Talk:Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (1940)
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Discussion for: Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (1940) • View • Links • Related changes
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Discussion
The three parts
The article is written from the first two parts, which the Wellcome Collection digitised (archive.org
b3135869x): part 1, The Santals and disease (1925), and part 2, Santal medicine
(1927). Part 3, How the Santals live (1940), is not cited. Jain and Tarafder's 1970 revival also
worked from the botanical content of parts 1–2.
Every cannabis statement in the article comes from parts 1–2. Whether part 3 carries further cannabis material is open.
Editorial treatment
Attribution of the ethnographic voice. Bodding was an outside observer — a Norwegian missionary recording Santal practice — and the disease beliefs, the bonga held to cause illness and the prescriptions are his transcription of what the Santals told him. The article reports them as Bodding's record throughout and never adopts them as statements of fact in the wiki's voice. That rule was previously written into the article itself; it is a note to editors, not content, so it lives here.
The 1970 paper as the reading of record for the medicinal uses. The diseases the gã̄jã prescriptions treat — epilepsy, convulsions and cramps, tongue paralysis, tetanus, convulsions with fever-delirium, sores, cough and colds — are given in the article as the readings of Jain and Tarafder, because their glossary is what maps Bodding's numbered prescriptions to named complaints. Bodding's own text gives the Santal disease name and an English rendering per entry; where the two differ, quote Bodding and attribute the gloss.
Page-precision. The prescription numbers (101, 103, 110, 111, 113, 123, 136, 173, 250, 251) and the pages they sit on (part 2, pp. 229, 231, 235–237, 241, 246, 264, 341) come from Bodding's own plant index. Whether each matches the prescription pages themselves is not established. A spot-check of the ten entries would settle it.
Terms that resemble cannabis vocabulary but do not denote cannabis
Recorded here because both will mislead the next person who searches the text, and because neither is cannabis content and so neither belongs in the article.
- sid. Bodding's term for the ojha initiation, which he derives from Sanskrit
siddhi in its sense of supernatural attainment. That is the same root that names the Bengali siddhi (bhang) preparation, but Bodding uses the word for the initiation and not for the drug. Part 1. Do not read an ojha initiation as a bhang reference.
- "wild hemp" (Santali bir son). A separate glossary entry, a fibre plant of the
sunn-hemp type, not Cannabis sativa. Part 2. Do not add it to the cannabis attestations.
Relation to the rest of the wiki
The article carried a closing section, "Significance for landrace documentation", which stated what the source contributes to the West Bengal material and placed it among "the cannabis traditions the cluster documents". That is the wiki describing its own coverage, and "cluster" is an internal grouping word rather than anything a reader can follow, so the section has been removed and its substance is kept here.
What the source gives the wiki:
- the Santal vernacular gã̄jã for Cannabis sativa, in a glossary matching some 300
medicinal plants to Linnaean binomials;
- cannabis as a compounded medicine, in the ten part 2 prescriptions;
- cannabis as an offering demanded in an ojha spirit-possession rite (part 1, p. 53) — an
attestation the plant-by-plant medicinal index does not capture, and the reason the séance passage is quoted in the article rather than summarised.
Two pages link here: Bengal District Gazetteers: Santal Parganas (1910) and Ganja. Neither is in the article's See also; adding the gazetteer in particular would be worth doing, since it is the sibling source for the same people.
Data hygiene
The hidden SMW block has been trimmed. It previously re-emitted the scalar bibliographic
properties that {{Infobox Historical Source}} already #sets from its own
parameters — source author, composition date, publication date, source language, publisher,
publication place, cannabis volume, cannabis pages, taxonomic significance, digital facsimile URL,
original held at — with values that did not match the infobox's. The effect was a set of
double-valued properties: Has publication date held "1925–1940, in three parts" from
the infobox plus "1925", "1927" and "1940" from the div; Has cannabis volume held
both "Vol. 10, parts 1–2 (Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal)" and "Parts 1–2". The div now
carries only the multi-valued documented-content properties the infobox does not emit, plus
Has source type. The infobox is the single source for the scalars; change a value
there, not here.
Two empty annotations removed. Has region documented and
Has variety described were present with no value. Has variety described
is correct as absent — Bodding records no variety. Has region documented is a real
gap and is an open question below.
Citation format. The refs on this page are raw inline refs, not CS1 templates. Wiki-wide
convention is CS1 ({{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}), so these should be migrated when
someone is next in the page. Three of the four Bodding refs are the same book differing only in
part and page range, which a single CS1 definition plus short page citations would handle better
than four near-identical full refs.
{{better source}} on the 1986 reprint. The Asiatic Society reprint of 1986 is stated
without a citation. The tag stays on the article until a catalogue record is found; WorldCat or
the Society's own list would settle it.
Has composition date is storing a wrong, precise date. The infobox parameter
composed reads "Recorded c. 1890–1925", and {{Infobox Historical Source}} feeds it
straight into Has composition date, which is Date-typed. SMW has coerced the string
to January 1890 — a month-precise value nobody asserted, and one that drops the 1925 end of
the range entirely. Read back on 22 September 2026 via action=browsebysubject; it
fails silently, with no error on the page. The template takes an optional composed_date
which wins over composed, so the fix is to add |composed_date =
(defined but empty) to suppress the annotation, or to give it a value the Date type can hold. The
prose range stays in composed either way. Not yet applied.
Infobox image has no alt text. image_caption is filled, image_alt
is empty. The template supports it. Alt text is not the caption repeated — it should describe the
cover.
Open questions
- The page title says (1940); the cannabis content is 1925 and 1927. The disambiguator takes
the date of the last part, which is the part not cited and the one with no cannabis material in evidence.(Bodding 1925–1940)or(1925)would each point at the work better. A move would need the two incoming links updated.
Has region documented— which region? Bodding's Santals were mainly in the
Santal Parganas, which is in modern Jharkhand, not West Bengal, and the one other source page that links here is the Santal Parganas gazetteer. The article is nonetheless written as West Bengal material and its See also points at Cannabis in West Bengal. Before a value is set, it needs settling whether this source is filed to the Santal Parganas, to West Bengal, or to both. Nothing has been asserted in the meantime.
Has source typevocabulary. This page sets "Ethnographic study"; another
source page sets "Ethnographic description". The property is Page-typed, so the two collect separately and neither collects the other. One of them should win.