Songs for the Spirits Music and Mediums
Review
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 .
Accessed: 09/01/2015 20:20
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Ethnomusicology.
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Book Reviews
537
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. Nevertheless, 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.” Ethnomusicology 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 Indonesian Festival. David Harnish. 2006. University of Hawai’i Press. x, 260 pp.,
black and white photographs, illustrations, glossary, index. Cloth, $22.34.
These well-researched and insightful monographs consider one of ethnomusicology’s overarching themes: the transformation of ritual musics in modernity.
Each text provides narratives of musical, religious, and political transformation,
set amidst thoughtful and nuanced engagements with musical forms, cosmologies, mythologies, spirit pantheons, and the content of ritual actions. Barley Norton’s book provides a history of Vietnamese spirit possession rituals (len dong)
and their musics (chau van) that foregrounds the Vietnamese Communist Party’s
condemnation of len dong and the government’s later decision to transform the
genre into a staged folk tradition. The author balances this historical account
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538
Ethnomusicology, Fall 2014
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 rigorous studies of aesthetic traditions in two regions radically underrepresented in
ethnomusicology.
Because of their wealth of detail, I fear that a broad ethnomusicological audience 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.
The festival explored in Harnish’s study is held annually at a temple complex
in Lingsar, Western Lombok. The festival is propitiated mainly by the Lombok
Balinese, but it is also important to the Sasaks, particularly a small component
of them called the Waktu Telu, whom Harnish defines as a community that
practices “a local, syncretic Islamic faith that combines indigenous beliefs with
Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist influences” (6). The Lingsar temple complex is
built above springs that irrigate fields in Central Lombok, and so the festival is
“the place to pray for rain and abundance, success in business and agriculture,
and cures and boons” (5). Nowadays, some 20,000 people partake in the festival,
with about 100,000 farmers relying on it “to coordinate irrigation and increase
the producing capacity of the earth” (ibid.). For the Balinese, the festival is a
vestige of their time as Lombok’s colonizers (1740–1894), so the event is not just
a religious festival but also a display of cultural heritage for the Balinese. Similarly, for the Sasaks, the festival is viewed as a site for khas Sasak (original Sasak
culture), and for this reason, even some orthodox Sasaks (who are otherwise at
odds with the Waktu Telu) propitiate the festival (7).
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Book Reviews
539
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 argument—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 considerable 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.
Harnish tells us the term “Waktu Telu” (meaning “three times,” and signifying that they are less devout than the “Waktu Lima,” or “five times”) has been
obsolete since 1968, on account of the belief that “there are no more Waktu Telu
left”; however, one of the strengths of Harnish’s research is that he locates them
at the Lingsar Festival, while hinting where (in rural areas in Lombok’s north)
and in what ways (at Lingsar and a few other annual festivals) this syncretic Sasak culture still exists. To my mind—and this is another important implication
of the book—the Lingsar Festival is yet another example of the persistence of
relatively harmonious ethnic interactions in a South and Southeast Asia currently
characterized by rampant (and much better documented) ethnic and religious
hostility. Harnish’s work on the Lingsar Festival fits nicely in a growing literature
on cultural pluralism and the uses of culture in spaces suffering from religious
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540
Ethnomusicology, Fall 2014
and ethnic conflict (e.g., Tan 1993, 2005; Willford 2006; Hansen 2012; NavaroYashin 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 chapters, 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,” explores 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 comparative study of Balinese and Lombok Balinese musics, followed by an introduction to Sasak musical aesthetics and genres. The sixth chapter, “Explorations 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 leadership 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.
In sum, Harnish’s book is characterized by a tension, to which he himself
admits (9), between the structuralist approach he found useful in the 1980s and
his more recent attraction to history and agency. My own view is that this is not
a tension, but a useful blueprint for how ethnomusicologists might at once consider homologies between music and cosmology and the relationship between
such structures and historical change. Harnish’s strength is that he shows us
how these domains are interconnected, in a way not unlike that which Marshall
Sahlins (1981) provided in his famous study of Captain Cook’s visits to Hawaii.
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Book Reviews
541
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 permitted 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 supporting 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 discusses the contested role of spirit possession over the longue durée of Vietnamese history. Deftly navigating between modern Vietnamese 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 revolutionary period. From here he explores the role of the Hanoi Music Conservatoire (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, Modernity, 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.
The middle of the book encompasses three chapters, “Songs for the Spirits,”
“The Musical Construction of Spirits,” and “Musical Creativity and Change,”
which do a fine job of demonstrating how “chau van is an elaborate musical system based on interrelationships between songs, spirits, and ritual action” (106).
Chau van musicians are typically male; traditionally, they were also spirit priests
(thay cung), but today most are professional musicians employed by state-run
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542
Ethnomusicology, Fall 2014
music troupes (81). Norton’s moon lute (dan nguyet) teacher, Pham Van Ty, attributes 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 denigration 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 applied 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 accompanying 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 performers (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).
The book’s final two chapters, “Engendering Mediumship” and “Ritual and
Folklorization in Late Socialist Vietnam,” demonstrate how the term “songscape”
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Book Reviews
543
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 compassion 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 version, 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.
It is for this historical depth and its merger with ethnography and experiential treatments of mediumship and ritual musics that Norton is to be
commended. Throughout the book, he provides analyses of chau van music—
sometimes set in highly illuminating dialogue with discussions of ethnicity and
gender—through which the genre is understood in its ritual and staged versions
(both of which appear on the book’s accompanying DVD). He consistently—and
usefully—extends his discussion of chau van and Vietnamese mediumship to
topics of broad interest to ethnomusicologists, including musical competency,
music and trance, and the nature and experience of mediumship through music. As such, he engages with Benjamin Brinner’s work on musical interaction,
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Ethnomusicology, Fall 2014
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 “songscape,” 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 encourage 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 ethnomusicology, 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. Durham: Duke University Press.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. 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.
Willford, Andrew. 2006. Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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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 .
Accessed: 09/01/2015 20:20
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Ethnomusicology.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 9 Jan 2015 20:20:01 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews
537
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. Nevertheless, 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.” Ethnomusicology 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 Indonesian Festival. David Harnish. 2006. University of Hawai’i Press. x, 260 pp.,
black and white photographs, illustrations, glossary, index. Cloth, $22.34.
These well-researched and insightful monographs consider one of ethnomusicology’s overarching themes: the transformation of ritual musics in modernity.
Each text provides narratives of musical, religious, and political transformation,
set amidst thoughtful and nuanced engagements with musical forms, cosmologies, mythologies, spirit pantheons, and the content of ritual actions. Barley Norton’s book provides a history of Vietnamese spirit possession rituals (len dong)
and their musics (chau van) that foregrounds the Vietnamese Communist Party’s
condemnation of len dong and the government’s later decision to transform the
genre into a staged folk tradition. The author balances this historical account
ETM 58_3 text.indd 537
9/23/14 8:37 AM
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
538
Ethnomusicology, Fall 2014
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 rigorous studies of aesthetic traditions in two regions radically underrepresented in
ethnomusicology.
Because of their wealth of detail, I fear that a broad ethnomusicological audience 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.
The festival explored in Harnish’s study is held annually at a temple complex
in Lingsar, Western Lombok. The festival is propitiated mainly by the Lombok
Balinese, but it is also important to the Sasaks, particularly a small component
of them called the Waktu Telu, whom Harnish defines as a community that
practices “a local, syncretic Islamic faith that combines indigenous beliefs with
Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist influences” (6). The Lingsar temple complex is
built above springs that irrigate fields in Central Lombok, and so the festival is
“the place to pray for rain and abundance, success in business and agriculture,
and cures and boons” (5). Nowadays, some 20,000 people partake in the festival,
with about 100,000 farmers relying on it “to coordinate irrigation and increase
the producing capacity of the earth” (ibid.). For the Balinese, the festival is a
vestige of their time as Lombok’s colonizers (1740–1894), so the event is not just
a religious festival but also a display of cultural heritage for the Balinese. Similarly, for the Sasaks, the festival is viewed as a site for khas Sasak (original Sasak
culture), and for this reason, even some orthodox Sasaks (who are otherwise at
odds with the Waktu Telu) propitiate the festival (7).
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539
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 argument—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 considerable 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.
Harnish tells us the term “Waktu Telu” (meaning “three times,” and signifying that they are less devout than the “Waktu Lima,” or “five times”) has been
obsolete since 1968, on account of the belief that “there are no more Waktu Telu
left”; however, one of the strengths of Harnish’s research is that he locates them
at the Lingsar Festival, while hinting where (in rural areas in Lombok’s north)
and in what ways (at Lingsar and a few other annual festivals) this syncretic Sasak culture still exists. To my mind—and this is another important implication
of the book—the Lingsar Festival is yet another example of the persistence of
relatively harmonious ethnic interactions in a South and Southeast Asia currently
characterized by rampant (and much better documented) ethnic and religious
hostility. Harnish’s work on the Lingsar Festival fits nicely in a growing literature
on cultural pluralism and the uses of culture in spaces suffering from religious
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and ethnic conflict (e.g., Tan 1993, 2005; Willford 2006; Hansen 2012; NavaroYashin 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 chapters, 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,” explores 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 comparative study of Balinese and Lombok Balinese musics, followed by an introduction to Sasak musical aesthetics and genres. The sixth chapter, “Explorations 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 leadership 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.
In sum, Harnish’s book is characterized by a tension, to which he himself
admits (9), between the structuralist approach he found useful in the 1980s and
his more recent attraction to history and agency. My own view is that this is not
a tension, but a useful blueprint for how ethnomusicologists might at once consider homologies between music and cosmology and the relationship between
such structures and historical change. Harnish’s strength is that he shows us
how these domains are interconnected, in a way not unlike that which Marshall
Sahlins (1981) provided in his famous study of Captain Cook’s visits to Hawaii.
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541
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 permitted 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 supporting 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 discusses the contested role of spirit possession over the longue durée of Vietnamese history. Deftly navigating between modern Vietnamese 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 revolutionary period. From here he explores the role of the Hanoi Music Conservatoire (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, Modernity, 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.
The middle of the book encompasses three chapters, “Songs for the Spirits,”
“The Musical Construction of Spirits,” and “Musical Creativity and Change,”
which do a fine job of demonstrating how “chau van is an elaborate musical system based on interrelationships between songs, spirits, and ritual action” (106).
Chau van musicians are typically male; traditionally, they were also spirit priests
(thay cung), but today most are professional musicians employed by state-run
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music troupes (81). Norton’s moon lute (dan nguyet) teacher, Pham Van Ty, attributes 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 denigration 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 applied 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 accompanying 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 performers (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).
The book’s final two chapters, “Engendering Mediumship” and “Ritual and
Folklorization in Late Socialist Vietnam,” demonstrate how the term “songscape”
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543
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 compassion 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 version, 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.
It is for this historical depth and its merger with ethnography and experiential treatments of mediumship and ritual musics that Norton is to be
commended. Throughout the book, he provides analyses of chau van music—
sometimes set in highly illuminating dialogue with discussions of ethnicity and
gender—through which the genre is understood in its ritual and staged versions
(both of which appear on the book’s accompanying DVD). He consistently—and
usefully—extends his discussion of chau van and Vietnamese mediumship to
topics of broad interest to ethnomusicologists, including musical competency,
music and trance, and the nature and experience of mediumship through music. As such, he engages with Benjamin Brinner’s work on musical interaction,
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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 “songscape,” 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 encourage 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 ethnomusicology, 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. Durham: Duke University Press.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. 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.
Willford, Andrew. 2006. Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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