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Jean DeBernardi
Department of Anthropology
The University of Alberta
The Way that Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia (Forthcoming, Stanford University Press)
In this monograph, I combine an analysis of the theodicy, morality, and poetics of Chinese popular religious culture with four chapters exploring the teachings and practice of Malaysian Chinese spirit mediums. In the Introduction, I delineate a set of ten characteristics that typify the contemporary Chinese trance performance in the Southern Min speaking communities of Fujian, Taiwan, and the Hokkien diaspora in Southeast Asia. I then draw on historical sources to explore the development of new forms of spirit possession in colonial Penang, a city established as a British entrepôt in 1786. For Chinese living in multi-ethnic Penang, the trance performance recreated the chronotope of traditional China, and the gods continue to present modern Penangites with images of Chinese tradition and ethnic purity. In the situation of diaspora, spirit mediums added to their performance repertoire new forms of self-mortifying martial practices borrowed from Hindu and other Asian trance performers, and placated animist nature spirits whose identities were modeled on the local Southeast Asian peoples whom the Chinese immigrants encountered in multi-ethnic Penang. Influenced by modernist forms of Theravada Buddhism and Theosophy, in the early twentieth century some spirit mediums also began to offer moral teachings to their disciples.
 
I propose that Chinese spirit mediums have three roles. First, vis-avis individual clients, the god possessing his spirit medium is a healer and moral guide. Second, for the small group of insiders who sponsor worship of the god, he additionally takes on the role of patron deity and charismatic leader. Finally, spirit mediums perform rituals of collective exorcism on behalf of the wider community, purifying its members of all evil through their self-mortifying performances. In Part II of this study, I attend closely to the first two of the god's roles when he possesses the spirit medium, that of healer and moral guide for clients, and of patron deity and charismatic leader for the group's inside members. These four case studies include a female spirit medium possessed by Malay spirits, and highly expert in the lore of ghosts and black magic, two older male mediums who taught syncretic moral doctrines to their followers, and finally a spirit medium possessed by a trickster god called the Vagabond Buddha. Although most spirit mediums use their charismatic presence to attempt to help people follow a moral path, some use them to sanctify socially marginal activities, and I describe my interactions with this spirit medium, who developed a religious antilanguage to valorize a perspective on moral values that existed in tension with that of the larger society. I conclude with a reflection on spirit mediumship as a system of divine leadership, and a traditional model for group formation and social control through ritual.
 
 
My previous publications on Penang Chinese spirit mediums include:
 
1996 "Teachings of a Spirit Medium," in Religions of China in Practice, edited by Donald Lopez. Princeton: Princeton University Press:273-286 [I & R].
 
1995 "Tasting the Water," in The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press:234-259 [R].
 
1994 "On Trance and Temptation: Images of the Body in Malaysian Chinese Popular Religion," in Religious Reflections on the Human Body, edited by Jane Marie Law. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press:151-165 [R].
 

1993 "The God of War and the Vagabond Buddha," reprinted in Chinese Religious Beliefs and Practices in Southeast Asia, edited by Hock-Tong Cheu. Pelanduk Press: Petaling Jaya, Malaysia:143-164.
 
1987 "The God of War and the Vagabond Buddha," published in a special issue focused on the theme of "Hegemony and Chinese Folk Ideologies," Modern China 13(3):310-33 [R]