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Spirits as technology: tech-gnosis and the ambivalent politics of the invisible in Indonesia

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Abstract

Spirits hold a central but ambivalent position in Indonesian political and social life. Pushed to the margins of public discourse in recent decades by modernism and Muslim piety, spirits remain key to the realm of the invisible or inscrutable (gaib) and continue to have a strong hold on the popular imagination in communities and on TV screens across the archipelago. One kind of spirit combines imagined potential and public ambivalence with particular force: jin spirits (also spelt jinn). Described in the Koran as real spiritual entities with an unfortunate habit of possessing humans, jin spirits are today also associated with heretical forms of Islam for many people with pious Muslim sensibilities and with backward superstition and evil magic for those with modern, secular sensibilities. Dealing with jin spirits, as a result, is always a careful negotiation with these cross-cutting sensibilities. This paper follows Kyai Muzakkin, the leader of an Islamic boarding school or pesantren in East Java, who insists that the one thousand jin spirits at his pesantren are real and effective “tools” at his disposal. I suggest that Kyai Muzakkin’s insistence on spirits as “tools” responds to the repressed and ambivalent reality of spirits in Indonesia. By turning tech-gnosis, the modern fascination with technology, into both ontological proof of and moral justification for the existence of spirits, Kyai Muzakkin harnesses the magic of modern technology – and of tele-technology in particular – in support of the reality of the invisible realm. While tele-technology thereby vindicates the reality of spirits and advocates for alternative ways of seeing Islam and the modern nation of Indonesia, I also argue that this vindication comes at a cost; namely the ambivalent re-inscription of visibility as proof of the real.

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Notes

  1. I have used pseudonyms for all informants in this article except for Kyai Muzakkin, who is a public figure in Indonesia and who agrees, even insists, that I use his name in order to make him and his boarding school known internationally. This is part of his hope for global visibility, which I will discuss later in the paper. Italicized words in this paper are, unless otherwise indicated, Indonesian (I.), Javanese (J.) or Arabic (A.).

  2. The video can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUif94g1Gik. As of March 2017 it has been watched 1770 times, and it is one of many thousands of video clips on ruqyah exorcism available on YouTube.

  3. Gaib, an Indonesian loanword from the Arabic ghayb, means “mysterious,” “invisible,” “hidden,” or “inscrutable” (Echols and Shadily 1989:167).

  4. Like the Arab word bāṭin, from which it is derived, the Indonesian term batin refers to matters that are related to the mind or heart, and that are “inner, internal, spiritual, esoteric, or mystical” (Echols and Shadily 1989:56; Walker 2015). Part of a central dichotomy in Sufi-inspired Islam, it is opposed to lahir (A. ẓāhir), referring to the outward, obvious or exoteric world (Sedgwick 2003).

  5. In an interesting argument, Laura Marks traces the intimate parallel between Islamic art and modern digital media in their play on visibility and invisibility, the finite and infinite, \( b\overline{a}\underset{.}{t} in \) and \( \underset{.}{z}\overline{a} hir \) (Marks 2010).

  6. This is not to say that spirits were not present or problematic in Indonesian communities before the establishment of the nation. But they were different kinds of problems. I am suggesting that the problem of their reality, the problem of their role in “proper Islam” and the problem of their place in Indonesian modernity and media are problematizations of a certain kind. Secularization, medialization and the development of national publics with certain ideas of reality reshape what spirits can be. My point is that the forces of secularization, modernization, puritan Islamization and medialization, quite evidently, do not diminish or undermine the reality of spirits. Rather, they re-organize this reality as a new sort of problem to which particular, competing solutions are made available.

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Bubandt, N. Spirits as technology: tech-gnosis and the ambivalent politics of the invisible in Indonesia. Cont Islam 13, 103–120 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0391-9

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