Shamanism, Tourism, and Secrecy: Revelation and Concealment in Siberut, Western Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This essay attempts to explain why international backpacker tourists in Indonesia are so interested in indigenous religion and especially in shamanism. It articulates the indigenous mode of analysis or reverse anthropology of the people whom the tourists visit: in this case, the Sakaliou clan on the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. According to Sakaliou, tourists seem to be looking for something they have lost, a kind of secret knowledge that is possessed by the shaman. Unlike other people, who keep their secrets in isolation, the shaman must skilfully reveal some of his secret knowledge as part of a public performance. It is this secret knowledge, indicated by the skilled revelation of skilled concealment, for which tourists seem to be searching among the members of the Sakaliou clan and their shamans.

KEYWORDS:

• Shamanism
• tourism
• secrecy
• authenticity
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rupert Stasch for organizing the panel at the American Anthropological Association 2011 Annual Meeting, at which this essay was originally presented, for his insightful comments from then until now, and for patiently persevering until the papers on the panel were published. I would also like to thank the other panel members Magnus Fiskesjö, Michelle MacCarthy, George Paul Meiu, and Anke Tonnaer, as well as the discussants Janet Hoskins and Francesca Merlan. Most of all – and for reasons that should be obvious – I would like to thank the Sakaliou clan Moili moili.

Notes

1. The recent attention to indigenous stereotypy complements the now-extensive literature on Western stereotypes of the primitive other (see, for example, Znamenski 2007).

2. The indigenous religion is sometimes referred to in the local language as arat sabulungan. For a more detailed description of it, see Hammons (2010). Not all of the indigenous people in Siberut continue to practice the indigenous religion; most people, in fact, have converted to a denomination of Christianity.

3. My account of the indigenous analysis of the tourist encounter emerged out of more than two years of ethnographic research among the Sakaliou clan, with whom I lived continuously from January 2003 to December 2004. Shorter term fieldwork was conducted in the summers of 2004, 2007, and 2008.

4. The term asli is from Bahasa Indonesia, not the local language. It is most often translated as ‘original’, but in various contexts, it can mean ‘authentic’. In the context of the tourist encounter in Siberut, the term is generally used to distinguish between ‘traditional’ forest-dwelling people and ‘modern’ village-dwelling people. That authenticity is a reference point for both indigenous people and tourists is only one of many convergences of seemingly incommensurable worlds apparent in the organization of tourism in Siberut.

5. An interesting contrast to Sakaliou's use of tourism as a firewall against the state is the situation among the Wa described by Fiskesjö (2014). In the case of the Wa, tourism is clearly a technique of state control. A critical difference may be the presence of international tourists.

6. Taussig, of course, is not only the one to have noticed the relation between secrecy and authenticity. See, for example, de Certeau (1984). More generally, many others have noted the relation between secrecy, exposure, and power (Simmel 1906; Barth 1975; Bellman 1984; Canetti 1984).

7. The shaman has always figured in the Western imagination (Znamenski 2007), but recent work has focused specifically on the allure of the shaman to Western tourists, especially in the mythical homeland of the shaman, Siberia, and Central Asia (Bernstein 2008), and among Native Americans (Bunten 2008) and the indigenous people of Central and South America (Feinberg 2006; Davidov 2010). For shamanism in Southeast Asia, see Laderman (1991) and Sather (2001).

8. Fletcher (2010) has identified something similar for adventure tourism.

9. Because of the money involved, surfing tourism in the Mentawai Islands to the south of Siberut has been formalized to a much greater extent.

10. Unlike the transformation of moran warriors among the Samburu, as described by Meiu (2014), tourism among Sakaliou has generally resulted in a kind of cultural involution.

11. The ambivalence about monetized transactions in the context of the tourist encounter is clearly a two-way street. As MacCarthy (2014) and Causey (2003) demonstrate, both sides are concerned about the ‘corrupting’ influence of money, although for very different reasons. This is yet another example of how seemingly incommensurable worlds can converge.

12. The blood is concealed in a bamboo tube.

13. The message is said to be made by the soul of the chicken at the moment of its death. The shaman and most other people learn to read the patterns in the entrails. If the message is bad, they will simply sacrifice another chicken.