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Paper short abstract:

In central Java, a number of sacred sites exist that are visited by pilgrims of both sexes not only to pray and meditate, but also to seek out sexual encounters. The historical roots of these practices are suspected to lie in Tantrism, which dominated large parts of Java until the sixteenth century.

Paper long abstract:

In central Java, a number of sacred sites exist that are visited by pilgrims of both sexes not only to pray and meditate, but also to seek out sexual encounters. Having sex at these sites is considered beneficial in terms of the actual goals of the pilgrimage, which are mostly aimed at solving family, financial or health problems. Since these sacred sites are visited by significantly more male than female pilgrims, there is a great demand for female sex partners that is covered by prostitutes. These lightly dressed women in turn attract numerous male visitors who visit these pilgrimage sites not for religious, but for purely profane reasons. As a result, pilgrims, pimps and prostitutes mingle at these sacred sites so that they are indistinguishable from each other, which gives these promiscuous practices a degree of protection against intervention by the authorities. The practices mentioned here have boomed since the 1990s and taken on a subversive character against the background of Indonesia's increasingly sexually hostile policies. The religious-historical roots of these practices are suspected to lie in tantric currents within Hinduism and Buddhism, which spread from India and dominated large parts of Java until the sixteenth century. As possibly tantric fragments, they have undergone numerous metamorphoses and adaptations to local conditions. But like tantrism in India, the sexual practices at pilgrimage sites in central Java have retained their transgressive character.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper returns an ethnographic account of the contemporary practice of establishing "garden shrines" in Buddhist rural communities in Java. The author investigates how this phenomenon is equally concerned with a new form of religiosity as is with a wider process of neighborhood re-configuration.

Paper long abstract:

Following the surge of nation-wide decentralisation and identity politics, often coloured with ethno-religious discourses, contemporary Indonesian Buddhism has undergone substantial modifications in the process of gaining equal recognition in a socio-religious landscape dominated by Islam and Christianity. The introduction of "garden shrines" in rural Buddhist communities in the island of Java, participates in these larger dynamics. The paper situates this practice within a number of concurrent phenomena partly relating to the internal developments of Indonesian Buddhism itself, partly to the practical concern of community building in the face of a perceived demographic precarity and socio-political subalternity.

The material formation of these new sacred places is intertwined with issues and aspirations that transcend religiosity as they participate in a communal vision that simultaneously aims at revitalizing a specific version of a Javanese ethnic identity. At the same time, this constructed and self-conscious idea of cultural revival is imbued with a very modern and urban idea of village lore and aesthetics. In this way, garden shrines join in a wider reformulation of village life which is not only the mark of a Theravada Buddhist turn in religious ritual and imaginary but encompasses also concepts such as environment-friendliness, community development and leisure/tourist potentiality.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes the study of the Kodungalloor theripaatu, songs sung at the annual temple festival of the Kodungalloor Goddess temple, as a rhizomatic node, in order to map the multiple narratives that underlie the development of the temple as a sacred 'Hindu' space.

Paper long abstract:

Every year, in the summer months of March/April, Kodungalloor is colored yellow with turmeric and the air reverberates with the rhythmic singing of devotees who congregate at the Kodungalloor Goddess Temple to celebrate the Bharani festival. A festival primarily attended by devotees from the Vannan, Mannan, Pulaya, and Thiya castes, and from the Mala Arayan and Malaya Tattan tribes, the Kodungalloor Bharani has both been read as a celebration that champions pre-Brahmanical, non-Aryan modes of worship and ritual traditions and as a celebration of the violent Brahmanical usurpation of Sramana spaces, deities and modes of worship. A key ritual element of the festival is the singing of the theripaatu, which translates to songs of abuse. By studying the theripaatu as a rhizomatic node, defined by Deleuze and Guattari as "bodies and things (that) ceaselessly take on new dimensions through their contact with different and divergent entities" that have no "distinctive end or entry point" and "propelled and perpetuated by innumerable levels of the affective forces of desire and its resonating materialisations" (Parr 2010), it is possible to lay before the reader a map of the multiple myths and histories that mark the growth of the Kodungalloor Bhagavathy Kshetram as a Hindu temple, and through this mapping, understand the ways in which the temple developed as a sacred site for 'Hindu' communities. This mapping in turn also helps us understand the ways in which these communities engaged in the process of 'becoming' Hindu in Kerala.

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Paper short abstract:

Following Deleuze, we propose the concept of "ethno-cinematographic rhizome" as a tool to visually express socio-cultural multiplicities and assemblages. We put the example of the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul that brings together the sacred and the profane in the Thai province of Isan.

Paper long abstract:

Following the non-representational philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his concept of rhizome as a non-hierarchical epistemic model based on multiplicity, we propose the concept of "ethno-cinematographic rhizome" as a possible alternative of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology, visually expressing the connection of heterogeneous human and non-human, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane elements in the same "plane of immanence", transgressing rational fixed points with the freedom that art gives.

An "ethno-cinematographic rhizome" would be a model of knowledge and presentation of an ethno-social world built with image and sound, where the backbone is time and expressed through "percepts", that is, appealing to the sensory perception of the spectator more than to his rational conceptions. Instead of a closed structure that "represents" "objectively" the actual reality, it is a map that lacks structure although it does have "plateaus" of meaning, opening subjectivity and time to virtual potentialities, combining territorialization and deterritorialization lines.

We put as an example the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, expressed in his filmography since Mysterious Object at Noon [2000] until Cemetery of Splendor [2015]. Between realistic documentary and surreal fiction, it is an example of an ethno-cinematographic rhizome based on a complex assemblage of experiences, sensations, dreams, memories, legends that seeks to express the deep ethnological reality of the Thai province of Isan. The sacred in Isan (temples, but also cemeteries, caves, the jungle itself) is "reenchanted" in his cinema by the assemblage of its spiritual, supernatural, magical, animistic, mythological elements with profane, natural, human, experiential elements.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how temples reproduce and reconstruct the sacred/secular dichotomies without subverting its religious essence and how these sacred elements -reproduced through everyday performativity of temple -contested across different social or religious communities amongst South Asians in UK

Paper long abstract:

Temple as an organizing principle play an important role in everyday socio-cultural and political activities amongst South Asian communities in Britain. Besides regular sermons and rituals, the temples also exercise political activities of campaigning and social awareness; performances of art and exhibition expressing the history and culture of a community; the voluntary activities like language and training classes as well as paid activities of renting temple halls and its premises to other religious groups. This phenomenon of everyday temple performativity is maintained by imitative and metamorphic feature of sacred elements generated through a peculiar process of (re)production of the sacred. This scenario of reproduction reconstructs and redefines the sacred/secular dichotomies without however compromising with the essence of 'sacred' inherent in the doctrinal basis of particular religion (i.e. Hinduism, Sikhism or Islam). Temple, thus, serves as a microcosm of everyday social world while expressing the modern feature of inclusiveness. These expressions however represent rather a singularity of narratives which either exclude or undermine the marginalized narratives of the diaspora experiences. This "selective enchantment" of exercising the 'secular' through everyday temple activity significantly shadows the internal social complexities driven by the sense of caste hierarchy. Based on my recent ethnographic field work among South Asian communities in the UK, this paper examines the way in which the sacred/secular dichotomies are contested in temple premises and the way within which the alternative temple spaces are created as an outcome of these contestation between different socio-religious communities in the diaspora.