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. Linguists long ago demonstrated the impact of the speaker’s native language(s) on glossolalia (Christian and non-Christian alike) in terms of phonology and syntax, represented by the classic cross-cultural studies of William J. Samarin and Felicitas Goodman (1974). Recently, a 10-country survey by the Pew Foundation (The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2006, 16–17) indicated that while glossolalia is a common feature of Pentecostalism, the proportion of individual Pentecostals who personally speak in tongues varies markedly by country.1 Overall, only a minority speak in tongues, and Guatemala is the only country where more than half of the Pentecostal respondents practise glossoalalia more than once a week. My tentative estimates of the percentage of Pentecostals in Central Java who regularly use glossolalia would be higher than that of Guatemala. Addressing these differences, I propose that we examine local language ideologies, code-switching experiences and practical multilingualism (the ‘iconizing’ prestige of each language). Accordingly, this article aims to tentatively sort out the relation between language ideologies and the practice of glossolalia in Java by highlighting the salience of local language ideologies in mediating the universality of glossolalia. While research in this direction is still scarce, one remarkable model to approach the relation between language and glossolalia comes from the anthropologist Thomas Csordas’ (1990, 24–26) work among charismatic Catholics in New England. Taking Merleau-Ponty (1962) as a point of departure, Csordas elaborates on the phenomenological reality of language and its relation to glossolalia, in which the root of speech is not a representation of thoughts but an approach to immanent meaning. This larger movement towards re-reading ‘words’ in charismatic Christian ritual was identified by Simon Coleman as a trend ‘from narratives to embodiment’ (2000, 117). From this perspective, sacred language is employed not so much to express pre-existing faith as to feel the faith in all of its possible manifestations. With this embodied specificity, we can even Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 claim that glossolalia constitutes a religious impulse against literalism. The relations between ritual and meaning thus lead us to the problem of semiotic ideologies and notions of human agency. In this article, I wish to show that Pentecostal religious embodiments cannot be appropriately appraised by the anxious opposition between words and things, or between anti-ritualism and fetishism in the pursuit of cultivating interiority of the subject and sincere commitment to the true Christian faith (see Keane 2007). Instead, the verbal confession that is expected to be a sign of sincerity among calvinists is outshined by embodied worship performed as a state of freedom from human representations, in which the demanded confession is turned into a ‘blessed fetishism’ leading towards the union of the human body and the divine spirit. The Holy Spirit is conceptualised and felt as the locus of agency, whereas the human Culture and Religion 377 self is consciously objectified as a tool of God to be used, to be dispossessed of discursive meaning and to be purified and realised through such blessed fetishism. In light of this, a singular portrait of Christianity may prove too narrow to reach the living, multi-layered religious experience that holds sway in the struggle of faith and commitment in an inherently pluralistic religious field and cultural world.

Islam, religious language and Pentecostalism in Java A status code does not get introduced in a vacuum anywhere; the emergence of Hebrew and glossolalia in Java are no exception. One of the goals of this article is to tell a story of Pentecostalism in a predominantly Islamic society. In doing so, I first outline some religious conditions of linguistic markets in Java. Postponing the active profile of shifting language ideologies to later discussion, I wish to briefly lay out the landscape where relevant cross-religious interaction and simulation occur and where language ideologies can be manipulated and rearranged. Owing to limits of space, I do not pretend to cover the vast field of Christianity in Java or Indonesia. I merely wish to look in some detail at a few hallmarks of Pentecostalism in contemporary Java and to suggest some clearly identifiable directions in which recent developments of Christianity are moving. This is a very tentative and fragmentary attempt at examining the important manifestations of Christianity in Java during a period of considerable religious revitalisation and cross-religious tension in the larger socio-political milieu. Recently, a good deal of anthropological work and political science analysis has explored the diverse ramifications of a deeper Islamisation in Indonesia (Hefner 2000; Bowen 2003; Hasan 2006; Sidel 2006), in particular, and in Muslim- majority societies, in general. However, differently approached, Islamisation has been accepted by scholars as a constitutive factor of religious terrains in these societies. What is relatively rarely done, though, as Meyer argued in reconsidering anthropological studies of Christianity (2004, 451), is to go beyond a single religious organisation or movement and engage in what I would call an Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 investigation of cross-religious order through ethnographic analysis (but see Sanneh 1996; Peel 2000; Farhadian 2005; Soares 2006). For our purpose here, this effort can be largely conceptualised as an examination of the place of Christianity in the expanding doxa of Islam, or, conversely, the place of Islam in the story of late Christianity, in a religiously rich society. Much research has focused on the boundaries between Islam and syncretism on the island of Java, while much less attention has been paid to Christianity and its historical significance to the reform of Islam in Indonesia, and indeed to the limits of the world expansion of Christianity. More than ethnologists and perhaps anyone else, evangelisers have long been aware of Islamic traditions in Java. The most noticeable traits would be Indonesian Christians’ entrenched understanding of God as Allah, salvation as Selamat and Jesus as Juru Selamat, all terms 378 E.-C. Chao captured through a Quranic filter. While mission was not allowed in Java until the nineteenth century due to the colonial government’s concern for maintaining ‘the peace’, its failure and frustration in the following century required explanation. In 1857, Zeldam Ganswijk, upon observing rising Islamic education in Java, remarked that ‘Islam ever more penetrates the spirit of the population’; similarly, Poesen noted in 1863 the increasing influence of the santri (pious Muslims) and predicted that one day Islam would ‘entirely penetrate the organism of the moral and spiritual life of the Javanese world’ (Ricklefs 2007, 90). Kraemer commented as late as 1923, with regard to Christian missionary activity, that ‘Considering the hard soil of Islam, a respectable piece of work has been accomplished’ (1923, 268). The deadlock continued, as made clear in yet another comment in 1932, ‘While the number of converts in Java is small, especially in view of the years of missionary work there, it is nevertheless the most successful Christian missionary work among Mohammedans to be found anywhere in the world’ (Haldane 1932, 144). The first episode of large-scale indigenous conversion to Christianity in Javanese societies featured some Sufi-styled groups led by gurus who were also called kyai – the same term Muslims called and continued to call their leaders, especially the ulama or teacher of an Islamic school in Java. The earliest such Christian kyai was the influential Russo-Javanese kyai Conrad Laurens Coolen. In East Java in the late nineteenth century, he led a gamelan orchestra to hold a ‘Christian’ ritual, incorporated the Muslim creed ‘La illah la illolah’ into the Christian creed to be sung like a Sufi dhikr (the repetition of the names of God), and set up wayang (traditional shadow puppet shows) to evangelise – in a word used all means of communication peculiarly qualified to hold the attention of a native audience. His success irritated the dismissive and jealous Dutch missionaries. Similar patterns took place later in Central Java, when another Christian kyai Sadrach attracted large crowds and built five churches under the name of masjid (mosques). This phase of Christianity in Java can be understood as the ‘ngelmu’ (mystical knowledge) period, a knowledge-pursuit that has been central to the Javanese/Muslim/Sufi epistemology. This phase ended when Sadrach died in 1924, and his 7000 disciples in Central Java were dispersed and Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 absorbed by the societies of missionaries already working in the area. This transition was characterised by a shift in the Christian community in Central Java from villages to towns and cities, where ‘the politics of syncretism’ faded, and organisational Christianity based on urban churches, instead of villages, took hold (van Akkeren 1970, 138; Aritonang and Steenbrink 2008, 677). This kind of cross-religious and multi-cultural amalgamation and negotiation never stopped leaving its imprint in Java. Founded in the early twentieth century, major Islamic non-government organisations were largely inspired by the Middle Eastern reformism and modelled after Western missionary work. Hospitals, social services and schools started to get populated under the name of Islam (Schumann 1974, 7; Burhani 2011, 337). As Islam seemed to ‘ever more penetrate[s] the spirit of the population’, Protestant proselytisation in Java Culture and Religion 379 remained stagnant beyond certain urban areas. The next significant shift occurred as the former dictator Suharto rose to power following a failed communist coup and the subsequent massacre of suspected communists in 1965. A new state law enforced compulsory religious affiliation for all citizens as a disproof of adherence to communism. Almost without any missionary effort, two million people converted to Protestant Christianity in Indonesia, especially among the Javanese and Timorese (Willis 1977; Boland 1982). Rarely mentioned, this mass conversion in Java ushered in immense anxiety among long-established churches who were concerned with the creation of ‘nominal Christians’ (Sumardi 2007, 90–1; Soekotjo 2009). In the following decade, the churches were haunted by disputes pivoting around the question of the limits of compatibility between Christianity and Javanese cultural practices.2 Some Javanese rituals were abandoned, but others were reformed. Meanwhile, due to the success of mass education and the rapid growth of national language use that accompanied modern education and bureaucracy, the official language also gradually replaced the role of Javanese as the dominant Christian ritual language. As Benedict Anderson has noted, Indonesian has become the primary language through which Indonesians of all kinds are coming to grips with modern realities ([1990] 2006, 124). One substantial consequence is that Indonesian does not only mediate modern education and bureaucracy, but also mediate other aspects of life from the most mundane popular culture to the most sacred religious identity. Since the 1980s, the post-anti-communist period of missionisation reached saturation, for there was no longer a widely approved cultural-political incentive to convert to Christianity. Yet, Christianity in Java did not remain static. Another transformation was underway: the rise of Pentecostalism and its ethnically pluralistic congregations. This phenomenon accompanied the previous shift but gained new momentum following Suharto’s resignation and political democratisation in 1998.3 The universal transmission of the Indonesian language was a crucial factor underlying the possibility of an ethnically plural church, since ethnic churches with their ethnic languages had been a formidable colonial legacy that shaped mainstream Christianity in independent Indonesia for five decades. Only now have the ethnic churches become a noticeably challenged Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 heritage. While no reliable statistical estimate of the Pentecostal constituency is available, it is clear that Pentecostalism today is no longer a marginal phenomenon in Indonesia. Aritonang and Steenbrink suggest that among around 17 million members of the Protestant churches, at least 6 million are Pentecostals, including those who were still registered in mainline churches (2008, 882-83). Commentators have recently pointed out that the Pentecostal churches are ‘far more ethnically inclusive and appealing than their mainline predecessors’ (Nagata 2005, 114), and are ‘multi-ethnic and highly indigenized, [and] expansive’ (Robinson 2005, 342). Although among the pioneers (see Cooley 1968) and current leadership, Chinese Indonesians are well represented, it seems the Pentecostal churches that Chinese Indonesians attend are the least ‘ethnic’ 380 E.-C. Chao among all overseas Chinese Christian communities in the world (cf. Nagata 2005). Regardless of ethnicity, converts were former Catholics, ethnic church members and even non-Christians. Most long-established churches that hold more sedate religious services are now facing the challenge of losing ‘sheep’ (domba) to the Pentecostal churches that heavily employ media, rock bands and glossolalia to create emotionally saturated worship environments. In this article, I primarily focus on linguistic practices and for this theoretical purpose, I strategically downplay the ethnic relations and class formations in the Pentecostal scenario. This by no means eliminates their relevance. However, Pentecostalism is not a new boundary machine for an timeless ethnic enclave among some Chinese Indonesians. Rather, it is a breakthrough avatar to forgo the ethnic divide and triumph over the spiritual hierarchy imposed by ethno- linguistic ideologies. This can be seen in the unambiguous efforts to win Javanese souls, the ethnically plural congregations, ritual imitation and competition among the re-born Christian communities with their Muslim neighbours, and the cross- religious pursuit of a higher language. In fact, the recent movements of Islamisation have left some visible marks on their Pentecostal counterparts, including some newly invented ritual and rhetoric. These religious acts reach their climax and are sharply epitomised in a series of speech acts and embodied worship that Pentecostals use to objectify power and empower themselves in a changing society distinguished by Islamic and Pentecostal resurgence.

A taste of Pentecostalism in Java On a Sunday afternoon in November 2009, I had my first encounter with Pentecostalism at Fendi church (pseudonym) in Salatiga. Standing at the entrance around 4:00 PM, I witnessed churchgoers unanimously high-five with the receptionists before virtually running one by one into a huge hall built from a converted movie theatre. As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I heard ‘evangelical rock’ played resoundingly by a band at the front of the hall. Nine members of a koor (choir) on the right side of the stage were jumping and dancing in brisk aerobic style to match the lyrics, while three ‘tambourine’ dancers at the Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 front were waving their instruments in graceful choreography. The entire team around the stage seemed dazzlingly professional and thoroughly enchanted under the dim light during the one-hour long musical session. Around a hundred people looked unbelievably excited, to an extent that I had never, and still have never, seen in any music concert in Java, either popular or traditional. Most of them had already memorised the lyrics, freely restyling songs in an R&B-like fashion. Towards the end of the musical session, the worship leader, back-up singers and the band suddenly slowed down the rhythm and started to focus on the last few sentences of the lyrics. With generously demonstrated passion and patience, the team repeated these identical lyrics for 15 minutes, until the congregation was brought into an even more heightened state of passion and, among some, agitation. The worship team played the music louder and louder, and people Culture and Religion 381 around me started to murmur, sob and kneel. Many raised their hands, some embracing each other. Many of them were whispering, rattling or even shouting unintelligible sounds at high speed. Suddenly it felt like the entire hall was vibrating in different tones, but there were only speakers, with no audience to be seen. This, as my church friends later would teach me, was speaking ‘bahasa roh’ (Indo. ‘the language of Spirit’).4 I was very frightened initially, not by the isolation caused by my incapacity to participate, but by witnessing a sudden mutation in moods of many who were so cheerful just minutes earlier. In an instant, the hall was filled by the sounds of glossolalia and bodily quivers. People’s faces were distorted by heart-felt weeping, their eyes tightly shut and with deep frowns on their brows. Their preoccupation with the ritual was deeply private yet provocative, focused yet restless. When the song eventually finished, loud drumbeats, applause, cheers and even yells poured out and filled the entire space. Then the young female worship leader switched her previously sharp tone to a cordial voice, shouting: ‘Sialom!’ The audience responded: ‘Sialom!’ She then asked the audience: ‘Bagaimana kabarnya?’ (‘How are you?’). The audience yelled back: ‘Luar Biasa!’ (‘extraordinary’). She asked again, ‘Siapa mau dipakai Tuhan?’ (‘Who wants to be used by God?’). The congregation cheerfully raised their hands. On behalf of the congregation, the leader welcomed and then obtained the names of the newcomers. She then led the congregation to greet all the newcomers in English: ‘Hi, ____ and ____ (the names of newcomers), you are so special!’ The atmosphere of friendliness and joy resumed. My first encounter with the church service at Ester (pseudonym), another charismatic church in Salatiga, was equally striking. As I later learned, worship sessions at the beginning and the end of each service normally lasted for 40 minutes to an hour, during which special worship performances were sometimes arranged. For example, a group of Papuan musicians was once invited to perform self-composed gospel music. Besides, gathering different ethnic groups to worship, another message delivered was ‘Tuhan itu baik bagi semua orang’ (‘God is kind to everyone’), a very frequently used slogan among Pentecostals in worship. My amazement at the Ester service, though, was Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 initiated by a special performance of a female Indonesian Chinese singer. The singer adapted a popular Mandarin song initially composed by a Chinese Malaysian, later internationally popularised by a Taiwanese singer in 2002. The lyrics were originally about a boy’s first love, which started as follows: ‘yo yi ke me li te tsiau nu hai/ta te mig zu tziau tzo Tsiau Wei/ta yo shuang wen ro te yen zing/ta chiau chiau to zo wo te sin’ (there is a beautiful little girl/her name is Tsiau Wei/she has a pair of soft eyes/she steals away my heart).5 In the performance, the singer changed ‘little girl’ into little boy, and the name into Jesus, while retaining the other intimate and romantic lyrics of the song. Even though the vast majority of the congregation, including the singer, did not understand Mandarin, they viewed the performance in a foreign language of a powerful country as a way to ‘go international’ (as does the elementary school they run that places an 382 E.-C. Chao emphasis on English education), and a free chance to entertain themselves with some informal language education. In general, such special performances existed for enhancing the ecumenical aura, as people did not particularly pursue Mandarin any further. They employed usages of these different languages as ‘icons’ for specific moods and motives without pursuing real proficiency. In the following analysis, I will continue to use examples from the two Pentecostal church communities: Fendi and Ester, in the Central Javanese city of Salatiga, where I conducted my fieldwork from October 2009 to September 2010. Salatiga has a highly Christianised demographic profile, 23%6 of the population being Christian (compared with Central Java and Semarang, the capital of Central Java, with 2.8% and 12.9%, respectively). Like other places in Indonesia, the region has experienced an Islamic revival, as evidenced by the increasing numbers of mosques (seven times the number that existed in 1980) and pilgrims to Mecca (with a growth rate of 50% since 2002). Despite some land disputes and debates over the control of resources that have sporadically soured Muslim– Christian relations, Salatiga is a self-consciously peaceful city, where a new church building may obtain approval from Muslim neighbours more easily than from neighbouring churches. Ester and Fendi belong to different higher national organisations respectively, which were the genealogical products of periodic schisms of an older church body. The church organisation that Ester belongs to is one of the fastest growing churches in Indonesia, whereas the ‘brand’ that Fendi affiliates with has focused on college towns across the nation. In their branches in Java, both attract large numbers of Chinese Indonesians and Javanese men and women, together who comprise the largest groups among congregants. Many Chinese Indonesian Pentecostals are third or fourth generation Indonesians who do not regard themselves as ‘Chinese’ but prefer ‘Indonesian’ or Warga Negara Indonesia (Indonesian citizens) as their ‘ethnic’ identity. They converted to Pentecostalism often under the initial objection of their family who were still Catholics, mainline Protestants or followers of some local variant of Chinese religion. A common argument that justifies conversion is that their ‘spirituality can grow stronger’ (kerohanian lebih Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 bertumbuh). Many Javanese converts also had obstacles to conversion, but some never got the approval or forgiveness of their family. For example, a male convert in Ester was renounced by his Muslim parents until their death, and they left him no inheritance. Others keep a dual loyalty to both mainline and Pentecostal congregations, since services are usually held more than once a week per church. The most thorough conversion of an entire family often comes from the experience of miraculous healing (of infertility, tumours, cancer, etc.), or from members who are the first-generation middle-class who decided to share their prosperity stories with their family. There are also a small number of Batak, Manado and Ambonese as well, many of whom were students or teachers in the city. Regardless of ethnicity, new converts from Christian backgrounds unanimously told me the reason they went to Pentecostal churches now was because the style of their Culture and Religion 383 mainline church service was ngantuk (sleepy) and membosankan (boring). They doubted that there would be a difference whether or not they attended. Ester has a constituency of diverse backgrounds, whose congregation comprises about 300 people, from the young and old, whose occupations range from teachers and students away from home to banking accountants, businessmen, retailers and caterers. While the middle class is well represented, the followers’ actual income levels differ widely. Comparatively, Fendi is heavily targeted at college students and has a congregation of less than 150 people, mostly Chinese Indonesians and Javanese, many of them being students of the Christian University of Satya Wacana (UKSW) from middle-class backgrounds, aged 18–25, led by seniors aged between 25 and 40. Both churches were built in the city around 1998, yet Ester has ranked among the most popular churches and has organisationally become more centralised. Fendi remains somewhat decentralised, both conceptually and structurally, which can be seen from the organisational structure of the church. It consists of several sel (cells), each sel being made of more or less a dozen church members. Unlike other Indonesian Christian churches that name official leaders and preachers pendeta, meaning ‘pastor’, they apply the term gembala, literally meaning ‘shepherd’, to all the leaders at all levels. A gembala sidang senior (senior shepherd of the council) is the head of the church organisation at the city-wide level. Below this leader there are wakil gembala sidang (vice shepherds of the council), gembala wilayah (regional shepherds) at the level of intra-city districts and gembala satelit (satellite shepherds) at the level of a church; penilik (supervisors), the representatives commissioned by satellite shepherds who take care of several cell groups; fasilitator (facilitators), those who take care of a cell; sponsor (sponsors), the representatives from the followers who are officially named sponsee, or simply those who have a commitment to be ‘herded’ (Indo. digembalakan). At the border of the church organisation are the simpatisan (sympathisers), who have not yet committed to the church despite their attendance. All members of the church organisation above the level of sponsee and simpatisan can simply be called gembala. Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 Absorbing the foreign, seizing the power To capture the significance of the religious languages among Indonesian Pentecostals in Central Java, it is necessary to situate them in larger socio-cultural contexts, especially the forces of the expanding Islamic climate. Three interrelated linguistic phenomena of Hebrew (bahasa Ibrani), English (bahasa Inggris) and glossolalia (bahasa roh) are particularly illuminating, and all of them involve the adoption of a foreign language that transforms ordinary self- identity with respect to a larger and deeper universe. First, Indonesian Pentecostals in recent years have taken the Hebrew expression sialom as a formal form of greeting. This development is in parallel to their Indonesian Muslim counterparts who now use Arabic greetings regularly. The greeting ‘sialom!’ is 384 E.-C. Chao originally supposed to be a hail, spoken by a leader and replied by the congregation but it also often appears in cell phone text messages, the current most widely used technology of communication. Traditional Javanese Church people consider ‘sialom’ to have been advocated and spread by the charismatic churches, and indeed it was more frequently used by charismatic churches, though not absent in GKJ (Gereja Kristen Jawa, or Javanese Christian church) churches. However, at special events such as the Christmas Eve service, it was used in one of the GKJ congregations as a way of greeting and lifting people’s spirits. Yet, the response was scant, in contrast to the resounding response in charismatic congregations. It might seem odd that Indonesian Pentecostals have adopted the word sialom, since it is translated from the Hebrew word shalom, a word usually associated with Jews. This development is a new adoption in parallel to the Indonesian greeting salam or selamat, which originated from the Arabic salaam but is now religiously neutral. Its popularisation, however, was arguably stimulated by the growing prevalence of the Arabic greeting assalamu alaikum among Indonesian Muslims. In fact, even the (Muslim) governor of East Java has recently juxtaposed the two forms of greetings in starting his opening speech at the twenty-first Pentecostal World Conference in Surabaya, which is home to a Pentecostal congregation that numbers among the largest in the world along with a similar-sized church in Seoul, South Korea. At the present time the Muslim assalamu alaikum is constantly heard in religious and social gatherings as well as daily routines such as visiting, leaving and coming home. Some Muslim parents have even changed their cell phone ring tones into ‘assalamu alaikum!’ in a cute and bright voice dubbed by two Malaysian cartoon characters, Upin & Ipin, who are extremely popular among children. In parallel, Pentecostal Christians often use sialom as their opening for text messages and emails. Today, sialom has become indispensable in Pentecostal worship, and even their non-Pentecostal counterparts have begun to adopt it, though they often garner scarce and awkward responses, such as I witnessed during the Christmas Eve celebration mentioned above. The Hebrew sialom, like the Arabic assalamu alaikum, is accorded a certain aura of religious authenticity by being spoken in Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 the ‘original’ language rather than Indonesian. It represents an ultra-Christian equivalence and response to the recent explosion of Islamic expressions in Indonesian contexts. To better comprehend its popularity among Indonesian Pentecostals, it is necessary to situate the new greeting in the public sphere where a ‘competition of religiosity’ has been taking place since compulsory religious affiliation in the 1960s, and where religious identity markers have obtained new momentum via technologies such as media and the Internet in the post-Suharto era (van Doorn- Harder 2006; Fealy and White 2008). My fieldwork suggests that there is a trend for Christians to amplify or even invent new rituals. For example, some GKJ churches, in seeming contradiction with their Protestant backgrounds, started to adopt the Catholic ritual of ‘Ash Wednesday’ as their own. On the other hand, Culture and Religion 385 Fendi also holds a regular outdoor walk of ‘exorcism’ that aims to eliminate harmful spirits and transform the souls of the city’s residents. A trend of holding early morning prayers at charismatic churches is perhaps the most intriguing case in terms of the Muslim–Christian relationship. Starting six years ago, Ester has had a prayer service every morning besides Sunday at four o’clock, around the same time that Muslims perform their first prayer of the day, subuh. Whether consciously or unconsciously, there is some evident competition with or influence from Muslim religiosity among Christians in recent years. A staff member at Ester even joked that: ‘they (Muslims) pray at five, [so] we pray at four. If one day they pray at four, then we will pray at three’. More frequently used than a simple Hebrew greeting, English has become a prominent foreign language in worship, prayer, singing or simply in the spontaneous response (Yes). Unlike Indonesian, English is not used as the main language in services or to deliver the sermons at either of the two Pentecostal churches, but is regularly used in advertising media, slogans and interactive responses. Both churches’ weekly newsletter also massively employs English in slogans, such as ‘God is an unlimited giver’, ‘Life by the spirit of faith’, ‘Nothing is Impossible in God’ and so forth. Moreover, during the service, whenever a member hears anything spoken by the worship leader, shepherds or witness that she is strongly in agreement with, usually praise to the lord or commitment to a good life, she would respond by saying ‘Yes’, loudly or quietly. The ‘Yes’ response is usually individually exercised, whereas the Indonesian version of ‘A- min’ is mostly performed collectively, either spontaneously or by instruction. ‘Thank you, Jesus’ is also very frequently employed among individual worshipers during prayer times. The application of English expresses an aspiration to be modern. Much as Deeb described for the Shi’i Lebanese, Pentecostal Indonesians are ‘unable to escape the West in ways that complicated their relationships to certain notions of the modern ... in its various forms’ (2006, 24), despite their moral censure of atheism, materialism, sexual promiscuity, family breakdown or modern pathologies usually associated with ‘the West’. For the educated youth in contemporary Java and Indonesia, it is clear that English can powerfully represent Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 all things modern, despite the fact that American or English culture often does not contain a wonderful recipe for moral conduct to them. Rather, being modern in this context means having access to Hollywood movies such as Avatar, even if through pirated DVDs, knowing some popular TV shows such as American Idol, being familiar with foreign TV channels such as Discovery, and studying abroad if possible. In a sense, self-presentation in English represents an aspiration to upward mobility and modernity that allows the educated youth to construct dignified self- imageries. Local media often reinforces this concept by incorporating lots and lots of English words into popular slang by ‘Indonesianizing’ them: sensi means ‘sensitive’; temperamen means ‘temperamental’; parno means ‘paranoid’. At other times, the youth simply adopt English words in their original forms to describe their modern moods: ‘excellent’, ‘exciting’, ‘happy’ and ‘yes’. It is not 386 E.-C. Chao English per se, but the ‘iconization’ that English is associated with, that makes a modern Pentecostal in Java a better, newer person, and potentially gives her/him a better chance of reception by God. The religious book market is yet another important factor in introducing English among church circles. The top-seller Gospel books in major book stores, almost invariably, are translated from the works originally written in English. During my fieldwork, for example, Heaven is So Real, written by Korean American Choo Thomas, who claimed to have personally visited heaven and hell several times, was enthusiastically read and believed by many Pentecostals. On the other hand, in the aspect of the music media, songs written by Australian worship band Planetshakers – all in English, of course – have been among the most popular in Pentecostal music worship, and only second to the Indonesian band ‘The True Worshippers’. These English-mediated gospel texts and ‘music’ have powerful effects. For example, one of the recent converts of Dutch–Chinese ancestry, Frances, an English literature major at UKSW, told me that 99% of her private prayers were in English. She explained to me that by speaking in English, she felt like a better and smarter person, and God would love her more. Although Frances is an extreme example, the implication of her behavior is clear. Being modern and international seems to be a process of self-perfection that leads to a closer relationship with God, produced through the act of sublime self- identification in an expanded, inter-connected Christian globe. If English facilitates a renewed, modern relation with God, bahasa roh helps further build a transcendental, hyper-intimate reinforcement of the relationship. Speaking in tongues is a highly valued, indispensable element and often the climax of a session of worship. Christian ‘speakers in tongues’ that I know use events recorded in the New Testament to justify their acts, and this inter-textuality is reinforced by their insistence that the tradition is primarily a personal expression of their unmediated relation with God. Among all the accounts I have heard from pastors, new converts and old members, what is unanimously stressed in the acquisition of bahasa roh is a strong voluntarism (‘you have to ask for it’) and a mysterious intervention (‘it depends on God whether He grants it’). Many describe feeling released, freed, opened or no longer Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 afraid during their first experiences of speaking in tongues. Advanced ‘tongues- speakers’ more frequently interpret the dominant mood as damai (peaceful) and sukacita (joyful, loving, devoted). Overall, energetic speech acts (confident slogans, greeting, yelling) and eruptive linguistic practices (glossolalia, restyling of songs, crying out) are the hallmarks of the new Pentecostal religious rituals. They are perceived as vital precisely because they are indispensable in creating feelings of intimacy between the self and God. The acquisition of bahasa roh hence involves a willingness and openness to enter a state in which the speaker foregoes all meaningful discursive devices and replaces them with sacred, ‘unfathomable’ sounds. The self initiates a willed self- alienation in order to authenticate a truer existence by virtue of speaking without understanding, in glossolalia: the perfect language exercised by the Holy Spirit Culture and Religion 387 through the human body (see also Csordas 1990). A 28-year-old professional working in a computer company Eka, ‘when we pray to God, we often don’t know what to say to match our feelings? It’s never accurate (tepat). So why not let the Holy Spirit speaks for us?’ Precisely because glossolalia cannot be understood, it can never be wrong, or be faulted. Speakers can never make mistakes in bahasa roh, and can never be unfaithful through bahasa roh. It is never inauthentic. Moreover, bahasa roh is the only one among many forms of the gift granted by God. As my Pentecostal friends repeatedly told me, we may be granted crying, seizures, prophecy and others. These may all be the proof of recognition by God. In light of this, glossolalia is not so much a proof of faith that reflects a pre-existing interior state in a statement as a ‘performative’ speech act that actually opens access to God again and again by the means of the external power of the Holy Spirit. Glossolalia describes nothing, but it does something.

Reworking language ideologies I have proposed that the Pentecostal linguistic practices embody an underlying language ideology that links power to an external, but relevant, language. In a famous case of language shift, Kulick (1992) described Papua New Guineans of East Sepik who gave up their minority language in favour of the dominant language through a language ideology that associates different languages with different personhoods. Based on Marshall Sahlins’s theory of culture and history (1985), the thrust of his argument is that the seemingly drastic language shift was in fact intrinsically linked to a language ideology, and that (the right) language is seen as a channel to power, prosperity and modernity. Language shifts are thus viewed as identity markers indicating cosmological shifts, instead of merely practical concerns for communication that grow out of socio-economic motivations. This cosmological impulse is even clearer when it comes to bahasa roh, whose role in interpersonal communication is denied altogether. After all, unlike other bahasa, bahasa roh is exclusively spoken to God through ‘unfathomable’ sounds. When it comes to the meaning of bahasa roh, my Pentecostal respondents firmly believe that they do not need to know, because God knows better. Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 It should be noted that in understanding Javanese ways of maneuvering religious languages there is no unitary, fixed structure. In fact, in the Javanese context, the linguistic situation is ‘unusually complex’ by the standards of most speech communities (Smith-Hefner 2009, 60). In the linguistic literature, Javanese ‘speech levels’ are a classic example of a highly differentiated system involving complex lexical alternants for honorific expressions (see Errington 1988). Different styles or levels of speech imply a deep concern and sensibility for relative status, which is marked by alertly switching linguistic forms on a case by case basis. Moreover, the entire range of such prestige associations in any Javanese context is negotiable and changeable, instead of merely deriving from a timeless and singular template. For example, the varieties of Javanese demand taking into account region (East Javanese areas that downplay Kromo but 388 E.-C. Chao highlight other speech levels), sub-groups (the Chinese Indonesian as Javanese speakers, see Oetomo 1987), gender (see below) and generation (see Smith- Hefner 2007 on ‘language of sociability’). It is only under this premise that we can possibly envisage some new prestigious ‘iconization’ of new languages coming into existence in Java. Such acknowledgement also assists freeing researchers from the analytical confinement of ‘the crowning or singular importance of exemplary centers’ (Smith-Hefner 2007, 198) that downplay the shifting and situational nature of status codes. This linguistic complexity has earlier in this article been roughly divided into two categories of language genres. To highlight the role of the performative status code, I wish to state again that the relative prestige associated with using a certain language form per se, rather than the meaning being conveyed, is an enduring socio-linguistic reality. Perhaps, more radically, it foreshadows the possible perception of the presence of a language in Javanese society that is unintelligible yet noble, efficacious and relevant, such as High Javanese or Arabic (for Muslims). I argue that this reality can be conducive to a higher acceptance and deference to a ritual language that may be ‘unfathomable’ in the life world. This suggests a transformation of the relation between language and religiosity in Java. The relevance of Anderson’s earlier portrait of Arabic in Java as a powerful language insofar as it was not understood ([1990] 2006, 127) has faded in recent decades due to Muslims’ widespread vernacularisation of Quranic exegesis. Ironically, it is perhaps Pentecostal Christians today, who value the esoteric experience of a divinely unknown language that better fit his picture. As shown in the ethnographic examples in this article, self-positioning is inescapably at stake in code-switching. In my daily life encounters with Javanese in Central Java, it was not uncommon to hear the expression of a hyper- recognition among middle-class Javanese speakers of their not having a command of ‘real’ Javanese (High Javanese, Kromo). Some were even convinced that only court-cultivated or well-educated elite could actually speak the language. The language they spoke, to them, was a rude kind of Javanese. This ideology, however, was often undermined by actual practices as I regularly saw Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 the very same speakers skilfully perform High Javanese. It is further weakened by the fact that those who literally have limited command do not bother to advance their learning of High Javanese. Nevertheless, High Javanese was simply viewed as an out-dated repertoire that had lost prestige and practicability in modern life. Instead, a good command in Indonesian, or better yet, English, is in general more urgently sought after. Social change, then, does not erase the salience of code- switching in Javanese understanding of the self and the society, but does alter the language repertoire. Code-switching continues to represent a distinctively Javanese sensibility to the subtle shades of meaning crafted through code-choice. Code-switching does not necessarily demonstrate ‘a pervasive anxiety about language’ (Siegel 1986, 5), or a concern about the unreliability of ‘translation’ between language genres (p. 299). Rather, it constitutes a consistent orientation Culture and Religion 389 towards form-choosing that resonates with appropriate self-positioning in changing social situations. Code-switching is operated in accordance with a wide range of factors, and one of the most salient ones is gender. As Smith-Hefner (1988) points out in her pioneering study differentiating Javanese men and women’s speech styles, women are required to receive less polite speech and offer it more within the family. In the wider context of Javanese culture, however, it is Javanese men who strive to cultivate politeness so as to express and maintain their superior status and authority. Therefore, I argue that an uncensored access to and practice of a prestigious language, such as bahasa roh, can be extremely appealing to Javanese women and men, but for different reasons. In bahasa roh, women can let go of politeness in family relationships and escape the relative public deprivation of their access to highest language, while men can enhance their identity with the finest language. This is partially reflected in the population of glossolalia practitioners I have observed so far. That is, despite the different valences it may hold for each gender, there is little difference in the proportion of men and women who receive the gift of bahasa roh. Code-switching is also operated in accordance with ethnic diversity. A persistent language ideology among Chinese Indonesians in Central Java – the vast majority of whom are Javanese speakers and not native speakers of any Chinese language – is to maintain or shift self-identity through the use of different languages or language varieties. Previous scholarship has made a distinction between the peranakan Chinese (long-term residents), the majority of Chinese communities in Java, and the totok Chinese (recent immigrants) (Oetomo 1987; Suryadinata 1997). It should be noted that the distinction between the two has diminished in recent decades, and in my field people did not actually use these categories. In Java, Chinese Indonesians belong to the same larger linguistic community as the Javanese. Yet, they employ different styles of mixing of Javanese and Indonesian (Oetomo 1987; Wolff 1997). More specifically, the speech levels they use are Ngoko and Indonesian, instead of Ngoko and Kromo. Interestingly, they may well talk among themselves in Javanese, but talk to Javanese in Indonesian. Virtually all of them use Ci and Ko (Hokkien. older Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 sister/brother) to replace the Javanese Mbak and Mas in addressing older strangers, friends or real relatives, a usage that demonstrates Indonesianised forms of Hokkien honorifics. Some also tend to use Opa and Oma (Dutch. grandpa/grandma) to reflect their upper-class backgrounds. The tendency to use the more external, distant language to assert and maintain a distinct identity is apparent among Chinese Indonesians. In fact, the persistent pattern of their language ideologies is to identify themselves with the most prestigious language at the time, such as High Javanese before 1850, Malay since the end of nineteenth century, and since Independence, Indonesian (Rafferty 1984, 251). Prior to the decades of state repression (1966–1998) of Chinese languages, Hokkien or Mandarin were sometimes studied as a second language among Chinese Indonesians. Today, many young Indonesians of Chinese ancestry can 390 E.-C. Chao no longer speak these Chinese languages or have attained only very low proficiency. Nevertheless, many young Chinese Indonesians avail themselves of large amounts of Mandarin movies, pop music and soap operas. In fact, both Chinese and non-Chinese Indonesians would occasionally ask me about the lyrics in pop Mandarin songs from Taiwan, and I personally have assisted a Javanese girl and a Chinese Indonesian boy in their assignments for Mandarin courses, now popular in local universities. This kind of updated nostalgia or cosmopolitanism does not necessarily invoke a desire to ‘become Chinese again’ for Chinese Indonesians. In fact, among Pentecostal Chinese Christians, ‘Chinese cultural tradition’ is never a priority, and sometimes an obstacle to overcome in becoming true Christians. Many do not celebrate Chinese New Year at all, and instead focus on Christmas. This is because, as the recent graduate from UKSW who majored in economy Febe often said, their ‘Perspectives are already differenr’ ( pandangan sudah beda). In any case, my point is that many Chinese Indonesians, due to their diasporic experience, also have developed some distinct linguistic attitudes. They have persistently shown an open affinity with a language that is a lingua franca (Malay), international (Dutch, English), and relevant to but not fully available to them (Mandarin). This sensibility may also reinforce the language ideologies they have partially absorbed as Javanese speakers. In this tentative argument, I propose that several Javanese and Chinese–Indonesian notions of power attributed to a higher language or an acceptance of an external language pertinent to the self is a reinforcing factor that helps bahasa roh prosper among Pentecostal Indonesians in Java. If new linguistic practices are mediated by pre-existing understandings of language, they may also transform older ideologies. Contrary to High Javanese, Arabic or any ‘higher’ language, bahasa roh is believed to be equally available for all. It is inclusive and available to all within the Pentecostal community while also marking the status of Pentecostals as distinct from other communities in the ‘outside world’. Ester and Fendi church members consistently remark that we could acquire bahasa roh as long as we had faith in God. Moreover, they believe that because human languages are artificially constructed and are inherently ambiguous, they are never a perfect means of communication or expression of Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 feelings. This comment is ironic, given that the Javanese speaker portrayed in the language textbook would always have a concern about relative status in order to apply the appropriate word out of several isosemantic sets. The historical trend however reveals a modern Javanese adoption of the linguistic practice of Chinese–Indonesian Javanese speakers: their speech levels have become Ngoko and Indonesian. This trend of linguistic shift also echoes the development of slang or bahasa gaul that increasingly represents young people’s aspirations for social and economic mobility and speak to a more egalitarian, anti-hierarchical and cosmopolitan ideal (Smith-Hefner 2009). This democratic dimension of glossolalia, however, does not mean that actors have lost their concerns over status. In fact, the democratization of language can facilitate the struggle for a better self with heightened religiosity, particularly in a society that has Culture and Religion 391 experienced thriving religious resurgence. When Arabic is heard everywhere, we are tempted to wonder what ‘heavenly language’ can belong to Christians. Against this backdrop, the rise of bahasa roh is remarkable precisely because it inter-links the often incompatible domains of formal prestige, democratic freedom and spiritual recognition. It is also remarkable because it actively quenches a Christian thirst in an Islamic sea. The case of bahasa roh also complicates the theory of ‘misrecognition’, which Bourdieu (1977, 178–9) describes as working to accord distinct symbolic devices including speech styles different qualities that naturalise social differences. Conceptually, speaking in tongues does not have an exclusive distribution among the believers (orang yang percaya), because it only requires a voluntarism and divine intervention. More decisively, the fetishisation transforms its associated value into an inherent quality of the language that as a prize, the identity of its winner no longer matters. Ritual is valued as a source and evidence of power, through which believers feel they empty all the frustrations they have accumulated in their lives – whether theses frustrations stem from class differences, ethnic boundaries or personal failure. They ultimately empty themselves. It was emphasised in nearly every service I attended, that this was not about the power of humans; this was about God. If one is egois (Indo. egotistical), one cannot speak in tongues. The self is transformed unconditionally through a non-communicative and non-symbolic language granted to collapse all social distinctions before God’s absolute sovereignty. Believers speak in tongues not because they are Chinese or Javanese, nor simply because they are Christians. They speak in tongues because they are a certain type of Christians: the true worshipers.

Religious discursivity and blessed fetishism In his work on the semiotic ideology of Christianity, Webb Keane points out that speaking is always threatened by risks that frustrate the power of representation. This notion can be conceptualised by what Bakhtin called an ‘internal dialogism of the word’ (2008 [1981], 280) in which ‘no living word relates to its object in a singular way’ (p. 276). Objects themselves are never complete without the Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 recognition of social consciousness. Through an outline of Pentecostal embodied worship in Java, I wish to highlight a different kind of Christian semiotic ideology. Here, the Calvinistic verbal confession as a sign of sincerity has given way to Pentecostal bodily techniques as a state of freedom from human representations. Rather than attempting to bridge the eternally unstable bonds between words and things, ritual purifies the self through non-representational expressions. As Csordas puts it, glossolalia is ‘Word made Flesh, the unity of human and divine’, as well as ‘the embodiment of nonverbal thoughts’ (1990, 24–5). To be able to enter the zone of the unmediated relation with God, in Pentecostal glossolalia one has to be dispossessed of discourses by being alienated from conventional meaning. In this vein, the imprtance of a religious ‘discursivity’, (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004; Keane 2007), prominent in both 392 E.-C. Chao Islam and Christianity, is transcended by a spiritual system that emphasises a performative theodicy and a tans-subjective freedom, arguably the most appealing factor for many converts to Pentecostalism. Interestingly, this part of the Pentecostal semiotic ideology is more akin to that of the Marapu ritual practised by the Sumbanese than that of the Calvinist Christianity in Sumba, as documented by Keane. The speaker is not the author; the Holy Spirit is (or the Sumbanese ancestor) (Keane 2007, 184). If an idealised Calvinistic semiotic ideology hopes to restore human agency from ritualistic mandates, here the Pentecostal ritual aspires to repatriate agency from the mindful self to the susceptible body. Meaningful words derived from the sincere self no longer retain the privilege to convey the interiority of one’s faith. Rather, a full range of ritualistic materiality – babbling, rattling, fainting, crying, clapping and dancing – represent sincerity, instead of a falsely relocated agency. Self is consciously objectified as a tool of God to be used (dipakai) and dispossessed of discursive meaning; the demanded confession is transformed into a blessed fetishism. Accordingly, religious glossolalia is enacted not only through ecstatic emotions. For the speaker in tongues to be an effective vehicle of the purified soul she must attain a status of a purified body free of thoughts, a body without conventional meanings and mundane cognitions. She must distance herself from her own subjective state, while actively experiencing the trans-subjective emotions where the exuberance of Spirit is circulated. When glossolalia and bodily techniques become breakthrough signs that elude all rational explanations (see also van de Port 2005), they reveal precisely where their ritual strength lies. During my research on glossolalia in Java, often my Pentecostal friends suggested me ‘not try to rationalize it’. ‘It contradicts rationality (rationalitas)’, a young couple from Ester told me, ‘one simply has to accept that God is unlimited’. This is something that ‘cannot be studied’ (tidak bisa diteliti), because there is no correspondent reality out there to be described by glossolalia. I replied that I was interested in their experience, rather than the rationality of it. And then most of my respondents could richly describe what they felt without being offended. It seems that glossolalia has established itself among Pentecostals such that it can be taken for granted without questions. ‘It just Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 came out, by itself’, said Febe in her response to my question about what happened when she first started speaking in tongues. In terms of the feelings she had during the experience, she described her heart as ‘on fire’ (kebakaran) and ‘flaming’ (terbakar). ‘But then’, she paused and continued: ‘I felt extremely peaceful (tenang). I had never been as joyful (sukacita)’. Seeing my still puzzled expression, she added: ‘it’s not easy ... it’s not like immediate. It’s gradual. We have to ask (harus minta). You have to be sungguh-sungguh (Indo. sincere, truthful), and pray to God that you want it, maybe for a month or a year’. Some converts told me that in fact at the beginning they had resisted glossolalia; it was simply too weird (aneh) to accept. A senior college student at UKSW Tomi recalled that while attending a spiritual retreat, he once threatened that if the other members of the group kept speaking in tongues, he would lead others to quit the Culture and Religion 393 retreat. Similarly, Eka told me that she ‘was very confused’ and wondered ‘what’s going on here?’ the first time she witnessed speaking in tongues. However, as time went by, they said to me, their hearts were softened ( jadi lembut), and they eventually started to desire to speak in tongues themselves. Most people expressed that they could feel that ‘God really exists’ and that they deeply love Jesus when speaking in tongues. In these stories of acquiring the heavenly language bahasa roh, sincerity has a vital role, but it operates on very different presumptions than those of a Calvinist ideology. Calvinists, according to Keane, stress human powers of self- transformation. They believe that ritual has no efficacy, whereas sincerity is the precondition of faith. Sincerity is imagined as an inner construct that is free from foreign coercion, and can be expressed outwardly as proof of faith. By contrast, for the Pentecostals, to be truthful is a complex process of bodily performance, rather than an unmediated state of mind. It must be initiated by the invisible touch of the Holy Spirit and the susceptible nature of the human body, rather than relying on a bounded, self-possessed determination that is controlled by individual interiority from inside out. Moreover, the negotiation requires the ordinary self to be suspended, even displaced. As a number of ethnographic studies of spirit possession, shamanism and Christian glossolalia have shown (Atkinson 1989; Boddy 1989; Lambek 1993; Cannell 1999; Engelke 2004), ritual authority and efficacy often attain maximal power when practitioners stop being themselves. The mind is either displaced or occupied by supernatural power, whereas the body stays as it is. Sincerity is never complete, but the sensitive body is the foremost means of authenticity. The voluntary absorption of performance purges, transforms and renews the converts’ inner state, bringing about the ‘right heart’; an orthopraxis brings about an orthodoxy. If glossolalia can be understood as a purely performative speech act, in its elimination of the ‘denotative’ function of words, it accordingly reveals the limits of a literalistic sense of meaning. It is a passage out of time that burns away the past, a handing over to God, via the Holy Spirit, the determination of all meaning. As one of the ‘must-sing’ Gospel songs among Pentecostal congregations in Java ‘Seperti Yang Kau Ingini’ (to become what you want me to be) says, ‘ku telah Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 mati, dan tinggalkan jalan hidupku yg lama. Semuanya sia-sia, tak berarti lagi’ (I have died, and abandoned my old life. Everything was all futile, no longer meaning anything). This, although quite succinctly, perhaps beautifully echoes what Simon Coleman refers to as the ‘meaningful meaninglessness’ (2006, 44) in the spirit of glossolalia.

Embodied worship and religious pluralism The efficacy of words in religious languages time and again shows its power to transform, rather than simply to inform. The enormous anthropological literature of ritual has shown that the social force of words does not require them to be understood or even heard. Monks may be isolated from general society in their 394 E.-C. Chao monasteries, but they offer prayers for the merit of society; when Thai Buddhist monks chant in public, laymen may not know a word of the esoteric ancient Pali language (Tambiah 1970, 195). The virtue of listening, even without understanding, critically constitutes a ‘performative’ act that downplays the literal meaning of words in an Austinian sense. In a different vein, the efficacy of religious languages among Hindu Javanese does not rely on a literal grasp of meaning, when the same liturgy actually means communication with Indic deities for the priests, on the one hand, and ancestor worship for the villagers, on the other (Hefner 1985). Such ritual secrecy, maintained in the distributional nature of knowledge, has served to protect priestly knowledge from public challenge, specifically the threat of Islamisation. Interpretative understanding of meaning, therefore, is not always urgently sought after in a ‘meaningful’ experience of a ritual language. This latter example also further highlights the centrality of the issue of legitimacy in a changing and challenging world. Religiosity does not happen in a vacuum. And, as much ethnographic literature has shown, often ritual practices can be better understood as responses to particular historical situations (for a colonial situation, see Taussig 1991), ethnic marginalisation (Tsing 1993) and multiple religious revitalisation movements (this article), rather than simply as the function of a unique ‘culture’ housed in an exotic society or a world religion. In line with this argument, I have alluded to some forms of competitive religiosity in Indonesia since the 1960s that gained new momentum after 1998 in the wake of socio-political democratisation, when mutual impacts between religious movements have generated particular forms of Christian worship in Java. My focus on the embodiment of religious practice is also set against the enduring current of ‘rationalizing’ religions in the Western scholarly tradition. In this article, I started with Austin’s idea of ‘performative’ speech acts to assist an understanding of Pentecostal glossolalia. Although they may take the form of a typical indicative sentence, performative sentences are not used to describe and are thus not true or false; they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ anything at all, and therefore are not, and cannot be, ‘true or false’ (Austin 1975, 5). Austin’s project, it seems to me, was to disavow a linguistic fallacy rooted in the traditional Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 philosophies of his time: the idea that language is used only to represent the world or individual intentions; ‘the intellectualist philosophy which treats language as an object of contemplation rather than as an instrument of action and power’ (Bourdieu 1991, 37, original emphasis). Against this kind of ‘descriptivist fallacy’, Austin painstakingly demonstrates ‘how to do things with words’ (the locutionary act of saying something, the illocutionary act performed in saying something and the perlocutionary act achieved by saying something). Ultimately, all language involves some sorts of speech acts that result in effects in the real world, and therefore can never be a non-act-dependent report. The true versus false fetish is realised in an ‘over-simplified notion of correspondence with facts’ (Austin 1975, 145) that haunts some kinds of Western language ideology. By emphasizing the ‘performative’ dimension of religious language, I wish to offer Culture and Religion 395 an alternative, and equally important, development of Christianity today that goes beyond the tension between denotation and salvation in Christianity that has been stressed in recent studies. In the Javanese context, the cultural traditions of appraising language repertoires and speech genres to negotiate fluid social status and the receptive self are actively on local radars. These cultural traditions are not so much seamless templates as a generative matrix for possible directions. The prosperity and prominence of embodied worship and concomitant ecstasy can only be appropriately comprehended when they are situated in multiple traditions of knowledge. The status-performative tradition of Javanese language offered some important mediating templates relevant to every conceivable individual experience in using verbal expression over the course of a lifetime. While being unevenly distributed and changing over time as younger generations aspire to more egalitarian ways of expressing themselves, such templates supply an enduring experiential habitus sustaining the key role of the speech act as engaging, marking and negotiating existential reality as much as denoting and describing a prefigured reality. Within the theoretical framework of Pentecostal embodied worship that is broadly presented here, this study contributes towards understanding the unprecedented popularity of glossolalia among Indonesian Pentecostals. Nevertheless, I wish to stress that this is only one aspect of Pentecostal ritual. Narrative confession and discursive sermons are still important (Harding 1987), even though human words are not seen as the only, let alone the best, definitive index of faith. Here, I have tentatively explored the roles of human languages and their differently assessed qualities among Pentecostals in the broader socio- linguistic contexts of Java. It is under this rubric of discussion that I wish to question the ramifications of a set of hackneyed dichotomies between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between denotative confession and performative action, between individual consciousness and legal jurisprudence, between agency and subjugation and, ultimately, between Christianity and Islam. This package of dichotomies is always worth rigorous re-examination, despite the fact that it can be an enduring trope that persists even in the contemporary anthropology of Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 10:22 02 January 2012 religion.

Acknowledgements The materials presented in this article are part of a dissertation project on women’s subjectivities and Muslim-Christian relationships in Salatiga, Central Java. Support for the research in Indonesia was provided by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant. This write-up was generously supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I would like to thank Robert W. Hefner, Nancy Smith-Hefner, Robert Weller, Kimberly Arkin, Charles Lindholm, and anonymous reviewers for providing insights for revisions on earlier versions of this paper. In particular, thanks go to Nathaniel Tuohy for his care. Finally, I appreciate assistance of Intan Kusuma, Kristia Rachmawati, Mungki Vitaresti, and Catherine Elvine. 396 E.-C. Chao Notes 1. What I try to consider here is the possibility that the local linguistic, ideological grasp of ‘glossolalia’ varies widely. Taking ‘translation’ alone, for example, the English or Spanish-speaking countries more or less stick to the Latin-derived variants of ‘glossolalia’. In Asia, the equivalence is much more diverse. In Korea, ( pang- eon) is borrowed from the word ‘dialect’, similar to the Mandarin equivalence ( fang-yien) in China and Taiwan. Yet pang-eon can also potentially mean bombastic talk or free, unreserved speech. In this sense, it is akin to the Japanese equivalent (i-gen), literally meaning dissenting speech. By contrast, the Mandarin usage is largely constrained to refer to glossolalia as a ‘dialect’, which often means an inferior language to the national language. Moreover, the biblical concept of fangyien is largely conflated with xenoglossia, even though it is clear that in the bible there are two types of speaking in tongues, namely glossolalia and xenoglossia. Here, the Indonesian equivalent apparently adheres more to the former than to the latter. The Indonesian equivalent of ‘speaking in tongues’ is bahasa roh, meaning ‘the language of spirit’. It is possible that these ‘naming’ conventions may potentially influence the impression of Pentecostal practices. For example, speaking in tongues among Taiwanese Christians is still largely demonised, considered to be the work of the devil. The varying significance of the linguistic grasps of a supposedly universal theological idea can be seen in other examples such as the term ‘Allah’, the universal translation of ‘God’ in Indonesia, as opposed to the neighbouring country Malaysia’s recent attempt to outlaw the usage of ‘Allah’ among Christians in fear of an undesirable prosyletisation among Muslims. 2. For an earlier episode among the nineteenth century Javanese missionaries, see Cooley (1968). 3. For a brief history of Pentecostalism in Indonesia, see Robinson (2005) and Wiyono (2006). 4. In Indonesian ‘bahasa’ means ‘language’. Indonesian is ‘bahasa Indonesia’; English ‘bahasa Inggris’, etc. 5. The original text is

6. See Sensus Penduduk (2000), Badan Pusat Statistik (the Central Body of Statistics).

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