Ritual retellings
Subtitle: Luangan healing performances through practice
By: Isabell Herrmans
Series: Epistemologies of healing -- volume 16
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9781782385646; 9781782385653
Subjects: Dayak (Indonesian people); Rites and ceremonies; Healing; Traditional medicine; Ethnology
Description: "Belianis an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do - socially, politically, and existentially - for particular people in particular circumstances. Departing from the conception that rituals exist as ethereal, liminal or insulated traditional domains, this volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings. It offers an analysis of a number of concrete ritual performances, exemplifying a diversity of ritual genres, stylistic modalities and sensual ambiences, from low-key, habitual affairs to drawn-out, crowd-seizing community rituals and innovative, montage-like cultural experiments"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Luangan lives : the order and disorder of improvisation and practice; title: Representing unpredictability; title: Making tactile : ganti diri figures and the magic of concreteness; title: The uncertainty of spirit negotiation; title: So that steam rises : ritual bathing as depersonalization; title: It comes down to one origin : reenacting mythology and the human-spirit relationship in ritual.