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In Between a ‘Feeling of
Natural’ and the Burmese Buddhist Order
An Encountering with Burmese
Spirit Possession
A talk by
Bénédicte Brac de la
Perrière,
CNRS-LASEMA
Present : Adele Anderson, Hans Bänziger, Alex
Brodard, Kwanchewan Buadaeng, Wit Buadaeng, Penkhae Camsa, Guy Cardinal, Darryl W. Crist, Etienne Daniels,
Nathalie Decroix, Bill Dovhey, Ron Emmons, Katie Friendship, Louis
Gabaude, E. J. Hass, Ryan Hillyparts, Otomi Hutheesing, Ken Kampe,
Gordon Kaufman, Joshua P. Kelly, Carool Kersten, Sylvie Kerston, Onsri
Khamnai, Renee Lertleumsai, Phubordin Phitipongkul, Nicolas
Renre, Siphon, David Steane, Bob Stratton,
Carol Stratton, Don Swearer, Valerie Veres, Michael Vickery, Molly
White, David Wyatt. An audience of 35.
The
full text of the talk
We were at Padeima, that is to say
somewhere in between Shweguni and Monywa, sitting on the Irrawady
River’s sandy bank, in the light of the moon, and listening to
the stories of KSM, a spirit-medium, who had previously shared a bottle
of brandy among the boatmen and his disciples. Then KSM told me that he
only had the chance to experience this ‘feeling of natural’
during this time of the year when going up the Irrawaddy from one nat
festival to another. What did he mean with this ‘feeling of
natural’, I did not dare to ask and stop him then when he was of
his spirit-medium’s world.
Indeed he went on telling his
version of what may be considered as the foundation myth of the ritual
specialists of the cult to the ‘Thirty-Seven Lords’. This
version supports my hypothesis that spirit-possession as an urbanized
and professionalized practice, as it is practiced nowadays in Burma in
the cult context, must have developed during the last period of Burmese
kingship, in the second half of the 19th century, as an indirect
consequence of a reorganization of rituals to the tutelary spirits of
Central Burma that were then reshaped according to those of kingship
and around the Court. An ethnohistorical analysis of today’s
rituals to the tutelary spirits, and of what is said or known of their
development, shows that this reorganization occured as a reaction to
the acute threat that British India was then posing on Mandalay, which
culminated in the Burmese kingdom’s dismemberment in 1885.
As stated convincingly by
Rosalind Morris in her recent book, contemporaneaous developments of
spirit-possession in Chiengmai may be considered as an attempt to be
‘in the place of origins’ and stand for the nostalgia of
these origins. In the same way, the development of spirit-possession in
Burma
during the whole of the 20th century may be understood as expressing
the loss of Buddhist kingship as it is experienced and as an attempt to
represent it again and again. However if spirit-possession allows to
make present what is not here and thus always implies the feeling of a
loss – loss of sovereignty in Chiengmai as in Burma – the
historical contexts and the ritual settings are very different in the
two cases.
The conditions that allowed
KSM’s experience of ‘natural’ were, for instance,
linked to the specificity of the Burmese ritual setting that
implies for the spirit mediums the recurrent physical separation with
the living and practicing environment, mainly Yangon, due to the
obligation to pay homage to the nat at their annual festivals in Central Burma. These are the places where the
nat are supposed to have appeared through their settlement as guardian
spirits by Burmese kingship. They are all located close to the
historical centers of Burmese kingship, either clustering at the
confluence of the Chindwin river or in the Mandalay area, actually mapping the
Burmese place of the origins. The feeling of ‘natural’
expressed by KSM arises from the recurrent experience of the gap
between its own place, that appears restrictive by contrast, and those
places of the nats’origins that are the source of the ritual
specialists’practices and their legitimation.
This
gap experienced by the spirit-mediums during their frequent travels
shapes their in-between placement that allows spirit-possession to
occur and the experience of the loss that is also an experience of the
otherness. In Burma,
this gap is not only a temporal one, separating the contemporaneous
outlet from the past authenticity : it is also spatial and
hierarchical. This gap differenciates the cult to the Thirty-Seven
Lords that constitutes the Burmese cult, from the numerous practices
locally addressed to tutelary, local or particular spirits that are
integrated into it. It is maintained through the ritual setting that
articulates the general cult whose main ritual category is that of the
spirit-possession ceremonies to the Thirty-Seven Lords that are
performed by the spirit-mediums with the local rituals to particular
figures of this pantheon that are connected together in an annual
ritual cycle through the participation of these same spirit-mediums.
This articulation is a
specificity of the Burmese spirit-possession cult. Its structure is a
dynamic one that has allowed a number of adaptations and developments
and that still does, notably through its constant renegotiation by the
different participants in the cult, namely the spirit-mediums and the
local populations, backed as it is by the symbolic authority still
invested in the lost Burmese Buddhist kingship. The structure implies
at a given time a closed list of nats whose figures have been
supposedly settled by kingship as local cults. This theoritically
closed pantheon of 37 tutelary spirits is also specific to this ritual
configuration, although one will find other cults organized around the
number 37 elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
It is all the more noticeable that it does not prevent the existence of
minor figures or the appearance of new ones, outside of the pantheon
and that it has evolved in time. Moreover it does not prevent the fluid
and unpredictable character of the spirit possession. Actually this
fluidity inscribed in a fixed frame is needed for the dynamics of the
cult that are constituted by the continuous encompassment of
differences or particularities in the general cult: it insures that the
gap between the center and its parts is maintained in the Burmese
space. In other words, it allows the differenciation of Burmese
identity out of its components to occur.
The in-between, or more
precisely, the articulations that hold up the origins of the cult with
its instituted form and their dynamics have been the main objects of my
twenty years of research into the social and ritual world of the
Burmese spirit-mediums. It has led me from the study of spirit
possession and its phenomenology, and the practices and discourses of
the ritual specialists of the ceremonies, to the Thirty-Seven Lords, a
mainly urban community of professionals, to the study of the local nat
festivals, these events of the Burmese countryside where the spirit
mediums meet and confront local populations and their practices.
The ‘feeling of
natural’ expressed by KSM not only implies the temporal and
spatial gap between the instituted cult and the origins that are the
sources of its authenticity, but the hierarchical setting makes it
appear as fundamentally ambivalent: if local practices are granted some
value by dint of the fact that they represent the original components
of the general cult, this value has to be put in the perspective of its
needed encompassement. From this point of view, the discrepancies of
the spirit-mediums positions are significant: they may altogether
highlight a detail of a local ritual as a pertinent sign of the nat
identity, preserved in the local memory but forgotten in the general
cult, or dismiss it on the grounds of the version of the nat story told
in the royal chronicles, criticizing the ignorance of local population.
The qualification of ‘natural’ is imbued with the same
ambivalence by referring both to a lost value and to the necessity of
its loss in the process of its mobilisation in the ritual setting.
From this point of view, it
makes sense to compare the qualification of ‘natural’ with
that of ‘tradition’ (‘yô ya), often used by the
spirit-mediums to differenciate the local rituals from the general
spirit possession cult. Both terms cast the local rituals away in a
temporal otherness. Ironically ‘tradition’ is also used in
Burmese to qualify the cult to the Thirty-Seven Lords from a Buddhist
orthodox point of view. Not more than ‘animism’ that one
will find in some writings in occidental languages, is
‘tradition’ pejorative, apparently. But the label of
‘superstition’, used in English by the Burmese Buddhists,
does have a pejorative intention. However, all these qualifications
imply the same casting out as pre-Buddhist that is equivalent to a
banishment in the time and the space. That is why these ways to qualify
the cult, and inside the cult to qualify the local rituals, must be
considered as a part of the hierarchilizing processes by which the
‘yet non-Buddhist Burmese’ is encompassed in the Burmese
Buddhist society.
As a matter of fact the
localisation of the cult in another time diverts the attention from its
contemporaneaous dimension and from its articulation to the Burmese
Buddhist society. It hides the sociological dynamics involved and
particularly the way that Burmese Buddhist identity is a continuous
construction made out of the differenciation from such components that
are banished in the time and the space, one could say
‘disavowed’. This denial seems all the more necessary to
the Burmese identity construction that by concealing such articulations
it allows the essentialization of its Buddhist dimension. The spirit
possession cult does constitue one of the devices of the
differenciation of the Burmese identity, one necessarily working under
the cover of ‘superstition’ in order that the Burmese
Buddhist identity emerges duly essentialized.
The way Burmese identity and
particular identites are hierarchilized at the structural level has a
continuity in the cognitive field. Downgraded as superstition, the
spirit possession cult can not be a valuable object of researches
concerning Burmese culture, which has been told to me many times by
Burmese, with some violence some times, out of the cultual context.
This hierarchilization also has consequences on the structuration of
the Burmese studies field as it has been constituted in the West, that
is to say as orientalism, were the study of this cult, after having
been kept under the umbrella of folklorism (see the works of Temple and
of Htin Aung), has been very marginal with the exception of
Spiro’s work, particularly if we compare with the field of
Buddhist studies.
As for KSM evocation of the
‘natural’ of the festivals, it also had these effects of
rejection of local practices, more often conveyed in the reference to
‘tradition’, because it is a part of the very dynamics of
the cult. As a matter of fact, the spirit mediums of the cult to the
Thirty-Seven Lords give voice to the dominant discourses, particularly
by contributing to the encompassment of the idiosynchratic rituals in
the general cult. Moreover, although when performing the spirit mediums
give shape to figures of the nat that are more often than not standing
against recognized norms of behaviour, they actually work for their
integration in the Burmese Buddhist order by inscribing them in the
cult frame. Anyway, they do not display a discourse of opposition, on
the contrary they are agents of the Burmese order.
While listening to KSM dreaming
in such an ambivalent way of the ‘feeling of natural’, that
is to say longing the loss of the non-Burmese-Buddhist origins of the
spirit possession cult which implies its actual Burmese Buddhist
character, I had to reflect on my own place in the world of the
spirit-mediums. Obviously KSM was not talking to his present disciples
then, but to me, the ethnographer, for him the foreigner, that had
followed spirit mediums in so many of their displacements toward the
festival places and who was then following him in his boat travel to
pay homage to some nats whose domains where located on this journey,
according to the route his master was himself following on his way to
the festivals. Indeed I was standing out from his usual disciples who
were taking this way as members of a ‘line’ of spirit
mediums having the same duties towards the nats as those of their
disappeared master. My approach was rather to have a view as global as
possible of the diversity of the practices belonging to the cult to the
Thirty-Seven Lords, without being restricted by specific obligations,
neither towards a master nor towards a nat. My position was that of an
outsider of spirit-possession, a position that was almost inconceivable
in the cult context but that was well known especially by KSM. My
demand was therefore specific, it was not merely a devotional one as
that of the other devotees or disciples seeking to insure the
protection and the benefits of the spirits for themselves, but it was
concerning rituals. I was particularly asking questions about ritual
‘norms’ and about the deviations allowed in the actual
practice, questions that may have been received in this context as an
attempt to evaluate the relative legitimacies of the different
specialists’practices. These questions were able to shake
specialists whose legitimacies lay in spirit possession that is their
only expertise and recognized way to act : they have not the
possiblity to refer to an explicit knowledge, at least theoritically,
as spirit possession implies forgetting as rightly insisted on by
Rosalind Morris.
The difficulty for the spirit
mediums to answer any question concerning their knowledge about the
ritual practices came out on many other occasions, provoking either a
relative silence or the following stereotyped reaction : turning
his face towards the shrines, the hands joined above the head, the
spirit medium mumble an improvised formula whose meaning may be
summarised as ‘forgive me if it happens to me to say something
wrong, it is because I do not know’, apologizing in advance to
the nat about a discourse about them that will not be dictated by them
during spirit possession. At the same time, this precaution serves to
put comments under the nats’ control and gives them some
consistancy. The difficulty for the spirit mediums to talk about their
ritual knowledge raises the question of transmission in the spirit
possession cult, between masters and disciples organized in
‘lines’, the only form of transmission theoritically
available working through practice that is supposed to be governed by
spirit possession. It raises also the question of the possibility of an
ethnography of the cult that would not be involved in spirit possession.
Anxious to answer with a kind of
authenticity that I could accept to what he may have perceived as a
test about his own validity, KSM overcame this difficulty by proposing
the reference to the ‘natural’ of nat festivals as the only
source of ritual legitimacy that could be the object of an explicite
knowledge among the spirit mediums, rather than to spirit possession
that is the main legitimacy of spirit mediums. He gave shape in this
way to another displacement that the ritual setting requires from the
specialists of the cult to the Thirty-Seven Lords, the displacement of
the legitimacy embedded in spirit possession to the legitimacy given as
a ‘tradition’. But KSM went on telling me the myth of
foundation of the specialists of the cult to the Thirty-Seven Lords,
getting back immediately spirit possession in his discourse, and what
is more, the origin of spirit possession. While juxtaposing in this way
what characterise conversely the two poles of the ritual setting, KSM
was highlighting the fundamental position of spirit possession as a
form of rituality that has allowed the integration of the local cults
or so to say the encompassement of the
‘natural’.
I knew KSM before setting out on
the voyage : indeed he considered the lady spirit medium whom I
had followed previously during my festivals peregrination, DY, as one
of his ‘sisters’, as he was paying homage to her mother who
was then the most ancient and highly respected spirit medium in Burma.
But they were not belonging to the same ‘company’, or
troupe, what the complexities of both personal and vocational histories
could explain. They were calling each other ‘brother’ and
‘sister’ merely to signify a close relationship as peers.
DY while being an experimented specialist of the cult was not strictly
speaking leading a troupe of her own and that explains why I found with
her the possibility to participate in the festivals without being
restricted by the obligations due to a particular belonging. I did not
fully appreciate the value of this freedom she gave to me until
recently when venturing alone on new festivals tracks, it happened to
me, as I had withdrawn for the night into the relative secrecy of the
mosquito net, to hear an exchange between the spirit medium who had
accepted me in his camp and his neighbours: they asked him if he had
‘breed’ me to welcome me in this way in his campment and he
answered laughing out of defense that I had installed myself. I knew
before that participants in festivals are not supposed to go from one
encampment to another one, that his to say from one troupe or line of
mediums to another one, but as long as I had the benefit of the
generous protection of DY, I had considered myself as not concerned by
the ritual rules governing relationships between companies while the
spirit mediums community did not and could not consider me in any other
way.
Anyway, when I asked DY about
the possibility to observe some specific rituals she was not cocerned
with, she left me naturally to the care of her ‘brother’
KSM whose travel was going across these rituals. The voyage turned out
to be a true encountering of my interest for the variety of the ritual
practices and their developments, and his anxiety to maintain the cult
authenticity through the scrupulous performance of his ritual duties,
that is to say all those that his master had complied with before his
death and those that were his own. Actually, if the cult to the
Thirty-Seven Lords requires a closed pantheon of settled tutelary
spirits, the calling of the cult specialists depends on a privileged
relationship with one of the figures of the pantheon – a
relationship that is conceived as marriage relationship from which the
specialists get the name of ‘nat spouse’, natkadaw. And
they get experience through the particular practice of the master who
accepts them into his troupe. The masters lead in this way schools of
spirit possession: the specialists they have trained are of course able
to perform spirit possession ceremonies to the Thirty Seven but they
have also special ways to perform them that are shaped by the
particular affinities with the nat they have been married with and with
those of the festivals their master used to go to. In this way they
belong to what is conceived of as ‘lines’ of spirit
mediums. Thus, the practices of the cult to the Thirty Seven are not
homogeneous, but are made of the addition of the particular practices
of the different spirit possession schools or ‘lines’, and
of the addition of local particularisms. The actual cult to the Thirty
Seven although given as a fixed pantheon, could be better described as
a constellation of ritual travelers having their own specificities but
still following the common trajectory of a circumambulation of Central Burma given by the temporal and spatial
sequence of the festivals.
That is why the spirit mediums
can not have a complete direct knowledge of the local rituals
constituting the complete cult although they may expose what they know
about some of them explicitely. While travelling up along the Irrawaddy river, my insistance to note down all
the versions of the rituals, even the local versions, must have looked
amazing to KSM. Born in a family with an educated background, the son
of a school master and the nephew of a once advanced student of the
most famous Burmese historian, both the father and the uncle had turned
to the devoted practice of the cult to the Thirty Seven, although for
very different reasons, without ever becoming professional specialists.
KSM did and he inherited from them an unusual explicit knowledge of the
cult to which my curiosity was most probably giving a new value. His
master had just died and he was in a position to succeed to him as the
leader of his school: he had to take over the responsability to
transmit his particular practices while having to be recognized as an
authority of his own.
As a young spirit medium he had been
famous for his beauty but he was now much heavier in a way that to
attract audiences to his ceremonies he could no more rely on his
dances, the main manifestation of the nats when they embody their
mediums during the ceremonies. On this ground he was facing fierce
competition from more and more numerous young transvestites, drawn into
the spirit possession market by promises of easy money and ‘who
know only how to dance,’ according to KSM’s own words. That
explains probably why KSM developed a very particular style of
performances, a didactic one in which the ‘right way’ to
comply to the need of each figure of the pantheon and thus to insure
its ‘true’ presentification, is explained as a part of the
spirit possession.
These norms concern particularly
the way to prepare the needed offerings and the respect of the
hierarchical sequential order of the appearance of the figures during
the ceremonial time. They constitute a form of knowledge that, for some
years, the spirit mediums have referred to with the Pâli word of
thammazin meaning in this case that they get this knowledge from their
master through the practice in the spirit possession context. The way
KSM has invested these norms does also echo an aspect of the official
discourse concerning the upgrading of the cultural traditions that as
promoted the use of the word thammazin that was seldom heard before.
This discourse has had other effects on the contemporaneous way to
perform the ceremonies to the Thirty-Seven, particularly the return of
the musicians to the classic repertoire to call on the nats, that one
that is compiled in the Mahagita Medanikyan, when during the eighties
any adapted pop song would have been prefered. That is to say that the
general actual context in Yangon had obviously its part in the
development by KSM of a particular inclination to orthopraxy, together
with his personal and familial history : particularly his own
culture concerning the cult makes him conscious of the changes in the
practices and raises his feeling of loss of authenticity.
However, without wanting to give
too much importance to the effect of my own look at his practice, it is
unquestionnable that as soon as this travel on the Irrawaddy river, KSM
gave to my questions a particular echo, commenting on them abundantly
to his disciples and to other spirit mediums. When going back to my
field notes now, it appears to me that he systematically rephrased my
comparative questions and comments about ritual variations as normative
critics and that the exchange that we then started and that had been
going on has been mainly dealing with the very working out of ritual
norms. Paradoxically, as an answer to my outsider discourse emphasizing
rituals variability and to my want to discover more about the
idiosyncrasies, he displayed rituals that were demonstrations of the
way that the ceremonies to the Thirty-Seven should be performed and it
seems to me, for the ceremonies I have attended, demonstrations that
were addressed to me. In these ritual contexts, my attendance was
announced publicly, that is to say that it was announced to the nat and
I was presented as a ‘lecturer of history’. That I will be
in the position to advertize the practices of the spirit mediums of the
cult to the Thirty Seven Lords in the outside world
as a part of the Burmese culture was stressed
and used significantly as a disciplinary tool of the other spirit
mediums participating in. In a way my questions on the differences of
practices were disturbing KSM because they were casting doubt on their
ritual validity, a doubt that could not be dealt with spirit possession
legitimacy as I was staying out of it : he thus transformed them
in an expertise about norms that he appropriated. It is as if he had
cast on my interest the anxiety for orthopraxy that has become his own
‘trade mark’.
Strangely enough, although his
knowledge of the ritual norms is explicitely the object of our
exchange, KSM goes on saying that he knows nothing, meaning that he
knows nothing but what he is practicing in the spirit possession
context. Recently he went back over the version of the myth of
foundation of the spirit mediums that he had told me on the Irrawaddy
river bank, explaining to me that then he had not remembered well the
story his master had told him and adding some factual details that
could give historical credence to this myth and that I had in between
mentioned to him, that is to say the name of the ritual specialist
performing at King Mindon Court, the kawi dewa Kyaw Thu. This latter
has left an unknown parabaik about the rituals he was in charge of and
he could indeed well be the one who is only referred to in the spirit
mediums version as the Old Guy. KSM then worked out anew this
connection I had already made in front of him to better integrate it as
part of his own tradition.
That is when I understood the
strange way that knowledge had circulated between us without knowing
it, because it was finally mediated through spirit possession although,
of course, I never experienced it. The process involved, the casting of
norms on the otherness to incorporate it, is indeed the process
characterising spirit possession in the Burmese cult. Moreover, by
casting on me, in this way, his anxiety for orthopraxy, KSM was at the
same time integrating me into his own line of spirit mediums that is to
say, in a way, in a spirit possession framework. Thus it has proved
impossible to escape to the specular move through which the
ethnographer by looking at the spirit medium is taken in his gaze, kept
at a distance and integrated in the same time. This distanciation is
the very process of encompassement in the superior Burmese Buddhsit
order working in spirit possession.
Thus far, I have tried to give
you an idea of some of the main characteristics of the Burmese cult
through this encounter with KSM. Let’s now summarize them and see
how they differ from what is known about Northern Thai spirit
possession cults. First, I have to underline that the studies about the
Northern Thai case are much more developed, having been conducted by so
many outstanding scholars as Davis, Turton , Tanabe, Wijeyewardene,
Rhum, and Morris, et al. (my list is still incomplete). They have given
all together a picture much more diversified not only reflecting a
diversity of views and opinions but I believe an actual diversity of
the spirit possession contexts and modalities they were observing. The
first characteristic I want to stress seems all the more striking by
contrast : the Burmese cult is an integrated one in the sense that
it is organized in a cultual framework that encompasses the different
possible cultural modalities under the general cult to the Thirty Seven
Lords. Although the historical process is
well documented, the symbolic material expresses the importance of the
kingship as the authoritative reference in the appearance of this
setting.
It means that not only is spirit
possession bounded by a fixed pantheon of 37 figures but that these
figures are a given, although the cult has changed and may still
evolve. The figures of possession always appear as already existing, as
cultural heroes whose cults have been settled by kingship, contrasting
with what we found in northern Thailand, that is to say, for instances,
purchased said ‘ancestral spirits’ of matrilineal
spirit cults, or spirit possession build in spirits as described by
Morris in the case of individual urban possession. It means also that
different modalities of the Northern Thai cults such as those of the
tutelary spirit of a place or of the domestic spirits of kinship groups
are all articulated in the Burmese case: actually the tutelary spirit
of the place ones originates in becomes the domestic spirit transmitted
as a tradition (‘yô ya) when moving out of the place. It
means that the place guardian spirit and the kinship group guardian
spirit are all but the same one: both cultural functions are fused in a
single one. The spirits are not linked as ancestors to the cult group
but they are cultural heroes of royal chronicles. The fact that
ancestrality is irrelevant is best expressed by the fact that the
spirits although they often go by two are actually pairs of brothers
and sisters, the sisters having been married to the king, and the pairs
being necessarily without any offspring. At
another level, the addition of all these ‘yô ya /tutelary
spirits forms the pantheon in which individuals may tape for more
modern personal aimed urban practice of spirit possession eventually
giving the way to professional mediumship itself linked to the tutelary
spirits cult through the participation of the spirit mediums in the
festivals.
There are cases where this
process of fusion of place guardian spirits and kinship group guardian
spirits in one category of ‘yô ya /tutelary spirits is
still traceable, probably because it is rather recent, as the case of
the spirits of Myittou I have analyzed elsewhere, where the fusion is
not well achieved until now (Brac de la Perrière, 1998a). But
most of the cases are not traceable and what is more there is almost no
evidence concerning the processes of the institutionalisation of the
integrated structure of the Burmese cult. Given this difference with
the diversity of the Northern Thai spirit possession cults it is all
the more interesting to see what are the similarities concerning the
spirit possession rituality in itself. Reading the literature about
Northern Thai cults, the Mon influence among others seems to have been
important. The Phi Meng cult case presented by Tanabe (1991) is
particularly interesting of course none the less because Tanabe
suggests that the Mon patrilinear cult have been converted to
matrilinearity in the process of encompassment in the Northern Thai
culture. Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that the modern
urban practice of spirit possession in Burma also denotes Mon
influences: I will only refer here to the organisation of the ritual
space opposing shrines devoted to spirits and musicians (but not as
such matrilineal spirit to male authority) in a specific temporary
ritual pavilion that in Burma is called kana, a Mon word, and that is
dismantled as soon as the ceremony is completed. There are also
differences but the general impression coming out of literature is that
of a ‘familiar resemblance’.
Reading this literature made me
think about the fact that the ritual setting of the Burmese cult could
be seen not only as the transformation of an integrated cult to the
tutelary spirits of the Burmese Kingdom, due to the displacement of the
Mandalay court by the colonial port of Rangoon and giving the way to a
modern professional practice of spirit possession, but also it could be
seen as the encountering of the Burmese public cult with the Mon
rituals through which the tutelary spirits were enriched with an aspect
of kinship group guardian spirits, an aspect that is styled as
‘yô ya in Burmese : however its working is very
different to that found in the Northern Thailand Mon/Meng cult for
instance in the sense that it does not follow at all a linear
definition and is not thought about as a linear cult but as a domestic
one eventually transmitted on an indifferenciated basis.
The interest in tracing these
kinds of influences is to somewhat enrich our understanding of
historical processes involved : comparison between different
configurations such as the Northern Thai one and the Burmese one gives
it some weight but it is still all conjecture. When coming to the
comparison of the articulation of public and domestic cults in
different settings, it seems to me that we get a more interesting
point. Whatever the Mon influences that could be traced in the
contemporary practice of ‘yô ya cults in Lower Burma the origins and the legitimacy of
these ‘yô ya reside in their function of place guardian
spirits in Central Burma. They are
encompassed in the territorial organization of the Burmese cult that
gives this striking integrated dimension compared to what we find in
the Northern Thai case. In contrast, the fact that the articulation
between the different levels of the cult is not integrated in the Thai
case could explain the kind of prediction made by Rosalind Morris in
her book. If I understand her well, in the study of spirit possession
that she has undertaken as a kind of history of representations, she
states that the denial of spirit possession such as that publicisized
by a famous spirit medium of Chantanaburi in 1997 leads to the
encompassement of spirit possession in unmediated communication in the
era of post modernism, after having herself stated that previous
predictions of the diminution of the
kinship group spirits possession cult had been invalidated by the
increase of modern urban spirit possession in Chiengmai. I wonder if
her prediction is not in turn challenged by the actual revival or
should I say ‘reinvention’ of kinship group cults in Northern Thailand that has been recently the
subject of some papers in the press. The fact that there is no
integration of the different levels of practice of spirit possession
could explain why they seem to react independantly.
Actually I do think that these
different levels are articulated in Northern
Thailand, even if not integrated in the Burmese way.
Finally, the fusion of place guardian spirits and kinship group
guardian spirits into one category of tutelary/‘yôya
spirits has to be understood as a reflection of more general features
of the territorial integration of the communities in Burmese kingdoms.
It is at this level of, say, social fabric, that a more thorough
comparison of the articulation of public and domestic cult in the two
cases could be more revealing. In Burma, the Burmese kingship
times’ religious policy had resulted in an enduring
territorialization of the identity of communities through a ritual
setting that is still producing distanciation allowing the integration
of new others in the Burmese society. Comparison between spirit
possession cults in Burma and in Northern Thailand may thus allow to
enrich the comprehension of what processes and influences may have been
involved in the appearance of the different settings in the same time
that it does highlight the specificity of the integration of the
Burmese cult not as an essentialized part of the Burmese identity but
as the product of a construction or in other words as a historical
process.
After the question and answer
session, the meeting adjourned to the Alliance Cafeteria where members
of the audience engaged Bénédicte in more informal
discussion over drinks and snacks.
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