Blessed fetishism: Language ideology and embodied worship among Pentecostals in Java

Abstract

A prominent trend of late Christianity has been a cultivation of ‘unmediated’ inspiration realised in embodied worship, notably glossolalia, ecstasy and verbal exuberance. Speaking unfathomable language and embracing spontaneous feelings, Pentecostals in Java have relied on and reworked local language ideologies by passionately employing both the babbling and yelling forms of code-switching in Indonesian, English, Hebrew and glossolalia, in an aspiration to achieve ‘true worshiper-hood’. A closer scrutiny of some elements of this embodied worship against the larger religiously heterogeneous context, furthermore, reveals the salient impacts of cross-religious relations on the process of shaping Pentecostal Christianity. This article argues that specific forms of Pentecostal worship can be better understood when situated in Muslim–Christian relations. Specifically, they speak to a thriving form of religious fetishism that is locally primed for a distinct voice out of the flourishing movements of Islamic resurgence.

Keywords:

• glossolalia
• language ideology
• Pentecostalism
• embodiment
• religious pluralism

Acknowledgements

The materials presented in this article are part of a dissertation project on women's subjectivities and Muslim-Christian relationships in Salatiga, Central Java. Support for the research in Indonesia was provided by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant. This write-up was generously supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I would like to thank Robert W. Hefner, Nancy Smith-Hefner, Robert Weller, Kimberly Arkin, Charles Lindholm, and anonymous reviewers for providing insights for revisions on earlier versions of this paper. In particular, thanks go to Nathaniel Tuohy for his care. Finally, I appreciate assistance of Intan Kusuma, Kristia Rachmawati, Mungki Vitaresti, and Catherine Elvine.

Notes

1. What I try to consider here is the possibility that the local linguistic, ideological grasp of ‘glossolalia’ varies widely. Taking ‘translation’ alone, for example, the English or Spanish-speaking countries more or less stick to the Latin-derived variants of ‘glossolalia’. In Asia, the equivalence is much more diverse. In Korea, (pang-eon) is borrowed from the word ‘dialect’, similar to the Mandarin equivalence (fang-yien) in China and Taiwan. Yet pang-eon can also potentially mean bombastic talk or free, unreserved speech. In this sense, it is akin to the Japanese equivalent (i-gen), literally meaning dissenting speech. By contrast, the Mandarin usage is largely constrained to refer to glossolalia as a ‘dialect’, which often means an inferior language to the national language. Moreover, the biblical concept of fangyien is largely conflated with xenoglossia, even though it is clear that in the bible there are two types of speaking in tongues, namely glossolalia and xenoglossia. Here, the Indonesian equivalent apparently adheres more to the former than to the latter. The Indonesian equivalent of ‘speaking in tongues’ is bahasa roh, meaning ‘the language of spirit’. It is possible that these ‘naming’ conventions may potentially influence the impression of Pentecostal practices. For example, speaking in tongues among Taiwanese Christians is still largely demonised, considered to be the work of the devil. The varying significance of the linguistic grasps of a supposedly universal theological idea can be seen in other examples such as the term ‘Allah’, the universal translation of ‘God’ in Indonesia, as opposed to the neighbouring country Malaysia's recent attempt to outlaw the usage of ‘Allah’ among Christians in fear of an undesirable prosyletisation among Muslims.

2. For an earlier episode among the nineteenth century Javanese missionaries, see Cooley (1968).

3. For a brief history of Pentecostalism in Indonesia, see Robinson (2005) and Wiyono (2006).

4. In Indonesian ‘bahasa’ means ‘language’. Indonesian is ‘bahasa Indonesia’; English ‘bahasa Inggris’, etc.

5. The original text is

6. See Sensus Penduduk (2000), Badan Pusat Statistik (the Central Body of Statistics).