When Mary Steedly went to North Sumatra, Indonesia, she intended to
study the curing practices of Karo Batak spirit mediums, the gurus who
keep a community in touch with its ancestors. She became fascinated by
the stories these women and men told of their encounters with spirits in
the ritual arena and on the borders of the everyday social world. In
these stories, Karo mediums conveyed their sense of historical
out-of-placeness, which they described as "hanging without a rope," in
Indonesia's state-proclaimed Age of Development. Based on the author's
three years of fieldwork in urban and rural Karoland, this engaging and
sympathetic account focuses on issues of experience, memory, and
narrative plausibility. Steedly approaches mediums' stories not simply
as reservoirs of information about "what happened" at a particular
moment, but as interested efforts to map a pathway across the shifting
landscape of historical memory.
Over the past century Karoland has been the scene of colonial conquest,
Christian conversion, commercial agricultural development, military
occupation, reolution, migration, and modernization. Storeis of spirit
encounters, Steedly argues, provide an alternative, "unofficial"
perspective on the historical transformation of the Karo social world.
In addition to her rich ethnographic material, she draws on feminist
theories of subjectivity, William Faulkner's reconstructions of personal
and collective memory, and current anthropological explorations of the
politics of representation to open the ethnographic imagination to
historical eventfulness.
Mary Margaret Steedly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard
University.
Originally published in 1993.
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