Janet Hoskins

Headhunting and the social imagination in Southeast Asia

Contributors 1. Introduction: headhunting as practice and trope Janet Hoskins 2. Lyric, history, and allegory, or the end of headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi Kenneth M. George 3. Headtaking and the consolidation of political power in the early Brunei state Allen R. Maxwell 4. Severed heads that germinate the state: history, politics, and headhunting in Southwest Timor Andrew McWilliam 5. Buaya headhunting and its ritual: notes from a headhunting feast in Northern Luzon Jules De Raedt 6. Telling violence in the Meratus mountains Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 7. The heritage of headhunting: history, ideology and violence on Sumba, 1890-1990 Janet Hoskins 8. Images of headhunting Peter Metcalf Index.

Seeing syncretism as visual blasphemy: critical eyes on caodai religious architecture

ABSTRACT The exuberant, eclectic architecture of the Caodai Holy See in French Indochina was described as a “grotesque combination” of European and Asian elements by several famous writers and this sense of horror served to construct a notion of “visual blasphemy” which merged aesthetic and ethical elements. Architecture is always read and misread though a cultural lens. It has been argued that the colonial “world as staged” (Mitchell 1999) produced its own “reality-effects,” so I argue that an anti-colonial counter project of large public works tied to an innovative Asian synthesis of world religions served not only to bolster the morale of a once downtrodden people but also to convince them of the historical inevitability of their triumph. Caodaism was a new religious movement followed by 3 million people in French Indochina and its daring and “presumptuous” architecture was a visual act of insurrection, an iconographic revolution designed to precede and prepare the way for the political revolution to follow.

Slaves, brides and other ‘gifts’: resistance, marriage and rank in Eastern Indonesia

Marriage is an occasion at which questions of rank come to the surface in the ‘house’ based societies of Eastern Indonesia and it is also an occasion when notions of family and alliance flirt with notions of commerce and commodity. Brides are transferred against gold and livestock, and their ‘prices’ are the subject of protracted debates. The transfer of slave girls at weddings and funerals mimes the gestures of a wedding, but is culturally understood as a quite different sort of ‘gift’. Reproductive women travel from one village to another wrapped in festive cloth, one bringing the promise of descendants and credit, the other the promise of labourers and debt. A comparison of the rhetoric at a wedding and a slave transfer on Sumba calls into question the fragile boundary between these different categories of women. Critically re-examining inequality and exchange in Eastern Indonesia can also contribute to bringing together two relevant scholarly discourses, one long centred in Africa, the other in Melanesia. Scholars of Africa have debated whether slavery and kinship exist on a continuum or are strictly antinomic. Scholars of Melanesia, in a somewhat parallel argument, have approached the relationship of persons and property by debating whether gifts and commodities exist on a continuum or must be seen as strictly antinomic. I argue that Eastern Indonesian material can help us to see both marriage exchanges and slavery in a new light, by stressing their similarities and the coercive nature of exchange. The bride is halfway between kin and slave (as is, in a somewhat different way, the groom) and halfway between gift and commodity. Her uneasy status, as an alien partially incorporated into the group, reminds us of the boundaries of freedom and enfranchisement, and just how fragile these boundaries may be. Ever since Watson’s influential collection on Asian and African systems of slavery, scholars have recognized that slavery is highly variable culturally, and linked to other forms of obligation and debt bondage. Watson describes indigenous African systems as ‘open’, because they worked as a way of incor-

The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing. Joshua Oppenheimer, director; Signe Byrge Sørensen, producer. Featuring Anwar Congo, Jusuf Kalla, etc. Produced by Final Cut for Real, Denmark, 2012; 159 or 115 mins. Available in DCP, DVD, BluRay, HDcam, and Digital File. World sales: Cinephil, 18 Levontin St., Tel-Aviv 65112, Israel; tel.: þ972-3-566-4129; fax: þ972-3-560-1436. North American distributor: Drafthouse Films, 13809 North Highway 183, Austin, TX 78750; tel.: (512) 219-7800. Instant streaming, US

Afterword—gendering religious objects: placing them as agents in matrices of power

14.99; purchase, US

An Unjealous God?: Christian Elements in a Vietnamese Syncretistic Religion

19.99.

What Is a Refugee Religion? Exile, Exodus, and Emigration in the Vietnamese Diaspora

ABSTRACT The articles in this special issue demonstrate how objects can be interpreted as agents, as gendered images that make a statement, and how their impacts can be understood and assessed by human actors. They are differentially placed in matrices of power, and they can be manipulated to shift genders, to play with gendered combinations, to expand the limits of a particular gendered domain, to creatively play with reproductive imagery, and even to sell commodities in new and enticing ways in the mass media. Gendered religious objects are “statements” addressed not only to the eye but to the emotions, and part of a complex cultural field in which things can play important roles in peoples lives. The links that connect ritual power to other forms of agency and biographical significance are perhaps the most significant links that we need to examine to understand them better in a world of many diverse cultural forms.

Symbolism in Anthropology

Despite the immense success of Christianity in many parts of the Global South, Asian intellectuals have often resisted actual conversion by incorporating Christian elements into new, more universal forms of spirituality. Caodaism, a syncretistic religion that emerged in French Indochina, offers one case study of this process, which is also found in Hinduism, Bahaism, and several Chinese redemptive societies. The place of Jesus within this new pantheon is explored in this paper by looking at the ways in which Christian ideas have influenced the organization, doctrine, and self-image of Caodaists in Vietnam and how these ideas have gained new force among Caodaists in the North American diaspora. Caodai “saints” famously incorporate prominent historical and literary figures as spiritual teachers, including Victor Hugo, Jeanne d’Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the United States) Joseph Smith. They provide new scriptures through spiritist séances, and through this mechanism they are able to “modernize” Caodai doctrine and expand it to fit new circumstances.

Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh

Within the field of migration studies, there are many ways of describing the experience of leaving one’s country. Migration is perhaps the most neutral term, since it simply designates the act or process of moving from one region or country to another. Exile is a more loaded word, referring to an unwilling rupture with the homeland, whether imposed by political circumstances or personal choice, but it hints at the idea of expulsion and suffering. Exodus evokes the biblical story of the Israelites forced out of Egypt and the movement of large numbers of people, described in less theological language as refugees. This chapter examines the narrative strategies applied to migration by followers of Vietnamese indigenous religions (Caodaism and Đạo Mẫu), and looks at the ways in which migration is inscribed into a religious theodicy, and ritual practice itself becomes a way of “returning” to an ancestral homeland. My title refers to refugees, as opposed to simple migrants, and this is because most overseas Vietnamese see themselves as refugees, people who were forcibly displaced from their homeland, although in recent years an increasingly number are legally classified as immigrants.1 The idea of the “loss of country,” and the threat that it raises of a loss of identity, is central to the very different ritual and doctrinal responses of these two religions.

The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange.

This article explores the importance of symbolism in anthropology, noting its role in the development of a ‘school’ of symbolic anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s, and the various positive and critical responses to this embrace of the ethnographic study of symbols. It concentrates on the works of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, David Schneider, Mary Douglas, and Sherry Ortner, since each of these thinkers has been seminal in developing this approach, although many others could also be included. I also explore the ‘genealogical’ criticism of the notions of religion and ritual as symbolic systems, particularly as articulated by Talal Asad.