The Sun Rises: A Shaman’s Chant, Ritual Exchange and Fertility in the Apatani Valley

At the centre of this study is a shaman’s chant performed during a three-week long feast in the eastern Himalayas. The book includes a translation of this 12-hour text chanted in Apatani, a Tibeto-Burman language, and a description of the events that surround it, especially ritual exchanges with ceremonial friends, in which fertility is celebrated. The shaman’s social role, performance and ritual language are also described. Although complex feasts, like this one among Apatanis, have been described in northeast India and upland Southeast Asia for more than a century, this is the first book to present a full translation of the accompanying chant and to integrate it into the interpretation of the social significance of the total event.

Stuart Blackburn, Ph.D. (1980) in Folklore and South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He has published several books on oral tradition and culture in India, including (with Michael Aram Tarr) Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859-2006 (Brill, 2008) and Himalayan Tribal Tales: Oral Tradition and Culture in the Apatani Valley (Brill, 2009).