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R. Wessing a Dance of Life; the Seblang of Banyuwangi, Indonesia In R. Wessing A dance of life; The Seblang of Banyuwangi, Indonesia In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155 (1999), no: 4, Leiden, 644-682 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:35:01AM via free access ROBERT WESSING A Dance of Life The Seblang of Banyuwangi, Indonesia1 Introduction The seblang2 is a trance dance performed once a year in two villages in the Banyuwangi area in East Java, Indonesia, which are home to the Using (also spelled Osing), a Javanese sub-group. These villages, located in the district (kecamatan) of Glagah3, are Bakungan, where the ritual covers one day and is performed at night, and Olehsari (also Ulihsari), where the activities go on for seven days during the day. The ritual, in which either a pre-menarcheal girl or a post-menopausal woman - depending on the village - is put into a 1 Many thanks are due to Ibu Nahariyah of Jember, Pak Ruslan and Pak Ichwan of Bakungan, and Ibu Sri Hidayati of Olehsari for long conversations and information and for imparting their personal insight into the field data. Thanks are also due to Rens Heringa for bringing the 1935 article by Stutterheim to my attention, to Jos Platenkamp for pointing out Adelaars work, to Ben Arps for his critical comments on both this article and my Javanese, and to my audiences at the 25th Annual Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies at Seton Hall University (October 25-27, 1996), at the Institut für Ethnologie at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat in Munster, and at the meetings of the Indonesië Kring at the University of Leiden, where I presented earlier versions of this paper, for their generous com- ments. 2 In the literature there is some discussion about the meaning and derivation of the word seblang. Wolbers' informants (see Wolbers 1992:89,1993:36) derived it from the words for 'silent' and 'always', though such instant etymologies should be approached with great caution. De Stoppelaar (1926:413) links it with the word nyeblangake, denoting the method or process of pos- session, which does not explain the root seblang either. Ben Arps (personal communication) sug- gests that the word may be related to ceblang-ceblung, 'to walk in a slouching manner or to mum- ble' (Pigeaud n.d.:576), which is vaguely descriptive of the seblang's movements. Perhaps, as Van der Tuuk (1896:9) suggests, the word seblang only means 'a woman possessed by a deity who performs dances', especially considering that there is no general word for 'dance' in Javanese (Hughes-Freeland 1997:481). Since the dancer is only seblang when possessed (see below), the word would indicate a state of being. 3 In both villages there are some people who claim that theirs is the only seblang performance (see Anonymous n.d.:l). Others acknowledge the existence of seblang in the other village, but disagree about which is the older or the more authentic. ROBERT WESSING, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana, has specialized in Anthropology. His two most important publications are: The soul of ambiguity; The tiger in Southeast Asia, 1986, and 'A princess from Sunda; Some aspects of Nyai Roro Kidul', Asian Folklore Studies 56-2 (1997):317-53. Dr. Wessing can be contacted at the Department of Culrural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands. BKl 155-4 (1999) Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:35:01AM via free access A Dance of Life 645 trance to be possessed by a spirit, is said by the inhabitants of the two villages to be the oldest and most potent ritual in the Banyuwangi area. In the course of the proceedings the villagers establish contact with both ancestral and tutelary spirits in order to promote the welfare of the community, keep the land fertile, and ensure the success of the next erop.4 This paper, based on field data collected in 1991 and 1993, considers the place of this ritual in the relations between the villagers, the ancestors, and the villages' tutelary spir- its (dhanyang). Older mentions of the ritual occur mainly in the Dutch literature. More recently its ethnomusicological and theatrical aspects have been discussed by Wolbers (1986; 1992; 1993), Sutton (1993), and Murgiyanto and Munardi (n.d.), and I will therefore not discuss these here. These recent treatments, however, do not deal at length with the ritual aspects emphasized here, which necessitates some duplication in the description of the dance between this paper and the previous ones. The ritual is similar to trance and possession phenomena elsewhere in Indonesia5, such as the sanghyang of Bali, the sintren of West Java (Foley 1992), the sintring of Madura (Schrieke 1920) and the Nini Thowong performances6 that used to be found throughout Java (Hazeu 1901). As Wolbers (1992:165) points out, these performances all have a similar goal, namely promoting individual and community welfare, and use very similar personages and similar techniques for inducing trance, such as the inhalation of smoke, and music and dance (see Pigeaud 1932:271; Wilken 1912:388). The latter two are not restricted to these trance and possession phenomena, however. At the 4 It should not be assumed that these dances are perceived as fertilizing rituals by the par- ticipants, even though Wolbers (1992) says that they are referred to as ritus kesuburan (fertility rite), a term I never heard used but which may have come into local usage due to outside aca- demie interest. Rather, the strengthening or the re-establishment of the connections between the ancestors, the nature spirits, and the community makes the fields fertile. In other words, this is not a ritual through which it is hoped that fertility will somehow come to the village, but rather is the creation or replenishment of fertility (see Wessing 1978:176); the difference between the two lies in the difference between emic (inside) and etic (outside) views of the proceedings (see Brede Kristensen 1962:7-14). 5 Both the similarities and the differences between seblang and these other trance and dance phenomena in Indonesia and beyond that are mentioned in this paper would make an interest- ing subject for further'study, though this is obviously beyond the scope of the present article. I refer to these other phenomena here in the 'ethnographic present', in order to point out their sim- ilarity to the seblang at one level or another and to indicate how explanations offered here fit in with or differ from those given for these other phenomena. 6 Foley refers to the sintren she describes as a play (1992:28), perhaps because of the theatri- cal aspects, such as the music and dance, associated with it. Murgiyanto and Munardi (n.d.) say the same thing about seblang. According to an Olehsari source (Anonymous n.d.), however, seblang should not be seen as an art form (kesenian), but rather as a traditional ritual. I have cho- sen to use the word 'performance' for this, as this is suitable for both stage art forms and for one of the essential aspects of seblang, the invocation of the various spirits in the community. Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:35:01AM via free access 646 Robert Wessing Javanese courts, too, specifk musical genres are said to protect the realm from disaster and disease (Sutton 1993:126). Also, the tayuban dance, which formerly was very popular at Javanese village celebrations and in which trance was not a factor, was 'an integral part of village shrine ritual associat- ed with annual bersih desa [the cleansing of the village] festivity', as well as with the associated veneration of the founder of the village (Hefner 1987:75, 91). The gandrung7 dance of Banyuwangi, closely related to the seblang, today serves a function similar to that of the tayuban in East Java (see Hefner 1987). On a more individual level, those who go into a trance are thought to be able to foretell the future and to know the cures for diseases and the like (see Hazeu 1901:49; Schrieke 1920:67). If the seblang dance were not to take place, the village would be sure to suffer; informants readily gave examples of trou- ble resulting from neglect of the seblang ritual. People and spirits In order to understand the ritual, the relation between the villagers and the local spirits should be briefly discussed. In Java, as in much of Southeast Asia, India, Southern China and the Pacific region, the soil is thought to be owned by spirits (Mus 1975:8-10). The most important among these nature spirits, from a human point of view, are those said to be responsible for the fertility of the land and thus, indirectly, for life. In Java they are usually called dhanyang. A village may have several dhanyang, but one among them is pri- mary and during the annual celebrations receives the main offerings brought to the village pundhen or place of worship (from pundhi, 'to worship', see Pi- geaud n.d.:474), which is often located near a spring or other source of water. Closely associated with the dhanyang is the founder (cikal bakal) of the vil- lage, the person who brought culture into the wilderness. To be able to con- vert an area of forest into a village, it is believed a person must have consid- erable spiritual powers, in Anderson's sense (1972), in order to persuade the spirits to give up their home and move. He (or occasionally she) also forges a relation with one of these spirits, which then becomes a guardian spirit to the village, cooperating with the founder and his or her descendants in watching over the community's welfare.
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