Resonant Encounters: Luangan Multisensorial Spirit Communication

Spirit communication among the Luangan Dayak of Indonesian Borneo is an ambiguous endeavor that relies on multisensorial forms of interaction—olfactory, sonic, visual, gustatory, and kinesthetic—to make spirits present and responsive during shamanic healing rituals. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article describes two dialogic encounters: one involving games played with spirits, and another involving spirit possession of a shaman. The unknowability of spirits and ritual outcomes encourages diversification of curing techniques, ritual genres, and poetic registers. Luangan rituals use beautiful ancestral language, joking, and perspectivism to both cultivate and cut spirit relations, making sensory resonance a central preoccupation in mutually making and unmaking human conditions and spirit dispositions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

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.