Pak Daud and Mak Ijah

Pak Daud is a renowned healer specializing in treating victims of poisoning and sorcery who was fifty-six years old when I first met him (1978). He began curing people around 1946, which is when he moved to Bogang and took up residence with his new bride (a cross-cousin, to whom he is still married), and he served as the village headman (ketua kampung ) from 1962 to 1987. Pak Daud treated victims of poisoning and sorcery—the majority of whom were male—on almost every night of the more

than sixteen months that I spent in Bogang during my first period of research, and I had the good fortune of being able to observe many of the healing rituals he performed.

I have commented on Pak Daud's curing sessions elsewhere (Peletz 1988a, 1993a [see also below]), and will simply note here that they are rather matter-of-fact and thoroughly undramatic; for example, unlike Mak Ijah, he does not light candles or burn incense, don special attire, or go into trance during the rites he performs. The ilmu Pak Daud deploys in such sessions derives in large part from his father and his father-in-law, both of whom were ritual specialists in their own right. More generally, Pak Daud's apprenticeship entailed lengthy periods of fasting and prayer, submission to numerous food and other prohibitions, and battling with spirits over whom he was learning to gain a measure of control. In the course of his apprenticeship, Pak Daud refined his powers of concentration and prayer, and otherwise developed control over his inner self, the latter being a goal of all dukun , and to a lesser extent of all other Malays as well (cf. Anderson 1972:8–13).

Compared to most other villagers, Pak Daud spends a good deal of time in the forest—hunting game animals of various kinds and harvesting petai and other forest products—and is thus associated in many villagers' eyes both with the forest (and the malevolent spirits who live there) and with the forest-dwelling aborigines, who are believed to have extremely dangerous (partly because non-Islamic) forms of ilmu . This conceptual link enhances villagers' views of his ilmu , as does the fact that Pak Daud was forcibly taken to Thailand by the Japanese during their occupation of the Peninsula from 1942 to 1945, and is believed by some villagers to have acquired at least some of his ilmu from his journeys among Thais and others living north of the Malaysian-Thai border.

The majority of Pak Daud's patients are from other villages (as are most of Mak Ijah's), but this is a common pattern both in Bogang and elsewhere in Negeri Sembilan (Swift 1965:164), and among Javanese (Geertz 1960:90) and others. As Obeyesekere (1969:180) suggests, it is probably related to the fact that it "facilitates the performance of the priest role by creating a social distance between priest and audience."

Pak Daud is an extremely charismatic individual, but he seldom speaks and is in this regard quintessentially male. Partly because of his taciturn nature, I was less successful than I would have liked in getting him to talk about ilmu and healing rituals, and about most other things. Some of his reluctance to talk about ilmu and healing rituals was no doubt related to his concern that I might share his secrets with others, for as another of

Bogang's dukun once told me, "This ilmu is my capital (modal ), and I can't afford to spread it around and lose it." Perhaps more relevant, though, is that to talk casually or excessively about ilmu —either one's own or someone else's—is a sign that one lacks ilmu . More generally, in many contexts talking indexes a lack of rationality (akal ), and since most men, particularly the ritual specialists among them, go to great lengths to assert their rationality (though obviously not always successfully), they do not usually talk much about ilmu —or anything else of substance.

In this connection, Siegel's (1978:20–21) observations concerning the culturally similar Acehnese are especially interesting:

Men seldom speak. This is not because they value silence, but because they think they should speak only when they have something of significance to say. Their speech expresses their rationality; it must therefore be substantive. The result is that it is usually portentous in tone but banal or absurd in content. Limiting oneself to saying only what is so limits one to the obvious or nearly obvious. Conversations with men tend to be confined to subjects such as what bus passed by, prices of various commodities, and other matters of fact. When they speak to their wives men are freed from the constraints of experience, which does nothing to lighten their tone but rather allows them to utter an order for duck for dinner or to have a child washed up and make it sound highly important.

Women, on the other hand, chatter continuously. Their activities are always filled with sounds,' illustrating the [Malay-] Indonesian concept of ramai —or noise-making activity. What they say is occasionally outrageous, but they feel, nonetheless, that they can say anything. Unlike men, they feel no constraint to be rational, but neither do they conceive of themselves as irrational. Rather their speech to them has authority which comes from a different source. In their struggle with their husbands they win not simply by subverting men's belief in themselves as rational, but by feeling no hesitation to speak. It is my contention that they find a source analogous to the Koran for the resultant authoritative tone in curing rites and dreams.

The situation described (and clearly oversimplified) for Aceh differs in some important ways from that of Negeri Sembilan—for example, in Aceh all healers are women, whereas in Negeri Sembilan and among Malays generally, most are men; and Acehnese women's culturally elaborated concerns with dreaming have no Malay counterpart. Even so, Siegel's observations help us understand some of the differences between Pak Daud and Mak Ijah (aged sixty-seven), who is Bogang's only female healer, and between (Malay) men and women generally.^[2]

Mak Ijah is the granddaughter of a Chinese woman who was born in Singapore and adopted while quite young by the nineteenth-century Hill

lineage luminary who became Undang . Mak Ijah has been married five times and lives in a house set off from all others in the village. Her parents and collateral ascendants are all dead, and she has neither siblings nor any natural children. For these and other reasons, Mak Ijah views herself as having no kin either within the village or outside. In this regard she is extremely atypical; all the more so since she adopted a former neighbor's daughter and reared her as her own for a number of years.

Unlike Pak Daud, Mak Ijah is ver-y expressive and dramatic, extremely high-strung, and quite marginal in the community. And although she is a very successful dukun who is able to cure, as she put it, "everything from injured bones to spirit possession except diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease," she is viewed with considerable ambivalence and skepticism by many members of the community. There are at least three reasons for this. First, unlike most (if not all) other healers in Bogang, Mak Ijah goes into trance (terun-menerun ) in the course of her healing rituals. Trance states brought about by spirit possession were long regarded—and to some extent still are—as legitimate sources of authority, much like dreams; but like dreams, they have come to be increasingly delegitimized as authoritative sources for speech and other behavior due to religious and other (e.g., political) changes of the past century that have encouraged the rationalization of village religion, and in particular the demise of most forms of shamanism and spirit cults. All things—and people—associated with trance states, shamanism, and spirit cults are thus viewed by villagers with ever increasing ambivalence and skepticism.

Second, Mak Ijah financed her pilgrimage to Mecca with money obtained from patients, whom she is widely believed to have exploited. Though concerns that dukun exploit their patients are widespread, they are especially pronounced when dukun appear to profit handsomely from the ritual services they provide (as Mak Ijah has done).

The third reason Mak Ijah is viewed with much ambivalence and skepticism is that she is anomalous since, as a female, she beat the odds by becoming a dukun . The anomaly lies not so much in the fact that females are not supposed to be ritual specialists or repositories of ilmu . For until quite recently, midwives, the vast majority of whom were female, drew upon ilmu in the course of delivering babies and providing both prenatal and postnatal care, and otherwise plied their trade widely.^[3] (One of Bogang's last shamanic specialists [pawang ], moreover, was a female.) Rather it is that to become a dukun or a "big person" (orang besar ) of any sort presupposes the development and refinement of qualities such as rationality, which are most commonly realized in inner tranquillity/se-

renity and outward restraint, and which are more strongly associated (at least in official discourse) with males than with females. There is, moreover, the issue of leadership and dependency relations. Traditional leaders' efficacy and spiritual potency were gauged in no small measure by the number of supporters or retainers they could muster, and this is true of contemporary leaders as well. Those who have benefited from a dukun 's services are his/her anak ubat (literally, "medicine children," children through curing"), and in theory at least they are forever indebted to the dukun for restoring their health. The hierarchical/asymmetric component of this relationship is not particularly problematic when the leaders are men; but when they are women and have many male supporters, they are in certain respects out of keeping with the usual state of affairs. This is all the more true now that there are no more traditional midwives and no more female (or male) pawang .

Just as Mak Ijah is viewed with more ambivalence and skepticism than Pak Daud, so, too, did she acquire her ilmu in more dramatic fashion: she was chanting and fighting off delirium-inducing fever (and perhaps death itself) brought about by her adoptive daughter's attempt to murder her and her husband through sorcery. Mak Ijah's highly charged, near hysterical account of the circumstances leading up to this attack, and of the attack itself—which entailed the mystical injection of needles and stones into their bodies—and its outcome, would easily fill a book. Suffice it to say that her adoptive daughter was furious with her because Mak Ijah refused to agree to transfer some of her land to her, or simply enter the adoptive daughter's name on the back of the land grant so that the land would pass to her when Mak Ijah died. The incensed woman thus contacted both a locally resident Javanese man who (like all other Javanese) is believed to have dangerous forms of ilmu ("he has tattoos all over his arms," Mak Ijah confided in me) and local aborigines in the hope that they could provide her with ilmu to kill Mak Ijah and her husband. The fee for this service, Mak Ijah told me on a number of occasions, was well over M$700! "How could she do this to me when I raised her as my own for so many years?"

Mak Ijah is far more talkative than other dukun , and is in many respects a caricature of female styles of speech and comportment. She talked continuously, and at a feverish pitch; and much of what she said struck me—and my (male) research assistant—as outrageous.^[4] She was, nonetheless, an excellent informant, for in our conversations she seemed altogether indifferent to status considerations and to whether or not she appeared rational. Moreover, both she and her husband (who was often

present when I spoke with her) were in my experience uncharacteristically forthcoming about the quality of social relations in the village and among Malays in general. In their view, fellow villagers (and most other Malays) know very little about Islam and are consumed by passions of greed, envy, and malice; these, along with obsessive concerns with face and honor, are responsible for the "treachery" (khianat ) that suffuses local social relations. Not surprisingly, Mak Ijah's husband would rather have his two acres of rubber trees go untapped than have them worked by someone who might possibly cheat him of his rightful share (50% of the tapper's yield), even though this results in the land lying unworked and hence in a substantially reduced household income. Summing up his experience with tenant tappers in metaphors of food and eating, he said "the [tenant] tapper gets all of the meat, while the owner is left with the sauce" (orang potong dapat daging, orang punya dapat kwa saja ). On another occasion he characterized his overall experiences with local reciprocity by saying "you give flowers and get shit in return" (kasih bungga, balas tahi ).

These sentiments, shared by Mak Ijah, highlight profound ambivalences concerning human nature and social relations. They also illustrate some of the ways in which breaches of the social order are cast in the imagery of food and eating. When speaking of adultery and of men involved in the offense of sororal polygyny, for example, villagers use expressions indicating that the offender "was given one but ate two" (diberi satu, makan dua ). Similarly, villagers liken the crime of incest to cannibalism insofar as they sometimes compare the behavior of individuals involved in incestuous unions with the habits of domesticated chickens who consume scraps of cooked food thrown to them at the end of meals, including the flesh/meat of other chickens with whom they share biogenetic substance (macam ayam makan daging sendiri ). We have seen, too, that in local mythology the primordial act of brother-sister incest was followed both by the brother lapping up the discharge that flowed from his sister's vagina as she gave birth, and by brother and sister alike being transformed into pelisit , which, as noted earlier, thrive off the blood they suck from pregnant and postpartum women as well as newborn children. Interestingly, the most detailed version of this myth that I encountered in the field came from Mak Ijah. Of perhaps greater interest is that the concerns realized in the myth (the inversion of proper kin relations, failed biological and social reproduction) are highly congruent with the themes accorded primacy in Mak Ijah's account of her relationship with her adoptive daughter and her acquisition of ilmu more generally.

A brief summary of some of the similarities and differences between Pak Daud and Mak Ijah may be useful here. First the similarities: Pak Daud and Mak Ijah are about the same age, and are associated (albeit in different ways: Pak Daud through marriage, Mak Ijah through adoption and satellite status) both with the same gentry clan (Lelahmaharaja) and with its wealthiest and most powerful and prestigious lineage (perut darat ). They treat many of the same forms of illness, and both of them acquired their ilmu as a result of association with same-sex kin.

As for the differences: Pak Daud acquired his ilmu through prayer, observance of food and other prohibitions, and meditation and study with elder kinsmen—all of which required active mastery of Koranic texts (the Word of God) as well as studied control and refinement of his various senses and inner being. Mak Ijah, in contrast, obtained her ilmu as a result of near fatal illness (including delirium-inducing fever), trance, and spirit possession brought on by a younger kinswomen's (her adoptive daughter's) attempt to murder her through sorcery—all of which entailed loss of control and lack of agency. Mak Ijah thus calls upon different sources to lend authority to her speech and comportment (trance, possession by spirits, rather than Koranic texts), invokes different intergenerational links in her account of how she acquired ilmu (links with the descending, rather than ascending, generation), and is, more generally, more attuned to the future (social and biological reproduction) than the past.

Differences in the quality of—and degree of elaboration concerning—the social relations directly or indirectly implicated in the acquisition of ilmu in the two cases are also quite striking: Pak Daud obviously had a high degree of rapport with the male elders from whom he acquired his ilmu , though, significantly, he did not comment on this; Mak Ijah's relation with her adoptive daughter, on the other hand, was both treacherous and the subject of extremely detailed, near hysterical elaboration. Some broad inferences can be drawn from these latter differences, but it would be erroneous to conclude that women's relationships are problematic whereas men's are not. The more accurate generalization is that, compared to men, women are more concerned with the tenor of social relations (e.g., maintaining peace and order) within their households and kin groups, and with looking after social and biological reproduction. (Men's moral concerns complement those of women and are, in any event, realized in different contexts. Note, for example, that Pak Daud is able to articulate his moral concerns in his roles as village headman and member of the various village councils that nowadays constitute the principal or-

gans of local government and administration.) Case studies presented in subsequent sections of the chapter illustrate how these concerns are realized in spirit possession and other forms of mystical attack.

Finally, a few comments concerning Mak Ijah and spirit possession among women generally. Mak Ijah's first experience with possession occurred when she was about thirty-five years of age. In this respect (as with many other features of her life) she is highly unusual, for most women who are subject to possession by spirits have their first experience with possession during their late teens or early twenties. This pattern seems always to have obtained. So, too, does the general principle that once a woman is possessed she tends to have recurring bouts of possession throughout her life: "Once possessed, always possessed," as Boddy (1989:177) puts it writing about possession among women in the Sudan. It is difficult to say with certainty why possession should first afflict women during their late teens or early twenties, but I suspect it is because this is when their sexuality and fertility are activated and publicly marked. These developments involve profoundly important psychological and social transformations which serve to impress upon young women both how central they are with respect to the honor, prestige, and reproduction of their households, kin groups, and society at large, and how threatening their activated sexualities, along with their bodily fluids and orifices, can be to themselves and others. The fact that the spirits that possess females are drawn to fertile women, and to their activated sexualities, bodily fluids, and orifices in particular, is also relevant here, as is the fact that many of these spirits are believed to be sent by male suitors, who as a group are altogether uninterested in prepubescent (and postmenopausal) females.^[5]

The case studies presented below provide a closer look at spirit possession in Bogang. They suggest, among other things, that possession provides women with a morally authoritative source to express and dramatize their most pressing social concerns, and thus serves some of the same purposes as women's curing rites and dreaming among the Acehnese.