I felt like an old-school anthropologist, the colonial era scholars who sought to find the most other-able of Others, those most unimaginable in a Western ontology, and “explain” them.
Except it happened completely by accident. My interest in Indonesia doesn’t stem from a desire to trek into the jungles of Papua to “discover” indigenous peoples. In fact, I became fascinated in this country because of how its people think about Islam as a tool of modernity. But nonetheless, there I found myself, in a small city in central Java called Temanggung, in the front row of a gathering of hundreds—called a nyadran.
I was visiting friends in Temanggung, and a small group of us were drinking coffee in the town square. The evening had a quotidian feel about it. It seemed that regulars filled the small park, and I reveled in the santai, sepi (quiet and relaxed) mood of the town, as compared to busy Yogya and frenetic Jakarta. As the time approached ten o’clock, my friends asked me if I’d ever seen Kuda Lumping, what they described as a “traditional Javanese horse dance.” I offered an apologetic “belum parnah” (no, never before) as they informed me that a friend of theirs was dancing in a nearby ceremony. As we pulled into a narrow lane a few kilometers away, I realized that the event was indeed a citywide attraction. Hundreds of motorbikes stretched out in lines like millipedes. Indeed, there were hundreds of people in the audience, seated along stone risers and facing a dirt performance ring. Behind the ring was a stage with an eerie sounding Gamelan set and a coarse singer. Soon after we arrived, a horse dance began, with costumed young men (perhaps 16-20) took on the nature of horses, performing in near perfect synchronism. My hosts excitedly pointed out their friend (he is the costumed performer in the picture I’ve included).
Once the horse dance concluded, a different, more gripping spectacle took shape. A costumed performer, who had been present since we arrived, assumed a sort of master role, as the music intensified and people from the audience spontaneously became kesurupan—best translated as possessed. The friend who’d just finished his horse dance ushered me to the front of the crowd for a better view, as other audience members lost control of their body and were brought, like animals, to the center of the ring. My friends explained to me that no one planned on becoming kesurupan, but that those who allowed their minds to become empty were susceptible to possession by the devilish spirits that had been called to the space.
Indeed, it seemed that those becoming possessed had lost human sensations. Their eyes became milky, and they assumed the posture of tigers and lions, at times rushing at the audience and growling. Those from the highest risers who became possessed jumped inhuman distances to the ground. Audience members within a few feet of me became kesurupan, and others took on the role as caretakers, charged with keeping satisfied the devil inside their peers.
Part of sating these devils involved feeding them. Their appetites are apparently quite multifarious. Some of those possessed were fed whole roses as if they were marshmallows. More shocking were the kesurupan who chewed up and swallowed long fluorescent light bulbs. Given their ease in chomping down on the glass, they could have been eating peanuts. All the while, the master walked around the twenty or so possessed individuals (all men), cracking his whip on their backs and sending shivers up my spine.
It turns out that a ceremony like this one is performed only a few times each year. The one at which I so fortuitously found myself was in fact scheduled intentionally just before the start of Ramadan. Whether this is read as a kind of ‘Muslim Mardi Gras’, when people get all the unorthodoxy out of their system, or as a ritual to ward off evil spirits and facilitate reflection and contemplation during a holy month, perhaps the more important point is that it is situated within a localized practice of Islam. Indeed, as I was told several times that night, the ceremony I witnessed was used by the nine saints who spread Islam in Java as a method of placing the religion in a local context. The nyaderan, of course, is a story seldom told. Usually the accounts of Indonesians harmonizing Islam and local culture involve pleasing descriptions of the pesantren (Islamic boarding schools), which employ teaching methods drawn from centuries of Hindu and Buddhist influence to pass on unique Islamic traditions. Or fantastic stories of the Yogyakarta sultan, publicly celebrating Maulid (Mohammad’s birthday) with a traditional Gamelan ensemble.
While old-school anthropologists wrote about “little” and “big” traditions, it is possible to see the nyaderan as actually neither. The audience members there, my friends included, are not carrying on a “little” tradition while a “big” one (Islam) threatens to swallow it. Perhaps, instead of determining what is errant or orthodox, little or big—a perspective that ultimately marginalizes someone or some idea—those hundreds who came that night embrace multiple affiliations. They are both Javanese and Muslim, and rather than this being a split identity, it is likely understood as joint.
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