Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

This paper is based on more than two years of field research in the city of George Town, Penang, Malaysia. Though specific to this culture and region, the discussion is relevant to trance possession elsewhere; it analyzes the role of the materiality of objects in the religious systems that such phenomena embody. The methods used were participant observation, video and still photography, and interviews. Research assistants allowed me to converse with participants in their native language. I attended more than 100 spirit possession sessions in several different temples. My questions to participants included the eliciting of details about all the often very colorful objects and equipment used in such events; I recorded many hours of conversations and kept voluminous notes about my observations. My conclusions are framed within existing theories of Chinese folk religion that hold that – contrary to some of the major themes and ideas of spirituality and religious practice in Western traditions – this is a practice of action and the materiality of concrete offerings and physical exchanges rather than concern to elicit any interior state. I combine this framework with contemporary theories regarding material culture and the power of objects, resulting in a new way of articulating what previously been called magic in older scholarly approaches. My results indicate that when such concretely material objects play such important roles in community rituals and spiritual thinking a somewhat different logic with different standards is at work than in more mainstream religious traditions.