Nathan Porath

Pain, Play and Music: Death and Healing Rites Among the Wana. 2024. By Giorgio Scalici. London: Bloomsbury. 256pp. $115 (hardcover), $39.95 (paper), $103.50 (e- book).

"Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, by Benjamin Tausig" published on 19 Mar 2020 by Brill.

"A Meeting of Masks: Status, Power and Hierarchy in Bangkok, by Sophorntavy Vorng" published on 13 Jul 2018 by Brill.

The Orang Sakai of Mainland Riau, on the east coast of Sumatra, have an elaborate performing art genre through which they physicalise the unseen spirit-dimension in a shamanic ritual called dikei . Their shamanic ritual utilises songs, dance as well as comedy. This article elaborates on how songs and dance visualise the unseen beings and provides detailed examples of Sakai performances during which shamans ‘dance with’ or ‘move with’ the spirits. A second theme of the article is the question of the relationship between the meaning of ‘performance’ and fakery, and suggests that there are three types of performed fakery, two of which are accepted as valid and necessary performances which technically contribute to the performance of medicine and the physicalisation of spirit presence.

This paper focuses on the ponoh/pondok Muslim schools of the south of Thailand. These schools, which are traditional institutions of religious learning and plac...

This article focuses on a healing technique to facilitate childbirth performed by the Orang Sakai, a Malayan‐speaking indigenous people of Sumatra (Indonesia). It explores the sensoriality of mimesis, mirroring, and embodiment through the works of Taussig, Girard, and others. It further makes a comparison between recent mimetic phantom‐limb somatic therapy and shamanic ritual, focusing on the idea of mirroring and mimetic touching without making direct physical contact. It concludes that the process of mirroring‐mimesis and embodiment is a universal in therapy and endorses the argument that clinical therapy and clinical experiments are also mimesis‐inducing rituals. Résumé: L'article est consacréà une technique de guérison visant à faciliter les accouchements chez les Orang Sakai, un peuple autochtone de langue malaise de Sumatra (Indonésie). Il explore la sensorialité de la mimesis, du travail en miroir et de l'incorporation à travers les œuvres de Taussig, de Girard et d'autres. Il compare en outre les récentes thérapies des membres fantômes au moyen de miroirs et le rituel chamanique, en se concentrant sur l'idée du travail en miroir et du toucher mimétique sans contact physique direct. Il conclut que le processus de mimesis en miroir et d'incorporation est un universel thérapeutique et avance l'argument que le traitement et les expérimentations cliniques sont eux aussi des rituels induisant une mimesis.

Review of: Zachary Abuza, Conspiracy of silence: The insurgency in Southern Thailand. Duncan McCargo (ed.), Rethinking Thailand’s southern violence.

This article explores therapeutic shamanic sounds in relation to Orang Sakai ideas of (altered) consciousness. The argument given is that within a shamanic epistemology the very idea of producing sound involves an assumption of the material existence of non‐physical beings as sound‐makers. Such sounds are conceived to be as materially real as are ordinary physical sounds. The article argues further that sound is not only experienced through hearing but can also be inter‐sensorially experienced through the perception of sight. Moreover, ocular perception can refer to both seeing with the eyes and seeing with the ‘inner eye’, which for Sakais is an organ and not a mental function. Finally, given that sound can be inter‐sensorially experienced, this article questions the validity of the oral/aural concept for non‐literate societies. Résumé: L'auteur explore les sons chamaniques thérapeutiques en relation avec les idées de conscience (modifiée) des Orang Sakai. Son argument est que dans une épistémologie chamanique, l'idée même de production de sons suppose l'existence matérielle d'êtres non physiques qui sont à l'origine de ces sons. Ceux‐ci sont conçus comme étant aussi matériellement réels que les sons physiques ordinaires. L'auteur affirme en outre que le son n'est pas seulement perçu par l'oreille mais peut aussi être perçu de façon intersensorielle, par la perception visuelle. En outre, la perception visuelle peut faire référence à la fois à la vision par les yeux et à la vision par « l'œil intérieur », que les Sakai considèrent comme un organe et non comme une fonction mentale. Enfin, étant donné que le son peut être perçu de façon intersensorielle, l'article remet en question la validité du concept d'oralité/auralité dans les sociétés sans écrit.

Psychiatry developed as a modern branch of medical knowledge in Western societies and arrived in Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth century. Dutch colonialism brought psychiatry and psychology to the Dutch East Indies as part of the development of European therapeutics in that part of the empire. During the twentieth century, psychiatry was naturalized in Indonesia (and other Southeast Asian countries) and integrated into the national health care system. In the post-independence period, most Indonesian psychiatrists – there are currently about 450 – received training at Western universities and brought the knowledge of this subject back with them to their home country.