Resonant Encounters: Luangan Multisensorial Spirit Communication

Herrmans I (2025)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2025

Journal

Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft University of Pennsylvania Press

Book Volume: 19

Pages Range: 243-263

Issue: 2-3

DOI: 10.1353/mrw.2024.a957214

Abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses the nature of spirit communication among the Luangan Dayak of Indonesian Borneo through examples from their shamanic healing rituals (belian). It presents two dialogic encounters between humans and spirits — one centered on games played with them, and another on the possession of a shaman by the spirits — and discusses the role of the dialogical sequences, along with shamanic chants and other ritual action and material ritual paraphernalia, in the context of the healing effort as a whole. The article describes how the unknowability of spirits and ritual outcomes encourages a diversification of curing techniques, ritual genres and poetic registers and a performative imperative to enact and dramatize proceedings through multisensorial means. Through such multisensorial forms of communication that cater to different olfactory, sonic, visual, gustatory and kinesthetic predilections of the spirits, the spirits are communicated into presence and cajoled into a process of active responsiveness. Illustrated through varied means such as beautiful ancestral language, joking, and perspectivism, Luangan spirit communication is shown to be an ambiguous endeavor based on complementary efforts at cultivating and cutting spirit relations. The article proposes that the reliance of Luangan rituals on the constitutive and destitutive power of encounter for mutually making and unmaking human conditions and spirit dispositions makes acquiring sensory resonance a central preoccupation in them.

Authors with CRIS profile

Runa Isabell Herrmans

Additional Organisation(s)

Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective (CAS-E)

Involved external institutions

Helsingin yliopisto / University of Helsinki FI Finland (FI)

How to cite

APA:

Herrmans, I. (2024). Resonant Encounters: Luangan Multisensorial Spirit Communication. Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 19, 243-263. https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2024.a957214

MLA:

Herrmans, Isabell. "Resonant Encounters: Luangan Multisensorial Spirit Communication." Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 19 (2024): 243-263.

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