Publication Type
Book Chapter
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
9-2018
Abstract
Chinese spirit-basket divination, which dates to the fifth century, would have been lost to the world had it not been reincarnated as Indonesian jailangkung. The term is the homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong [菜篮公, vegetable basket deity] and unambiguously links the Indonesian practice with the Chinese. Contemporary Chinese divinatory methods have replaced the clumsy basket planchette with the handier tri-forked branch or a pen held in the medium’s hand, but a spirit-basket still features in jailangkung and remains the key element in involutions of the prototype. For example, Nini Thowong’s spirit-possessed doll, is essentially an anthropomorphic effigy built over a basket armature. Jailangkungand its iterations are performed as sacred rituals or games of amusement all over the archipelago to an extent that jailangkung has been absorbed into Indonesian magic folklore. Jailangkung starred in the country’s most successful horror horror movie. This investigation discusses the domestication of an alien tradition as social-political engineering.
Keywords
Indonesia, Jailangkung, Hantu, Mysticism, Séance, Spirit-basket, Archaeology of the everyday, International distribution of games
Discipline
Asian Studies | Religion
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Oxford Handbook of Religion Online
First Page
1
Last Page
28
ISBN
9780199935420
Identifier
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.69
Publisher
Oxford University Press
City or Country
New York
Citation
CHAN, Margaret. (2018). Jailangkung: Indonesian spirit-basket divination. In Oxford Handbook of Religion Online (pp. 1-28). New York: Oxford University Press.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2834
Copyright Owner and License
Oxford University Press and Author
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.69