Moved by Devtās: Embodied Mediation of Divine Agency in Western Himalayan Palanquin Rituals

Village deities in the Western Himalaya agentively participate in the everyday lives of their devotees. A primary form in which they do so is through their raths—portable wooden palanquins carried on the shoulders of male devotees. The raths are understood to embody the deities and manifest their will, which, devotees report, is communicated through the palanquins’ autonomous movement, to which the carriers’ bodies respond. In this paper, I explore the embodied socialization process through which male community members are trained and gradually integrated into this ritual performance. Drawing on scholarship on material religion and on two decades of ethnographic research in the region, I illustrate how this process unfolds in gradual stages—from early childhood games to full adult performative integration—during which practitioners learn to transform their bodies from active producers of choreographed movement to responsive conduits of what is experienced as divine agency.