A Holy Bazar: Music, Spirits and Spirit in Middle India (original French title : Un sacré Bazar - Musique, possession et ivresse en Inde centrale).

A Holy Bazar (“Un sacré bazar”) is the ethnographic chronicle of two days of ritual in Bastar, central India. The author draws the lively portraits of the main protagonists of the ritual - men, gods and ancestors -, presented in their interactions, as they appear in the ritual. By providing the data necessary to understand the social and religious system throughout the narrative, this book reconstructs, condensed into two days, the detours of a long ethnomusicological investigation, made up of misdirection and backtracking, in search of the meaning of the music at the heart of this ritual of possession. Thus, during the two intense days he takes us through, appear gradually the logic and dynamics of a system that is at once musical, ritual, social and cosmological. This book sheds new light - through the prism of music - on a widespread form of local Hinduism too often presented in India as "tribal animism". It contributes more broadly to the understanding of the relationships that so closely link music and trance-possession phenomena throughout the world. Finally, by comparing music and alcohol as substances, it shows how they act on men in a complementary way, so that drunkenness becomes a form of possession.
This publication was awarded the ICAS Book Prize 2023 (French Language Edition).