Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity, and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community (review)

For the past twenty years, DeBernardi has published many articles on the temples and rituals of the Chinese community in Penang. She has provided detailed anthropological studies of the social and religious life of the local Chinese community with an eye to placing it not only in its Malaysian context but also in the broader comparative context of Chinese communities elsewhere. In this book, she applies the same perspectives to the history of the community from the early nineteenth century to the present, raising interesting issues concerning the interdisciplinary approach.

The book is divided into two parts, "Religion and Society in Colonial Penang" and "Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Revival in Contemporary Penang." Topics include the conflict between the colonial governor and the Kong Hok temple in 1857, the social role of the Heaven and Earth Society "sworn brotherhoods," the creation of the "Chinese Town Hall" in 1886, the political context of the Hungry Ghost and Nine Emperors festival revivals in the 1970s, and the historical narratives embedded in the lives of the deities. The author applies her understanding of the rituals and the narratives to the formation of ethnic identities in both the past and present, proposing that the formation of popular religious institutions in colonial Penang and the contemporary revitalization of popular religious culture were "social movements designed to create and sustain unity" (4). She contrasts her view with that of "social-movement theorists" who argue that ethnic-identity movements, although they may combine modern ideologies with mythic reaffirmations of the past, are different from religious revivals based on invented ritual traditions, which the theorists dismiss as "escapist." To support her interpretation, she invokes recent trends in anthropology and history, adding to the mix of insights into rituals and their meanings a remarkable new source, the words, or "texts," of the Chinese spirit medium.

DeBernardi's most controversial methodological challenge involves her conclusion that the leaders of the sworn brotherhoods of the mid-nineteenth century acted in their initiation rites as mediums for the spirits of the founders, thus combining secular and sacred authority in a manner that had a great impact on the initiates. She goes beyond the recent groundbreaking work of Murray, Ownby, and ter Haar on the invention of the sworn brotherhood's traditions and the meaning of their rituals as performance, investigating "how the inventors of the sworn brotherhoods used historical narrative and ritual process to construct a social contract (81)."¹ The "shamanistic dimension" of their rites, the models of political centrality and authority expressed in the narratives, and their periodic festivals invested with cosmological significance are akin to the convergence of rites, narratives, and periodic festival celebrations that occurred in response to the May Thirteenth Crisis of 1969 and the resulting Rukunegara, or "National Ideology" of Malaysia. In both cases, popular religious traditions were reinvented and revitalized with the help of influential secular power-brokers in ways that reaffirmed the local Chinese community's sense of its cultural roots.

The detailed descriptions of the historical narratives, community institutions, ritual paraphernalia, and public action in themselves make this book fascinating reading for anyone interested in Chinese popular religion, colonial history, or contemporary cultural politics. The interdisciplinary insights into the complex ways that local cultures and national or global politics interact, free of master narratives and theoretical blinders, make it especially exciting.