Healing Performances: Ethnographic Concepts and Emic Perspectives

This paper looks at healing performances as
ethnographic expressions of local knowledge and culture embedded
within the Malay psyche and gemeinschaft. As society develops and
progresses, these healing performances are caught within conflicting
trajectories which become compounded by the contestations of
tradition, religious concerns, locality and modernity. As
exemplifications of the Malay ethos, these performances practice
common rituals, cater to the innate needs of the practitioners and
serve the targeted, closed, local community. This paper traces the
ethnographic methods in documenting these practices as rituals of
healing in a post-modern world. It delineates the ethnographic
concepts used to analyze these rituals, and to semiotically read the
varied binarial oppositions and juxtapositions. The paper concludes
by highlighting the reconciliatory processes involved in maintaining
these ritual performances as exemplifications of the Malay ethos
playing an important role in the re-aligning, re-balancing and healing
of the Malay community’s psyche.

Authors:

• S. Ishak
• M. G. Nasuruddin

Keywords:

• Angin/winds
• Semangat/spirits
• Traditional Theatres
• Trance.

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