part0019

i Tang-ki is the most common word used to refer to Chinese mediums in Singapore. The word is Hokkien and literally means ‘divining youth’. The English translation is ‘spirit medium’, a term commonly used in anthropological discourse. Anna, one of the main tang-kis in my research in Singapore, disputes the use of the term ‘spirit medium’ as a translation, as it implies she could be possessed by a ‘hell-spirit’. Some people are thought to be possessed by hell-spirits but are still known as tang-kis. Still, in deference to her view, the term ‘spirit medium’ is used in this book when referring to anthropological literature, but, more often the term ‘tang-ki’ is used, although sometimes the word ‘medium’ is also used. The term ‘tang-ki worship’, derived from Chan’s (2002) work, refers to the wider context of tang-ki activities.

ii Schizophreniform disorder is similar to schizophrenia in that it is characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganization of speech and behaviour as well as negative symptoms such as lack of motivation and apathy. It differs from schizophrenia in having a lesser duration. Schizotypal disorder is characterized by aloofness and odd eccentric thoughts and behaviour that cause distress.

vi In the anthropological literature, a difference is usually made between shamans who retain their volition, can request spirits for help and can be taken on voyages to different realms and spirit mediums who become possessed by spirits and lose their volition (Paper 1995). Two tang-kis [spirit mediums] that I met during the research said they did, or were able to, go to other realms such as heaven and hell [usually in dreams]. The question can be asked: Does this make them shamans?

iii Quinn and Strauss, in Introduction to Special Issue on the Missing Psychology in Cultural Anthropology’s Key Words , note the frequent use of such psychological terms as agency, desire, embodiment, identity, resistance, subjectivity and the self by anthropologist without grounding them in the psychological theory from where they derive (2006: 268-269). They note the opposition of many anthropologists to using psychological theory and they point to the influence of both Geertz and Foucault’s work in influencing this opposition to psychological models (2006: 269-273). They point out that the use of psychological concepts without grounding them in psychological theories is often just labelling, rather than explaining and that such an approach has little intellectual content (2006: 268-269). They suggest that a combined approach of a social, cultural orientation as well as a psychological one would more adequately serve as a research approach in anthropology. See page 43 for Nuckolls’ (1998) similar ideas on the contributions a psychoanalytical approach can make to anthropology when considering the subject of motivation.

iv For a criticism of the use of the Lacanian notion of the imaginary in the social sciences, see Billig (2006). In this empirically orientated paper, Billig questions the meaning Lacan gives to the child’s recognition of itself in the mirror and also Lacan’s poverty of referencing source material. In my opinion, Billing misses the wider implication and importance of Lacan’s idea of the imaginary. Even a blind person develops a sense of themselves as a whole or totality gained from interactions with other people. It is not dependent on an actual mirror. Billig, paradoxically, uses the very theory of the imaginary he is criticising in implying that Lacan gets a sense of the uniqueness of his own self and his own work through ‘repressing’ the mention of one of his sources, Walloon.

vii Lacan’s (1969/70) typology of the four discourses formalized in his 1969/70 seminar PSYCHOANALYSIS UPSIDE DOWN: THE REVERSE SIDE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS came out of Lacan’s thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship to society at that time. There had been the student uprising in 1968 that led to reforms of the university system. Lacan was interested in ideas about revolution, protest, knowledge and how all of these related to authority, power and enjoyment and to the various economic and social systems that functioned in the world at that time. He also, in this seminar, questions and sidelines the role of the father in the psychic economy. He starts to see the Oedipus complex as the myth of the neurotic, and he sees the father, as the agent of the master, being incarnated in almost any master signifier. He, also, sees the Oedipus complex as somehow covering up that there is a lack-in-being (1969/70: VIII 11-IX 16). In his next seminar, Lacan (1971) carries on with his development of the theory of discourse, looking also at the nature of the signifier, the real and truth in connection with both writing and speaking. He draws particularly on ideas from the Chinese philosopher Mencius and on his knowledge of the nature of both the Chinese and Japanese languages.

viii As well as writing on aspects of Eastern religions, Jung made reference to shamans in his writings. Jung has not been referred to in this book because to do so would increase the sheer volume of the work and because of the author’s lack of familiarity with his writings. Jung in psychoanalytical circles is usually considered to be outside the psychoanalytical domain, and this book concentrates on psychoanalysis.

ii Early investigators of possession phenomena can perhaps be excused for seeing a direct association of this entrance into the possession state and the descriptions of people suffering a hysterical fit. In some cases of possession that I saw, especially in men and especially at the end of the possession, the tang-kis became almost locked in position resembling the ‘posturing’ of some people with a catatonic illness. Micale describes the hysteric en pleine crise well, ‘…hair dishevelled, head tossed back, limbs contorted, eyes rolling, and body rigid and writhing’ (Micale 1995: 149). This description could also be a description of a tang-ki entering a trance. This type of comparison can be faulted, of course, in that it is at a behavioural level and misses out on meaning. The Lacanian notion of hysteria used in this book is is not based on observable symptoms but is based on a structural level of analysis that moves the idea of hysteria away from being just about illness to an idea of it being a certain structure of a person in relationship to another [See last part of this chapter].

iii Heaty [fa re] is a common word amongst Chinese to describe a feeling or condition of the body. It is related to irritability, fever, constipation and having a sore throat. The Hokkien term ‘sip jua’ is used for a slightly different type of ‘heaty’ feeling; one associated with diarrhoea. Various foods and herbs are seen as heaty or cooling, [related to yin-yang], although this is not the same as the English hot or cool. Tea, for instance, is cooling. If one is heaty, one should abstain from foods which are heaty and take foods which are cooling.

iv One person said that just as a person might have some physical characteristics like their parents, so a tang-ki will have characteristics like a god and that this is the god bone [shengu]. Chan gives a more mythical account. She says that the repository of one [spiritual] part of the soul [hun] is in the bone and that all unborn children have a connection by way of thirty-six ethereal bones to a corresponding plant in the heavenly flower garden. When a child is born the link of the bones is broken, apart from in the case of potential mediums (Chan 2002: 201).

v Zhang Tian Shi [also known as Chang Tao-ling] lived in the first century CE and was the founder of the Heavenly Masters Sect of Taoism. He is considered to be the first ‘pope’ of Taoism. The other two founders were the Yellow Emperor and Lao Tzu. The legendary Yellow Emperor [Huang Di] was said to have lived in the third millennium BCE and to be the writer of the YELLOW EMPEROR’S MEDICINE CLASSIC . He is considered to be the ancestor of the Chinese people and the first Emperor. Lao-tzu is said to have lived in the sixth century BCE and to be the writer of the classic TAO TEH CHING .

vi In psychiatric nosology, the relationship of conversion [conflicts channelled into physical symptoms] to dissociation and to hysteria is complicated. In the DSM-11, 1968, classification of mental illness, one category of mental pathology was called neurosis and was made up of nine subcategories including conversion type and dissociative type (Klass 2003: 89-90). In the DSM-111, 1980, manual, there was a separate category formed of dissociative disorders, which contained multiple personality disorder, psychogenic fugue, psychogenic amnesia, depersonalization disorder and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified. Another separate category of somatoform disorders [previously subsumed under hysterical neurosis] was created with conversion disorder and somatization as two of five specific disorders (Klass 2003: 90-91). The ICD-10 classification of mental illnesses used in Great Britain and Europe, though, places conversion disorder with dissociative disorders under the heading of dissociative [conversion] disorders. Merskey, a psychiatrist, sees no value in distinguishing between dissociation and conversion (2001: 179)

vii This is obviously an ambitious aim. Usually, analyses veer towards taking on one aspect or another of the points mentioned. Thus Littlewood and Bartocci (2005), in their paper on stigmata, choose a naturalistic explanation of the phenomena in terms of self-harm over the participants explanation of what is happening as being miraculous or over the Freudian idea of conversion disorder. Chan (2002), in her study of spirit mediums, often takes on the religious point of view in her explanations. For instance, when talking about tang-ki mortifications, she says that the person’s belief is that their bodies are not pierced, as the god inhabits the body at the time of piercing. She concludes from this that considerations of personal motives do not come into such an analysis (Chan 2002: 373). Obeyesekere, as we have seen, goes deeply into personal motives in his explanation of possession phenomena. Boddy (1989) keeps to the importance of social factors in her study of spirit-possession.

i Bai Yi Niang Niang is a different form or manifestation of Guanyin. Anna sometimes uses the two names interchangeably when talking about this deity, but when she is talking about this deity in relationship to issues of sexual identity, she usually uses the name Guanyin. For the sake of clarity, I use the name Guanyin to refer to the deity.

ii Anthropology has had a long fascination with the relationship of myth to ritual, starting from Robertson Smith’s view that ritual comes before myth, going to Leach’s idea that they are one and the same and then to Lévi-Strauss’ view that they are separate. In this present work, Malinowski’s idea that myths can serve as a charter for action is taken into consideration. In the Lacanian theory of discourse, a myth can be analyzed as belonging to one of several discourses, depending on both the content of the particular myth and the context in which it occurs. Myths can be seen as master discourses [this may be the way Malinowski saw them], or as in the case of the myths analysed in this book, they can be seen as being part of the discourse of the hysteric. The myths studied here can also be seen as being part of another discourse, which I will call the discourse of the tang-ki. In this discourse, myth is a narrative that helps situate a person in the symbolic world vis-à-vis both the real and the imaginary. The relationship of myth to ritual and action is a dialectical one. In this study, two myths are analyzed in some detail.

iii Psychoanalytic writings, including Lacanian, often have an ideologically fixed position on the question of the nature of religious experience. They often assume that religion is essentially fantasy or illusionary in content. This view, itself, is often used as a type of master discourse and takes no account of the tremendous variety of beliefs and behaviours seen in different religious groups or within any one religious group. The view is parallel, in many ways, to the view of the first anthropologists because, largely, the psychoanalytic view on this point is indeed influenced by these early anthropologists [See page 28 ]. However, anthropology moved away from the somewhat speculative evolutionary assumptions of these anthropologists early in its history. It moved to more symbolic and hermeneutic ways of understanding religious activity. A second point to be made here is that it is the province of anthropology rather than psychoanalysis to investigate the question of the nature of religion in its relationship to society. It is only by looking at the actual use of myths and rituals in particular communities that one can answer the question of whether myths and rituals are used to avoid reality or to construct reality. This is not to say of course that psychoanalysis cannot inform an anthropological analysis.

ii While most of the deities mentioned in this work can be seen as being somewhat subversive, they are usually beneficent and able to help people in positive ways. However, there is in the literature accounts of spirits and deities in Chinese tang-ki worship that are not so positive and that are associated with immoral and even occult practices [see page 217 ]. The Wangye spirits, who are believed to cure illness actually perpetrated these illnesses (Shahar and Weller 1996: 12). The gods of the Five Paths to Wealth [Wulu Caishen] were known for raping women (Shahar and Weller 1996: 20). Gan Wang [King Wan] murdered his mother (Weller 1996: 252). While I did not come across any such gods or shrines dedicated to these gods in Singapore, there was a concern by some people in the shrines about the possibility of people in some other shrines being engaged in negative practices. I was warned by Anna and others on some occasions not to go around too much to other shrines in case I came across dangerous practices.

iii In my terms, I thought that in this situation there was some rivalry. Many tang-kis tend to operate by themselves without much contact with other temples, apart from their yearly celebrations. Jealousy and enviousness seem sometimes to be mediated and dealt with in the discourse on possession, spirits and ghosts. Once when visiting a shrine with Anna and her husband, a tang-ki looked very rough with many tattoos. I sensed Anna’s husband did not like the tang-ki or Anna’s involvement with that particular shrine. Her husband became ill and we decided to leave, after which he recovered.

iv Prime Minister Goh, in 1999, used a dichotomy between ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘heartlander’ to talk about differences between Singaporeans. A ‘cosmopolitan’ outlook is international; cosmopolitan people are generally productive and concerned with global markets. ‘Heartlander’ interests are local and traditional; their labour is only useful locally (Tan 2002: 122-124).

v I strongly disagree here with Seymour’s and Crapanzano’s view of resistance as needing to be intentional and conscious (Seymour 2006: 305; Molino 2004: 70-71). In Seymour’s paper, she rightly argues for psychological concepts used in anthropological writings to be attached to explicit psychological theory. In her paper, however, she implicitly rejects Freud’s theories of parapraxis, his theory of dreams and his theory of hysteria. Freud’s theories combined with a Lacanian interpretation would show that we are divided beings, not exactly knowing what we are doing and showing that some of our behaviour does involve resistance to dominating discourses. I believe, for example, that anorexia is often about a type of protest or resistance. This does not mean that a person with anorexia is consciously aware that they are protesting. The Lacanian theory of discourse provides a more sophisticated psychological framework to help one understand how resistance operates.

vi Henley, in his paper on Rouch’s film LES MAITRES FOUS, argues that the Hauka possession cult is not counter-hegemonic but is more about an instrumental therapeutic cult of healing or just about maintaining a relationship with spirits (2006: 753). While this may be the case, could it not also be both? While Boddy (1989) in her work on the Zar cult in the Sudan wants to downplay the therapeutic aspect of the cult and highlight its resistance aspect, Henley in his analysis of the Hauka cult downplays the resistance aspect and highlights the therapeutic. While Henley does not say that all analyses of cults that bring into play ideas of resistance are misguided, there is the implication that this could be so. In the tang-ki cults in Singapore, members would maintain they are about healing and worshipping the gods. They would not think they involved any political factor. I, however, maintain they are both and that healing and therapy always have a political and social aspect. I believe this can be shown in the case of tang-ki worship by bringing into the analysis Lacanian psychoanalytical theory.

i I read the story as a variation of Freud’s story in TOTEM AND TABOO of the foundation of civilization. There the brothers kill the father and set him up as a symbolic father, and then form bonds with each other. This bond, for Freud, was the beginning of civilization or society: ‘It was the beginning of so many things - of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion’ (1913: 203). For Freud and Lacan, this story is another version of the Oedipus complex. It shows that the Oedipus complex is not just something an individual goes through but that it is fundamentally a social process and is about how a person gains subjectivity. In the film, the symbolic father [the king] is already in existence. To have killed him would have reduced Chinese society to a horde. My analysis is made of the film alone. I am aware that historically the situation of China, at the time the events portrayed in the film were said to have occurred, was more complex than portrayed in the film. I am also aware that the character of Qin Shi Huangdi was more complex than was portrayed. As emperor, he was tyrannical and was known to destroy cultural productions e.g. burning books. Another more cynical interpretation of the film is that it could be seen to condone a country’s exploitation of another country in the interest of the greater good and that one could see China’s domination of Tibet as being justified in this manner.

i Lacan, in discussing Freud’s ideas of the ego and related concepts as a Copernican revolution in their decentring of the ego as the centre of the human being, draws on the 19th century poet Rimbaud’s idea that poets do not know what they are saying but still manage to say something, which Rimbaud summed up as, ‘Je est un autre’. Lacan’s whole theory of the subject can be seen to be built on this idea (Lacan 1988b: 7).

ii Keremat [miracle worked by Muslim saint] worship in Malaysia was once widely practiced by Malays, although it has been frowned on by both the religious and state authorities. In this belief, it is thought that the souls of holy people can manifest themselves in various objects such as trees, snakes and stones and be of help or hindrance to people [if not appeased]. This practice in Malaysia is a highly hybridized phenomenon and has been taken up in Chinese tang-ki practices with the spirit being known as Datuk Kong [see page 17 ]. In analyzing the involvement of Chinese property developers in Malaysia in the cult, Goh sees the phenomenon as being associated with revealing and being a channel for negotiating the, ‘contradictions of economy, social power and ethnic politics, besides being creative sites for the transmission of suppressed realities and desires beyond bureaucratic definitions’ in Malaysia (Goh 2005: 319).

iii One significant difference between spirit possession in the Zar rituals and tang-ki rituals is that in the Zar rituals anyone can be possessed, whereas in the tang-ki rituals it is generally only the tang-ki that becomes possessed, although, on one occasion, I saw at a temple celebrations a couple of people from the crowd become possessed. Experiencing oneself as ‘other’ is not so much a part of an immediate experience for people at tang-ki shrines apart from the tang-ki but is a mediated experience, mediated by the discourse of the tang-ki and the accompanying rituals with all their irony, ambiguities and paradoxes.

iv The ‘other’ referred to here is not Lacan’s imaginary ‘other’, with a small o, which for him is the other person as a projection of one’s ego. Nor is it the Other with a capital O meaning the symbolic or cultural system made up of rules and regulations of a society. Rather, it is a combination of the idea of Levinas’ ‘other’ as that which is not mine, that I cannot control, that is encountered in the phenomenon of death, but which give us at the same time a sense of both ‘otherness’ and of ‘self’ (Levinas 1969) and Lacan’s notion of the ‘Jouissance of the other’, which is an aspect of the real outside of symbolization but nevertheless something we try to symbolize. The notion of Jouissance is examined in more detail in the next chapter.

i Fulford sees the ‘Present State Examination’, as formulated by Wing, et al. in this 1974 work and the ICD classification of mental disease as being the ‘gold standard’ of psychiatric classification. He is critical of these standards being able to do justice to religious phenomena (Fulford 2004: 300-301).

ii I found this idea very helpful in my clinical work. One young man of fifteen had a diagnosis of psychosis with some autistic features. He used to often engage in making elaborate maps with some streets and places on his maps being named with his surname. He also used to write stories with frequent metonymic wordplays on his name. Some colleagues were inclined to see his behaviour of map-making as an obsessional symptom. A traditional psychoanalytical way of working with this would be to offer an interpretation to try to get at what was underlying the symptom. In his case, an interpretation would probably be made in terms of a reference to his absent father [he had never seen his father]. I, however, saw his psychic structure as psychotic rather than neurotic and as lacking a fundamental signifier [the Name-of-the-Father] that would keep his structure stabilized. I saw his map-making behaviour, then, not as a symptom but as a way that made up for the missing signifier of the father [and working through of the Oedipus complex], and I saw my task as being not to interpret the map-making and stories he wrote but to allow him to draw more maps and write more stories in the sessions and to elaborate his work. In this way, I treated the maps and the stories as a sinthome.

i The nature of the Singaporean political system is somewhat of an anomaly, being, in my opinion, both socialist and capitalist. Lee, Goh, Toy and others when studying in England were influenced by British Fabian socialist ideas. The PAP party was set up as a democratic socialist party, although Lee Kuan Yew admitted it could not change the capitalist economy into a socialist one (Josey 1968: 48). Goh, the second prime minister, in 1972, as Finance Minister, defined socialism as the state ownership of the means of production, and he noted that the PAP party was a good socialist party (Khondker 2003: 31). He also noted Singapore had good relations with capitalists (Khondker 2003: 31). The PAP party in 1976, in anticipation of being expelled from the Socialist International [which it had joined in 1966], resigned from the organization (Rodan 1989: 127). The Singaporean political system has been termed ‘market socialism’ as distinct from ‘Soviet-style socialism’, which ignores the market, and the ‘welfare socialism’ of the West (Khondker 2003: 31; Yao 2007: 15).

ii The ‘substantivist’ school of economic anthropology associated with Karl Polanyi made much of the concept of ‘embeddness’. In this school of thought, ‘embeddedness’ was seen as characterizing pre-market or pre-capitalist societies. In contrast market or capitalist societies were seen as disembedded and dominated by a separate sphere of economics (Hefner 1998b: 9).

iii Gates maintains that while late imperial China had important elements of capitalism such as treating land, labour and capital as commodities with developed markets for each and having commercial enterprises run on capitalist principles within its economic system, the state had a somewhat bureaucratic/feudal vision that militated against the hegemony of capitalism. An alternative capitalist worldview did, however, develop amongst the general population. This alternative worldview enabled status to be based on wealth rather than through degree or office holding (Gates 1987: 260-261). The people who migrated to Singapore in the 19th and 20th century were from this general population.

iv While I found a general preoccupation with money and wealth amongst people in Singapore, I also found an overwhelming generosity once I was accepted into a family or group. This reminded me of Lin’s (1988) work, which talks about Chinese people’s interest and concern for others within families and their self-interest when operating outside families. The interest in the other is also seen in shrines. While many Chinese people see tang-ki shrines as overly preoccupied with money and as ‘conning’ people, my experience overall was somewhat different. People could basically pay what they wanted for consultations with tang-kis. This varied from a few dollars to large amounts where people were well off. The contributions are placed in red packets and put into a box, rather than handed to a person. While I paid for various events at the shrines, which other members also paid for, I was stopped from paying too much. With the Redhill shrine it was difficult to give them anything at all, as they tried throughout my long association with them to pay for everything – meals, drinks, and only accepted a donation at the end of my association with them after a great deal of pressure from me.

v Apart from Warner’s (1985) work on the relationship of various environmental variables to schizophrenia outcome, there is ongoing work being carried out on this issue. Patel, Cohen, Thara and Gureje (2006) believe that there is a lack of evidence for the proposition that there is a difference in outcome of people with schizophrenia between non-industrial and industrial countries. McGrath, Saha, Welham, El Saadi, MacCauley and Chant (2004); and McGrath (2005, 2007) believe the incidence of schizophrenia varies in terms of gender, urbanicity and migrant status. Saha, Chant, Welham and McGrath (2005, 2006), while recognizing there is no evidence for any difference in the incidence of schizophrenia between countries when divided by economic status, believe there is evidence that the course of the illness is not so favourable in developed nations. They believe the prevalence of schizophrenia varies with developed nation status and migrancy [being lower in developed nations] but not with urbanicity or sex, apart from in a few sites.

vii Kua, Wong, Kua and Tsoi (2003) mention close family relations and also people with schizophrenia being in employment as possible factors favouring a positive prognosis of the illness. Tan et al. found in their study of ‘quality of life amongst schizophrenic patients’ in Singapore that 90% of them still lived with their families as compared to approximately two-thirds of schizophrenic patients in Western countries living by themselves (Tan, Choo, Doshi, Lim and Kua. 2004: 111). However there was amongst those studied some dissatisfaction with family life, and the majority were unemployed.

Conclusion

i In a later work, Kleinman (1988) develops a more nuanced approach to illness. For example, he quotes Bryan Turner (2008), ‘‘Disease is not a fact, but a relationship…” which implies that the anthropological researcher needs to be in at all stages of any research, rather than separating out some biological ‘substance’ for the medical researcher and leaving the rest for the anthropologist (Kleinman 1988: 5).