Table Of ContentSpirited Politics
Religion and Public Life in
Contemporary Southeast Asia
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Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M. George, editors
Spirited Politics
Religion and Public Life in
Contemporary Southeast Asia
SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM PUBLICATIONS
Southeast Asia Program
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
2005
Kl
Editorial Board
Benedict R. O'G. Anderson
Tamara Loos
Stanley J. O'Connor
Keith W.Taylor
Andrew C. Willford
Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications
640 Stewart Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850-3857
Studies on Southeast Asia No. 38
© 2005 Cornell Southeast Asia Program
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may
be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-0-877277-37-8 / ISBN-10: 0-877277-37-0
Cover Design: by Robin Werner. Cover illustration: Detail from "Bulan Sabit
Merah" (Red Crescent Moon), by A. D. Pirous, 1998. By permission of the artist.
Digital photograph courtesy of Kenneth M. George.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction: Religion, the Nation, and the Predicaments of Public Life 9
in Southeast Asia
Kenneth M. George and Andrew C. Willford
The Priestess and the Politician: Enunciating Filipino Cultural Nationalism 23
through Mt. Banahaw
Smita Lahiri
The Modernist Vision from Below: Malaysian Hinduism and the “Way of Prayers” 45
Andrew C. Willford
Fraudulent and Dangerous Popular Religiosity in the Public Sphere: Moral 69
Campaigns to Prohibit, Reform, and Demystify Thai Spirit Mediums
Erick White
Islam and Gender Politics in Late New Order Indonesia 93
Suzanne Brenner
A Sixth Religion?: Confucianism and the Negotiation of Indonesian-Chinese 119
Identity under the Pancasila State
Andrew J. Abalahin
Relocating Reciprocity: Politics and the Transformation of Thai Funerals 143
Thamora Fishel
Immaterial Culture: “Idolatry” in the Lowland Philippines 159
Fenella Cannell
Picturing Aceh: Violence, Religion, and a Painter's Tale 185
Kenneth M. George
Contributors 209
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As the volume's editors, we would like to thank Cornell University's Southeast
Asia Program Publications Editorial Board for its unflagging support, and our
contributors for their collegiality, cooperativeness, and scholarly care. Benedict
Anderson's interest in this volume has been pivotal, and he offered several very
helpful suggestions during the earliest stages of our work. Our thanks also go to the
entire staff at SEAP Publications, and in particular, to Deborah Homsher, who has
been a delightful source of editorial critique and expertise. Her steady and patient
interventions in the face of our numerous delays, travels, and debates are evidenced
throughout. We are extremely grateful to her for her enthusiasm, energy, and
formidable editorial talents—they made this a better book.
This volume has roots in two conference panels. The first occurred at the New
York Conference on Asian Studies, Association of Asian Studies, which took place at
Hobart and William Smith Colleges in fall of 1999. This panel, entitled "Spirited
Politics," was organized by Smita Lahiri, Thamora Fishel, and Erick White, and was
chaired by Smita Lahiri. Andrew Willford served as discussant. Plans and ideas for
this volume emerged at that conference. A second panel followed at the Annual
Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago, in the spring of 2001. Ken
George served as discussant on this subsequent panel, which included papers by
Andrew Willford, Thamora Fishel, and Andrew Abalahin. The conversations and
papers launched at these two panels provided the basic blueprint for the core themes
addressed in this book. Later, Suzanne Brenner and Fenella Cannell kindly accepted
our invitations to contribute their respective chapters.
From Andrew Willford: I wish to thank Vasantha, Rabindra, and Anisha for their
constant supply of laughter, joy, and love. Vasantha, moreover, has been more than a
life partner; she has been oftentimes my harshest and most helpful critic. I also wish
to thank my parents and sister for their remarkable faith and help over the years.
Last, I want to thank Ken George for his insight, hard work, frank advice, and good
judgment. His patience, sense of humor, and intellectual generosity have been both
inspiring and delightfully stimulating.
From Ken George: I would like to thank Andrew Willford for inviting me to
serve as co-editor of Spirited Politics. I have learned much while working with him
and the other contributors. It happened that I fell gravely ill about a year after joining
the project and had to bring all work to a stop for nearly six months. Andrew and the
others were wonderful medicine; they waited for me to recuperate and helped
reawaken my energies. They were part of the cure. To my wife, Kirin Narayan, go
affectionate and unending thanks for the love and care it took to get me back on my
feet, and for all the companionship before and after.
ACW&KMG
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INTRODUCTION:
RELIGION, THE NATION, AND THE
PREDICAMENTS OF PUBLIC LIFE IN
SOUTHEAST ASIA
Kenneth M. George and Andrew C. Willford
The essays in this book all call attention to the salience of world religions in
Southeast Asian public life. Modernization, it was once argued, should have led to
the "disenchantment" of Southeast Asian social life. Specialists reckoned that
nationalism and nation-building, the global rise of capitalist markets, and the
broadening reach of mass media, along with the other cultural, structural, and
ideological features of modernity, would so swamp religious communities,
institutions, and ideas that they would become unmoored from their once-prominent
place in defining and legitimating political and cultural orders. Religion, in this
scenario, was to become a "private" concern, and, for this reason, largely sequestered
from the central and transcendent, "secular" energies of public culture and the
modern nation-state.1 Spirited Politics joins a growing list of studies that see religion
differently—as an enduring and increasingly significant precinct of Southeast Asian
politics and public life.2
1 See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003) for a critique of treating the "religious" and the "secular" as fixed and
opposed categories. The "secular," for Asad, is conjunctural—a bringing together of diverse
practices and knowledge—and so, "secularism" and "secularization" need to be investigated
as political projects, not as the emptying of religion from social life.
2 See, for example: John R. Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo
Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia:
An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2003); Robert W.
Hefner, ed., The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and
Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); Robert W. Hefner and Patricia
Horvatich, eds., Islam in an Era of Nation States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim
Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997); Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall,
and Helen Hardacre, Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and
Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994); Rita Smith Kipp and Susan
Rodgers, eds., Indonesian Religions in Transition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987);
