Religion in Southeast Asia: An Encyclopedia of Faiths and Cultures

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The uplands in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, are often markedly different from lowland areas, and this distinction has been an important analytical dimension of research in the region. While historical states have spread in lowland and coastal areas of Southeast Asia, the uplands are commonly characterized by non-centralized, village-based societies. The difference between uplands and lowlands is framed in somewhat different terms in insular Southeast Asia and on the mainland. In insular Southeast Asia, powerful polities based on trade historically emerged on coasts, while the hinterland provided trade goods, but was less integrated into state structures. Thus, the distinction is known as one between coastal, down-river regions and those up river. On the mainland, the genesis of states was based on permanent wet rice fields, but their influence ceased where the terrain is more rugged and only allows for temporary dry rice fields, called shifting cultivation or swidden. For the upland areas of the mainland, scholars have used the terms “Southeast Asian Massif” and “Zomia” in recent years. While world religions like Buddhism on the mainland and Islam in Indonesia spread in the lowlands, often as the state religions of newly emerging polities, uplanders commonly practiced local religions, conventionally termed animist.

In the course of history, states and the religions associated with them slowly encroached on the highlands. However, more or less efficient administrative structures were often only established during the second half of the twentieth century, especially on the mainland. In terms of religion, animist uplanders responded in four different ways to lowland influence: subtly including some lowland religious practices into their local systems; full conversion to the lowland religion; conversion to a foreign and markedly different religion, in particular Christianity; and millenarianism.

Conversion to lowland religion was often accompanied by slow acculturation, and presumably the ancestors of numerous current lowlanders originated in the uplands. However, sometimes lowland religion was adopted in the uplands while keeping upland cultural identities intact, as is the case with the Buddhist Phunoy in Laos. However, uplanders’ ethnic and religious identities can be constantly shifting. Thus, anthropologist Edmund Leach reported on persons who passed as non-Buddhist Kachin in the uplands and as Buddhist Shan in the lowlands of Myanmar.

The second option is to convert to a different world religion, but one that is marked off from those of the lowlands. For example, many uplanders of Myanmar have converted to Christianity since the late nineteenth century. Conversion is often reasoned on the base of local socio-cosmic concepts. As animism is based on careful and laborious negotiations with spirit forces, Allah or Christ appear as superior spirit protectors, or Buddhist ritual as an improved technique to control spirits. Thus, Buddhism or Christianity were not perceived as alternative cosmologies but as more efficient means to engage with the established cosmology. Also, conversion promised a new way of engaging with new types of relationships, including global trade and the expansion of the modern nation-state. Christianity in Myanmar or Eastern Indonesia often proved to be an important means to articulate local identities in the face of aggressively expanding nation-states. Being Christian meant to be different from the state.

A third option, even more explicit in its engagement with the increasing power of state centers, consisted in millenarian uprisings. These characterized the mainland of Southeast Asia much more than the archipelago. Millenarianism denotes the idea that a catastrophic upturning of the established order is near, often leading to a more just leadership, a golden age or the predominance of a previously oppressed group. These movements were not restricted to uplanders, but often attracted any marginalized group.

Millenarian movements like the Phi Bun uprising in Thailand and Laos in the early twentieth century were as political as they were religious. They often focus on charismatic leaders and spread among people who experience themselves as disempowered. Millenarianism thus necessarily emerges in a context of strongly felt social inequality. Characteristically, millenarian movements create their own cosmologies, but often make strong use of religious imagery borrowed from the outside, often from dominant and state religions. Thus, Kommadam, the leader of a revolt in southern Laos in the first half of the twentieth century, was celebrated as the Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of the coming age, even though most of his followers were probably not Buddhist. Uprisings of the Hmong, an ethnic group originating from China, sometimes centered on the idea of regaining their mythical lost script, a cultural feature that would put them on equal terms with the Chinese empire or the lowland Southeast Asian states. Some of these millenarian cults still survive today in a politically less volatile form, e.g. among Hmong in northern Thailand.

All these types of responses to lowland states share a particular quality. Uplanders often combine elements from their own local rituals with external elements, in order to create constantly changing ritual systems. Sometimes, these systems serve to stress local identity and the difference to lowlands. Sometimes, elements from lowland societies and religions were integrated into quite different societies in the uplands. The process is highly selective and creative, but historically served to maintain upland identities. In many cases, only a limited number of elements from a lowland religion were integrated into upland ritual systems, as for example in the form of Buddhist ritual verses endowed with healing powers.

Today, the state administration of the uplands has intensified. Therefore, the forms that uplanders use to express their identities have changed. While some people try to escape from lowland prejudices about superstitious and unrefined uplanders by embracing lowland lifestyles, others find new ways of showing their distinctiveness to the world. This often takes the form of ritual. Typically, local rituals like New Year festivals or harvest rituals are transformed and become platforms for performing folkloric versions of local culture. Shows of costumes and dances, some newly invented, are less addressed to benevolent spirits but to national and global media, state majorities, and tourists. These local culture festivals can be called neither authentic nor inauthentic. Although they have little to do with the rituals uplanders performed 50 years ago, they still serve the same purpose: to relate them to an outside world of spirits and states, foreign religions, and peoples, by selectively combining local usages with external ideas.

Guido Sprenger

See also: Ancestor Worship; Animism; Buddhism; Christianity; Contextualization; Dance and Drama (Theater); Ethnicity; Indonesia; Islam; Laos; Messianic Movements; Myanmar (Burma); Myth/Mythology; Religious Conversions; Ritual Dynamics; Spirit Mediumship; Thailand; Tourism.

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Further Reading