN. Madras: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvii, 279 pp. $27.00 (cloth).
In 1981-82, anthropologist Susan Visvanathan undertook research in the south Indian neighborhood of Puthenangadi, motivated by two preoccupations: the relationship of individual cultural representations to shared culture, conceived a la Durkheim, and the rediscovery of a past left behind in a personal, secularizing journey. The result is a careful ethnography which documents the power of religion in a complex society to create multiple types and sites of conflict and cohesion.
Puthenangadi, on the outskirts of a central Kerala town, is dominated by the Yakoba, an Orthodox Jacobite section of the region's denominationally fragmented Syrian Christians, whose collective memory reaches back to the first century A.D. Within the Yakoba sect, a theological and cultural homogeneity which permits intermarriage and residential solidarity is marred by an ecclesiastical schism, an 80-year-old dispute which is both...