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Witchcraft holds a perennial fascination for scholars and the public at large. In Southeast Asia malign magic and sorcery are part of the routine experience of villagers and urban dwellers alike, and stories appearing in the press from time to time bear witness to a persisting public concern. The essays presented in this volume describe what people believe and what actions result from those beliefs. Not surprisingly, given the range and variety of cultures, considerable differences exist in the region. Among some cultures, in Thailand and Indonesia for example, sorcerers are said to possess spirits that empower them to cause illness and misfortune. Elsewhere, in Malaysia and Sumatra, the power of the dukun derives from the accumulation of arcane knowledge and mystical practice. Contributors describe the witches and sorcerers they have met and suggest both how their societies look upon them and how we in turn should regard them. Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia will appeal to scholars and students of social anthropology and comparative religion. Its substantial contribution to theoretical and comparative issues in a Southeast Asian context provides a fresh perspective on a stimulating topic.
This book combines two classic topics in social anthropology in a new synthesis: the study of witchcraft and sorcery and the study of rumors and gossip. First, it shows how rumor and gossip are invariably important as catalysts for accusations of witchcraft and sorcery. Second, it demonstrates the role of rumor and gossip in the genesis of social and political violence, as in the case of both peasant rebellions and witch-hunts. Examples supporting the argument are drawn from Africa, Europe, India, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.
Drawing from ethnographic examples found throughout the world, this revised and updated text, hailed as the "best general text on religion in anthropology available," offers an introduction to what anthropologists know or think about religion, how they have studied it, and how...
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
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 modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, 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, sacrifice 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 significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.
Understanding Southeast Asia points to the wisdom of seeking common factors that unite regional worldviews. This fresh and possibly more Asian perspective complements other Western-style empirical analyses that rely on differences to explain traits of the region and its peoples. In various ways, this book provides a context for scholarly works on specific places, technological studies and the nation-building stories of the new countries that make up the region. Beginning with the common origins of Southeast Asia’s peoples and languages, their shared heritage is emphasized through agricultural, archeological, cultural, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious and technological fields. Perennially defined by rice, stability and commerce, Southeast Asia has evolved a common trading ethic and morality influenced by China and India long before a short European colonial interlude. Historically known as a Golden Land, the region exudes a resilience founded in millennium-long traditions that are today expressed through local adaptations of world religions. In acknowledging the region’s integrated worldviews and tolerance of opposing approaches, this work will inform a new generation of Western understanding about Southeast Asian politics, decision-making and ASEAN. It will also support the young educated elite of the region to see themselves in a new and proud light.
Far from being the province of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery, indigenous understanding of contagious disease in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world very often parallels western concepts of germ theory, according to the author. Labeling this 'indigenous contagion theory (ICT),' Green synthesizes the voluminous ethnographic work on tropical diseases and remedies_as well as 20 years of his own studies and interventions on sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, and traditional healers in southern Africa_to demonstrate how indigenous peoples generally conceive of contagious diseases as having naturalistic causes. His groundbreaking work suggests how western medical practitioners can incorporate ICT to better help native peoples control contagious diseases.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.
Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape of the world’s third-largest democracy is as complex and enigmatic as ever. The country has achieved a successful transition to democracy and yet Indonesian democracy continues to be flawed, illiberal, and predatory. This book suggests that this and other paradoxes of democracy in Indonesia often assume occult forms in the Indonesian political imagination, and that the spirit-like character of democracy and corruption traverses into the national media and the political elite. Through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, all of whom employ spirits in various, but always highly contested, ways, the book seeks to provide a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy, contending that the contradictions that haunt democracy in Indonesia also infect democracy globally. Exploring the intimate ways in which the world of politics and the world of spirits are entangled, it argues that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself. Engaging with recent attempts to look at contemporary politics through the lens of the occult, Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, Anthropology and Political Science and relevant for the study of Indonesian politics and for debates about democracy in Asia and beyond.
Witch-Hunt and Conspiracy brings unique insight and prize-winning analysis to an extraordinary story – that of a witch-hunt and ‘ninja’ craze that swept a region of Java, Indonesia, in 1998. When neighbours, family members and friends believed that one among them was a sorcerer, this suspicion would sometimes culminate in the death of the suspect. In 1998, these sporadic killings turned into an outbreak of violence. Muslim organisations attributed the escalation of these killings to political conspirators, alleging that squads of ‘ninjas’ were responsible. A paramilitary group (Banser NU) began preparing and training for an onslaught of further violence, while anxious residents throughout East Java established road-side guards. Dozens of suspected ninjas were caught and some were tortured and killed. Using first-hand accounts, Herriman provides these events with a detailed context and history and analyses their development in terms of the interplay of national institutions and local culture and dynamics. This book represents the culmination of his researching of witch-hunts for more than a decade.