In 1880, Edward Tylor made a “special argument” for games as anthropological evidence. Jailangkung can be described as a game inasmuch as there is an objective and rules of play. Apparently, jailangkung is commonplace in Indonesia. I pressed my informants for answers, only to be met with nonchalance.
3 Notwithstanding my familiarity with temple rituals and Malay magic, a spirit-possessed basket, endearingly dressed in a little shirt, was a discovery.
This included the everyday belief in djinns and hantus. I also investigate Indonesian spiritualism for at home I was immersed in the Sino-Malay cultural world of my Peranakan 2 mother. My childhood in Singapore of the 1950s was a social milieu of temple ceremonies for my Hokkien father’s family practiced Chinese popular religion, which is why I chose to research Chinese spirit possession. It was a rattan basket dressed in a little red and yellow Ming-style soldier’s tunic (Figure 1). After the séance, the “beast” lay lifeless on the main altar table. The “beast” pulled the men up and down the temple hall and into the crowd so that spectators had to scramble to get out of the way. They appeared to be wrestling with a “wild beast” that they were hanging onto with sashes. The languid performance lulled me, so I was unprepared when two men suddenly barged past me in a flurry of activity. 1 This was at a temple in Jam Thang village on the outskirts of Singkawang, West Kalimantan, where I was watching a spirit medium dance with a fan on the evening of February 9, 2008. I was astonished by my first encounter with a jailangkung (also jelangkung, spirit basket). Keywords: Indonesia, jailangkung, hantu, mysticism, séance, spirit basket, archaeology, distribution of games This investigation discusses the domestication of an alien tradition as social-political engineering. Jailangkung starred in the country’s most successful horror movie. Jailangkung and its iterations are performed as sacred rituals or games of amusement all over the archipelago to an extent that jailangkung has been absorbed into Indonesian magic folklore. For example, Nini Thowong’s spirit-possessed doll originated as an effigy built over a basket armature. Contemporary Chinese divinatory methods have replaced the clumsy basket planchette with the handier triforked branch or a pen held in the medium’s hand, but a spirit basket still features in jailangkung and remains the key element in involutions of the prototype. The term is the homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong and unambiguously links the Indonesian practice with the Chinese. Chinese spirit-basket divination, which dates to the fifth century, would have been lost to the world had it not been reincarnated as Indonesian jailangkung.