DISGUISE, REVELATION AND COPYRIGHT:DISASSEMBLING THE SOUTH INDIAN LEPER

James Staples

School of Oriental & African Studies

This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in SouthIndia conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider howsuch an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood,such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I askwhether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenuesof exploration and complement our existing methodological tool-box. A focus on indi-viduated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In lookingat how leprosy-affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies inradically different contexts – at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urbanMaharashtra – I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves fromdifferent bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience ofleprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individu-ated parts dissolves.

Introduction

‘I say to my sons, us lepers never go whole to the grave. We go piece by piece.’Victor, May 2000.

My friend Victor’s1 comment – part joke, part bitter reflection on what hedescribed as being trapped in a decaying, but not dying, body – plays, likeother leper jokes, on the idea of detachable body parts, dropping off one byone as the disease progresses. Although biomedically misleading, it was aremark that prompted my enquiry into the particular ways that leprosy-affected people in South India might conceptualize and experience theirbodies.

This led me to consider, first, how existing anthropological approaches tothe South Asian person – especially those emerging out of ethnosociologyand phenomenology – might be utilized to explore how bodily differenceimpinges on deformed leprosy patients’ experience of the world. Secondly, Ibecame interested in whether analysis of bodily difference might open up newavenues of exploration (or stretch existing ones) through which to look gen-erally at South Indian notions and experiences of the body that otherwiseremain implicit or hidden.

Drawing on recent fieldwork with leprosy-affected people from a village Ishall call Anandapuram, in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, this article

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2003.J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 9, 295-315

attempts to shed light on both of these areas by focusing on leprosy-deformedbodies and their interaction with the world. I explore ways in which leprosypatients might order or prioritize their body parts, and at what this might saymore generally about how bodies are ‘read’ and related to in South India. Ithen move on to consider how those ‘body readings’ relate dialectically tobodily practices, exploring the tensions that arise between aesthetic and pragmatic considerations in radically different contexts. Finally, I take a broaderperspective to consider how, in certain circumstances, the lived experience of bodily difference might serve to create a community of the afflicted – acollective, intersubjective ‘body’ formed of many leprosy-deformed bodies –within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves. By presenting thematerial in this way, I demonstrate how the significance of the body and itsparts shifts in different social contexts, and identify the different aspects of personhood that might be emphasized in different situations.

Bodies of theory

First, I offer some background on the theoretical perspectives employed here.Following Marriott (1976),2 South Asian concepts of personhood have tendedto be defined in contradistinction to those of the West. Western ‘individuals’have been characterized, following Descartes’s (1985) methodological distinc-tion (cf. Csordas 1994: 7), as ‘indivisible, integrated, self-developing-units, notnormally subject to disjunction or reconstitution’ (Marriott 1989: 17). Hindu‘dividuals’, by contrast, are non-reflexive, composite, and divisible, and their‘interpersonal relations in the world are generally irregular and fluid’ (1989:17). In the latter model, there is no radical distinction between biogenetic andmoral aspects of the person. ‘Corporeal’ and, from a dualist perspective, ‘non-corporeal’ aspects of the person are not radically differentiated.

As a number of commentators have suggested, the placing of European and Indian models of personhood at polar extremes overstates the absolutedifferences between the two (see e.g. Fuller [1992: 12]; Parry [1989: 494-512;1991]). Thus the upper-middle-class French women described by Bourdieuappear to conflate aesthetic and moral aspects of personhood in a way thatveers more towards monism than dualism (1984: 206), and there is plenty ofethnographic evidence to suggest that Indians do not always experience their body boundaries as fluid (see e.g. Mosse [forthcoming]; Spencer [1997:694]).

Despite its shortcomings, however, ethnosociological attention to theseissues has successfully challenged the assumption of mind-body duality, allow-ing exploration of alternative models.3 The Osellas, for example, build on ethnosociological frameworks to think in terms of a ‘network body’ (Osella& Osella 1996: 44) as a way of understanding social and physical bodies inKerala. Busby’s (1997) work on gender in the same state likewise offers a subtlealternative to Marriott’s dualism-monism contrast, identifying different typesof dividuals and making comparisons not between the West and non-West,but between South India and Melanesia.

Parallel to these developments, phenomenological approaches have chal-lenged mind/body dualism without imposing a Western-non-Western dis-

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tinction. They are useful here for a number of reasons. First, a focus on thebody as an ‘experiencing agent’ (Csordas 1994: 6) is essential to understand-ing variations in the lived experience of deformed leprosy patients. Secondly,the importance of context to an understanding of embodied action is broughtout well by Haraway’s (1990: 191) emphasis on location, an approach which– as Csordas puts it – ‘accepts the interpretive consequences of being groundedin a particular embodied standpoint – the consequences of relatedness, partialgrasp of any situation, and imperfect communication’ (Csordas 1994: 2).Thirdly, in that phenomenological approaches have been particularly influen-tial in the field of medical anthropology (see e.g. Del Vecchio Good, Brodwin,Good & Kleinman 1992; Kleinman 1988; Lock 1993), body theorists havedeveloped concepts that provide valuable explanatory frameworks for analysisof my own ethnographic data. For example, Leder’s notion of the ‘dys-appearing’ body (1990: 83-92) – a term he uses to describe the subjectiveemergence of the body as an alien presence at particular crisis points – offersa fruitful perspective on how deformed leprosy patients experience and usetheir bodies.

Finally, in developing a research methodology, I was particularly influencedby Jackson’s suggestion that we explore human experience through bodilymovement, literally putting oneself in the place of another by occupying hisor her world. In doing so, he suggests, we might ‘grasp the sense of an activ-ity by using one’s body as others did’ (1983: 340).

In that I did not publicly emulate leprosy deformities or use my own bodyto beg in the streets of Mumbai, as my informants did, my own practices fellshort of Jackson’s recommendations. Nevertheless, his work, alongside myreading of Farnell (1994: 932) – who posits ways of including bodily move-ment in defining social action – shaped my observation and recording ofembodied activity.

I used these observations as starting-points for further probing, askingbegging leprosy patients, for example, to demonstrate how they encouragedpeople to give. This allowed further reflection on why a particular bodilymovement, or the exposure of a particular body part, communicated a par-ticular message, and encouraged responses that surpassed the verbal. Some-times I would also act out what I thought I had seen, inviting discussion onhow accurate my representation was.This enabled me to focus on the aspectsof the process they considered relevant. Body ‘reading’, in this sense, was amethodological as well as an analytical concern.

Anandapuram

Anandapuram is a small village in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India. Themain site of my fieldwork, Anandapuram differs from the hamlets that sur-round it in several ways. First, as a self-established kustha rogi sanghamu (leprosysettlement), around half of its 9074 inhabitants have had treatment for leprosy,and 300 of them have deformities or disabilities of some kind.

Secondly, Anandapuram is a relatively new community, its members havingcome from a wide variety of places and backgrounds. The first settlers onwhat was then a patch of railway wasteland arrived in the late 1950s, when

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advances in leprosy drug treatment led to long-term residential patients beingdischarged from a local mission hospital. For a variety of reasons, these patientswere unable to return to their home localities. Most had converted from Hinduism to Christianity; many had married fellow patients, often outsidetheir caste groups; and a large number had become separated from their fam-ilies after years in institutional care.

This early settlement was, according to many accounts from inhabitants, a dangerous and liminal location.5 It was described as a place where men came to rape women or even murder them – and which, at night, was frequentedby dayyamu (spirits). Basing my approach on South Indian ideas about the sig-nificance of place to identity (Daniel 1987: 62 ff.), I would suggest that thesenarratives were, at least in part, figurative.They were used as a device throughwhich the extent of their exclusion – their ‘otherness’ – and the suffering itcaused could be emphasized.

The shared experiences of leprosy and of the missionary institutions wherethe residents had been treated are also reflected in the internal organizationof the village. The early settlers registered themselves as an Association underthe Societies’ Act, with the aims of acquiring aid from central and state government and of admitting ‘the helpless and hopeless leprosy sufferers andconsole them by providing shelter’.6 The bylaws also stated that the Associa-tion’s executive body would have seven elected Elders charged with carryingout these aims, and General Body meetings at least twice a year, electing theirexecutive Committee annually. Membership charges – originally Rs 0.25 –enabled the Elders to carry out their duties, which, by the time I visited,related mainly to what were called ‘village matters’. These included helpingto arrange marriages (exchanging partners with other leprosy colonies); main-taining law and order (through a system of hearing cases and imposing fines);and collecting government rations of rice and other provisions for redis-tribution. Although election of Elders was officially once a year, in practiceelections occurred far more frequently, usually because Elders either resignedover the frustrations of the role or were forced out by public accusations ofwrong-doing.

A third defining feature of Anandapuram has been the direct involvementof foreigners during the last twenty years of its history. A Benedictine monksettled in the village in 1980, and the role he forged for himself was takenover and developed by a British nurse when he left three years later. In con-junction with the elected Elders, both the monk and the nurse established arange of social welfare and development projects. These included a clinic,creche, and primary school, and income generating schemes.

The aim of the latter was to eliminate begging, an activity that was origi-nally the main source of village income, and which still remains significantfor at least 150 of those living in the village. Indeed, the opportunity to gobegging collectively, and hence make an independent living, was also a sig-nificant attraction for many patients who left the hospital. Although begginghas these days become a largely solitary occupation, it was originally con-ducted in what were called zanda (flag or banner) groups, consisting of up to ten members, unified under a single banner, who would march, sing Christian songs, play instruments, and solicit alms in begging-tins.The moneyraised in this way was shared between group members.

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Development activities, generated by funds from overseas, led to a steadytrickle of mainly European volunteers and visitors throughout the 1980s andearly 1990s. I was the only foreigner in residence by the time I conductedmy fieldwork in 1999 and 2000, but project-making was still a vital part ofAnandapuram’s collective identity and – at least partly as a consequence ofthis – so was the perceived right to assistance as compensation for their disease.

Although this is necessarily a simplified account, for present purposes I havetried to pin-point the main differences between Anandapuram and elsewhere.I also want to emphasize that the people I am writing about are not onlyleprosy patients.They are, among other things, converted Christians, men andwomen of different ages, professional beggars, and a group of people intri-cately linked to the West. Although leprosy deformities are what I focus onhere, the disease is embodied in relation to a range of identities and socialcontexts.

A ranking of parts

While working as a reconstructive surgeon in a Hong Kong leprosarium,Warren observed that ‘few [leprosy] patients spontaneously present[ed] them-selves seeking removal of stigma of the feet’ (1972: 80), but that requests forsurgery to the face were commonplace. He argued that different parts of thebody – especially the face – were thus more vulnerable to stigma than others.

With this in mind, I asked people with multiple physical deformities whichdeformity, if any, they would repair if they could change one thing. Initialresponses were that they would change nothing, that the condition of theirbodies was ‘God’s will’.This response seems to suggest a refracted sense of theself that fits certain ethnosociological models well. Agency, people seemed tobe telling me, was located outside the individual, and that they accepted theirexternally controlled destinies. Like the Malayali persons Busby (1997: 276)describes, my informants represented themselves in this context as internallywhole (that is, unable or unwilling to isolate particular body parts that mightbe altered) and permeable (that is, subject to external forces – in this case,God – beyond their control).

As I shall demonstrate later, such notions of displaced agency were alsoimportant in translating the leprosy-deformed body into ‘social capital’ (cf.Bourdieu 1984: 114). Many of Anandapuram people’s claims to resources reliedon what was presented as their incapacity to bring about change for them-selves. The recognizable effects of leprosy socially legitimated the use of theirbodies in practices, like begging, that elicited moral disapprobation outside thecontext of religious mendicancy.7

Nevertheless, unlike other bodily markings that in certain contexts mightbe seen as blessings – for example those left by smallpox8 – this was not sofor leprosy deformities. People knew that they could enhance their earningsas beggars by exposing the physical signs of leprosy, but this was seen as com-pensation for the affliction they had suffered: unlike smallpox scars, in SouthIndia the leper’s bodily deformities are never seen as ‘blessings’ of the god orgoddess. Furthermore, even if they accepted that their body shapes were theconsequence of ‘God’s will’, actual practices – as Warren’s findings suggested

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– were frequently at odds with the impression my informants gave of havingno personal agency over their bodies.

Later in my fieldwork I reformulated the original question along the linesof: ‘If God said He wanted to change one part of your body back to the wayit was before you had leprosy, what would you ask Him to change?’ Un-surprisingly, my respondents found it a bizarre question, and my posing of thequestion created data that might otherwise never have existed. Nevertheless,responses were startling in their uniformity. Without exception people saidthat they would first change their faces. Indeed, in a few cases people hadalready had facial surgery of some kind, and one man I knew used a pros-thetic nose bridge.They were hazy about particular reasons for this selection,although observation and the literature suggest several explanations.

The face is physiologically the first point of contact with other people –‘an originary locus of communication and perception’ (Leder 1990: 29), ableto communicate ‘because it is available to the Other’s gaze’ (1990: 11, empha-sis added). As such, the face is the most important site ‘from which visualinformation on the body state can be conveyed’ (Polunin 1977: 92).We greetor appeal to others by looking at them (more-or-less) eye-to-eye, only laterlowering our gaze to dwell on other aspects of their bodies. In this sense, asHillman and Mazzio (1997: xii) argue, parts might usefully be seen as con-centrated sites where meaning is located.

Reports from Pakistan of a rise in what have been called ‘honour crimes’(Constable & Khan 2000; Price 2001), where men disfigure the faces of wiveswho seek divorce or commit adultery, are illustrative of this point more gen-erally. Deprived of their noses or otherwise marred, it would seem that thesewomen’s faces convey an instant message from their attackers about their allegedbetrayals.Bourdieu has also made reference to the linguistic associations betweenthe face and honour, noting that the Algerian word nif, literally the nose, isclosely associated with virility (1977: 15). As the ‘point of honour’ (1977: 61),the nose is not only symbolic of honour but the embodiment of it.

There was no spoken suggestion by the people I worked with that theyliterally associated deformed facial characteristics with ‘honour’ as it might beapplied in the Islamic contexts described above. Nor, to my knowledge, werethere linguistic links between the Telugu words for nose and face (mukku andmukhamu, respectively) and honour (maryada). However, I use these examplesto make the more general point that leprosy patients’ faces were neverthelesssites through which meanings were communicated. If, as some believed,leprosy was seen as a consequence of ‘sin’ – papamu or, as it was often ren-dered in English, ‘bad works’ – (cf. Berreman 1984: 858; Bruin 1996: 40;Dwiveldi 1974: 245), facial deformities informed others of the patient’s trans-gressions. Few people, patients or not, made an explicit correlation betweenleprosy and wrong-doing, but the desire in patients to prevent their bodiesfrom communicating leprosy does suggest an implied link between the physi-cal mark and less tangible attributes of the person who carries it.

In relation to the rest of the body, the face is usually more conspicuousthan the hands, which are easier to disguise. However, as they are also usedas tools of communication the hands remain more noticeable than the feet.Other body parts – those routinely covered by clothing, for example – areless significant still in this particular ordering of the body.

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It is not that I found this ordering of parts or the meanings attributed tothem to be fixed or immutable. As Warren observed, the loss of eyebrow hairwas considerably more distressing for the Indian women he treated than itwas for Chinese patients, who routinely plucked their eyebrows (1972: 75).He also points to the significance of the ways in which patients use theirfingers, noting that the same surgical procedures that would help an Indianpatient to scoop up rice would prevent a Chinese patient from using chop-sticks (1972: 78). My fieldwork in Anandapuram also suggested that both themeaning and practical effects of deformities are often contextually defined.One man I knew, with no obvious deformities, was reluctant to work as afarm labourer because his leprosy treatment made his back sweat so profuselyhe was sure it would identify his disease to others. His back took on anenhanced significance, all the more so because it was out of his own line ofvision, rendering the gaze of others less manageable.

Those without facial deformities, as the above case suggests, were some-times more conscious of their bodies than those who had them. For the latter,leprosy deformities – like other disabilities (cf. Coleridge 1993: 28-30) –became as much a feature of identity as the individual’s gender. In contrast,those who were only marginally disfigured were in something of a liminalposition. For them, social encounters brought their bodies, in Leder’s termin-ology, into thematic focus in a dys- (as in dysfunctional) state (1990: 84). Fearof whether a bent finger or a thickened ear lobe would be noticed, and, ifso, whether it would be identified as leprosy, brought the body to the fore-front of subjective experience. The kind of body one has was clearly signifi-cant in relation to one’s physiological and social experience of and with theworld.

What I have suggested, then, is that in certain conditions, those with bodiesthat are culturally defined as ‘different’ are able to separate out and hierarchi-cally order body parts.The question of how this process of hierarchical order-ing might connect or contrast with existing models of partibility (cf. Busby1997; Strathern 1988) will be considered below. At this point, however, I wishto draw out two important points from the above. First, I have shown howleprosy deformities provide a useful way of exploring how the wider societyrelates to and reads bodies, and how particular parts of the body might relateto the whole. Secondly, I have highlighted the impossibility of any fixed cat-egorization of the body, since different explanatory models are deployed, first,in relation to different aspects of personhood manifest in different contextsand, secondly, according to the intentions of the self or selves in question. Inshort, consideration of agency and context are vital.

The next two sections elaborate further on these two points, exploring anumber of contrasting ethnographic examples to demonstrate how bodieswere actively used to convey different meanings at different times.

Revelation

I focus here on a group of Anandapuram people who spent most of the yearon the opposite side of the country, begging in Mumbai (formerly Bombay).The group – up to 150 people at any one time – ate and slept communally

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in a makeshift roadside settlement, setting out alone or in couples at sunriseeach morning to beg for alms from shopkeepers, religious pilgrims, and thegeneral public.

There is much evidence pointing to a high level of ambivalence in South Asian attitudes towards begging. Although a large proportion of Anandapu-ram’s population depended on begging, I found that many strove to keep thisa secret even from family members living outside the community, and thepractice was not common among others in the locality. Some ethnographicaccounts suggest that both Hindus and Muslims may regard begging as a prac-tice which allows them to engage in meritorious forms of religious donationor alms-giving. For Hindus this may facilitate the accumulation of merit andthe offsetting of sin; for Muslims the practice is in conformity with Quranicscriptural injunctions (Chaudhuri 1987: 5; Gore 1963: 232; Islam 1996: 7). Onthe other hand, there are those who now distinguish between pious alms-giving (in the form of gifts to monk-ascetics, for example) and giving moneyto beggars, a practice which may nowadays be characterized as ‘a menace to the healthy growth of society’ (Chaudhuri 1987: 5). By concentrating onthe ways in which Anandapuram people used their bodies in begging, I seekto show how individuals experienced their body parts, especially their handsand arms.9 In addition, I note their pragmatic use in begging and other activities, and I also show how these body parts were read by others. In focus-ing on the ways in which the group actively used their deformed bodies toconstitute themselves as ‘leper beggars’ in the eyes of other people, what Iwish to emphasize is not the dys-appearing body of the leprosy patientevading recognition, but what Leder calls the ‘ecstatic body’ (1990: 21-2), thatis a fully discernible body which then merges with the world through inten-tional acts.

By way of demonstration, I begin with an extract from my fieldnotes ofApril 2000, which records my observations of Kumar, one of Anandapuram’searliest settlers, in the act of begging on a busy street:

[He is] sitting on the ground with a red ‘Help!’ hat10 on his head, and he puts out hisright hand to every person who goes by after first touching his forehead with it. Thisshows off his hand deformity (he has no fingers) to the full, and his mutilated leg isstretched out in front of him. His begging-tin is to the side, and passers-by are encour-aged to throw money into it … he speaks in short sentences – just enough to get heard– things like ‘please help’ or, simply, ‘Amma! [mother]’

This was a fairly typical example of how begging was performed by themost elderly, physically deformed members of the group. It was done sittingdown in busy, roadside locations, using the obvious bodily signs of disability– in Kumar’s case, his fingerless hands and damaged leg – to appeal to passers-by. As Appadurai explains it, beggars used ‘an exaggerated and intensifiedenactment of forms of dependence and types of interaction that are widelyinstitutionalised in Indian society’ (1990: 101). In other words, they use ‘coer-cive subordination’ to trap benefactors ‘in the cultural implications of theirroles of superiors, that is, the obligation to be generous’ (1990: 101).

I regularly observed Anandapuram people deploying begging strategies ofthis kind. Their enactments evoked both a worshipper’s conventionalized actof submission before the divine (touching the brow, for example), and the

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conventionalized postures appropriate to those displaying deference to theauthority of elders and lordly superiors, as in the touching of the feet of actualor potential alms-givers. Few actually said that this is what they were doingwhen I asked them directly about the ways in which one should undertakethe act of begging. Nevertheless, some replied to my questions by acting outthe practices described above. Revelation – exposing oneself as both a ‘beggar’and a ‘leper’ – was as important as was disguising those identities in othersocial contexts.

There were several techniques available for revealing leprosy to best affect.Rama Rao, for example – a younger, cured leprosy patient who bore novisible signs of his disease – used particular tools to carry out his work forbegging purposes. He had a begging-tin fashioned from an old powdered-milk can which he looped over the bandaged wrist of one arm, and in theother hand he always carried a kaiah (rattle) which he shook as he beggedamong stationary cars in traffic jams. Over his shoulder he carried a whitebag made from plastic sacking, and on his head he wore a red hat with theword ‘Help!’ stitched on it in both English and Hindi. The bandage aroundhis hand and wrist – the one used for carrying the begging-tin, and there-fore the one most visible to donors – bound his fingers inwards towards hispalm, and was a vital prop because his hands were not actually deformed.

To have hands that were not debilitated, in a context where the hand isliterally metonymic of a person’s agency and capacity for self-help, was a defi-nite disadvantage. ‘Everyday someone, always someone, says to me, “Why areyou begging? Your hands and legs are good,” ’ complained one woman – thehealthy daughter and wife of leprosy patients – after returning to the settle-ment at the end of the day. From a donor’s perspective, ‘good’ hands attachedto someone begging implied idleness. Deformed or injured hands, by con-trast, gave begging a moral legitimacy.

Travelling back from Mumbai by rail after this part of fieldwork, the comments of another passenger in my compartment neatly encapsulated theproblem. Prompted by the steady flow of beggars through the carriage –among them leprosy patients, street children, and people with other disabil-ities – he said:

‘When that man came with no hands, I gave, because what can he do? When the childcame and swept the floor, I gave, because he was doing something, he didn’t just expectsomething for nothing. But when they come along and they have nothing wrong withthem, when they could work, I don’t give, it just encourages them in their idleness.Theyshould get a job, or at least do something for their money.’

The hands, as the above suggests, were important instruments in conveyingthe beggar’s story. There was not time during a begging encounter, as it wasexplained to me, to outline in detail the particular narrative that had led thebeggar into destitution. By using their bodies they communicated an instantmessage to passers-by that they had leprosy, and thus all that ‘leprosy’ mightbe shorthand for in the popular imagination.These ‘encounters across an openpalm’ (McIntosh & Erskine 2000: para. 1.6) created an immediate – albeitfleeting – relationship mediated by shared assumptions and understandingscommunicated by parts of the leprosy-affected body.

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Constituting and revealing oneself as a ‘leper beggar’ also perpetuated a particular stylization of ‘the leper’ in the public’s perception. For example, thebody of the old, deformed man at the roadside told a story about Kumar, butit was a highly selective one. His body and the way he used it communicatedhis disease and his destitution, but it also omitted the information that he hada wife, also a leprosy patient, healthy children, a small house, and a plot ofland back in Anandapuram. His begging, in common with that of most ofthose I worked with, was not just about satisfaction of immediate biologicalneeds, even if that was the impression his body gave to those who encoun-tered him. It was also about financing his daughter’s wedding and paying forhis son’s education: in short, about gaining entry to what he saw as normalsocial life.

What then, did the begging leprous body communicate? At one level, asmy encounter with the train passenger suggests, street-donors responded tobegging in ways that drew on a common Indian and British inheritance ofVictorian notions of the deserving and undeserving poor (Caplan 1999: 291).These understandings were fed by ideas about begging which also have cur-rency in countries outside India; this was an important factor in the experi-ence of the Anandapuram group because India’s urban beggars tend to relyon tourists and other foreigners as potential alms-givers. Like the Indianrailway passenger quoted above, shoppers in Edinburgh (McIntosh & Erskine2000) and New York subway travellers (Williams 1995) also preferred to giveto those who did something for their money or who were otherwise deserv-ing. The apparently healthy beggar does better if he can convince his publicthat he is selling them something. A disabled hand, an open wound (Williams1995: 27), or even the look in someone’s eyes (McIntosh & Erskine 2000:para. 4.3) perform a similar function.

In the cases I knew about, there was a direct relationship between type andlevel of deformity and income. A beggar’s legitimacy increased in proportionto the extent of his deformity or disablement, since this was seen to have adirect relationship with the beggar’s capacity to make a living. Deformitiesassociated with leprosy were especially productive because they evoked apowerful mix of fear and pity that differentiated the leprosy victim frombearers of less stigmatized disabilities. Giving to the leper satisfied culturalobligations to give (Appadurai 1990) and fulfilled criteria based on percep-tions of need. In addition, in social contexts where the body is seen as per-meable and liable to contamination from others, giving money enabled apotentially polluting encounter to be terminated as rapidly as possible.

The extent to which leprosy-affected people have control over how theirbodies are read depends on their capacity to anticipate how others will inter-pret their body parts and actions, and on how effectively they perform accord-ing to those interpretations. This is no easy task in the contemporary urbanbegging environment, where multiple ideas about begging and leprosy co-exist and intermingle. Beggars consequently need to develop an instrumentalrelationship (cf. Mauss 1979: 97 ff.) with parts of their bodies in order tomanage the begging transaction. The hand comes to represent not only therest of their physical, diseased bodies, but also less tangible attributes, such astheir moral claim to receive alms and their implicit capacity to cause harmand evoke fear. As my examples show, those without the appropriate deformi-ties achieve the same result through practical mimesis (cf. Jackson 1983).

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I often found that the leprosy patient’s capacity to evoke fear and compas-sion at one and the same time could also be deployed as an effective strategyin non-begging situations outside the village. On a previous trip to India, forexample, there was a problem about the renewal of my visa. A village Elderoffered to gather the most deformed members of the community and escortme to the police station, explaining: ‘We’ll tell the police that we won’t leaveuntil they sign your papers. They won’t want a group of leprosy patients inthe cells!’ And even if they did arrest them all, he added with a wry smile,‘How would that look in the local papers, when people read how the policelocked up poor, elderly leprosy patients like us?’ In the event, the protest wasnot necessary, so I am unable to comment on its efficacy as a ‘weapon of theweak’ (Scott 1990 [1985]). What is clear, however, is that leprosy-deformedpeople, as embodied agents, recognized the collective power of their bodiesto bring about change and contest power.

A second example is from a meeting between the representative of a localNGO – the administrator of a revolving loans scheme for small businesses –and individual beneficiaries of the scheme from Anandapuram who haddefaulted on their loans. The NGO representative,Yesudaiah, and the electedElders of the village gathered together in a meeting-room, and the defaultersentered – one at a time – to discuss their cases. One of them was a highlydeformed man in his 50s called Venkateswarlu, who had borrowed money toopen a tea-shop, which had subsequently gone out of business.

In making his case for having the loan written off – based on his presenthealth condition and other factors – he used many of the bodily strategiesthat I described in relation to begging. His fingerless hands moved expres-sively in exaggerated movements towards and away from his bowed head, andhe gestured as if to touch Yesudaiah’s feet. He was then asked to leave theroom while Yesudaiah and the Elders discussed Venkateswarlu’s case. ‘His healthis very poor,’Yesudaiah said. ‘I think we should consider writing off the loan.’Venkateswarlu’s message, communicated verbally and through his body, hadalmost had the desired effect. However, the Elders were quick to point outthat Venkateswarlu owned three properties in the village, and would be per-fectly able to repay the debt if he sold just one of them. It was decided, there-fore, that he should repay a certain amount each month, and Venkateswarluwas recalled to the room to be informed of the decision. It was not theresponse he had hoped for. In my notes for June 2000 I recorded:

… when Yesudaiah tells him,Venkateswarlu explodes in anger: he gets up and down fromhis seat, he momentarily waves one of his crutches above his head, and then he shakeshis fingerless hand first at Yesudaiah and then towards where the Elders are sitting. Heshouts and talks quickly, hardly pausing for breath, and it’s hard to tell if by shaking hisfists he’s showing off his deformed hands to gain sympathy or to express his frustration,or if he’s about to punch someone in the face.

Although at the time I was searching for a definitive meaning toVenkateswarlu’s response, on reflection I would argue that it was the veryambiguity of his actions and the ambivalence they evoked that made it so powerful and disconcerting. He had shown us a hand that was both a physical metonym for his decaying, helpless body and a potentially dangerousweapon.Without the pre-existing knowledge of Venkateswarlu’s ability to pay

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the debt, it may also have been effective. The deformed hand was a powerfulsymbol, but it was also something more tangible than that. As the healthy sonof a deformed leprosy patient put it: ‘No one wants to get hit by a patientwith a deformed hand. They aren’t soft like hands with fingers, they’re reallyhard, so they really hurt.’

People affected with leprosy exploit the ambiguity of their position – andtheir nuanced understanding of it – in their performance of begging and inconflict situations, using the hand, and what it represents to different peoplein different social spaces, to evoke both fear and compassion.11

Disguise

Away from begging, leprosy patients had to represent themselves in radicallydifferent ways in order to participate in other aspects of social life.Those whosuccessfully begged from shopkeepers, for example, later needed to relate tothem as customers.This required not the exposure demanded by begging, butpublic concealment of the signs of leprosy.

I turn here to the life history of a man with whom I spent time duringfieldwork, although aspects of his story were common to many in Ananda-puram. By caste, Kotaiah was a Sali (a socially middle-ranking but economi-cally poor caste in the region), and by background and initial occupation hewas a weaver. His family had started training him in the skill when he was achild.When he exhibited the first signs of leprosy in his early teens, his parentssent him for long-term treatment in a leprosy hospital. While there heretrained as a paramedic, acquiring skills that he later tried to market outsidethe hospital. He claimed however, that recognition of his leprosy had deterredthe public from visiting the small practice which he had established in a nearbylarge town, and his business foundered. His paramedical skills were of littleuse in his ‘native place’ (home locality), and since his leprosy disabilities ren-dered him unable to weave, he married and settled in Anandapuram, wherethere was a chance of work. After trying a number of jobs, by the time ofmy fieldwork Kotaiah was in his early 50s, and held a relatively senior cleri-cal position in a nearby leprosy NGO, charged with promoting income gen-eration programmes for those currently begging.

Although he had taken treatment for his disease, Kotaiah had sufferedmuscle wastage on the fingers of his left hand, and as a result the tips of hisfingers had been amputated, the remainder left permanently bent in whatlooked like a gripping posture. He also had deformities to his feet, which –on excursions outside the leprosy community where he lived – he kept hiddenin socks and shoes.

To prevent others from ‘reading’ his hand, he took care to keep it awayfrom public gaze. He would put it behind his back while shaking hands withhis (presentable) right hand,12 and concealed it under the table while eating;otherwise he simply concealed it in a large handkerchief.

In practical terms, this meant reorganizing the ways in which he orches-trated his bodily parts during routine aspects of daily life. He could not usehis right hand for carrying a bag in case circumstances demanded use of thathand, so he used a shoulder bag, kept in place with his handkerchief-covered

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left hand, and, if he needed to carry more than this, he took along anotherperson to assist him. It also meant that every departure from the villagebrought his body into ‘dysappearance’: an alien presence that preventedKotaiah from relaxing in the company of strangers.

Although nowadays he always managed to ‘pass’ (cf. Goffman 1963: 92-3),he remembered – and often recalled – an incident that had happened twentyyears previously, when he was asked to leave a ‘hotel’ (an inexpensive restau-rant) and he assumed that this was because his deformity might deter othercustomers. As a result of this, he went to a leprosy hospital and asked to havehis fingers cut off straight, ‘so they would look’, as he put it, ‘like they hadbeen cut off in a machinery accident’.A different type of deformity, as Kotaiahunderstood it, would suggest an alternative narrative that might still evokesympathy, but not the fear and rejection he associated with leprosy.While evi-dence of leprosy empowered the patient in begging contexts, the conversewas often true in other social situations.

Doctors persuaded Kotaiah not to go ahead with the operation, because hewould not be able to ride a bicycle or perform similar practical functions afterthe amputation. However, the story does illustrate the extent to which it isthe meanings attributed to bodily signs that are debilitating, as well as thephysical limitations they might impose. With disease comes an enhancedawareness of the body – or particular parts of the body – which, in othercontexts, remains largely invisible (Frank 1991: 87; Leder 1990).

The sharp contrast between situations in which deformities are disguisedand those in which they are purposefully emphasized shows how individuals’relationships with their bodies change radically according to context. In allcases, however, people are more aware of parts or attributes that differentiatedeformed bodies from those considered normal. While the ability to evokeresponses of fear by using one’s face and hands can be a rich source of ‘socialcapital’ (Bourdieu 1984: 114), at other times its effects are more likely to besocially debilitating.

In some ways the position of leprosy patients is comparable to that of low-caste groups who, as Mosse found in the case of Tamil Paraiyars, often face astark choice between the economic benefits of degrading jobs and hereditaryroles and enhancing their social status by eschewing those benefits (1999: 77).In Anandapuram, however, people had developed strategies for dealing withthis. By careful demarcation of different social spaces, those I worked withwere able to maintain a delicate balance between gaining economic advan-tage and managing their social status.

This enhanced bodily awareness separates those with leprosy from thosewith healthy bodies, for whom the body remains generally invisible. As thenext section shows, however, this explicit corporeal awareness also binds theleprosy sufferer to others with the disease in potentially useful ways.

The body collective

‘My first experience was that there was more love, which I didn’t get at home, and morehelp and affection from those people serving there. All the people living there had thesame kind of disease, so it was easier for us to become friends with each other … In the

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beginning, sometimes we cooked food separately, maybe we were a bit cautious. But aftera while we were talking, and gradually we became more friendly. Slowly, slowly, we beganto understand each other and started co-operating with each other.’

[S]uffering is based partially on the experience of isolation … pain and disease disruptcommunion with the natural and the social world, creating a lived solipsism. Whenanother consents to form one body even with the ill body – one in pain, contorted ordisabled – this exerts a healing force. (Leder 1990: 161).

In the first quotation above, abstracted from a life history interview I con-ducted in August 2000, Muniswamy was describing early experiences in themissionary-run leprosy hospital to which he was admitted after discoveringthat he had leprosy. As Leder’s analysis suggests, Muniswamy’s words highlightthe growing empathy that might exist between fellow sufferers on the onehand, and the gulf that excludes them from the rest of society on the other.While ill health might unmake the sufferer’s world, in certain contexts – likethis one – it also remakes it, providing what Kugelmann describes as ‘a wayof being in the world’ (1999: 1670).13

Scarry (1985) makes the additional point that pain can be near – suffered,perhaps, by the person sitting next to you – but that you will not neces-sarily be aware of it.This is not so, however, in a community literally createdin response to that particular suffering; where, in addition to pain being anintersubjective experience, its cause – leprosy – might also be inscribed, some-times very subtly, as a reminder of that pain. As the quotation from Ledermakes explicit, however, that pain might also be muted in the sharing of it.

My neighbour was a wife and mother of three children, ranging in agesbetween 5 and 11, and she had no fingers or toes. Her husband, whom shehad met while being treated at a leprosy hospital, had similar disabilities. Shetherefore relied on another neighbour (the daughter and wife of leprosypatients) to brush and plait her hair, and either her eldest son or her ageingmother cut vegetables, drew water, and ground spices for her. Informal supportnetworks of this kind existed throughout the village, the less disabled com-pensating for the physical limitations of those unable to perform the neces-sary tasks of everyday life. In a more formal sense, the elected village Eldersfrequently sought out able-bodied women from other leprosy communities as wives for leprosy-affected men who were otherwise unable to care forthemselves.

This form of ‘habitus’14 was especially noticeable during a World LeprosyDay outing to a mass meeting 400 kilometres south in Chennai that I attendedwith a small group from Anandapuram. The meeting had been organized bya state-wide association of leprosy patients, and Anandapuram people wereeager to use the event to campaign for improved pensions and other benefitsfor leprosy patients. On the suburban train to our location, we ran into anumber of leprosy-affected people from different communities. Although theyhad not met before, their mutually recognizable deformities indicated that they were going to the same destination and, without any exchange of words,they understood one another’s basic needs. I recorded the following observa-tions in my notebook at the end of the same day:

When we meet them again, [the two men] are eating at the far end of the railway plat-form – I notice that he’s using a spoon to eat his idli [steamed rice cake], and that Anand

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is supporting his water bottle for him while he drinks. Anand also wipes his face for himwith his towel when he’s finished eating, and screws the cap back on the bottle.

Later, I watch a couple of men sitting together, one with almost no hands. Every timehe wanted a beedi [a kind of cigarette] the other one took them out from his insidepocket for him, propped one into the tiny crevice between what was left of his fingerand thumb, and lit it. They carried on chatting and, when the smoker had finished, theother man threw it on the floor for him to stamp out.

When people with the same debilitating disease come together, my obser-vations suggest, the boundaries that tie particular body parts to an individualbody are broken down, external organs literally pooled and shared to commonadvantage.

The empathy that arose from shared experience was not only confined to those who actually had leprosy, however, as can be seen from an incident thatoccurred while I was conducting a house-to-house survey. I recorded in my fieldnotes:

I offered one woman an onion pakodi by holding the packet – they were wrapped in newspaper – towards her. She shook her head to refuse (as, I’ve learned, refusal is a cus-tomary response when first offered food. Acceptance is never immediate) and I pressedher to take some (as also seems to be customary), enlisting John for support. John [whowas assisting me] intervened by lifting the pakodi from the packet and pressing it intoher fingerless hand. What I hadn’t realized was that she was unable to pick up in the‘normal’ way and so – I’m assuming now – she declined to save awkwardness. John wasmuch better attuned to her needs and responded accordingly. She then moved the foodto her left hand – where she had some grip – and ate it.

A number of possibilities emerge in trying to account for the marked differences between our bodily responses to the situation. John, a healthy 30-year old who had grown up in a leprosy colony and whose parents haddisabilities comparable to those of the woman to whom we were speaking,understood the needs of those around him in ways that I did not. His behav-iour, as I interpreted it, was a clear example of the habitus I referred to above.That is to say, it was not a measured response to a particular situation, but aresponse embodied through his lifelong interaction with handicapped peoplein the community.

John’s reaction also suggests a well-developed ability to ‘other’ the self, anda resistance to any impermeable boundaries between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ inhis social setting.15 On the face of it, there are clear resonances with Roland’srather sweeping assertion that ‘Indians rarely think and feel in terms of anindependent, self-contained I-ness, but rather experience a constant “we-ness”in having the other in mind as intrinsically related to the self ’ (1988: 225).Applied to the case I have described, John’s ‘dividuality’ – set in relation tomy own more ‘individual’ response – is notable.

While Roland’s approach might have positive applications for the practiceof psychoanalysis, however, I remain sceptical about his assertion that SouthAsians have more interconnected ‘inner images’ of self and other than Euro-Americans. Orientalist implications aside, I would argue that there issomething more going on in the case I describe than the embodied mani-festation of general South Asian psychological characteristics: what Roland

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sees as the dominance of the ‘familial’ and ‘spiritual’ selves over the ‘indi-vidualized’ self (1988: 7-10). I knew other Indians from the same geographi-cal region and social backgrounds as the people of Anandapuram; those amongthem who lacked intensive, day-to-day experience of leprosy patients alsolacked the embodied empathy displayed by people like John. They may wellhave been likelier than Euro-Americans to conceive of the boundariesbetween themselves and actual leprosy sufferers as fluid and permeable.Nevertheless, they did not have the embodied knowledge – the habitus – thatallowed John’s kind of response to encounters with other leprosy-affectedpeople.

This suggests a rendering of personhood by the people of Anandapuramthat was particular to their unusual circumstances. Anandapuram, to a greaterextent than other villages in the area, was a close-knit and socially excludedcommunity whose members defined themselves in relation to the ‘outside’(bayata). Roland’s analysis also allows for this possibility of variation when heargues that the close identifications people make with their own families andcommunities enhance the perception of differences in other people (1988:226).

Furthermore, people in Anandapuram understood and actively worked torealize the potential of their collective leprosy deformities, a point that cameacross particularly clearly when I made a follow-up visit to the village in April2001. During the six months that I had been away, hand-painted signs hadappeared on the sides of public buildings where leprosy-affected peopleworked or received welfare benefits (such as the clinic and a central kitchenthat prepared meals for the elderly), proclaiming ‘Photography Strictly For-bidden. By Order.’

‘We were concerned’, the project co-ordinator – himself a leprosy patient– explained it to me, ‘after a group of local missionaries came to look aroundand took pictures. People thought that maybe they would use the pictures toraise money but not spend it on us, use it for themselves or for their ownprojects.’ A similar concern had previously been articulated by those beggingin Mumbai, who complained that people who brought them second-handclothes – ‘just rags, some of them!’ – took photographs and used them to raisefunds which they then kept for themselves. They had recognized in theirleprosy-deformed bodies ‘marketable selves’ (Featherstone 1991: 171), and theywere eager to ensure they were used only in ways that would benefit themdirectly. They had, in putting up signs, effectively copyrighted their bodies and the associated images of leprosy and had sent out a message that theybelonged to them and could not be used for purposes to which they had notconsented.

Conclusion

In focusing solely on those aspects of identity that relate to leprosy, this articlehas deliberately disregarded such features as gender, age, and the specific socio-cultural environments in which persons are embodied. I have done so despitethe fact that – as can be inferred from my description of Anandapuram – any

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or all of these might also be important in local people’s constructions of per-sonhood. My argument is not that leprosy overshadows other distinctions, butthat such a focus highlights how meanings attributed to the body as a wholemay change as persons move through a variety of social spaces.

Context, I have argued, is vital to understanding divergent notions of personhood. Busby’s focus on substantial aspects of the person led her to conclude that South Indian dividuals are both whole and permeable, at leastin terms of how they are gendered. The model of personhood presented bythe people of Anandapuram in the contexts described above was more oneof a person made up of separable bodily parts, suggesting that different aspectsof personhood may also be conceived through different registers.

The South Indian leprosy patient whom I encountered – the individualwho ‘detaches’ deformed parts by disguising them for routine social trans-actions while accentuating them for economic gain while begging – appearsto have more in common with the mosaically constructed person of Strathern’s Melanesia than the Malayali people whom Busby describes (Strathern 1988: 135; cf. Busby 1997: 274). The fit is not a precise one,however, since the notion of a mosaic implies self-containment of differenti-ated parts in ways that did not apply to the people with whom I worked.Rather, their exposed parts served as corporeal synecdoches, the cheyi (hand-and-arm) standing out from the body and representing something about thewhole person. Likewise, different parts certainly were qualitatively ordered –in different configurations at different times – but their relative importanceremained in relation to what they represented about the embodied person asa whole.

In addition, there were not predefined ways of experiencing or presentingthe body that always applied in every situation. Bodies could be experiencedand used as symbolic resources: as both objects and subjects; as differentiatedpractical instruments; and as aesthetic objects. When the leprosy patient cameinto contact with similarly deformed people, for instance, they became inter-twined, not through flows of substance (as was the case for Busby’s persons[1997: 273]) but through the literal sharing of body parts; an empathy createdby habitus; and the realization that as a community of the afflicted they couldsometimes contest power (Burkitt 1999: 6).

Furthermore – and this is where ethnosociological theory, in its raw state,remains wanting in relation to more phenomenological approaches – myobservations also demonstrate that people, as experiencing agents, realign theway in which they present and experience their bodies according to prag-matic concerns.The ‘ecstatic’ deformed body that evokes pity in the encounterbetween beggar and donor, ‘dys-appears’ (cf. Leder 1990) in the place wherefood is served, because here – if detected as leprous – it might evoke fear anddisgust.The leprosy patient lacks the power to define just how bodily symbolsare socially constructed and read, but if he knows what they mean to otherpeople, he can use his body accordingly.

In summary, then, I have argued that it is at times of dysfunction – whenthe subjective body is acutely and explicitly experienced – that culturally specific ideas about the body and about social practices more generally arethrown into sharp relief. I have also made the methodological case for closer

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observation and analysis of the body in action, since experiencing bodies – as I have demonstrated – can provide an informative window on social action.

NOTES

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the London Medical Anthropology Con-ference at the London School of Economics and Political Science in July 2001, and at theSocial Anthropology seminar series at Brunel University in November 2001. I am grateful forthe comments of Jonathan Parry, my discussant at the London Medical Conference, the anony-mous JRAI readers, and David Mosse, Ian Harper, and Damian Walter, all of whom read initialdrafts. The fieldwork on which this article draws was undertaken during October 1999 andNovember 2000, funded by the ESRC (Grant R00429924418).

1 Victor was a 60-year-old Brahman who had cut himself off from his wealthy family – toavoid the risk, as he saw it, of bringing shame upon them – after being diagnosed with leprosyforty years earlier. He had since trained and worked as a leprosy paramedic, but in the smallcommunity where he lived – not the main site of my fieldwork – there was no longer muchcall for his skills. Victor had clear views about his position that he wanted to share, and thequotations I use here are extracted from an intensive, two-day-long conversation about hisexperiences of leprosy. I use pseudonyms for all those mentioned in this article.

2 See also Inden & Nicholas (1977: 91), on the ‘gross’ and ‘subtle’ body, and Beck’s work onthe links between the corporeal body and less tangible attributes (1969), and the fluidity ofboundaries between the person and the cosmos (1976).

3 For further examples, see also Cohen’s work on Alzheimer’s disease in India (1998: 33 ff.),Daniel (1997), and the psychoanalytic work of Roland (1988) and Kakar (1982).

4 Statistics used in this section are taken from a survey I conducted in December 1999.5 Described locally as a panikirani sthalamu, literally ‘useless place’ (Brown 1903).6 The quotation is from the original bylaws of the Association.7 See Caplan (1999: 291) and Chaudhuri (1987: 5) for limited ethnographic evidence of this.8 Survival from smallpox is seen by some as a sign of mercy from the smallpox goddess Shitala

Mata, whose actions determined whether or not a victim of the disease survived. The marksleft by the disease thus demarcate a blessing from the goddess (Basu, Sezek & Ward 1979: xvii;Wise 1860: 238).

9 The Telugu word for hand (cheyi) also encompassed the rest of the arm, suggesting that thehand was not seen as a separate part in its own right. I use the term here in the Telugu sense,as the hand-and-arm.

10 These hats were modelled on those originally supplied by organized begging group leaders to their members. These days they are purchased individually from Anandapuram tailors.

11 Although the leprosy patients with whom I worked made little reference to ritual impu-rity – perhaps not surprisingly, since this would have suggested the possibility that they wereimpure – there is little doubt that non-patients made associations between the leper, ritual pollution, and notions of untouchability, as evidenced by Bruin’s work with leprosy patients inTamil Nadu (1996: 35-6). Consequently, it is possible that in certain interactions the people Idescribe are actively employing their capacities to pollute.

12 A greeting that he favoured above the more traditional ‘Namaskar’ greeting, which requiredboth hands.

13 A phrase with a long phenomenological genealogy. See, for example, Leder (1990: 21),following, among others, Merleau-Ponty (1962), who saw embodiment as the existential con-dition of possibility for culture and self (cf. Csordas 1994: 12).

14 Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is summarized by Shilling (1993: 129) as a socially consti-tuted system of cognitive and motivating structures which provide the individual with class-dependent, predisposed ways of relating to and categorizing situations. Formed in the contextof a people’s social locations, it inculcates in them a world-view based on and reconciled tothese positions. I use the term here to emphasize the importance of embodiment, although Irecognize (after Shilling [1993: 146] and Farnell [1994: 931]) that in assuming that people have

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corporeal trajectories assigned to them, Bourdieu’s formulation leaves insufficient space in whichembodied people can exercise agency.

15 I thank an anonymous JRAI reader for this suggestion.

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Déguisement, révélation et droits d’auteurs:désassembler le lépreux Sud-indien

Résumé

Cet article étudie les façons qu’ont les personnes défigurées physiquement par la lèpre dansle sud de l’Inde, de s’organiser, d’expérimenter et d’utiliser leurs corps de manières distinc-

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tives. Je pense qu’une telle enquête pourrait être nourrie par des approches de recherchesexistantes concernant la personne sud-asiatique, telles que celles qui émergent de laphénoménologie et de l’ethnosociologie. Inversement, je demande si l’analyse ethnographiquede ceux qui ont des corps dif-férents pourrait ouvrir de nouvelles voies de recherche etcomplémenter notre boîte à outils méthodologique déjà existante. Une focalisation sur desparties individualisées du corps est l’une des approches qui a émergé de cette dernièreenquête. En observant la façon dont les lépreux percevaient leur corps, en parlaient et lesutilisaient, dans des contextes radicalement différents – chez eux dans le monde rural deL’Andhra Pradesh et à l’extérieur en mendiant dans le Maharashtra urbain – je démontrecomment ils peuvent s’ordonner et/ou se dissocier eux-même des leurs différentes partiescorporelles, selon les espaces sociaux. Je montre aussi comment l’expérience vécue de la lèprepeut créer une communauté de victimes au sein de laquelle la conscience des parties indi-viduelles se dissout.

Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental & African Studies, Thornhaugh St., RussellSquare, London WCIV OXG. Jamesstaples@onetel.net.uk

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