Demons and Gods on Display: The Pageantry of Popular Religion as Crossroads Encounters

Title: 1127 | Demons and Gods on Display: The Pageantry of Popular Religion as Crossroads Encounters
Area: Border Crossing and Inter-Area
Stream: Anthropology
Presentation Type: Panel Presentation
Panelists:
Katherine Swancutt, King's College London, United Kingdom (organizer, presenter, chair)
Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History, United States (presenter)
Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati, School for International Training (SIT), Indonesia (presenter)
Kari Telle, Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), Norway (presenter)
Moumita Sen, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Norway (presenter)
Cynthea Bogel, Kyushu University, Japan (discussant)

Abstract:

Display is a recurrent and immanently diverse theme in Asian studies and classic anthropological analyses of ritual, performance, theatre, and even museology. Yet an ‘anthropology of display’ has yet to emerge as a field of study in its own right that would show how persons, things, gods, spirits, beings, qualities, and emotions are not only explicitly brought to the surface of social life, but mobilise old and new narratives about creativity, curiosity, philosophical reflection, national identity, political debate, latent danger, and ethnic belonging. Popular religions in Asia routinely play host to multiple forms of pageantry that offer a wealth of examples for display, which can be traced semantically to the notion of being ‘unfurled’, ‘unfolded’, ‘scattered’, or even ‘dispersed’ among spectators. Seen in this light, anything put on ‘display’ is inherently elastic and positioned at a crossroads – stretched, as it were, between self and other, subject and object, performer and audience, or the demonic and divine. Bringing together ethnographic works on popular religion and pageantry in Bali, India, Korea, Lombok, and Southwest China, we explore how specific worlds of display are made by different ethnic groups and Asian spiritual milieus. We probe the politics and imagery behind historic conflicts that underpin new modes of religiosity and victory; the morality of openness to strange or unexpected spirits; the deployment of bodies, objects, and aesthetics in diverse ritual settings; the celebration of newfound cosmopolitanisms in staged pageants, shamanic ceremonies, villages carnivals, and cityscapes; and the complex, elastic, emotive, and unpredictable relationships that make going on display a ‘crossroads encounter’ in Asia.



Panel Abstracts:
Turning Defeat into Victory: At the Crossroads of Pageantry and Display in Southwest China
I set out to conceptualise an ‘anthropology of display’ through the pageantry of the Torch Festival among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman animistic group of Southwest China, whose celebrations have become the platform for state-sponsored competitions in the art of making ‘ethnic identity’ – from verbal duelling to wrestling, horse racing, singing, playing musical instruments, dancing, women’s beauty, and traditional clothing. Contestants in these pageants evoke the classic sense of ‘display’ as they strive to unfurl, unfold, scatter, or disperse their visions of what accomplishment, ‘tradition’, and the crossroads encounters between multiple ethnic groups means. Audiences are comprised of judges, local crowds, and even the sky god to whom every Nuosu must repay a debt-ransom during the Torch Festival (or face soul loss and death), in order to atone for a mytho-historical wrestling match where a hero killed a spirit. Display here is inherently elastic and positioned at the crossroads between self and other, subject and object, performer and audience, humans and gods. It mobilises old and new narratives about the latent dangers of pageantry. To underscore this point, I discuss the exceptional case of Meigu County, where Nuosu cite a generations-old battle during the Torch Festival that culminated in legendary red snowfall – a euphemism for extreme bloodshed – which they do not want to summon again. Their local pageantry is thus held on unexpected dates, as an artful way of ‘turning defeat into victory’ and preventing competitors from unwittingly reaching an audience of ghosts, angry gods, and hidden danger.

Manifestations of Presence in Korea and Bali: Crossroads, Intersections, Divergences (co-author and co-presenter with Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati)
Korean shaman ritual (kut) and Balinese temple festivals (odalan) are richly constructed displays of presence: gods, ancestors, and restless ghosts in the Korean case, oscillations between demon and god in the Balinese. In both instances, the rituals require an artful construction of ritual space, music, material properties such as costumes and (in Bali) masks and most particularly the skilled deployment of an inspired practitioner, a shaman (mansin) in Korea, the combination of an entranced medium (mundut) and a mask empowered by a local tutelary (sesuhunan) in Bali. If the ritual performance is successful, participants feel a sense of encounter that is emotionally resonant and subsequently regarded as consequential, as necessary ritual work successfully accomplished. This description constitutes the point of intersection between these two traditions, the crossroads. The remainder of our presentation explores divergences between these two rich, and richly-documented traditions. We consider how the powerful entities that Korean kut and Balinese odalan engage are understood and realized through different deployments of bodies, other objects, and ritual space. To use Stephan Feuchtwang’s term, we explore two different regimes of visibility. The idea of crossroads, intersections, and divergences permits deeper understanding of resonance and contrast than might be subsumed by the broad headings of “possession rituals” or “ritual theater.” Laurel Kendall is an anthropologist who has studied Korean mansin since the 1970s. Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati is a Balinese scholar of religious history whose knowledge of Balinese ritual is life-long. Kendall and Ariati have done collaborative work on Balinese masked performance.

Manifestations of Presence in Korea and Bali: Crossroads, Intersections, Divergences (co-author and co-presenter with Laurel Kendall)
Korean shaman ritual (kut) and Balinese temple festivals (odalan) are richly constructed displays of presence: gods, ancestors, and restless ghosts in the Korean case, oscillations between demon and god in the Balinese. In both instances, the rituals require an artful construction of ritual space, music, material properties such as costumes and (in Bali) masks and most particularly the skilled deployment of an inspired practitioner, a shaman (mansin) in Korea, the combination of an entranced medium (mundut) and a mask empowered by a local tutelary (sesuhunan) in Bali. If the ritual performance is successful, participants feel a sense of encounter that is emotionally resonant and subsequently regarded as consequential, as necessary ritual work successfully accomplished. This description constitutes the point of intersection between these two traditions, the crossroads. The remainder of our presentation explores divergences between these two rich, and richly-documented traditions. We consider how the powerful entities that Korean kut and Balinese odalan engage are understood and realized through different deployments of bodies, other objects, and ritual space. To use Stephan Feuchtwang’s term, we explore two different regimes of visibility. The idea of crossroads, intersections, and divergences permits deeper understanding of resonance and contrast than might be subsumed by the broad headings of “possession rituals” or “ritual theater.” Laurel Kendall is an anthropologist who has studied Korean mansin since the 1970s. Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati is a Balinese scholar of religious history whose knowledge of Balinese ritual is life-long. Kendall and Ariati have done collaborative work on Balinese masked performance.

Demons at the Crossroads: Display and Sacrifice in Urban Lombok, Indonesia
In the Balinese imagination demons (buta kala) are ambiguous figures of the crossroads. Being figures in motion, demons are associated with temporal and spatial transitions. Hence it is fitting that demons are celebrated with parades and sacrificial rituals on the last day of the lunar year. Although intersections are ideal sites to perform such sacrifices, it can be challenging to convince municipal authorities to close off busy thoroughfares in a multi-religious context like Lombok where Balinese Hindus are a small minority. Drawing on Howe’s (2000) insight that rituals involve risk, this paper examines the spatial and aesthetic dimensions of display. In the first part, I consider how the parade of demon puppets (ogoh-ogoh) permits Balinese youth to demonstrate their aesthetic prowess and how the ritually empowered puppets impart a sense of excitement. Unlike parades that have been promoted as inter-ethnic ‘cultural’ events, municipal authorities are reluctant to close crossroads for ‘religious’ events. In the second part, I discuss how a group of Balinese nevertheless managed to organize the New Year sacrifice in a major crossroads rather than in an enclosed space by activating their political connections and providing monetary sacrifice.

Celebrating the Martyrdom of a 'Demon': Politics, Religiosity, and Aesthetics in the Mahishasur Movement of India
The Mahishasur movement began in 2011 in India when caste minorities appropriated the so-called ‘demon’ Mahishasur in hegemonic Hindu mythology and began to celebrate his martyrdom publicly as their great ancestor and a fallen hero of the vanquished castes in the hands of the Aryan races (upper caste Hindus). These public celebrations in urban and rural settings not only demanded a new image of the now-deified demon figure, it required a new template of religio-political ritual. This paper will focus on three particular instances of these public celebrations to bring out the complex iterations of (re)invented tradition, religiosity, social activism, and political ideology among indigenous rural communities and the Dalit/Bahujan (oppressed castes) communities in urban areas. The paper will closely analyse the traces of the political ideology of Lenin, Marx, and Mao in one avatar of the deified demon created by Leftist members of the Mahishasur movement, while the other avatar embodies the ideals of equality and dignity from the political thought of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the American Civil rights Movement. The article will analyse the work of planning, collecting funds, building the image, printing pamphlets and propaganda material, and other production work that activists do in order to stage these celebrations. In addition, it will study the interaction of the image and the political interlocutors with the body of the ‘crowd’—the dozen or hundred thousand people—who gather around this deified demon image, their new god, in village carnivals or narrow alleys of cities


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