War Magic

The Chamorros lived on the chain of islands known as the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. The author argues that the ancient Chamorro religion and world view are based on a nondual cosmology of paired opposites that interact to generate a living world. The nondual cosmology is found throughout Micronesia. Religious beliefs and practices give expression to the nondual world view. This is especially true of the ancient Chamorros use of their ancestral skulls in warfare. The skulls were taken into battle against the Spanish. From the nondual world view the ancestors’ power lives on through their descendants and is symbolically manifest in the skulls. After the Spanish Chamorro war, the survivors converted to Christianity and the ancient religion came to an end.

War magic is violence, orchestrated or defended against through magic, used alternately to harm or to heal.1 Compelling the investigator to navigate complex webs of definition in ‘religion’ and ‘magic’, war magic appears multisided, with porous conceptual boundaries incorporating various particular historical contexts. Janus-like offense and defense inevitably form a dualistic central pole around which webs of meaning arise, to wit, ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic, spells to harm and protect, and talismans to unleash or ward off the murderous and sickening powers of unseen enemies, supernatural entities, gods, demons, and the dead. Taking a performative, ethnographic, embodied approach to war magic—otherwise referred to as assault sorcery, magical death, and warrior religion—reveals that war magic is located in specific sites of cultural performance, where people evoke and enact supernatural, liminal, or divine power, on the one hand, to perpetuate violence and, on the other, to resist ha...

War magic is violence, orchestrated or defended against through magic, used alternately to harm or to heal.1 Compelling the investigator to navigate complex webs of definition in ‘religion’ and ‘magic’, war magic appears multisided, with porous conceptual boundaries incorporating various particular historical contexts. Janus-like offense and defense inevitably form a dualistic central pole around which webs of meaning arise, to wit, ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic, spells to harm and protect, and talismans to unleash or ward off the murderous and sickening powers of unseen enemies, supernatural entities, gods, demons, and the dead. Taking a performative, ethnographic, embodied approach to war magic—otherwise referred to as assault sorcery, magical death, and warrior religion—reveals that war magic is located in specific sites of cultural performance, where people evoke and enact supernatural, liminal, or divine power, on the one hand, to perpetuate violence and, on the other, to resist ha...

The film "Art of Silat" regards Malay culture through dance and martial arts in Singapore, Malaysia, and England and provides a visual accompaniment to D.S. Farrer's ethnographic book Shadows of the Prophet: Martial Arts & Sufi Mysticism (Springer, 2009). The Malay martial art, silat, is enacted through wedding dance, martial arts, violence, magic, film and theater. This film charts initiation into the cult of silat, via divination, where the spirit of an ancestral warrior is summoned into a lime. The lime is cut by a guru silat (master) to decipher the initiate's elemental personality, whether fire, air, earth or water. The subsequent boiling oil ritual sees hundreds of coconuts chopped to extract their milk to be strained into cauldrons. Forty men say continuous prayers as they boil the milk to prevent the oil from burning the initiates later when they plunge their hands into it. In medieval times the oil bath (mandi minyak) was used as a juridical test of veracity. Those who could pass their hands unscathed through the oil (or molten tin or lead) were pronounced innocent. From trial by ordeal the mandi minyak became an invulnerability rite. In Singapore the rite was discontinued due to alleged links with al-Qaeda training camps. In contemporary Malaysia, however, the bath in boiling oil is billed as a therapeutic exercise, albeit participants husk coconuts with their teeth, split the nuts with their bare hands, and engage in wild ludic sparring. As outsiders travel to Malaysia to learn silat, Malaysians journey to England to stage a show in London. During rehearsals one man loses a finger to a machete. Filmic motifs include lines drawn between this realm—the shadow realm—and the ultimate reality of the afterlife; and magical circles regarded as portals to divine mystical power. A cacophony of machine sounds interspersed with haunting music recorded in situ combines with an observational style to present an evocative bricolage of traditional arts within Islamic Malay modernity.

Recent publications have called for magic, sorcery, and witchcraft to the re-thought as the epistemological core of anthropology. Neglecting to consider embodied war magic and the warrior shaman prior investigations have revealed only a partial view of Malay mysticism. I reconfigure the field of Malay mysticism via a performance ethnography of the transnational silat organization, Seni Silat Haqq, an offshoot of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. Elements combined from the anthropology of art and performance provide a theoretical framework to address silat through social practice, performance and enchantment. I analyse becoming animal versus becoming a shadow of the Prophet, and explore the creation of silat through spontaneous bodily movement. Silat practitioners travelling from England to Malaysia and vice versa provide a way to test the infinity loop model of social and aesthetic drama. To chart the unseen realm I consider divination and initiation rituals and silat in relation to its deathscapes.