Animism in Southeast Asia
Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood
to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this
concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modernWestern naturalistic notions of human-environment relations.
Based on original ieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of
animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive
overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its
resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the
current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist
societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in
local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacriice and hierarchy and explores the
question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world
religion, and the state.
Shedding new light on Southeast Asian religious ethnographic research, the
book is a signiicant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization
of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.
Kaj Århem is emeritus professor in social anthropology at University of
Gothenburg, Sweden. His previously published books include: Makuna: Portrait
of an Amazonian People (1998); Ethnographic Puzzles (2000) and The Katu
Village (2010).
Guido Sprenger is professor at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg
University, Germany. He has previously published on ritual, exchange, humanenvironment relations, kinship and social morphology, cultural identity, and
sexuality.
Myanmar
1
Laos
4
2
es
pin
ilip
Ph
Thailand
Cambodia
Vietnam
3
Malaysia
5
7
Indo
nesi
N
0
9
500 km
12
8
a
10
13
11
Papua New Guinea
6
1 000 km
1. Rmeet (Chapt. 4)
2. Katu (Chapts 5, 6)
3. Chewong (Chapt. 3)
4. Ifugao (Chapt. 7)
5. Kelabit (Chapts 9, 10)
6. Bentian (Chapt. 8)
7. Toraja (Chapt. 1)
8. Bugis (Chapt. 1)
9. Sasak (Lombok) (Chapt. 12)
10. Bima (Sumbawa); Nage (Flores) (Chapt. 13)
11. Alor;Atoni, Makassi, Naueti (Timor) (Chapt. 13)
12. Huaulu (Seram) (Chapt. 11)
13. Banda Eli (Kei Islands) (Chapt. 11)
Figure 1 Southeast Asia showing the distribution of ethnic groups and localities described
or discussed in the book.
Animism in Southeast Asia
Edited by
Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger
With an End Comment by Tim Ingold
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Selection and editorial matter: Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger; individual chapters:
the contributors.
The right of the editors to be identiied as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identiication and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Animism in Southeast Asia / edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger
pages cm. — (Routledge contemporary Southeast Asia series ; 77)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Animism—Southeast Asia. 2. Ethnology—Southeast Asia. 3. Southeast Asia—Religious life
and customs. I. Århem, Kaj, editor. II. Sprenger, Guido, editor. III. Howell, Signe. Seeing and
knowing. Container of (work):
GN471.A54 2016
306.60959—dc23
ISBN: 978-0-415-71379-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66028-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
2015022435
Contents
Lists of igures and table
Preface and acknowledgements
vii
ix
Part I
Introductory
1 Southeast Asian animism in context
3
K A j Å R HE M
2 Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
31
G U I D O S P RE NGE R
Part II
Case studies – mainland and the philippines
3 Seeing and knowing: Metamorphosis and the fragility of
species in Chewong animistic ontology
55
S I G N E HOWE L L
4 Graded personhood: Human and non-human
actors in the Southeast Asian uplands
73
G U I D O S P RE NGE R
5 Animism and the hunter’s Dilemma: Hunting, sacriice
and asymmetric exchange among the Katu of Vietnam
91
K A j Å RHE M
6 Wrestling with spirits, escaping the state: Animist ecology
and settlement policy in the central annamite cordillera
N I K O L AS ÅRHE M
114
vi
Contents
7 Actualizing spirits: Ifugao animism as onto-praxis
138
j O N HE NRI K Z I E GL E R RE MME
Part III
Case studies – insular Southeast Asia
8 Relatedness and alterity in bentian human-spirit relations
157
K E N NE T H S I L L ANDE R
9 The dynamics of the cosmic conversation: Beliefs about
spirits among the kelabit and penan of the upper
baram river, Sarawak
181
M O N I CA jANOWS KI
10 Animism and anxiety: Religious conversion
among the kelabit of Sarawak
205
M AT T HE W H. AMS T E R
11 Boundaries of humanity: Non-human others and
animist ontology in Eastern Indonesia
219
T I MO KAART I NE N
12 Gods and spirits in the wetu telu Religion of Lombok
236
S V E N CE DE RROT H
13 Impaling spirit: Three categories of ontological
domain in Eastern Indonesia
257
D AVI D HI CKS
Part IV
Concluding
14 Southeast-Asian animism: A dialogue with amerindian
perspectivism
279
K A j ÅRHE M
15 End comment: To conclude in the spirit of rebirth,
or, a note on animic anthropo-ontogenesis
302
T I M I NGOL D
Notes on contributors
Index
311
315
Lists of igures and table
Figures
1
5.1
6.1
6.2
6.3
14.1
Southeast Asia showing the distribution of ethnic groups
and localities described or discussed in the book.
The dual igure of the Katu Animal Master.
The Mraang basin in the northern part of the A’vuong
commune (Tay Giang district, Quang Nam province).
The map shows villages and settlement in 2004.
The distribution of pre-war village territories in the
Mraang basin and the effects of the 1975 resettlement
campaign (FCSP) in the area.
The return of the Dövil and A’urr groups to the upper
Mraang basin and ensuing settlement moves 1988–2010.
The spectrum of possession.
x
100
117
119
123
294
Table
13.1 The seven narratives: motifs, occurrences and frequencies.
268
Preface and acknowledgements
This volume is the result of a panel with the same name that we organized at
the 6th conference of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies
(EuroSEAS) in Gothenburg, Sweden, August 26–28, 2010. The book has taken
a long time to complete; several important works relevant to our topic were published or came to our notice in the passing years, and we have tried, as far as
possible, to take account of these works – particularly in the two introductory
chapters. Of particular signiicance in this respect was the publication in English
of Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (2013). We felt that it was
necessary for us to relate to Descola’s book and, in particular, discuss his notion
of analogism since it bears directly on our topic – animism in its prototypical
Southeast Asian form. This is done in the introductory part of the volume, especially in Chapter 1.
Our thanks go, irst and foremost, to all the contributors to this volume for
their patience and unwavering trust that the volume would eventually be completed. We also want to express our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers
who helped us to develop important themes in the introductory and concluding
parts of the book – thus providing a frame around the case studies – and, at Routledge, to Dorothea Schaefter, who irst approved our book proposal, and Jillian
Morrison, Rebecca Lawrence and Sophie Iddamalgoda for their support, lexibility and encouragement throughout the project. Finally, we would like to thank
Felix Bregulla who helped in the inal stages of preparing the manuscript.
Kaj Århem
Guido Sprenger
Part 1
Introductory
2
Dimensions of animism in
Southeast Asia
Guido Sprenger
Generalizing about animism in Southeast Asia is a dificult enterprise,1 given
the notorious diversity of cultural representations and social institutions in the
region. However, the islands and the mainland areas which were shaped by
external, mostly maritime trade, oscillating power centres and overlapping
waves of religious inluence are markedly different from the stateless societies of
Melanesia and Australia, the expansive apparatus of the Chinese empire and the
Hinduist sphere of India. Therefore, looking for commonalities uniting the region
might be a fertile undertaking. In the irst part of this introduction, Kaj Århem
proposes a continuum of general features of Southeast Asian animism, setting it
within a global comparative framework of cosmologies and ontologies. I will, in
the second part, undertake a complementary effort. I will try to turn diversity into
an asset by approaching Southeast Asian sociality as being based on the dynamic
production of alterities. Within this dynamic, certain dimensions stand out which
are correlated with each other and might allow a comparative description of case
studies in the region. I am thus proposing a toolkit of analytical terms which might
help to systematize the differences deining the region.
A few remarks on the history of the term should lead up to this effort. On several
levels, the original concept of animism was informed by the Western distinction
of mind and matter. Edward Burnett Tylor, deining religion as ‘belief in spiritual
beings’, initially conceived animism as the foundational concept of all religion, the
principle which separated it from materialism (Tylor 1958: 86, Stringer 2013: 65).
This stress on spirit and matter as hallmarks of an ontological divide is reproduced
by Tylor’s intellectualist approach which considers the evolution of religion mostly
as a result of observation and thought. This suggested a separation of animism
as philosophy of nature and religion, which was elaborated by Cornelius Peter
Tiele (1873). Tiele taught at Leiden University and had an immediate inluence on
Georg A. Wilken, who held the chair for studies of the ‘Indian Archipelago’ and
authored the irst comprehensive volume on animism in (Dutch) Southeast Asia
(Wilken 1884–1885). The mind-body distinction also shaped Albert C. Kruijt’s
subsequent account on the same topic (1906), and Tylor’s intellectualism lived on
in Anton Nieuwenhuis’ proposition, based on Dayak data, that ‘soul’ was merely
a place holder for an unresolved problem, comparable to the ‘black boxes’ of the
natural sciences (Nieuwenhuis 1918: 65). It is curious how the current debate on
32
Guido Sprenger
animism seems to mirror these earlier approaches, by focusing on practice instead
of thought, and on body instead of soul (Descola 2011, Ingold 2006, this volume,
Viveiros de Castro 2007). This seeming reversal indicates the dificulties of dealing with ontologies which do away with the mind-body distinction2 altogether.
If animism is not informed by the mind-body dichotomy, the question arises,
which other distinctions are pertinent for its Southeast Asian forms? Animism
denotes a ield of alterity which concerns social relations between living human
beings and speciic others like spirits and life-forces. This ield of alterity is
situated within a multitude of other types of alterity that make up Southeast Asian
diversity, like states, ethnicities, livelihoods, languages, centres and peripheries
and, most notably in this context, religion. Religion most prominently appears
in the form of so-called world religions, or rather, transcultural religions, that
have been variously localized in Southeast Asia. Theravada Buddhism, Chinese
cosmologies, Islam, Christianity and certain forms of Hinduism all claim to be
majority religions in certain areas in the region.
Everywhere, however, these dominant ideologies coexist with systems of
animist relationships. This occurs in two forms: irst, as groups who do not identify
with transcultural religions at all, in particular in the highlands of the mainland,
in inner Borneo, Eastern Indonesia, and upland Philippines; second, as a concern
with life-forces and spirits which runs below, or besides, or within the seemingly
dominant world religion in place. The question how these two ields, world religion
and animism, are interrelated, has produced a massive literature, concurrent with
the debate in Southeast Asia itself. Forms of this coexistence range from unrelected
complementary practices to strongly debated discourses about proper cosmology
and ritual (e.g., Endres/Lauser 2011, Gottowik 2014, Horstmann/Reuter 2013). In
regard to the second form, the term animism survived, albeit with little theoretical
amibition, in Southeast Asian studies well into modern and even post-modern
anthropology (e.g., Condominas 1975: 257, Geertz 1964, Ong 1988: 30, Spiro
1967: 241–42). This makes the limited engagement of Southeast Asianists in the
current debate, as mentioned by Århem above, all the more surprising.
However, as animism is mostly practical, its coexistence with world religions
is not by necessity a contradiction. Animism is not a belief system separate
from the hands-on practices of everyday life, nor different from knowledge
(Fox 1987: 524). Animism covers doubt as much as belief, guesswork and experimentation, as much as tradition and convention. I take the term animism therefore
as shorthand for animist relationships, which contingently crystallize into moreor-less stable cosmologies.
Animism has thus proven to be tenacious, as the relationships cultivated in
animist rituals and discourses are often constitutive of sociality as such. This is
true for modern contexts as well. While states and cities do not igure prominently
in the present volume, spirits and potencies play a crucial role in these settings
(e.g., Chambert-Loir/Reid 2002, Platenkamp 2010, Holt 2009, Van Esterik 1982).
While urban spaces are replete with spiritual agencies (Goh 2011, johnson 2012,
2014), even in rural areas, important local spirits are said to originate in faraway
historical kingdoms (Rhum 1994, Tsing 1993).
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
33
Such alterities at the core of sociality – of spirits and humans, locals and
foreigners – are also present in the concepts of heterogeneous origin held by many
Southeast Asian communities, which deine themselves as composed of autochthonous and immigrant people (Sahlins 2008). This accommodates ‘multicosmological’ societies, in which cultural difference itself produces spirits (Long 2010).
Constitutive alterity also speciies the conditions for the adoption of extrinsic
cosmological concepts, like transcultural religions, as Benjamin has argued for
Malay Islam (Benjamin 1979, see also Aragon 2000, MacDonald 1992).
Other types of alterity, like classes, or centres and peripheries, equally provide
the context for animist relationships. In a uniied cosmos, these various alterities
intersect or serve as models for each other. This produces considerable variation
even within groups or categories of people, while at the same time certain ideas and
practices – most notably notions of potency and spirits – spread across boundaries,
thus enabling communication. Therefore, animism – which is usually thought to
be mostly local in nature – provides linkages between conventional intra-regional
distinctions like upland and lowland or insular and mainland Southeast Asia
(e.g., Benjamin 1979, Durrenberger/Tannenbaum 1989, Endicott 1979: 26–27,
O’Connor 2003, Platenkamp 2007). Therefore, the use of ethnonyms or country
names in the following remarks thus does not ascribe exclusive or even deining
representations to these groups, but rather indicates the conditions under which
data were collected.
Analytical dimensions which outline the productive principles of animist
relations would, therefore, enable us to address various scales of analysis: events,
actors, communities, ethnically or locally deined groups, as well as transcultural
or region-wide practices and ideas. I propose to analyze such ways of reproducing
and relating alterities by three dimensions, which help to grasp their local
variations: exchange, accessibility to the senses, and hierarchy.
Exchange
As the ethnography of Southeast Asia, including numerous contributions to this
volume, demonstrates, the notion of exchange has been crucial for understanding
the region (Barraud/Platenkamp 1990, Fox 1980, Errington 1989, josselin de jong
1983). Most conspicuously, societies with asymmetric marriage alliance, ranging
from Myanmar and northeast India (Leach 2001) down the Annamese Cordillera
to Eastern Indonesia (van Wouden 1968) highlight the dominant role of exchange
in the reproduction of socio-cosmic orders. In societies like Tanebar Evav and
Laboya in Eastern Indonesia (Barraud 1990b, Geirnaert 2002) or Rmeet and Katu
on the mainland (Århem, Sprenger, both this volume), matrimonial exchange is
indissolubly connected to exchange relations with ancestors and spirits. Thus, for
these societies, stopping to venerate the ancestors would equal stopping to marry.
The ‘low of life’ characteristic for Southeast Asian animism is generated through
such kinship relations (Fox 1980, 1987). As exchange is possible only between
actors who are different, exchanging often creates these differences even between
nominally equal or similar groups – for example, by deining them as (superior)
34
Guido Sprenger
givers or (inferior) receivers of brides or valuables. It thus constitutes asymmetries and alterities as the base of social life.
However, I argue that an exchange paradigm of sociality does not only apply to
societies of what Errington (1989) has called the ‘exchange archipelago’ or similar
ones on the mainland. Exchange here is understood in an encompassing sense, not
just as reciprocity, where two parties exchange gifts and recognize them as returns,
but as the circulation of material and immaterial items and services that create and
sustain particular socio-cosmic relationships (Barraud e.a. 1994, Gregory 1980,
Mauss 1974). Gift giving, ceremonial exchange, mutual sharing and trade all are
differentiated, but related types of relationships reproducing alterities. Indeed, the
classical Maussian notion of the gift as creating social wholes would not work if
exchange was restricted to reciprocity. The imbalance of gifts is actually favourable to the integration of such wholes, as Lévi-Strauss’ (1967) understanding of
asymmetric alliance has demonstrated. But while Lévi-Strauss still focuses on the
contractual aspects of Mauss’ model, more recent approaches have stressed the
uncertainty of each act of giving, without losing sight of its constitutive social
character (e.g., Caillé 2000, Därmann 2010). Such openness and risk account for
the non-reciprocal elements of sharing, including them into the notion of exchange
(pace Willerslev 2007: 45–6).
The inclusion of non-humans into exchange networks allows us to address the
conspicuous difference in the role of animals in hunting and sacriice. As Århem
has observed in the irst part of this introduction, while the new animism debate
has mostly focused on relations between hunters and prey, many Southeast Asians
see themselves as agriculturalists which raise animals for sacriice. As Descola
(2011, Chapter 15) has pointed out, venatic animism and sacriice are based on a
different notion of transfer. In venatic animism, human beings take animal lives,
and (the spirits of) animals take human lives in return. Human illness and death is
seen as counter-predation or counter-sharing. Sacriice, however, is usually understood differently. Spirits attempt to take human lives, but what they receive instead
are the lives of domesticated animals. Thus, while animals appear as humans in
hunting animism because they see each other as human beings (Viveiros de Castro
1998), sacriicial victims are like humans because they can replace them in the
confrontation with spirits. The principle of replacement thus separates sacriice
from hunting, implying a hierarchy between humans and animals mostly absent
from hunting animism (see also Lévi-Strauss 1973, Chapter 8). The primacy of
domestic animals in sacriice might be a major reason why classiications and
ritual rules concerning wild animals are modelled upon those for domestic ones
(Tambiah 1985). Many sacriicial rituals thus assume the form of more or less
asymmetrical exchange (Howell 1996: 21).
This correlation of hunting on the one hand and agriculture and animal
husbandry on the other with distinct forms of relations with non-human beings
could easily lead to the conclusion that the differences in cosmological ideas arise
from differences in livelihood. For two reasons, I argue against such a materialist
determinism. First, many societies practicing venatic animism also cultivate plants,
including the Amazonian Achuar (Descola 1996a). However, the Achuar conceive
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
35
of their relationships with manioc in terms of mutual predation. Human beings
feed upon manioc, while the plants draw blood from humans. Hunting animism
thus encompasses relationships with plants, while in contrast, in many Southeast
Asian societies, sacriicial animism encompasses hunting (e.g., Ellen 1996). The
notion of replacement seems even present in societies without domestic animals,
as, for example, among Malaysian Orang Asli who sacriice their own blood to
appease the thunder god (Endicott 1979: 156–159, Needham 1963, see also Valeri
1994). It is thus a matter of how a particular society deines its own constitutive
relationships, more than how they produce their livelihood in material terms.
This leads to the second, more pertinent argument regarding exchange.
Much of classical economic anthropology – and economic theory in general –
separates the production of goods from their distribution and exchange, taking
the irst as a condition for the latter. This distinction implies that production is
a relation between persons and things (i.e. resources) while exchange is a relation among persons. However, in many subsistence-based societies in Southeast
Asia, what seems to be production is in fact understood as a kind of gift exchange
or circulation. Humans socially engage with the – sometimes ancestral – spirit
owners of the rice, the ground or the forest animals, in order to safely acquire
food. In particular the production of stable crops hinges upon successful relations
with the spirits (Walker 1994, in particular Terwiel 1994, Sprenger 2006a). Even
gathering – an important subsidy of diet among many agriculturalists – involves
entering the domains of harmful spirits, which force people into exchange
relationships that might demand a sacriice. Small amounts of food, tobacco,
libations, which are constantly left for the spirits, bear testimony to the pervasive
and everyday character of such exchanges.
However, I do not propose some kind of strict cultural determinism either. The
material qualities of the non-human beings involved do shape relations with them
as well (see Latour 2000). Thus, it seems, while hunters like the Chewong (Howell,
1984, this volume), on the one hand, differentiate between relations among humans
and those between humans and non-humans by applying ‘cosmo-rules’ to the cooking of food, self-identiied agriculturalists, on the other hand, tend to express their
human-to-non-human sociality in terms of place and space, in particular through
the fertility of the land (Kammerer/Tannenbaum 2003, Allerton 2009).
Looking at livelihoods from the point of view of exchange reveals how
humans and non-humans are involved in a uniied, but internally differentiated
social cosmos. As relations between non-human and human beings become part
of an encompassing reproduction of life, it becomes decisive how relationships
are valorized in relation to each other and which relations are used as models
for others. For example, hunting relations might be shaped in terms of sacriice
(Sprenger, this volume) or in those of afinity (K. Århem, this volume).
This also pertains to productive relationships other than subsistence. Southeast
Asian societies have been involved in trade and relations with political centres for
many centuries. Markets, states and money have fed into the ways non-human
agency has been managed. In the present volume, both Kenneth Sillander and
Timo Kaartinen point out how the relations of alterity that link people with
36
Guido Sprenger
foreigners, like traders, and with spirits, match and thus reinforce each other on
a conceptual level (see also Gibson 1986: 194–200). Market and trade are often
characterized as a ield of cultural alterity which corresponds with the alterity
of the spirits, for example in the presence of spirit markets (Sprenger 2014). As
Dove (2011: 92) has argued for Borneo, rituals and their spiritual addressees shift
together with shifts in the economy, from a livelihood based on collecting to one
based on cash crops. Spyer has demonstrated how the exchange relations with the
spiritual ‘sea wives’ of the pearl divers on the Aru Islands in eastern Indonesia
enable exchange with the traders for whom the pearls are collected (Spyer 2000:
137, 143–5). Urban prosperity cults articulate another way of giving shape to relations with spirits via consumer goods and market success (Endres 2011). Trade is
thus located within the ield of exchanges among humans and between humans
and non-humans as linked modes of alterity. It is, therefore, itting that the ritual
language used to address spirits is often identiied as the language of ethnic others
or heavily relies on loanwords (Sillander, this volume).
The presence of trade is also hinted at in the asymmetry of value in exchange
with spirits. In the eastern Indonesian myths analyzed by David Hicks (this
volume), human beings frequently enter into reciprocal relationships with spirits.
However, the gifts transferred are usually not properly recognized. The human
heroes of these stories receive unassuming everyday items for their services in the
spirit world, which turn into valuables like gold and buffaloes only after their return
to the human world. Part of the plausibility of these myths, I suggest, originates
from the asymmetry of valorization experienced in trade, where inconspicuous
local products can be exchanged with outsiders for money and other valuables. As
Dove (2011: 249–50) and others have observed, some of the most desired trade
goods in Southeast Asia, like rubber, spices and pepper, were not used by their
producers. This parallels the ritual gifts for spirits which are often old, broken or
miniature specimens of valuables or everyday items (e.g., Erb 1996: 31).
Two principles of exchange emerge from this, the sacriicial principle of
replacement already mentioned, and the asymmetry of the gifts exchanged
between wife-givers and wife-takers. The latter is often couched in terms of
relations between autochthonous and foreign people and enabled through trade
goods as bridewealth. Thus, the exchange relations that connect human beings
with each other are based on alterity, similar to their relations with spirits, which
humans need for their livelihood. Exchange is thus the means by which alterity is
constantly produced as the base of sociality (see Därmann 2010, Moebius 2009).
Southeast Asian exchanges thus comprise an open system, as they relate potentially ininite chains of differences to local systems of reproduction, in the form
of just so many asymmetries. The alterity of the spirits is merely one version of
this process, to which diverse relations might become attached, spanning kinship,
trade and animals (see Viveiros de Castro 2007).
Therefore, when analyzing animism in Southeast Asia, we should direct our
attention to the dimension of exchange and query: What is the speciic alterity
on which it is based? How is it articulated through what is given and what is
received? Is the relationship supposed to be durable or temporary? Does it aim
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
37
at complementation, for example in order to produce life, or separation, which
protects life from being drawn away?
But such a grammar of exchange is not only a language of relating, but at the
same time a language of being. At this point, the question who is exchanging and
how these beings are constituted through their relationships becomes crucial.
Personhood and the Accessibility to the Senses
Being is often a matter of sensing, and in Southeast Asia, spirits are usually
deined by the way they are being detected. The following section explores their
accessibility to the senses, as the second dimension of analysis. Before doing
so, I need to address two related issues, personhood and the question why some
Southeast Asian concepts sometimes designate impersonal life-forces and sometimes persons, an issue mentioned by Århem above. The range thus runs from
the concepts which Anderson (1972) has discussed as ‘power’ or Fox (1987) as
‘immanence of life’, to rather concrete, even physical beings. Examples of such
concepts are semangat among Malay (Cuisinier 1951, Endicott 1970), ruwai
among Chewong (Howell, this volume), lulik on Timor (Bovensiepen 2014) and
lennawa among Ilongot (Remme, this volume) – all terms denoting impersonal
life-forces, personal souls or personalized spirits in different contexts.
As Benjamin (1979) has shown in a brilliant comparative article, the ixedness
of souls and the dangerous and sacred unboundedness of spirits provides the central axis by which animist relationships can be analyzed within and across cultural
boundaries in Southeast Asia. The distribution of traits of personhood, like bodies,
agency, visibility etc. and the stability of the relationships between these traits
is a central concern in these cosmologies. As such, it has drawn the attention of
numerous previous scholars. Albert C. Kruijt, in his early account (1906) shaped
by his own protestant background, misleadingly assumed a deep conceptual gap
between the impersonal life force (‘soul stuff’) and the personalized soul which
emerges after death (see also Aragon 2000: 163–5). Endicott (1970) has argued
that the classiication as well as the degree of boundedness of spirits corresponds
with the features of a more general classiication system. A less bounded category, therefore, is represented by a less clearly deined spirit. While the idea
that the boundedness of categories follows particular rules across a classiication
system is plausible, the assumption that a taxonomy of spirits and a classiication
of other categories simply match is less so. Endicott, after all, assumes that souls,
spirits and potencies are representations or metaphors (ibid. 75). However, for
Malay and other Southeast Asians, spirits and life-forces are beings in their own
right, deined by their own rules and relationships. Therefore, there is no clear
correspondence between spirit taxonomies and other classiications, even though
relationship models move from one domain to another, as Sillander (this volume)
has demonstrated.
Tsintjilonis (2004) attempts at solving the seeming contradiction between the
processual nature of spiritual forces and their stable emergent forms by describing
Toraja cosmology as a complementation of animic and totemic elements. While
38
Guido Sprenger
life as a process is animic in Ingold’s (2000) sense – all beings emerge from
interactions with each other, based on a low of life – its hypostatized forms are
totemic in the sense of early Descola (1996b). The essential differences of the
bodies of people of different class are associated with other beings and thus form
ontologically separate totemic classes which emerge from a differentiated distribution of life force (see above). However, as Kaartinen (this volume) argues, the
differentiation is not so much one of beings but of human-spirit relationships.
Consequently, I will add, the question of the boundedness, concreteness and
accessibility to the senses of a non-human being is primarily a matter of relationships, and not so much of essence (see Bird-David 1999). How, then, can we
analyse the processes which shape these relationships?
The issue of sacriicial replacement already touched upon the relation between
personhood and exchange. Considering personhood from the angle of exchange
has produced important insights into how social action and its subjects are understood in Southeast Asia (e.g., Barraud 1990a, Platenkamp 2010). In this view,
the various aspects or components of personhood are constituted by exchange
and circulation between humans and non-humans (Marriott 1976, Strathern
1988). The word aspect describes the constitution of Southeast Asian personhood
perhaps better than component, as it suggests various sides of a person, like faces
of a crystal, which come into being because they are directed to something other
than the person – a relationship that creates the respective aspect. As Sillander
(this volume) observes for the Bentian, the concept of the person corresponds with
the multiplicity of relations. Human beings thus appear as temporary hypostases
of cycles of reproduction which outlast human lifespans.
This becomes particularly obvious in mortuary rites, which are of central
importance for many Southeast Asian societies. Often, these rituals stress the
disassembling of persons through exchanges, secondary funerals and so on.
A typical case is the Laboya of Sumba, where the dead differentiate into a name,
which sustains its social group, and liquid matter, which turns into fertilizing
rain, life-giving but undifferentiated in terms of personhood (Geirnaert 2002).
Substances, objects, powers travel along particular relationships within a sociocosmic space and temporarily coagulate to form human persons.
The relational character of personhood helps understanding the diverse appearances of spirits and non-human forces in Southeast Asia. If exchanges are seen as
risky and systems as tentative, then the persons and forces which emerge as actors
in the course of the exchanges will show various degrees of agency and boundedness, ranging from concrete person to abstract force. This is what I call graded
personhood (Sprenger, this volume). The question which relationships are possible with spirits and which form these beings assume are therefore immediately
related. One way to approach this issue is by looking at the manner spirits and
spiritual forces are experienced, that is, how they are accessible to the senses.
The Southeast Asian ethnography suggests that visibility is the main feature that
differentiates spirits and humans. Spirits, as many Southeast Asians are reported
saying, are invisible, and some societies even tell stories how humans and spirits
separated after living together before (Schefold 1990: 291, Tooker 2012: 100).
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
39
However, scanning the ethnographic material reveals that this is only partially
true. Rather the sensual accessibility of spirits is selective and often depends on
their own agency. The popular Thai story about Nang Nak tells about a young man
returning from war who does not realize that his wife has died during his absence,
as she keeps performing all the tasks of a housewife (McDaniel 2011). Stories like
those analyzed by Hicks (this volume) tell about humans touching, healing and
marrying spirits. Spirits might also appear as shadows or relections (Kaartinen,
this volume) or reveal themselves in dreams and during trances. Ominous events
like the birdsong omens described by janowski or Amster (both this volume) are
forms of selective sensual communication by spirits.
Visibility is thus merely the dominant indicator of accessibility to the senses.
It is not a stable ontological given but a mode of relating, sometimes symmetric, sometimes asymmetric. Platenkamp, in an important analysis of visibility in
Southeast Asia, observes that ‘to be visually acknowledged by other people and
spiritual beings is a precondition of human existence and a fundamental dimension
of social life’ (2006: 80, original italics). Spirits are not only invisible, ‘what – or
how – they see is not identical to what people see’ (Sillander, this volume). As
Howell elaborates in her chapter, for the Chewong a particular quality of the eyes
determines how the beings of the world appear to the beholder. Stories about
human beings marrying non-humans also demonstrate that vision is the sense that
determines the relationship. In the Pura myth collected by Rodemeier (2009) and
analyzed by Hicks (this volume), a young woman destined to marry a ish spirit
is able to see the smoke from the spirits’ swiddens, that is, she realizes that spirits
socialize space in the forest like humans do. Later, the girl and her husband produce a ish-like child. But the afinal relationship with the spirit world is terminated when the girl’s mother, of all things, plucks out one of her grandchild’s eyes.
The last example suggests that differentiated accessibility to the senses
indicates social distance. McKinley (1976) argues that tribal Southeast Asians
imagine their cosmology as continuous, connecting the spirit realms with those
of humans. Therefore, even distant human neighbours tend to be seen as spirits,
ordered in a gradual transition from humanity to non-humanity. Such differences
are systematically acknowledged when people who deine themselves as farmers see both markets (Sprenger 2014) and hunter-gatherers as close to the spirit
domain. Agriculturalists of Thailand and Laos called the hunting and gathering
Mrabri ‘spirits of the yellow leaves’ (Bernatzik 1941, Trier 2008). Not only are
Mrabri, like spirits, rarely seen, their practices of producing persons might be
quite incompatible with what their neighbours accept as sociality (see Praet 2014).
Thus, material and sensual qualities are not essential givens preceding communication, but emerge in relationships. In Ingold’s terms, perception is a movement
out into the environment, towards immediate interaction with other beings (Ingold
2000: 18). The sensual accessibility of spirits is thus a function of the relationship
they establish with their human counterparts. Among Tobelo in Halmahera, for
example, someone seeing or otherwise perceiving a spirit enters into a special
relationship with it, often leading to illness and death (Platenkamp 2006: 83, see
also Formoso 1998).
40
Guido Sprenger
In those cases where amorphous life forces and the concrete personiication of
spirits coexist within the same conceptual framework, we can think of the low
of life as a potential of hypostasis or crystallization, similar to conceptions of
space which encompass boundedness as well as diffusion (Endicott 1970: 33–35,
Tooker 2012). The relationship between humans and spirits thus also conditions
the material, or rather, sensual qualities of things, as in the differing appearance
of the gifts from spirits, mentioned above. What is more, human actors often provide sensual forms to non-humans in order to facilitate communication with them:
shrines and bodies of wood, clay, stone (Cederroth, this volume) or other materials, to be addressed or fed during ritual. Communicative devices like artefacts and
sacriices not only materialize relationships with spirits, but usually result from
the prospering of the low of life themselves, in particular crops and animals, but
also trade. Thus, they evidence a process by which spirits and life-forces become
increasingly material, bounded and differentiated. For addressing the spirits, the
abundance of rice is transformed into portions, often clearly differentiated on an
offering tray into separate little heaps. Offerings are named or additional, speciic
ingredients are added. Sacriicial victims are cut up, their body parts differentially
valorized and distributed to different actors (Howell 1996).
Thereby, a language of things and gifts often provides shapeless, disembodied
spirits with concrete forms (Ladwig 2011, 2012). The gifts themselves embody
the principle of differentiation, and thereby involve the recipients in the same
process. This implies that the concrete form of the beings involved emerges from
the process of relating them to each other.
This communication thus might operate on different levels with the same effect:
It channels amorphous life force, personalizes a spirit, or opens up a spirit towards
human sociality. This is highlighted by Howell (this volume). Differentiation is
the condition for a cosmology of humans and non-humans to exist in the irst place
(see Bovensiepen 2014). After the offering, after the ritual, the non-human agents
might dissolve again, waiting for receiving concreteness and differentiation in the
next interaction. At the same time, both the asymmetry of the exchange principle
and sensual differentiation enable the elaboration of hierarchies. It is not just the
intensity of communication, which determines concreteness. Communication is
also shaped by hierarchical relations.
Hierarchy
As Århem has argued above, hierarchy is a constitutive feature of animism in
Southeast Asia. Other than most regions that the current animism debate focuses
on, Southeast Asia has a long history of political centres, endowed with military
might, cultural splendour and trade connections outside of the region. Within
and around these centres, hierarchies of power and status took shape, which are
articulated through emboxed spirit cults (Tambiah 1985, Tanabe 1988). These
hierarchical relations shaped the lives and identities even of hunters and gatherers
(Benjamin 1985). As Nikolas Århem’s chapter makes clear, the state also plays into
the way spirit relationships are recognized (see also Jonsson 2012, Kwon 2008).
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
41
But the presence of states is not simply the model or condition for the importance
of hierarchy. While political centres were notoriously unstable, the differentiation
between centre and periphery provided another common idiom of hierarchization,
be it as upland and lowland in the mainland, or coast and hinterland in insular Southeast Asia, but also as society and wilderness in general (Tooker 1996,
Sprenger 2008a, 2015). In addition, stratiication is not alien to societies with little
centralization or urbanization, like Tanimbar in the Moluccas (McKinnon 1995),
‘Maloh’ in Borneo (King 1985: 83) or Bugis and Toraja (see above).
This type of hierarchy is transitive and has absolute tops and bottoms. But
besides it, there are intransitive and relative hierarchies, in which each position
is subordinate and superior to speciic others at the same time. The classical
example is the superiority of wife-givers over wife-takers in a system of asymmetric marriage alliance (Parkin 1990; Sprenger 2010; K. Århem, Chapter 5, this
volume). In such systems, wife-givers appear as givers of life, health, the fertility
of the ields and the households. The deinition of their power as either economic,
ritual or political is a matter of emphasis, as Leach (2001) or Kirsch (1973) have
demonstrated.
This highlights that many hierarchies, including those of political power,
are, irst of all, hierarchies of value, which motivate actions, create priorities or
legitimize judgements (Iteanu 2009, Dumont 1986). Even societies with strong
egalitarian values profess a world-view structured by hierarchy. The Buid of
Mindoro, whose central social value derives from the equality of husband and
wife, are ‘obsessed with hierarchy’, as Gibson (1986: 185–8) notes, referring to
relations with animals, spirits and neighbouring groups. This consideration of
outsiders and non-humans renders Southeast Asian cosmologies as hierarchical. Relationships are based on asymmetric values, which inevitably results in
hierarchies, even without recognizable political or economic dimensions stabilizing them. Indeed, many value hierarchies are reversible according to context.
Thus it seems that equality is the balancing of hierarchies and a peculiar human
achievement within a hierarchical universe.
This sheds additional light on the shifting status of spirits and non-human
forces, addressed above. One somewhat atypical case might serve as a model.
The Ma’Betisék of the Malay Peninsula recognize two value levels in relation to
non-humans, in particular animals and plants. In the context of tulah, animals and
plants are food, while in the context of kemali – mostly during healing rituals –
they are persons and addressees of ritual gifts. Tulah denotes the curses which
human beings have put on potential food, thus keeping it from shape-shifting
and reversing its lot by predating upon humans. However, plants and animals
sometimes overcome their cursed state and cause illness among humans. In these
cases, they need to be addressed as persons in the kemali context (jahan-Karim
2004 [1981]: 8–10, 196).
The case is atypical, as the non-human actors are visible beings like in Amerindian
animisms. But it is still helpful for making my point, as the hierarchy in question
is not modelled upon hierarchies among humans, which are absent. The status of
plants and animals as food results from their subordination through superior ritual
42
Guido Sprenger
techniques. The hierarchy thus created is not permanent, but reversible. ‘Object
status’, in this system, can be described as the disregard of the agency of a being,
even when its recognition would be an option (Sillander, this volume).
This type of hierarchy is more stabilized in relationships between householders and domestic animals in their deining context, sacriice. Animals are part
of households, sometimes under the protection of a house spirit or a localized
spiritual force. They can represent the householders in their relations with spirits
or vice versa (e.g., Forth 1998: 25–6, Sprenger 2006b), but as they are deined as
edible in the context of sacriice, and householders as eaters, they do not stand on
equal terms with their human owners. The hierarchical principle enables householders to use animals as sacriice without running the danger of ritual autocannibalism (see Fausto 2007).
As Remme (this volume) argues, such shifts between person and object status
are a necessity for animist ontologies, as the productive and the destructive aspects
of non-human agency need to be negotiated properly. The graded personhood
of non-human beings, in particular souls and spirits, partially reveals degrees of
hierarchization. Some non-human beings in Southeast Asia are not non-persons
because they lack the ontological potential to be persons, but rather because their
situation does not allow them to talk back. Human beings recognize hierarchies by
treating others more person-like or less so, but they also recreate these hierarchies
by reformulating them through ritual. Ritual thus often serves the – temporary –
stabilization of ontological and communicative statuses.
This also addresses the case of the spirit owners of game, which can be seen as
the hypostasis of an entire category. As Tsintjilonis (2004: 437) has observed in
regard to the Toraja, the ancestors of rice, the animals etc. have intentionality and
a biography, but the individual plants and animals do not. The latter only have lifeforce, which assigns them to a lower order of the hierarchy, where they are subordinate to the human beings handling them. Only as a category do they achieve the
degree of complexity in their relation with human beings which constitutes their
status as persons (see also Sillander, this volume).
Hierarchy thus implies that the recognition of personhood is often a matter of
degree, and not so much of an absolute threshold. The origin stories of totemic
clans among Rmeet (Sprenger 2008b) and Khmu (Lindell e.a. 1984: 127–33) in
Laos tell of a reversal of the normal relationship between a forest creature and a
human being. A man handling a bush knife is startled by the call of a forktail and
kills himself; a civet saves the life of a boy who is chased by his dead girlfriend.
Their descendants become the clans of forktail and civet, respectively. These
mythic animals are usually not personalized, nor are their present-day specimens,
but they still had a decisive inluence on life and death. Therefore, they have
shifted their hierarchical position in relation to humans which usually assert their
superiority by hunting and eating animals. The mythic animals became like ancestors, while the present-day specimens, like humans, cannot be consumed.
The focus on hierarchy also offers an approach to the relationship between
local animistic relations and transcultural religions, like Buddhism or Islam, a
central theme in Southeast Asian scholarship. As Spiro has noted, professed doubt
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
43
in spirits is no uncommon stance among Buddhist Burmese. What this statement
expresses, however, is not always disbelief in their existence, but rather in their
power to affect the speaker. Both these attitudes exist and are argued for with the
superiority of Buddhism. Fewer men express belief in spirits than women, who are
less protected by Buddhism and therefore more vulnerable to spirit attack (Spiro
1967: 56–9). Belief in spirits is thus not an attitude regarding their absolute ontological status, but the recognition of potential relationships with them. What seems
like a shift in ontology, from ‘animism’ to ‘world religion’, is often enough a shift
in the hierarchical order of the cosmos (see also Kammerer 1990, Platenkamp
2007, Tooker 1992, janowski, Amster, both this volume). This only becomes
a contradiction when animist practices are identiied as religious and therefore
in competition with doctrinal religions. Thus, reformist and modern versions of
world religions may actively curtail communication with spirits. In so far personhood depends on the recognition of the ability to communicate, spirits might
become less stabilized and gradually diminish in this cosmology – in the long run.
In summary, as Århem has already argued above, Southeast Asian ethnography implies that the suggestion of several scholars (Descola 2011, Chapter 13,
Pedersen 2001, Sillander, this volume) that animism corresponds well with egalitarian social values needs to be qualiied. Animism, in a broader sense of the term,
often implies hierarchy, although hierarchies might be reversible.
Toward Comparison within Southeast Asia
I refrain to set up a comparative model of animism in Southeast Asia by deining large contrastive categories or subregions of societies. Instead, I argue that
three major factors will help to analyse the varieties of animistic relationships in
Southeast Asia in any speciic case. All provide form to the production and reproduction of alterities. The asymmetry of exchange is a major means to establish
communication and deine alterities, both social and cosmological. Accessibility
to the senses is a horizon of the intensity of communication. Hierarchy is the
dimension that orients communication in terms of values. Both the accessibility to
the senses and hierarchy establish, in different ways, the recognition of actors. All
these three factors contribute to the creation and dissolution of human and nonhuman beings in Southeast Asia, which shift in and out of personhood.
The brevity of this introduction does not allow me to consider in more detail
a number of contexts in which animist relationship are prominently situated –
animism in cities (johnson 2014), in politics (e.g., Bubandt 2009, Ong 1988) and
in its relation to transcultural religions, possession cults and mortuary rituals.
However, the three dimensions established above help to determine variations in
the production of animist relationships. Exchange, accessibility to the senses and
hierarchy are irst of all types of difference in a processual view. These differences
integrate social roles and corporeality, existence on both sides of the life/death
boundary, humans and non-humans. While the differences are usually ordered and,
to a degree, ranked, the complexity of the multitudinous factors which produce
these differences makes it dificult to stabilize and constrain this order. Thus,
44
Guido Sprenger
constant debate and variation characterize animist discourses. Members of the
same community provide different accounts of the nature, number and function of
the cosmological forces and persons, and even single individuals produce diverging information according to context (e.g., Bovensiepen 2014, Endicott 1979:
198–214). Current local debates about proper ritual and belief also emerge from
this process.
Anthropologists trying to derive stable models of local ontological discourses
from such complex data sometimes run the risk to perform as – foreign and
unrecognized – theologians. Therefore, the necessity of stable models in the
communication of knowledge – not at least in modern academia – should not
divert from the insight that animist relationships emerge from permanent becoming and improvisation. Animism is the ever uninishable project of socializing
humans and non-humans in the project of life-producing difference. If this does
not necessarily result in a stable cosmology, the question is: Which types of difference do Southeast Asians use to assemble their relations with non-humans,
types which make such relationships comparable across events, myths and rituals,
across villages, cities, strata, institutions, networks, ethnic categories and regions?
My proposal is to employ the analytical dimensions I have suggested as tools for
the analysis of contingent cases without classifying them.
The Chapters
In Signe Howell’s chapter, the production of socio-cosmic difference is at the
center of the analysis of the hunting and gathering Chewong of Malaysia. While
the Chewong are treated as prime examples of a monist universe in the current
animism debate, Howell points out how human and non-human agency are kept
separate through the observation of ‘cosmo-rules’ regarding food preparation.
Thus, relationships within communities of living Chewong are separated from
relationships between Chewong and non-humans in an idiom of food and the body.
The chapter by Guido Sprenger is also concerned with hunting, but this time
from the perspective of an agricultural society, the Rmeet of Laos. He demonstrates how personhood is constructed and acknowledged gradually through
ritual. In this framework, wild animals are like domestic animals from the point
of view of their spirit owners. As sacriice is the encompassing idiom for relationships with domestic animals, hunting needs to establish game as non-sacriicial
animals in order to be successful.
Kaj Århem’s chapter deals with comparable practices in a similar society, the
Katu on the Vietnam-Laos border. However, subtle differences in myth and ritual
show how the relationship between hunters and game is construed entirely different
from the Rmeet, as the idiom of alterity is not so much derived from sacriice but
from afinity and the imagery of the asymmetric exchange. Game appears as bridewealth provided by a forest spirit who relates to the Katu as a wife-taker.
Nikolas Århem’s complementary chapter on the Katu adds relationships with
the state to the set of alterities. Both the state and the spirits were involved in
the decision to move a village in a highly selective way. The two were seen as
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
45
mutually exclusive and in a tense relation between spirits and secular modernity.
Still, the relationality and the practical character of animism was maintained.
Similar to Burmese Buddhists (see above), some Katu’s disbelief in spirits had
less to do with their assumed non-existence but with the denial of their inluence
on modern subjects.
jon Remme, in his chapter on the Ifugao of the Philippines, analyses a paradigmatic case of human-non-human relationships as a continuous phenomenal
process. Ifugao constantly heed a host of spirits, which emerge as various appearances of the life-force/soul lennawa. In a way comparable to Howell, Remme
stresses differentiation. He argues that the omnipresent potential of non-humans
to become persons asks for a highly selective actualization of personhood.
Otherwise, the distinction between the beneicial and the destructive potentials
of human-spirit relationships could not be managed. Thus, in animism, sociality
needs to be proportionate.
In his chapter on the Bentian of Borneo, Kenneth Sillander points out that
integration and alterity are not mutually exclusive. The same types of relationships apply to relations among humans and between humans and spirits. However,
many of the latter are characteristic for relations with humans which are socially
distant – trade, tribute or mutual predation, for example. The social universe thus
appears not so much differentiated into spirits and humans, but into Bentian and
non-Bentian.
In her comparative chapter on Sarawak, Monica janowski observes marked
differences between the hunting and foraging relations of the Penan on the one
hand, and agricultural relations, as exempliied by the Kelabit, on the other.
Clearing plots in the forest amounts to an act of domestication that separates the
attention people pay to the beings within the human sphere from that paid to those
in the forest. The types of relationships thus shape their respective ‘education
of attention’ (Ingold, this volume). janowski places the adoption of Christianity
within the framework of differentiated spirit power. For the Kelabit, the Christian
God now appears as an extension of the more generalizing end of the continuum
of manifestations of potency.
Matthew Amster, in his chapter, signiicantly complements this argument. For
Christian Kelabit, the relationship with jesus Christ encompasses and subordinates all the relations with competing spirits, who are thus not non-existent but
rather muted, the Good News drowning out the call of the omen birds. At the
same time, Christianity opens up the local system of relationships to transnational
networks also on the level of non-humans. However, as relationships with spirits
remain important, Amster proposes that animism should be considered as a mode
of thought or identiication rather than a religion in any exclusivist deinition.
A similar co-existence of transcultural religion and animist concepts is subject
of the following two chapters. Timo Kaartinen’s chapter provides a general outlook
on relations of alterity in Eastern Indonesia, substantially referring, among others,
to his research on Muslim Bandanese. He stresses that, contrary to the standard
model of animism, the principle of differentiating humans and non-humans is
less connected to different bodies, but to an inversion of humanity. This alterity is
46
Guido Sprenger
represented by ethnic others, in particular traders. The effort to maintain humanity,
as indicative of animism, is thus shaped rather by what we might conventionally
call cultural diversity.
Sven Cederroth’s chapter equally speaks about Indonesian Muslims, this time
on Lombok, and their parallel animist practices. The area stands out as the only
one in this volume that featured a pre-modern state. Adherents of Wetu Telu
identify the Muslim god with the supreme being of a local cosmology populated
with numerous other types of spirits: ancestors, locality spirits, capricious ghosts.
As in janowski’s account, animist potency appears in a distinctively physical
form, here as stones. This concreteness is also represented by the relation between
spirits and territoriality.
In the inal ethnographic chapter, David Hicks provides an analysis of a set
of myths from Eastern Indonesia, most of them connected through the motif of a
lost ishhook and water as the medium between the human and the spirit world.
Once again, alterity and integration appear as necessarily related, as both domains
reproduce themselves through mutual exchanges. As in perspectival animism, the
spirit world resembles the world of living humans, but is marked off by a different
visuality.
All contributions suggest the recurrence of certain ideas – monist cosmologies
which integrate human and non-human agencies, structured by the differentiated
and graded nature of personhood and sociality, the cultivation of differences and
alterities, and – often ambiguous – hierarchical orders.
Notes
1. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the 7th EUROSEAS Conference,
Lisbon, and at the universities of Zurich, Hamburg, Freiburg, Marburg, Berlin and
Heidelberg. I proited greatly from discussions there and particularly thank Kaj
Århem, Annette Hornbacher, William Sax and Susanne Rodemeier.
2. The absence of the mind-body distinction is most prominent in Ingold’s (2000) writings on non-Western ontologies but even Descola (2011), whose interiority-physicality
distinction echoes the mind-body distinction, points out that the latter is only one
version of the former.
References
Allerton, C. (2009) (ed.) ‘Spiritual Landscapes of Southeast Asia. Special Issue’,
Anthropological Forum, 19 (3).
Anderson, B.R.O’G. (1972) ‘The Idea of Power in javanese Culture’ in C. Holt (ed.)
Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1–69.
Aragon, L.V. (2000) Fields of the Lord: animism, Christian minorities and state development
in Indonesia, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Barraud, C. (1990a) ‘Kei society and the person: An approach through childbirth and
funerary rituals’, Ethnos, 3–4: 214–31.
——— (1990b) ‘Wife-Givers as ancestors and ultimate values in the Kei Islands’,
Bjidragen tot de Tal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 146: 193–225.
Barraud, C., de Coppet, D., Iteanu, A., and jamous, R. (1994) Of relations and the dead:
four societies viewed from the angle of their exchanges. Oxford/Providence: Berg.
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
47
Barraud, C., and Platenkamp, j.D.M. (1990) ‘Rituals and the Comparison of Societies’, in
C. Barraud and j.D.M Platenkamp. (eds) Rituals and Socio-Cosmic Order in Eastern
Indonesian Societies, Part II: Maluku, Special Anthropological Issue. Bijdragen tot de
Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 146/1: 103–23.
Benjamin, G. (1979) ‘Indigenous Religions of the Malayan Peninsula’, in Becker and A. Yengoyan, (eds) The Imagination of Reality : Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems,
9–27.
——— (1985) ‘In the long term: three themes in Malayan cultural ecology’ in K. Hutterer,
(e.a.) (eds) Cultural values and human ecology in SoutheastAsia, 219–78. Ann Arbor:
Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan (Michigan Papers
on South and SoutheastAsia; 27).
Bernatzik, H.A. (1941) [1937] Die Geister der gelben Blätter: Forschungsreisen in
Hinterindien, Leipzig.
Bird-David, N. (1999) ‘“Animism” Revisited. Personhood, Environment, and Relational
Epistemology.’ Current Anthropology, (40, supplement): 67–91.
Bovensiepen, j. (2014) ‘Lulik: taboo, animism, or transgressive sacred? An exploration of
identity, morality and power in Timor-Leste’, Oceania, 84(2): 121–37.
Bubandt, N. (2009) ‘Interview with an ancestor: spirits as informants and the politics of possession in North Maluku’, Ethnography, 10(3): 291–316.
Caillé, A. (2008) [2000] Anthropologie der Gabe, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. (irst: Anthropologie du don.).
Chambert-Loir, H. and Reid, A. (eds) (2002) The Potent Dead: Ancestors, saints and heroes
in contemporary Indonesia, Honolulu (e.a.): University of Hawai’i Press.
Condominas, G. (1975) ‘Phi Ban cults in rural Laos’, William Skinner, G. and Thomas
Kirsch, A. (eds.) Change and persistence in Thai Society, Ithaca/London: Cornell Univ.
Press, 252–73.
Cuisinier, j. (1951) Sumangat: l’ame et sonculte en Indochine et en Indonésie. Paris: Gallimard.
Därmann, I. (2010) Theorien der Gabe: zur Einführung, Hamburg: junius.
Descola, P. (1996a) Leben und Sterben in Amazonien. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. (irst: Les Lances
du Crépuscule. Paris: Plon, 1993).
——— (1996b) ‘Constructing natures: symbolic ecology and social practice’, in:
P. Descola/G. Pálsson (eds.) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London:
Routledge, 83–102.
——— (2011) [2005] Jenseits von Natur und Kultur, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (irst:
Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.
Dove, M. (2011) The Banana Tree at the Gate: A history of marginal peoples and global
markets in Borneo, New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Dumont, L. (1986) Essays on individualism: modern ideology in anthropological perspective, Chicago [u.a.]: University of Chicago Press.
Durrenberger, E.P., and Tannenbaum, N. (1989) ‘Continuities of Highland and Lowland Religions of Thailand’, Journal of the Siam Society, 77(1): 83–90.
Ellen, R.F. (1996) ‘Cuscus and cockerels: Killing rituals and ritual killing amongst the Nuaulu
of Seram’, in: S. Howell (ed.) For the sake of our future: Sacriicing in eastern Indonesia,
Leiden: Research School CNWS, 263–81.
Endicott, K. (1970) An Analysis of Malay Magic, Singapore: Oxford University Press.
——— (1979) Batek Negrito Religion: The World-View and Rituals of a Hunting and Gathering People of Peninsular Malaysia, Oxford: Clarendon.
Endres, K. (2011) Performing the divine: Mediums, markets and modernity in urban,
Vietnam. Copenhagen: NIAS.
48
Guido Sprenger
Endres, K., and Lauser, A. (2011) (eds) Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and
Practices in Modern Southeast Asia, Oxford/New York: Berghahn.
Erb, M. (1996) ‘Talking and eating: sacriicial ritual among the Rembong’, in S. Howell
(ed.) For the sake of our future: Sacriicing in eastern Indonesia, Leiden: Research
School CNWS, 27–42.
Errington, S. (1989) Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Van Esterik, P. (1982) ‘Interpreting a Cosmology: Guardian Spirits in Thai Buddhism’,
Anthropos, 77(1): 1–15.
Fausto, C. (2007) ‘Feasting on people. Eating animals and humans in Amazonia’ Current
anthropology, 48(4): 497–530.
Formoso, B. (1998) ‘Bad Death and Malevolent Spirits among the Tai Peoples.’ Anthropos,
93: 3–17.
Forth, G. (1998) Beneath the Volcano: Religion, cosmology and spirit classiication among
the Nage of eastern Indonesia, Leiden: KITLV Press.
Fox, j. (ed.) (1980) The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
——— (1987) ‘Southeast Asian Religions: Insular Cultures’, in M. Eliade (ed.) The
Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 13, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 520–30.
Geertz, C. (1964) [1960] The Religion of Java, London: MacMillan.
Geirnaert, D.C. (2002) ‘Witnessing the Creation of Ancestors in Laboya (West Sumba,
Eastern Indonesia)’, in H. Chambert-Loir and A. Reid (eds) The Potent Dead: Ancestors,
saints and heroes in contemporary Indonesia. Honolulu (e.a.): University of Hawai’i
Press (e.a.), 32–47.
Gibson, T. (1986) Sacriice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands: Religion and Society
among the Buid of Mindoro, London/Dover: Athlone.
Goh, B.-L. (2011) ‘Spirits Cults and Construction Sites: Trans-Ethnic Popular Religion and
Keramat symbolism in Contemporary Malaysia’, in A. Lauser and K.W. Endres (eds)
Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia,
New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 144–62.
Holt, j. (2009) Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
Horstmann, A., and Reuter, T. (2013) (eds) Faith in the Future: Understanding the Revitalization of Religions and Cultural Traditions in Asia, Leiden: Brill.
Howell, S. (1984) Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. Singapore
(u.a.): Oxford University Press.
——— (1996) ‘Introduction’, in S. Howell (ed.) For the sake of our future: Sacriicing in
eastern Indonesia, Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1–26.
Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and
Skill, London: Routledge.
——— (2006) ‘Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought’, Ethnos, 71(1): 9–20.
Iteanu, A. (2009) ‘Hierarchy and Power: a comparative attempt under asymmetrical lines’,
in K.M. Rio and O.H. Smedal (eds) Hierarchy: Persisence and Transformation in
Social Formations, New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 331–48.
johnson, A. (2012) ‘Naming chaos: accident, precariousness, and the spirits of wildness in
urban Thai spirit cults’, American Ethnologist, 39(4): 766–78.
——— (2014) Ghosts of the new city. Spirits, urbanity, and the ruins of progress in Chiang
Mai, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
49
jonsson, H. (2012) ‘Paths to freedom: Political Prospecting in the Ethnographic Record’,
Critique of Anthropology, 32(2): 158–72.
josselin de jong, j.P.B. de (1983) [1935] ‘The Malay Archipelago as a Field of Ethnological
Study’, in: P. E. de josselin de jong (ed.) Structural Anthropology in the Netherlands,
Dordrecht: Foris, 164–82.
Kammerer, C.A. (1990) ‘Customs and Christian conversion among Akha highlanders of
Burma and Thailand’, American Ethnologist, 17: 277–91.
Kammerer, C.A., and Tannenbaum, N. (2003) (eds) Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia:
Ancestors, Polity, and Identity, New Haven: Monograph 52, Yale University Southeast
Asia Program.
Karim, W.-j. (2004) [1981] Ma’ Betisék Concepts of Living Things, Oxford/New York:
Berg.
King, V.T. (1985) The Maloh of West Kalimantan, Dordrecht: Foris.
Kirsch, A.T. (1973) Feasting and social oscillation: religion and society in Upland
Southeast Asia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kruijt, A.C. (1906) Het Animisme in den Indischen Archipel, ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff.
Kwon, H. (2008) Ghosts of war in Vietnam, Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge University
Press.
Ladwig, P. (2011) ‘Can Things Reach the Dead? The Ontological status of Objects and
the Study of Lao Buddhist Rituals for the Spirits of the Deceased’, in K. Endres and
A. Lauser (eds) Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern
Southeast Asia, Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 19–41.
——— (2012) ‘Visitors from hell: transformative hospitality to ghosts in a Lao Buddhist
festival’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18: 90–102.
Latour, B. (2000) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Leach, E. (2001) [1954] Political systems of Highland Burma: A study of Kachin social
structure, London and New York: Continuum.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1967) The elementary structures of kinship, Boston: Beacon.
——— (1973) Das wilde Denken, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (irst La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.).
Lindell, K., Swahn, j.Ö., and Tayanin, D. (1984) Folktales from Kammu III: Pearls of
Kammu literature, London/Malmö: Curzon.
Long, N.j. (2010) ‘Haunting Malayness: the multicultural uncanny in a new Indonesian
province’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(4): 874–91.
Macdonald, C. (1992) ‘Protestant Missionaries and Palawan Natives: Dialogue, Conlict or
Misunderstanding?’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 23(2): 127–37.
Marriott, Mc.K. (1976) ‘Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism’, in B. Kapferer
(ed.) Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and
Symbolic Behavior, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 109–42.
Mauss, M. (1974) The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
McDaniel, j. (2011) The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk: Practicing Buddhism in
Modern Thailand, New York: Columbia University Press.
McKinley, R. (1976) ‘Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites
and the social deinition of enemies’, in G. N. Appell (ed.) Studies in Borneo Societies:
Social Process and Anthropological Explanation, Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
Northern Illinois University. Special Report; 12, 92–126.
50
Guido Sprenger
McKinnon, S. (1995) ‘Houses and Hierarchy: the view from a South Moluccan society’
in j. Carsten and S. Hugh-jones (eds) About the House: Lévi-Strauss and beyond,
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 170–88.
Moebius, S. (2009) ‘Die elementaren (Fremd-)Erfahrungen der Gabe: Sozialtheoretische
Implikationen von Marcel Mauss’ Kultursoziologie der Besessenheit und des “radikalen
Durkheimismus” des College de Sociologie’, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 19: 104–26.
Needham, R. (1963) ‘Blood, thunder and the mockery of animals’, Sociologus, 14(2): 136–49.
Nieuwenhuis, A.W. (1918)‚ Die Wurzeln des Animismus: eine Studie über die Anfänge
der naiven Religion, nach den unter primitiven Malaien beobachteten Erscheinungen’
Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, 24, Suppl.: 1–87.
Ong, A. (1988) ‘The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation
in Malaysia’, American Ethnologist, 15(1): 28–42.
Parkin, R.J. (1990) ‘Ladders and Circles: Afinal Alliance and the Problem of Hierarchy’
Man, 25: 472–88.
Pedersen, M.A. (2001) ‘Totemism, animism, and north Asian indigenous ontologies’,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (N.S.) 7: 411–27.
Platenkamp, J.D.M. (2006) ‘Visibility and Objectiication in Tobelo Ritual’, in P. Crawford
and M. Postma (eds) Relecting Visual Ethnography - using the camera in anthropological ieldwork, Aarhus: Intervention Press & Leiden: CNWS Press, 78–102.
——— (2007) ‘Spirit representations in Southeast Asia: a comparative view’, in F. Laugrand
and j. G. Oosten (eds) Nature des esprits et esprits de la nature dans les cosmologies
autochtones / Nature of spirits and spirits of nature in aboriginal cosmologies, Quebec:
Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 99–129.
——— (2010) ‘Political change and ritual tenacity: The New Year’s ritual of Luang
Prabang, Laos’, in A. Iteanu (ed.) La coherence des societies: Mélanges en hommage à
Daniel de Coppet. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 193–233.
Praet, I. (2014) Animism and the question of life, London e.a.: Routledge.
Rodemeier, S. (2009) ‘Bui Hangi – the Deity’s Human Wife’, Anthropos, 104: 469–82.
Rhum, M.R. (1994) ‘The ancestral lords : gender, descent, and spirits in a Northern Thai
village’, DeKalb, Ill.: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois Univ.
Sahlins, M. (2008) ‘The Stranger King, or Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life’,
Indonesia and the Malay World, 36/105: 177–99.
Schefold, R. (1990) Natur und Kultur im Weltbild indonesischer Stammesgesellschaften’,
in W. Böhm and M. Lindauer (eds) Viertes Symposium der Universität Würzburg,
Woher, wozu, wohin? Fragen nach dem menschlichen Leben, Stuttgart: Klett, 285–336.
Spiro, M. (1967) Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of
Suffering, Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall.
Sprenger, G. (2005) ‘The way of the buffaloes: Trade and sacriice in Northern Laos’,
Ethnology, 44(4): 291–312.
——— (2006a) ‘Out of the ashes: Swidden cultivation in Highland Laos’ Anthropology
today, 22(4): 9–13.
——— (2006b) ‘Bone transfers: Incomplete replacement in Rmeet ritual exchange’,
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 4(1): 79–111.
——— (2008a) ‘The problem of wholeness: Upland Southeast Asian cosmologies in transition’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 133(1): 75–94.
——— (2008b) ‘Do the Rmeet have clans?’, in M. Lorrillard and Y. Goudineau (eds)
Recherches nouvelles sur le Laos, Paris: Ècole française de l’Extrême-Orient, 559–78.
——— (2010) ‘From power to value: ranked titles in an egalitarian society, Laos’, Journal
of Asian Studies, 69(2): 403–25.
Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia
51
——— (2014) ‘Where the dead go to the market: market and ritual as social systems in
upland Southeast Asia’, in V. Gottowik (ed.) Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia:
Magic and Modernity, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 75–90.
Spyer, P. (2000) The memory of trade: Modernity’s entanglements on an eastern Indonesian
island, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Strathern, M. (1988) The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Stringer, M.D. (2013) ‘Building on belief: Animism in Tylor and contemporary society’, in
G. Harvey (ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, Durham: Acumen, 63–72.
Tanabe, S. (1988) ‘Spirits and ideological discourse: The Tai Lü guardian cults in Yunnan’,
Sojourn, 3(1): 1–25.
Tambiah, S. (1985) ‘Animals are good to think and good to prohibit’, in: S. Tambiah:
Culture, Thought and Social Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 169–211.
Terwiel, B.j. (1994) ‘Rice legends in mainland Southeast Asia: history and ethnography in
the study of myths of origin’ Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography, 10: 5–36.
Tiele, C. P. (1873) De plaats van de godesdiensten der natuurvolken in die
godsdienstgeschiedenis. Amsterdam. https://download.digitale-sammlungen.de/pdf/
1393848068bsb11158874.pdf Access 3. 3. 2014.
Tooker, D. (1992) ‘Identity systems of Highland Burma: ‘Belief’, Akhazang, and a critique
of interiorized notions of ethno-religious identity’, Man N.S., 27: 799–819.
——— (1996) ‘Putting the Mandala in its place: a practice-based approach to the spatialization of power on the Southeast Asian ‘periphery’ - the case of the Akha’, Journal of
Asian Studies, 55(2): 323–58.
——— (2012) Space and the production of cultural difference among the Akha prior to
globalization: Channeling the low of life, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Tsing, A.L. (1993) In the realm of the diamond queen : marginality in an out-of-the-way
place, Princeton, N.j: Princeton Univ. Press.
Tsintjilonis, D. (2004) ‘The low of life in Buntao: Southeast Asian animism reconsidered’,
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 160(4): 425–55.
Tylor, E.B. (1958) [1873] Religion in Primitive Culture, Vol. 2. New York e.a.: Harper &
Row.
Valeri, V. (1994) ‘Wild Victims: Hunting as Sacriice and Sacriice as Hunting in Huaulu’,
History of Religions, 34(2): 101–31.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998) ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism’,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 4: 469–88.
——— (2007) ‘The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits’, Inner
Asia, 9(2): 153–72.
Walker, A. (1994) (ed.) Rice in Southeast Asian myth and ritual. Contributions to Southeast
Asian ethnography 10, special issue.
Wilken, G.A. (1884–85) ‚Het animisme bij de Volken van den Indischen Archipel’, De
Indische Gids, 6(1): 925–1000; 6(2): 19–100; 7(1): 191–242.
Willerslev, R. (2007) Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian
Yukagirs, Berkeley CA: Berkeley University Press.
Van Wouden, F.A. (1968) Types of Social Structure in Eastern Indonesia, The Hague:
Nijhoff.