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. 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