The complexity of shamanism is Southeast Asia is in part a
reflection of the geographical, linguistic, and ethnological complexity of the
region. Southeast Asia consists of both a mainland area (which includes, most
importantly, the modern countries of western, or peninsular, Malaysia, Vietnam,
Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma, plus contiguous areas of southern China and
eastern India) and an insular one (including, most importantly, east Malaysia,
the Philippines, and Indonesia, excluding Irian Jaya, or western New Guinea).
Except for remnant groups in a few areas, the indigenous
peoples of the entire region share many physical features that link them to the
inhabitants of the more northerly areas of East Asia. Most of the languages of
mainland Southeast Asia belong to several large families or groupings,
including Tibeto-Burmese, Mon-Khmer, Tai-Kadai, and Vietnamese-Muong. The
languages of insular Southeast Asia (along with some of those of the mainland)
all belong to the great Austronesian family, which, though spread throughout
most of the Pacific Islands, is also of Asian origin. The indigenous peoples of
Southeast Asia include very small and localized populations of nomadic
hunter-gatherers or foragers, much larger and more widely spread groups of
slash-and-burn horticulturalists, and vastly larger numbers of agriculturalists
who practiced wet rice cultivation.
Shamanism in Southeast Asia also needs to be seen against a backdrop
of religious development that includes a long and complicated history of
involvement with other major zones of Asian civilization, especially (except
in sinicized Vietnam) India, and of later Western colonial rule. Indic religious
influences date to the beginning of the common era and were in full flower
among lowland, rice-cultivating populations of the western Indonesian
archipelago, the Malay Peninsula, and most of the mainland by 1,000 C.E.
Beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Islam began to spread, also
mainly from India, along the routes of the spice trade, and it became dominant
in the coastal areas of Sulawesi, Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay peninsula, the
southern Philippines, and the northern littoral (and eventually all) of Java.
At about the same time, Theravada Buddhism began to replace earlier forms of
Hinduism and Buddhism throughout most of the lowland areas of the mainland. In
all instances, however, elements of earlier indigenous and Indic beliefs and
practices persisted, both among village cultivators and in the ruling court
centers. Further, the later diffusion of Buddhism and Islam involved folk
traditions of magic, animism, spirit possession, and the like, as well as
scriptural or "orthodox" traditions. Finally, in the case of the
numerous more autonomous tribal peoples of the upland and interior areas, the
impact of outside influences was much more limited, and their classic religious
traditions, including shamanism, much less affected.
It has been the introduction and spread of Christianity,
along with other Westernizing and modernizing influences, by colonial and
postcolonial regimes that have done the most to transform the religious
traditions of the tribal peoples of Southeast Asia. Brought first by the
Portuguese and then the Spanish, Roman Catholicism arrived almost as early as
Islam. However, outside of the Philippines and a few other local areas, the
wider spread of Christianity was linked to the expansion of Dutch, British, and
French colonial control and began mainly in the latter part of the nineteenth
century or in the early part of the twentieth. Such processes, which have made
few inroads among Muslim or Buddhist populations, are ongoing, diverse, and far
from complete.
Introduction
to the Entries
The eleven entries that follow this overview include two
general and comparative articles plus nine more specifically focused ones.
"Southeast Asian Shamanism " provides a general introduction to
Southeast Asia as a region, and to its types of societies, religious
traditions, varieties of shamanism, and patterns of change. It makes a
distinction between narrowly and broadly conceived forms of shamanism, one that
is reflected in the more specifically focused entries. In addition to this
introduction, "Indonesian Shamanism" also offers an overview of
shamanism and related religious traditions in Indonesia, the largest and most
ethnically diverse country in Southeast Asia. This entry takes a broad approach
to shamanism and relates some of its general features to the different areas
and religious traditions of the vast and varied Indonesian Archipelago.
The more specific entries are those that concern particular
ethnic groups, including the Thai, Burmese, Malays, Javanese, Hmong, Taman,
Murut, and Semai. These groups are of two types. The Thai, Burmese, Malays, and
Javanese are large "national" (or transnational) ethnic communities
that have long-established civilizations, literate cultures, state-level or
centralized political traditions (courts, capitals, and kings), and adhere to
either Buddhism (in the case of the Thai and Burmese) or Islam (in the case of
the Malays and Javanese). Observers have sometimes used the term shamanism to
describe the practices of trance and spirit mediumship and the notions of the soul
and other spirit beliefs that have flourished, specially at the popular or
village level of these societies, though more recently in increasing tension
with religious orthodoxy. Such beliefs and practices fit better with a broad
concept of shamanism than with a narrow one of the classical type first
delineated regarding Siberia and central Asia.
Among these articles, the entry "Malay Shamans and
Healers" follows a longstanding precedent in applying the term shamanism
to Malay spirit medium and healing practices. In contrast the entry "Thai
Spirit World and Spirit Mediums" uses the term shaman for the spirit
medium, but not for the spirit priest, and brings out some shamanistic elements
in those practices, at the same time noting the extent to which popular Thai
animistic beliefs and practices actually derive from Buddhism. Among the
Burmese the shamanistic overtones of popular animism, possession, and exorcism
appear to be somewhat stronger, but the entry "Burmese Spirit Lords and
Their Mediums" embodies a similar view and uses the term shaman simply as
a different way of referring to a spirit medium. The entry "Javanese
Shamanism" takes much the same approach, but notes more explicitly that
neither the classical shaman nor a shamanistic worldview really exists in Java,
though shamanistic practices persist. More specifically, the entry "Shadow
Puppetry and Shamanism" briefly explores possible links between shamanism
and the most important and popular form of traditional theater in Java, but
finds few. The most notable connection is perhaps that the dalang, the puppet
master, is believed to be "called," a common attribute of the true
shaman as well.
The societies noted in the remaining entries, the Hmong,
Semai, Taman, and Murut (along with similar groups mentioned in the two broader
surveys, including the Than and Ngaju of Borneo and the Wana of Sulawesi, to
which many others could be readily added), are very different from the Burmese,
Thais, Malays, and Javanese. The Hmong and the others of this second group are
basically small-scale or tribal societies of the interior or upland areas of
Southeast Asia. They have not been, at least until recently, adherents of any
of the world religions, and although many of them have now converted, it has
often been to Christianity rather than to Buddhism or Islam, thus contributing
to their continued ethnic and religious separateness.
It is to the healing and religious practices and cosmologies
of these societies that the label of shamanism has been most commonly applied
by observers, and with the clearest comparative justification. Even so, it
would be incorrect to suggest that all of the entries about these societies describe
the same common form of true shamanism. Of these articles, "Taman
Shamanism"-the Taman being a numerically small interior Bornean people of
the upper Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, Indonesia-describes one of the most
impressive examples of classic shamanism. Tamanshamans are always called to
assume their position by willful spirits whose demands cannot be refused; once
they are initiated, their souls can undertake journeys to other realms, and
they cure by retrieving the souls of the afflicted and reinserting them back
into their bodies.
As the entry "Hmong Shamanism" explicitly notes, the
practices of the Hmong are also an instance of classic shamanism. Nonetheless,
Hmong shamans are hardly carbon copies of Taman ones, one difference being that
whereas the former are usually men, the latter are nearly always women. In
contrast to the Hmong and Taman traditions, those of the Semai of the interior
of the Malay Peninsula and the Murut of Sabah (far northern Borneo) fit the
mold of classic shamanism less well. As described in "Semai
Shamanism," the Semai have several types of practitioners of supernatural
healing, of which hala' are the most shamanic. But although hala' do cure by
rescuing and retrieving the absent souls of the afflicted, only some become
hala' as a result of calls (that come in dreams) by spirits, others doing so
only through apprenticeship and study. The Murut appear to be even more of a
mixed case, one that combines elements of spirit mediumship with those of
shamanism. The entry "Murut Shamanism" notes that though shamans
acquire spirit guides, they do not become practitioners as an effort to gain
relief from bouts of mental or physical illness attributed to the attention of
spirits. Given the localized nature of such societies and the oral basis of
their traditions, such diversity is hardly surprising, and it could be easily
further documented by reference to many other instances.
Robert
L. Winzeler
The subcontinent of South Asia comprises the present-day
states of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the
Maldives; its influence over the adjacent countries of Tibet, Burma, and
Afghanistan has been sufficiently strong that they too are often included as
parts of the region. Among these countries, Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh (part of India),
and Tibet are located in the Himalayan region, the highest mountain range in
the world. The economic, cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity of this
region, which includes nearly 25 percent of the world's population, is
staggering. India alone has recorded over 1,600 dialects.
South Asia has a complex prehistory, being considered, along
with China and West Asia, as one of the three "cradles of
civilization." Agricultural settlements in the Indus Valley cultivating
barley and wheat date back at least 5,000 years, as does the domestication of
sheep, goats, and cattle. Pottery also appeared by 5000 B.C.E. and came to be
mass-produced with the introduction of the potter's wheel around 3500 B.C.E.
Although the earliest written materials that have been preserved, the
inscriptions of Emperor Ashoka, date back only to 240 B.C.E., the magnificent
collection of hymns known as the Rg Veda has been preserved orally from the
second millennium B.C.E., brought at that time to the subcontinent by
Indo-Europeans, arriving in waves from the northwest to become the ruling power
throughout much of the region. Prayer and sacrifices were the key
characteristics of Vedic religion, which evolved to contribute to the complex
practices, doctrines, and philosophies generally grouped together as
"Hinduism."
Siddhartha Gautama, who became known as the Buddha, was born
in the region circa 563 B.C.E., his birthplace traditionally identified
in the lowlands of Nepal. Buddhism spread from northern India throughout Asia,
yet, except in Sri Lanka and the Himalayan regions, by the twelfth century C.E.
it had nearly disappeared from the subcontinent, losing ground to a vigorous
Hindu resurgence and the arrival of Islam from West Asia.
Most of the region was colonized by the British during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a legacy that has helped shape much of the
region's current politics and economies, though the states involved gained
their independence in the mid-twentieth century. South Asia has rich traditions
of poetry, linguistics, science (having invented, most notably, decimal numerical
notation), medicine, music, dance, architecture, and the decorative arts, but
these all lie outside the scope of this present work.
Using the Sangam anthologies of poems that date back
approximately two thousand years Tamil poems of South India describe various
categories of ritual performers, several of whom appear to have had shamanic
functions, including healing while in altered states of consciousness induced
by drumming. But the earliest record of shamanic phenomena in South Asia, can
be found in the classical texts of the Vedas,
In common with the ritual specialists of Manipur, most of
those found in Rajasthan are more accurately termed spirit mediums rather than
"shamans" in the strict sense, as they act as human vehicles for
supernatural forces who overpower and occupy humans who have suspended their
own consciousness.
Spirit mediums who incorporate many more characteristics of
shamans than those of Rajasthan and Manipur are found in Tibet, most notably
the State Oracle, best known of the high-ranking monastic oracles, a role also
found in Ladakh, though in decline there. Other forms of oracular expression in
Tibet and its adjacent areas occur among local curers,
The situation in Ladakh is particularly interesting, as it is
characterized by growing popularity, with oracular possession gaining
increasing centrality in local ritual practices, as what was formerly a
hereditary calling has shifted toward becoming a vocational practice, a shift
apparently not yet true in other Tibetan communities. Village oracles
articulate concerns of the disempowered, sometimes so forthrightly that the
authorities may seek to suppress them.
Nepal provides more examples of the varieties of shamanic
activity, as nearly every ethnic group in the country has its own forms of
shamanic expression. The situation among the Chepang, a marginalized ethnic
group of south central Nepal, is distinctive, in that shamans are the group's
only religious specialists. Chepang shamans are responsible not only for
conducting healing ceremonies that involve travels to the upper and lower
worlds.
Also in Tibet where the travelers tot the other world, are
called ‘Das Log, the majority seem to be women. In most cases, a conflict
of a religious nature constitutes the starting point in the career of the
'das-log. Wishing to be a nun but forced to remain in a secular state, she
suffers. She has visions of her future life, hears strange sounds, and feels
soaked in a rain of blood and phlegm. She finally dies and sees her relatives
gathered around her bed and realizes that she has, in fact, died. Then she
travels in unknown and terrifying lands where she is approached by dead people,
eager to tell their sad stories. In the different hells she then visits, she
sees the pains and torments of the sinners. When it is time for the 'das-log to
be put in front of the tribunal before which all the newly dead must appear,
her case is investigated thoroughly. Since it is discovered that a mistake has
been made, she is sent back to the living. Having returned to this world, she
becomes a 'das-log and spends the rest of her life telling about her great
experience and giving advice on how to avoid having to spend time in the hells.
The overall structure of the career of the 'das-log is
similar, the most obvious difference being the ability of the contemporary ones
to die again and again. They may even travel to the nether regions several
times a month, on fixed days in the Buddhist calendar, or whenever someone
asks them to. Such a journey may last for a few hours, or even longer, and
after having returned the 'das log is able to deliver very precise messages as
to what has to be done in this world to improve conditions for unfortunate
relatives and friends in the Otherworld.
Stories have been recorded of 'das-logs traveling in the
heavens and in the hells for as long as seven days. And according to one
informant, the 'das-log is herself able to save people from hell and bring them
to a better world. After their return it is said that they weep for days, having
seen so much suffering…
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