Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam

2. Experiencing Spirit Possession

2 experiencing Spirit Possession The fascination with spirit possession in academia has spawned numerous theories that attempt to explain the phenomenon. Janice Boddy’s review of the literature points out that “spirit possession research has been characterized by a fundamental tension between reductive, naturalizing, or rationalizing approaches on the one hand and contextualizing, more phenomenological approaches on the other” (1994:410). The approach taken here is contextual and phenomenological rather than reductive. Possession experiences are situated within the religious system of the spirit pantheon and are conceptualized in terms of embodiment, as a mode of bodily engagement with the spirits. Based on mediums’ own accounts, the interactions between human and divine forces are understood as grounded in the body and bodily being-in-the-world. Phenomenological approaches to spirit possession are diverse, but they share a concern with the complexity of lived experience. In the broadest sense, a phenomenological orientation “demands a turning back to the world of lived human experience and taking what people do and say seriously” (Kapferer 1991 [1983]: xix). Bruce Kapferer’s study prioritizes the power and logic of the lived experience of Sinhalese exorcism and resists reductionist understandings of human action in terms of social functionalist or individual psychological theories. Since Kapferer’s study, anthropological and ethnomusicological studies of spirit possession have paid attention to lived experience, the body, and embodiment in quite different ways (e.g., Roseman 1991; Stoller 1995; Friedson 1996; Lambek 1998; Emoff 2002; Tanabe 2002). From the perspective of the experiencing spirit possession · 55 anthropology of the senses, Paul Stoller has made one of the strongest calls for consideration of the “centrality of the sentient body” in spirit possession (1995:20). He draws on Paul Connerton’s theories about collective memory and commemorative ritual and Michael Taussig’s writing on mimesis and alterity to theorize how sensuous, embodied possession among the Songhay of Mali and Niger triggers cultural memory and is related to colonial encounters and political power. For Stoller, “spirit possession is an arena of sensuous mimetic production and reproduction, which makes it a stage for the production and reproduction of power” (1995:37). Positioning the sentient body at the center of investigations into spirit possession is closely related to “radical empiricism,” an approach espoused by Stoller, in which the experiences of the ethnographer and the interaction between “observer” and “observed” are brought to the fore in narrative ethnography (see also Jackson 1989). As in other related disciplines, there has been a strong shift toward experiential approaches in ethnomusicology (see Titon 1997), but Steven Friedson is one of the few ethnomusicologists who has adopted a form of radical empiricism, which he blends with Heidegger’s philosophy of “being.” Friedson’s ethnographic inquiry is about Heideggerian “questioning” or investigating possibilities (1996:8). Understandings arise from “ethnography as a questioning” through intersubjectivity at the ontophenomenological level, rather through the “encounter of a perceiving subject (ethnographer) with the world of the ‘other’” (Friedson 1996:3). Friedson’s research on Tumbuka trancing and healing in Malawi proposes a “phenomenology of musical experience” in which “lived experience is a musical mode of being in the world” (1996:5; emphasis in original). For the Tumbuka, Friedson demonstrates that music is not merely an acoustical phenomenon that is the object of reflection. Instead, musical experience “penetrates directly into the realm of bodily existence” and “musical structure reveals itself as a mode of being-in-the-world that can be understood in formal terms, an important onto-phenomenological opening not available to all modes of being” (1996:168). Part of Friedson’s phenomenological mode of inquiry is his own experience of “dancing vimbuza.” By carrying out the dances of the class of vimbuza spirits in the intense atmosphere of the thempli, the healer’s temple, Friedson experiences a change in conscious awareness that brings him closer to Tumbuka modes of being-in-the-world. Although on a few occasions, I actively participated in len dong by playing the moon lute for some songs, I was not initiated as a medium. For initiation to take place, a “master medium” (thay dong or dong truong) or “spirit priest” (thay cung) must diagnose an adept as 56 . songs for the spirits destined to become a medium. Initiation is usually deemed to be necessary following some sort of affliction attributed to the spirits. None of the mediums and spirit priests I met suggested I should be initiated, and I felt...