Folk religion
Entry in Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin, Cambridge UP, Santa Barbara, 2004.
To speak of folk religions is in the first place to refer to what ordinary village people do in everyday practice rather than to ideals articulated by religious specialists or urban elites. As soon as Europeans, already conditioned by the print revolution of the Reformation, encountered the peoples of what we call Southeast Asia they registered differences between formal professions of faith and everyday practices. Most observers thought this meant that ordinary people did not really understand Islam or Buddhism, the prevelant formal religions, that in practice locals were actually animists, superstitious believers in magical powers and ancestral spirits.
More recently students of the region were influenced by the anthropologist Redfield's analysis of folk and civic traditions in Mexico and India. He suggested that the 'great tradition' of urban written cultures always interacted dynamically with a 'lesser tradition' of village oral customs--each shaping the other yet remaining distinct and coherent. Thus while Burmese villagers bow to Theravada monks they may be more focused on healing and connection to spirits, the nats, than Buddhist imagination of spiritual liberation. Similarly in Java committed Muslims may spend more time making pilgrimages (ziarah) to sacred sites, to connect with the goddess of the Southern Ocean (Nyai Loro Kidul), than practicing daily prayers (solat).
The keynotes of folk religion in villages throughout monsoon Asia are remarkably consistent. Villagers have generally held that all of existence, even stones and metals, are 'animate', alive and charged with specific magical energies. In the archipelago such ideas are evident in beliefs about the kris, wave shaped daggers traditionally critical to war and manhood. Springs, caves, mountains and trees (especially the banyan) are each thought to be alive with spirits which influence the human domain. The spirit of rice, named Nang Phrakosib in Thailand or Dewi Sri in Java and Bali, is seen as a goddess upon whom life depends.
Beyond shared awareness of a spiritually charged environment villagers usually relate to nature through hierarchies of spirits inhabiting invisible planes accessible only to especially powerful people. Shamanic mediums and healers have often been female; the datu (rulers or chiefs) have usually been 'big men'. In any case every person is understood as differently empowered rather than equal, and links with guardian (or 'tutelary') spirits as underlying the power of the living. Thus the founding ancestor of a community or kingdom would, upon death, move into the spirit world, becoming a bridge between human and natural realms, remaining accessible to living descendents. Usually prayer or meditation, at graves or other sacred sites, would be undertaken to tap into spirit powers through contractual relationships which ensured healing of the sick, the success of crops, or social power.
The past is knowable through living practices as well as through traces in texts, monuments or artifacts. Since ethnography exposes such practices in a way archival research cannot, cultural archaeology is a crucial window to understanding local histories on their own terms. Insofar as prehistoric patterns persist into the present they must have conditioned intervening transitions. Village rituals, divination, sexual magic, and quest for powers through sacred sites relate at once to contemporary social contests and, as Reid shows, to early historical transitions. Since animistic folk religion remains a pervasive underlayer in village societies the basic logic of this pattern must be original. While this does not imply that the substratum is either singular in essence or unique to the region it does mean that it is foundational in the same way that grammar is within language.
Focus on ancestral folk religion became a keynote in seminal works of French scholarship on Indochina. Coedes termed it a 'substratum' while Mus stressed that contractual relations with tutelary spirits underlay rice cultures throughout Asia. Their works helped shift attention from outside influences to indigenous forces, from elites to the foundations of subsistence and everyday life, to what Benda later called the 'infrastructure'. We are now more likely to call the village substratum a Bakhtinian 'chronotype', noting that folk religion carries a distinctive sense of time which speaks dialogically with subsequent discursive domains, thus producing the separate rythms of social life in agricultural villages, trading ports, and dynastic kingdoms.
Distinct spheres, related at once to different historical phases and groups, coexist in the present, however transformed internally and through the gestalt which contextualizes them, rather than replacing each other in simple sequence. This relationship is suggested by the coexistence of ox carts, horse carriages, bicycles, cars and airplanes--each following a distinct rythm and thus embodying a different sense of time, yet moving together. Using this image and noting that peasant societies have focussed, as Eliade suggested, on rituals which 'regenerate time' we can imagine a sense in which folk religions maintain a literally 'timeless', because non linear, awareness from prehistory into the present.
In sociological terms continuity of the substratum is stressed in the works of van Leur and Schrieke. Van Leur held that: 'The sheen of the world religions and foreign cultural forms is a thin and flaking glaze; underneath it the whole of the old indigenous forms has continued to exist...' (1957 p 95) and Schrieke argued that the infrastructure of Java did not fundamentally change from 700 to 1700 CE. Mus noted that Vietnamese villagers were traditionally autonomous in their internal affairs. Symbolically their autonomy was marked by the bamboo hedges which bounding them, socially they were insulated by the mediation of councils of notables which protected them from centralizing states. Later and in different ways Geertz's work on Java and Tambiah's on Thailand drew attention to the persistence of primal village religious patterns within present frames.
The formation of states in what would remain the core areas, the dominant centers of population and power in Southeast Asia, brought dynastic periodicity into the seasonal and life cycles of the folk religious substratum: villages counterpointed courts so that they came to define each other. Cosmopolitan contacts within early states brought not only increasing scale but also an imperative to conceptualise local forces in more universalized terms--as societies of millions replaced the kinship patterning of villages, scale called for specialization, for a new language to orchestrate energies. Indian, or in Vietnam Chinese, written culture offered an instrument for this purpose.
There is no doubt that in the process folk religion was transformed. Through most of Southeast Asia, even most of what became the Philippines, Indian derived terms for deities, dewi' or dewa', became common. Mythologies derived from Indian cycles, the Jatakas, Mahabharata, and Ramayana found reenactment in oral village traditions such as the wayang (shadow play) in Java. Notions of karma and reincarnation became a pervasive new frame for local imaginations of spirit realms.
Syncretism defined the process by which local beliefs found voice within, rather than being simply replaced by, Indian spiritual vocabularies. Syncretism arises naturally from folk religious ontologies because usually those register all being as one at root. This perpective predisposed locals to allow additions, new interpretations, to be received as supplements, which enrich by elaboration, rather than replacements for what went before. Localization provided new idioms relating to the same energies of spirits, shrines, caves and ancestors. Spirit hierarchies continued to parallel social structures, as had earlier tutelary spirits; but, with new kingdoms, kings, queens, princes and armies fought in the spirit as well as social realms.
Everywhere external influences have been transformed, reworked and used by local systems which have ancestral spirits at their heart. As the template world religions fitted into has been animistic spirit cults still percolate below the surface. Winstead linked shamanism, shaivism and sufism to show how the main strands of Malay religious history wove into a pattern based on a pre-historic systems. Golomb noted that animistic healing practices transcended boundaries between Buddhism and Islam or Thais and Malays. As in Java Muslims meditate on graves seeking magical powers, Suharto's grave complex was styled to enshrine him as guardian ancestor of the modern state in the same way that earlier Indian influenced rulers enshrined themselves within massive stone temples.
When changes appear overwhelming on the surface underlying continuity is obviously obscured. The substratum is now breaking down rapidly, yet it retains more power than we easily register. Only nocturnal ethnography opens this face of local practice as in the daylight little activity suggests any of the power present within sacred sites. As with the subconscious or the submerged portion of an iceberg, the surface evidence of folk religion, what may catch our eye and enter discourse, depends profoundly on what does not appear. Emphasis on it is analogous to recognition in psychology of the importance of the first years of life: we may not remember them but we know that the patterns imprinted then nevertheless inform our subsequent paths. The spiritual substratum of the Southeast Asian region is especially hard to see because modern Europeans have suppressed or marginalized their analogues to it and cannot see in others what they can no longer imagine as existing in themselves.
Paul Stange
Murdoch University
Perth, Australia
References
Benda, H. "The Structure of Southeast Asian History", Journal of Southeast Asian History, V 3 N l, 1962.
Coedes, G. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, East-West Center Press, Honolulu, 1968 (1944).
Geertz, C. The Religion of Java. U Chicago P, Chicago 1976 (1960).
Golomb, L. An Anthropology of Curing in Multiethnic Thailand, U Illinois P, Urbana and Chicago, 1985.
Leur, J C van. Indonesian Trade and Society, W van Hoeve Ltd, The Hague, 1967 (1955).
Mus, Paul, India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa (trans I Mabbett), Pps on SEA, N 3, CSEAS, Clayton, Victoria, 1975 (1934).
Redfield, Robert. Peasant Society and Culture. U Chicago P, Chicago 1956.
Reid, A. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680, Vol 1. Yale UP, New Haven, 1988.
Tambiah, S.J. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1970.
Wolters, OW. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, ISEAS, Singapore, 1982.
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This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/paulstange/folk.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.