The Indonesian practice rehearses spirit-basket rituals of the Chinese Goddess of the Latrine and the Seven Star Sisters. The Chinese origin of jailangkung is published by the name, which is a homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong. This study shows how jailangkung naturally assimilated into Indonesian animism to foster involution, but how a newer import, Middle-Eastern Islamic ideas, have necessitated new coping strategies.

8 Perhaps the fact of cultural diffusion needs no explication, or the origins of traditional games can never by proven, but TylorвЂ™s theory combined with an archaeology of the everyday enables a critical examination of how host societies cope with alien traditions through time. Tylor proposed that if geographically separate communities have similar games that are вЂњpeculiar or complex enough to bar the supposition of their having sprung up independently,вЂќ then this would be proof of cultural connections between the groups.Дespite the cogency of the argument and the eminence of the proposer in the field of cultural anthropology, the study of the international distribution of games never quite took off as research method. In 1880, Edward Tylor made a вЂњspecial argumentвЂќ for games as anthropological evidence. Jailangkung can be described as a game inasmuch as there is an objective and rules of play. Apparently, jailangkung is commonplace in Indonesia.

I pressed my informants for answers, only to be met with nonchalance. 3 Notwithstanding my familiarity with temple rituals and Malay magic, a spirit-possessed basket, endearingly dressed in a little shirt, was a discovery. This included the everyday belief in djinns and hantus. I also investigate Indonesian spiritualism for at home I was immersed in the Sino-Malay cultural world of my Peranakan 2 mother. My childhood in Singapore of the 1950s was a social milieu of temple ceremonies for my Hokkien fatherвЂ™s family practiced Chinese popular religion, which is why I chose to research Chinese spirit possession. It was a rattan basket dressed in a little red and yellow Ming-style soldierвЂ™s tunic (Figure 1). After the sГ©ance, the вЂњbeastвЂќ lay lifeless on the main altar table. The вЂњbeastвЂќ pulled the men up and down the temple hall and into the crowd so that spectators had to scramble to get out of the way. They appeared to be wrestling with a вЂњwild beastвЂќ that they were hanging onto with sashes. The languid performance lulled me, so I was unprepared when two men suddenly barged past me in a flurry of activity. 1 This was at a temple in Jam Thang village on the outskirts of Singkawang, West Kalimantan, where I was watching a spirit medium dance with a fan on the evening of February 9, 2008. I was astonished by my first encounter with a jailangkung (also jelangkung, spirit basket). Keywords: Indonesia, jailangkung, hantu, mysticism, sГ©ance, spirit basket, archaeology, distribution of games This investigation discusses the domestication of an alien tradition as social-political engineering. Jailangkung starred in the countryвЂ™s most successful horror movie. Jailangkung and its iterations are performed as sacred rituals or games of amusement all over the archipelago to an extent that jailangkung has been absorbed into Indonesian magic folklore. For example, Nini ThowongвЂ™s spirit-possessed doll originated as an effigy built over a basket armature. Contemporary Chinese divinatory methods have replaced the clumsy basket planchette with the handier triforked branch or a pen held in the mediumвЂ™s hand, but a spirit basket still features in jailangkung and remains the key element in involutions of the prototype. The term is the homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong and unambiguously links the Indonesian practice with the Chinese. Chinese spirit-basket divination, which dates to the fifth century, would have been lost to the world had it not been reincarnated as Indonesian jailangkung.

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