Static Crosses and Working Spirits: Anti-Syncretism and Agricultural Animism in Catholic West Flores

Abstract

In southern Manggarai, in the west of the Indonesian island of Flores, Catholicism has a long history and people assert the importance of their identity as Catholics. Nevertheless, they also continue to engage, both pragmatically and in ritual contexts, with a landscape that they experience and describe as full of spirits and energies. As an example of this, I consider a ritual to renew the fertility of a river feeding into wet-rice fields. Despite attempts by the Catholic Church to ‘inculturate’ the faith in Manggarai, many people adopt an attitude best described as anti-syncretism, in which they reject the possibility of a fully Catholic landscape. I argue that the resilience of this anti-syncretic spiritual landscape can be explained both by the particular nature of the Catholic mission on Flores and local adherence to a strict separation of ‘religion’ (agama) from the ‘custom’ (adat) associated with the land. Drawing on recent literature reviving the concept of animism, I suggest that Manggarai people's engagements with their spiritual landscape are a form of ‘agricultural animism’. However, like all animisms, this has a specific history, including responses to shifts in spiritual potency occasioned by state-sponsored resettlement.

Keywords:

• Manggarai
• Landscape
• Catholicism
• Animism
• Anti-Syncretism

Notes

[1] Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference in Atlanta, April 2008. Funding for attendance at the conference came from a British Academy Overseas Conference Grant and the London School of Economics. I am grateful to the co-members of our panel, Matthew Amster, Brian Howell and Kari Telle, and to our discussant, Mary Steedly, for their thoughts on my original paper. Gregory Forth generously answered my queries on spirits and eels elsewhere in Flores. Thanks also to Matthew Engelke and three anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Forum, who commented on an earlier draft.

[2] I conducted research in southern Manggarai for 19 months from 1997 to 1999, for four months in 2001, and during two brief visits in 2005 and 2008. My main fieldwork took place in the highland village of Wae Rebo and in some lowland sites connected with it.

[3] The most common way to refer to ‘charismatic’ Catholics is as people who ‘don't eat medicine’ (toé hang rewos), since they usually reject the efficacy of healing practices that involve ‘blowing’ spells into roots or water.

[4] Gregory Forth (personal communication) suggests that eels may be ‘doubly spiritual’ in this context, since eels not only look like snakes (associated, throughout Flores, with spirits) but are also connected with spiritually potent water sources.

[5] As in many areas of Southeast Asia (see Telle, this issue), Manggarai people associate the health of both people and land with coolness and dampness.

[6] On another occasion, one man, somewhat unusually, described the ‘two religions’ as the ‘pagan religion’ (agama kafir) and ‘the religion of only a few days’ (agama ata piha bari koé).

[7] Amé de Sana's tears remind us of the biographical and idiosyncratic aspects of landscape. Such ‘personal landscapes’ are explored in Allerton (in press).

[8] Significantly, many Wae Rebo people say that a state official who ordered them to abandon their highland site later died, and that his death was caused by the ‘energy of the land’ (ghas de tana).