Author(s): Jim Sykes
Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam by Barley Norton; Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth, and Cultural Politics at an Indonesian Festival by David Harnish Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 537-544
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.0537 .
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from her interlocutors, such as interview recordings or transcripts. Moreover, Hofman makes mention of several musical performances by her interlocutors that occured during the oral history interviews. Recordings or transcriptions of these performances could have been tremendously enlightening, offering further articulations of female individuality within the constraints of rural society. Ne-vertheless, these are minor omissions that do not detract from Hofman’s excellent scholarship and compelling writing. The book emphasizes a necessary shift in researching gender politics from representation toward experience and points to many ways that individuals transgressed the traditional binaries often used when considering socialist cultural practices. Hofman also makes a persuasive case for oral history methodology as a means by which scholars can further access personal experiences to examine the interplay of discourse, ideology, and practice.
Ryan S. Haynes University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
References
Petrović, Ankica. 1990. “Women in the Music Creation Process in the Dinaric Cultural Zone of Yugoslavia.” In Music, Gender, and Culture, edited by Marcia Herndon and Susanne Ziegler, 71–85. Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag.
Thompson, Paul. 1978 [2000]. The Voice of the Past—Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rice, Tim. 2003. “Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and Ethnography.”
Ethnomu-sicology 47(2):151–79.
Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam. Barley Norton. 2009. University of Illinois Press. xvi, 256 pp., black and white photographs, illustrations, index, DVD. Cloth, $42.30; Kindle, $23.49.
Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth, and Cultural Politics at an Indone-sian Festival. David Harnish. 2006. University of Hawai’i Press. x, 260 pp., black and white photographs, illustrations, glossary, index. Cloth, $22.34.
with an ethnography of a len dong revival that emerged following the economic reforms (doi moi) of the mid-1980s. David Harnish’s book draws on fieldwork conducted since 1983 in Lombok, an Indonesian island to the east of Bali, at an annual religious festival that remains important to both the island’s majority Sasak Muslims (comprising ca. 90% of the population) and minority Balinese Hindus (numbering just 110,000 out of a total population of 2.6 million; 6). The books allow music history and analyses of ritual musics to emerge through the authors’ lived experience of social, musical, and religious transformation; part of their charm is their ability to deftly mix reflexive ethnography with rigor-ous studies of aesthetic traditions in two regions radically underrepresented in ethnomusicology.
Because of their wealth of detail, I fear that a broad ethnomusicological audi-ence may pass these books by—merely flipping through their pages might lead some to believe they are useful just to area specialists. This would be a shame, for surely there are not many of us who specialize in the musics of Vietnam or Lombok. So let me be upfront in saying that these books demand a broad ethnomusicological readership. Norton develops the notion of a “songscape” to understand how songs in len dong fuse dance, offerings, and other ritual actions; Harnish explores how the Lombok festival stabilizes fraught relations between the Sasaks and the Balinese. These contributions are made through well-written, traditional ethnography, and as such, the books are useful for registering where ethnomusicology has been, where it is going, and how it may productively stay the same. Each would make a welcome addition to a number of ethnomusicology courses, such as those concerned with ritual, festivity, modernity, the politics of tradition, gender, ethnicity, conflict, nationalism, and ethnographic method.
Harnish’s book traces the persisting and transforming meanings of the Lingsar Festival for the Balinese and Sasaks, as the mythologies that play out in the temple complex come into contact with discourses of cultural heritage and transformations in ritual content due to changes in festival leadership. But the book’s strength lies in its swaying back and forth, between Balinese and Sasak myths about the temple complex, Balinese and Sasak cosmologies, Balinese and Sasak ritual practices at the festival, and Balinese and Sasak musical instruments and genres.
The most intriguing aspect of the book—indeed, Harnish’s main argu-ment—is that the Lingsar Festival mediates relations between the Sasaks and the Balinese, which remain fraught due to the history of Balinese colonialism on the island. As one festival organizer puts it, without the festival, the Balinese and Sasaks would be “like the Palestinians and Israelis” (6). Harnish thus views the festival as a “stabilizing mechanism” (15). The theoretical implication for ethnomusicology is vast—music festivals can play a role in mediating ethnic conflict—but Harnish’s narrative is more complex and rewarding than this. Even on the book’s first page, for instance, the author provides an example of a dispute that occurred in 1988 between the two groups over which would have the right to carry the main food offerings in the festival (1). Such tensions litter the text, and the festival appears more a place where ethnic tensions play themselves out than simply a place for stabilizing ethnic relations—though perhaps such a playing out is the stabilization Harnish sees. The author also spends consider-able time describing the tensions between two other groups at the festival, the orthodox Sasak Muslims (known as the Waktu Lima) and the Waktu Telu, whose relations are also fraught (for example, some Waktu Lima have banned bronze instruments in their areas of influence, out of the belief that they are a vestige of pre-reformist Sasak culture; 38). The Lingsar Festival, then, does important work in Lombok, stabilizing relationships between ethnic and religious groups who are otherwise quite at odds with one another.
and ethnic conflict (e.g., Tan 1993, 2005; Willford 2006; Hansen 2012; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Schultz 2012). The book allows us to better grasp the importance of the demarcation of religious festivals and artistic genres as “cultural heritage,” for it seems such a discourse is what allows syncretic practices to be sanctioned in spaces characterized by a strict religious orthodoxy that would otherwise ban them.
There is much to be gleaned from the book’s intermediate and final chap-ters, which I can just briefly touch upon here. The intermediate chapters will be of special interest to Balinists, for they provide an engagement with Balinese Hinduism set against a comparison of Balinese and Lombok Balinese musical practices. Chapter 4, “Temple Units, Performing Arts, and Festival Rites,” ex-plores the inner workings of the Lingsar Festival, with diagrams that situate both Sasaks and Balinese at two festival sites separated by about a hundred meters of rice fields (89). The chapter introduces the ritual content and performing arts at the festival, paying particular attention to the gadoh and kemaliq, the former an exclusively Balinese courtyard, the latter a second courtyard considered a “place of supernatural sanctions” (240). We learn that the festival is five days long, but includes weeks of preparation. The gamelan gong kuna, “the primary Balinese ceremonial gamelan in Lombok” (96), is featured at the festival, while “about 1997 a newly choreographed dance from Bali, Rejang Déwa” (temple dance for the gods), that combined a variety of movements from sacred dances, was introduced to Lombok (97). This dance is now performed on the main day of the festival (ibid.).
Chapter 5, “Music: History, Cosmology, and Content,” provides a compara-tive study of Balinese and Lombok Balinese musics, followed by an introduc-tion to Sasak musical aesthetics and genres. The sixth chapter, “Exploraintroduc-tions of Meaning,” and seventh, “Changing Dimensions, Changing Identities,” document (respectively) the importance of various styles and placement of music at the festival, and changes in music and other ritual content at the festival following the death, in 1993, of Sanusi, a Sasak priest. After Sanusi’s passing, Sasak lead-ership of the festival was transferred to Sanusi’s brother, Asmin, who had little prior interest in the festival, and Harnish locates many of the profound changes in the festival over the past few decades in this change of leadership.
Barley Norton begins his “Introduction: Encountering Mediumship” by describing his discovery of len dong at a 1995 festival at Phu Giay, a temple complex in Vietnam known as the mausoleum (lang) of the goddess Lieu Hanh (2). We learn that this 1995 festival was particularly noteworthy since it was the first time that the Ministry of Culture and Information officially permit-ted the festival to occur (4). Norton writes that, “At least since the 1970s, the festival has been officially prohibited and condemned as superstitious, feudal, and depraved” (4); despite its official sanction from 1995 to 1997, “the Party’s policy to eliminate ‘backward’ and ‘superstitious’ aspects of the festival was, at least nominally, still in evidence during the three ‘experimental’ years [of sup-porting the festival]” (5). Interestingly, as with the Lingsar Festival, official state recognition was garnered through the idea that the festival is traditional culture: “At the 1998 festival, the antisuperstition banners [which had been hung at the earlier festivals] were replaced with cultural nationalist slogans like ‘promote and develop the character of the nation’ . . .” (6).
In chapter 1, “Mediumship, Modernity, and Cultural Identity,” Norton dis-cusses the contested role of spirit possession over the longue durée of Vietnam-ese history. Deftly navigating between modern VietnamVietnam-ese novels, the work of Vietnamese folklorists, and French colonial writings on len dong, the author demonstrates how “the history of spirit practices and ritual music is a barometer of social, cultural, and political change in modern Vietnam” (21). Moving to a discussion of music and the Cultural Revolution, Norton explores the place of music in debates about “the cultural direction of the nation” (32), providing an introduction to chau van music not in its traditional garb (which is described elsewhere throughout the book), but in the style initiated during the revolu-tionary period. From here he explores the role of the Hanoi Music Conserva-toire (Nhac Vien Ha Noi) and one particular composer, Dang Xuan Khai, in composing “Neotraditional Music,” a genre that draws upon folk musics such as chau van for inspiration. The book’s second chapter, “Mediumship, Moder-nity, and Cultural Identity,” considers experiences of mediumship and types of transformative events that lead the (today, mostly female) spirit mediums to their craft, in a style reminiscent of Gananath Obeyesekere’s (1984) writings on female mendicants in Sri Lanka. Norton provides an overview of the Four Palace Religion (the “Mother Religion”) and considers historical developments in how its spirit pantheon is represented in len dong.
music troupes (81). Norton’s moon lute (dan nguyet) teacher, Pham Van Ty, attri-butes the fact that most chau van musicians are male to the tendency during the colonial period for only men to be educated to read and write Sino-Vietnamese characters (a necessary component of being a spirit priest; 82). Women do sing in chau van bands, either as spirit mediums or because they were “introduced to it by their husbands who perform ritual music” (83). Nevertheless, today it is male musicians who remain favored for their ability to “‘flatter’ (ninh) the spirits more effectively than female singers” (ibid.).
Norton uses the life stories of three musicians to capture the kinds of changes chau van underwent in the twentieth century. His moon lute teacher, Pham Van Ty (b. 1956), has no hereditary ties to chau van, but came to the genre through his education at the Hanoi Music Conservatoire. He is a moon lute player, singer, and resident performer at the Mulberry Temple (Den Dau), as well as an employee at the Folk Culture Institute. By contrast, Dang Cong Hung (b. 1955) is the son of a chau van player who performs in Hanoi temples and has served since 1977 as an instrumentalist at the Vietnam Cheo Theater. Lastly, Norton considers Le Ba Cao, who traces his heritage back through five generations of spirit priests; though Cao stopped playing chau van in 1952 because of the genre’s denigra-tion by the authorities, he picked it up again in the 1970s, and since the late 1980s has served as a spirit priest in several Hanoi temples. For Norton, Cao is “a representative of the prerevolutionary tradition and is seen as an important link to the past by younger musicians . . . .” Hung is “one of a growing number of professional musicians who learned chau van in the reform era” (albeit with a hereditary connection), while Ty is “a formally trained musician who has ap-plied his musical knowledge and skills across genres” (90).
The chau van repertoire includes over forty strophic songs (90), and the centerpiece of the book’s middle chapters is an analysis of parts of this repertoire through the lens of two rituals, which are excerpted on the book’s accompany-ing DVD. Norton puts his experiences with multiple teachers to good use, for it allows him to develop a comparative approach to the chau van repertoire. For instance, he provides a transcription that shows differences in how two perform-ers (Ty and Hung) approach the same melody (138–39). What emerges is that each chau van song is not a set composition so much as a “backbone” or “way” (loi) that allows musicians to develop unique interpretations. Different spirits are distinguished by certain melodies and rhythms, in a manner not unlike that which Richard Jankowsky (2010) has documented for the stambeli genre of Tunisia. Chau van aesthetics favor “sweet playing and interesting singing,” with the purpose of the latter being “to flatter the spirits” (106).
may be taken not just as a heuristic for interpreting the relations between song, spirits, and ritual action in len dong, but also as a means to help us understand how len dong produces subjectivities broadly engaged with interpretations of Vietnamese tradition. Len dong rituals involve female mediums becoming “prestigious scholars, fierce warriors, playful princes, and naughty boys,” and male mediums becoming “beautiful ladies, graceful unmarried princesses, and cheeky young girls” (155). Norton counters previous research on gender in len dong that was conducted with Vietnamese immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area (Fjelstad 1995), in which spirit possession was interpreted solely as a female domain set in opposition to “male systems of feudal power rooted in Confucian orthodoxy” (thus forging a split between a yin system of compas-sion versus a yang system of social values; 158). By contrast, Norton adopts a performative approach to the mediums’ gendering practices that foregrounds how the “dynamic flow” between stereotypes of male and female behavior play a role in structuring the subjectivities of the mediums themselves. The author articulates how his own gender situated him in the field, and he considers how chau van music is gendered to match male and female spirits.
The final chapter considers the recent invention of a folklorized version of len dong, The Three Spirits (Ba Gia Dong). Invented in 1993 by the Vietnam Cheo Theater in preparation for their tour in France (206), the show had much success, after which it spawned other versions. Norton analyzes one such ver-sion, The Five Spirits (Nam Gia Dong), a show by the Nam Dinh Cheo Troupe that involved loud amplification and bright, multicolored lights (also featured on the DVD). Norton’s teacher, Ty, is frustrated with this version, since it places emphasis on visuals rather than on music or correct ritual process, and thus it appears to him as ritual mixed with theater (216). Overall, Norton’s text does an excellent job of situating such folklorizations of len dong and chau van as myriad waves that emerge in tandem with political shifts in Vietnam, the most important of which was the transition from authoritarian Communist rule to the reform era.
Judith Becker’s writings on trance, and Bruce Kapferer’s and Steven Friedson’s theories on embodiment in ritual.
If these books can be faulted, it is that they are led too much by theory rather than following the profound theoretical implications of their subject matter. Each text cites appropriate literature when needed, but too often the citations feel as an aside, a nod toward what others have said about similar subject matter. Readers must infer the ethnomusicological usefulness of “song-scape,” for instance, and to ask how the power of music festivals to mediate ethnic hostilities contributes more broadly to our understandings of music in conflict situations. Perhaps most important is the fact that these books encour-age us to break down barriers between ethnography and history in a unique way. History emerges in each text as the ethnographer’s personal engagement with sonic and sociopolitical change, through years of sustained ethnographic fieldwork. This is not an attempt to bring the archive into ethnography, but it is still something quite provocative. We are moving into a time when ethno-musicology, if not accruing its own longue durée, has developed an approach to history through ethnography that deserves more theoretical attention. These monographs allow us to glimpse how the relationship between history and ethnography might be brought into dialogue with contemporary concerns, of which the newly emergent fields of sound studies and music and conflict seem currently to be the most pressing.
Jim Sykes University of Pennsylvania
References
Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2012. Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jankowsky, Richard. 2010. Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Dur-ham: Duke University Press.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experi-ence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Schultz, Anna. 2012. Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism. NY: Oxford University Press.
Tan Sooi Beng. 1993. Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Drama. NY: Oxford University Press.
———. 2005. “From Folk to National Popular Music: Recreating Ronggeng in Malaysia.” Journal of Musicological Research 24(3–4): 287–307.
