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En-Chieh Blessed Fetishism

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En-Chieh Blessed Fetishism Culture and Religion Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2011, 373–399 Blessed fetishism: Language ideology and embodied worship among Pentecostals in Java En-Chieh Chao* Anthropology, Boston University, Boston, USA A prominent trend of late Christianity has been a cultivation of ‘unmediated’ inspiration realised in embodied worship, notably glossolalia, ecstasy and verbal exuberance. Speaking unfathomable language and embracing spontaneous feelings, Pentecostals in Java have relied on and reworked local language ideologies by passionately employing both the babbling and yelling forms of code-switching in Indonesian, English, Hebrew and glossolalia, in an aspiration to achieve ‘true worshiper-hood’. A closer scrutiny of some elements of this embodied worship against the larger religiously heterogeneous context, furthermore, reveals the salient impacts of cross- religious relations on the process of shaping Pentecostal Christianity. This article argues that specific forms of Pentecostal worship can be better understood when situated in Muslim–Christian relations. Specifically, they speak to a thriving form of religious fetishism that is locally primed for a distinct voice out of the flourishing movements of Islamic resurgence. Keywords: glossolalia; language ideology; Pentecostalism; embodiment; religious pluralism It was the largest public hospital in the Central Javanese city of Salatiga. I was with some 40 college students from Fendi church, a growing Pentecostal congregation, knocking on the doors of the patients’ rooms. Our goal was to ‘implicitly’ celebrate Christmas two weeks ahead of the actual holiday in 2009, by ‘sending love’ to those who take care of the hospitalised patients, mostly their relatives. Our method was to deliver sweet tea and snacks. This was called sentuhan kasih, or ‘the touch of love’, a form of regular social outreach of the Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 congregation. It concerned me that some of the congregants wore red Santa Claus hats when doing this. I thought we all agreed that Christians had to be low-key in a non-Christian or, more precisely, predominantly Muslim environment. After a few smooth deliveries, smooth meaning the caregivers who answered the doors took our snacks and said thank you, the tiny love-sending squad that I belonged to stopped by at the door of another room. A man in songkok (Jv. Fez, Islamic hat) opened the door of the patient’s room, with several women in jilbab (Indo. hijbab, Islamic headscarves) and other men in songkok behind, staring at our Santa Claus costumes in confusion, speechless. *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2011.633273 http://www.tandfonline.com 374 E.-C. Chao ‘Is there anything that I can help you with?’ the man in the fez said cautiously. ‘We wish to celebrate Christmas and deliver some snacks to you’. The Muslim family in the patient’s room seemed disturbed by the simple request, and their silence revealed the awkwardness they felt in this situation we had put them in. After a minute, the man who was next to the patient’s bed put his right hand on his chest and broke the silence: ‘Well. I am Islam.’ The first man, still standing close to us like a doorkeeper, shook his head, declined the cup of tea offered to his face, and said: ‘We ... we don’t ... we don’t have this tradition.’ He seemed so deeply bothered that he was not even ready, if merely out of courtesy, to appreciate what had just happened. While still reflecting upon the awkwardness of the Santa-Fez encounter, I was soon carried away by another scene occurring in another room right across the hallway. Inside, the family was weeping softly, holding the hands of the unexpected Pentecostal guests, who stood close by the bed with their hands raised in the air facing palms towards the patient’s head. A young female congregant was praying in Indonesian at high speed, until her speech slipped into a concerto of glossolalia joined by everybody in the team. Later, at the end of the same floor, when my team was shifting to yet another room, I saw a bunch of young ladies in jilbab already sitting together enjoying the tea and snacks that they received from some of us. ‘Alhamdulilah, insyall Allah my son will get better soon. Selamat Natal’ (Allhamdulilah, Arb., Praise to God; insyall Allah, Arb., God permitting, hopefully; Selamat Natal, Indo., Merry Christmas) an old lady said to the congregants. In response, the congregants disappeared behind the door in the hallway after expressing the holiday greeting in its English version: ‘Merry Christmas!’ In the midst of these contradictory, intense and occasionally friendly encounters, the hospital was suddenly resonating with a wide variety of languages, vibrating and even in dialogue with one another. During the event, I had heard Indonesian, Javanese, Arabic, English and Pentecostal glossolalia in the same place at the same time. The richness of the linguistic repertoire captivated me, as did the possible implications that were entailed in the concomitant religious self- expressions implied by these multi-code switches. Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 In this article, I will demonstrate how local ideas and practices of multiple languages anchor, mediate and climax in a supposedly universal, biblically driven Pentecostal glossolalia. Languages are treated here as having a power of ‘iconization’ (Gal and Irvine 1995, 403) that endows different linguistic forms and language genres with distinct social values, depending on the context. In this sense, languages in particular, and signs in general, operate more like a (re)productive sorcery of identification, rather than a neutral tool of communication. From this perspective, the action of diversifying and choosing language varieties can potentially open up varying access to avenues for social or spiritual power that is linked to the status of the self. To illustrate the action-based selection of languages in ritual contexts, I highlight the distinction between performative and denotative dimensions of Culture and Religion 375 a speech act in an Austinian linguistic sense of ‘how to do things with words’ (Austin 1975). The performative speech act is typically imbued with force that can transform a status, such as in ‘I promise’ or ‘you are under arrest’, that does not report some pre-existing reality out there, but instead creates a new order of things by the very act of its utterance. Drawing on this notion of performativity as transformativity of a speech act, I argue that different ‘iconizations’ of different languages, when actively chosen for ritual application, also constitute a performative activator of social transformation, rather than simply a vehicle of denotative meaning (If I just want to say ‘Jesus’, what difference does it make if I say ‘Yesus’ in Indonesian or ‘Jesus’ in English?). In the hospital scenario, for example, the iconic values of choosing Arabic and English were involved in a dialogue between modern Muslims and Christians to express something they could have said in plain Indonesian. When they switched to a different language, though, they vividly asserted their distinct self-identities in a cross-religious setting. It is this performative act of choosing different status codes for particular contexts that brings about the issue of fetishisation of languages. By fetishism, here I simply mean the ambiguous and even inverted relationship between a subject and an object, in which the object is endowed with personality, quality and agency that actively interacts with people and symbolically indicates status (Pietz 1987, 23; Ellen 1988, 213). Based on this understanding, I argue that we can analytically distinguish, however often intertwined they are, two larger categories of language as goods in a linguistic market. The first category prioritises the denotative, communicative functions of a language. It includes the most common and mundane language devices selected more for reasons of practical communication and less for luxurious display. The second category, on the contrary, highlights its performative and iconic values, which is closely linked to status claims and conducive to the birth of a fetish. No doubt, the same language can fall into either category depending on the situation. Yet the point made here is simply that the latter category, in which a certain language is treated as having exquisite power in itself, is capable of being conceptualised and perceived as a prize to seize and a spiritual wealth to possess. In the following ethnographic account, I will further demonstrate the recent Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 Christian usage of Hebrew and glossolalia, in addition to Arabic and English. Here I wish to stress that the performative dimension will climax and develop to its extreme in the case of Pentecostal glossolalia, which eliminated any trace of denotative meaning. It is also via the case of glossolalia that our understanding of fetishism can be most clearly presented. As other scholarly accounts have shown (Coleman 2000, 21; Wacker 2003, 44; Engelke and Tomlinson 2006, 6), glossolalia has become a sign of blessing and the vital heart of Pentecostal ritual across the globe. It is also regarded as a ‘gift’ granted by God, and, I argue, a precious valuable to possess. Unlike other tangible categories of valuables, such as a necklace or bracelet, however, the only way to possess a language is to perform it. Hence the ubiquity of the practice, and the practice of glossolalia among Pentecostals. 376 E.-C. Chao Glossolalia is not a universal phenomenon within Pentecostalism. Rooted in the Bible and hence ascribed a transcendental origin, glossolalia’s perception and popularity nonetheless is always mediated through local language ideologies that are constantly renewed in a socially and religiously plural situation.
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