Thanatophidia and Symbolic Ecology Vietnamese Nature Mythoi

Balinese Character and Culture

Animism and Syncretism The "Circular-Center Hypothesis"

Some symbolisms have such an enduring character that they transcend the vicissitudes of time and cultural change. Southeast Asian culture and civilization has always remained closely tied to its natural setting and environment, and this close, often dangerous and unpredictable relationship, is deeply embedded in the cultural symbolizations and symbolic themes recurrent throughout the region.

The conventional functionalist, materialist and ecological models of cultural-environmental adaptations are contraposed to a symbolic model that claims that cultures will draw directly from the symbolism in its environment and utilize these in social institutions, practices and relations. The symbolic structure of its socio-cultural organization will thus be highly congruent with its local and trans-local settings. This congruence will extend to the regional character of its civilization in certain basic forms. An animistic Southeast Asian spirit complex that is rooted in a basic relationship to nature is held to be a common defining feature of Southeast Asian civilization.

A culture has a more direct relationship with nature than most cultural materialists and ecologists would want to admit. People draw readily and directly from nature's cornucopia the symbolisms which they employ in the organization and mobilization of their cultural resources. Totemic relationships did not end or become merely submerged beneath the rise of states. We do not need to speculate upon the protein requirements of a tropical forest or the ecology of rice to understand the impact which the introduction of the cultivation of rice had upon Southeast Asian civilization--rice became a principle means, as well as metaphor, for health and success. We do not need to observe evidence of ancient irrigation works to understand that the harnessing of rivers that brought life and death to peoples was a major source of symbolisms about death, fertility and the renewal of life.

This symbolisms and their function did not necessarily take effect only after the "techno-environmental foundations of irrigation" had already been laid--humans had thought about, realized and experienced the potentialities of the rivers long before they figured out how to go about building dikes and irrigation canals. If anything, such symbolisms probably formed the necessary mental connections that paved the way for such invention. The invention of an artificial civilization, if anything, tended to sever the direct human symbolic connection with its natural world. In devising technologies to overcome the forces and harness the power of nature, we began creating mythologies in which this natural connection became reversed and subdued by a human embodied supernatural force.

Early Southeast Asian statecraft may always relied upon the promotion of the sacred legitimacy of certain nature symbols as totems of state authority and power. The dragon, the phoenix, the Naga, the crocodile, were all recurrent totemic symbols of Southeast Asian peoples.

A functionalist perspective would maintain such symbols serve a secondary legitimating institutions which serve to provide universal omnipotence and legitimacy, and which serve to annihilate "marginal" episodes or alternative sources which threaten the legitimacy of the center. A materialist orientation would maintain that these mechanisms are largely epiphenomenal and exist only as secondary feedback mechanisms rather than as "primary determinants" of social change.

A socio-structural perspective rooted in Durkheim holds such symbols as the sacred embodiment of the social order. While all of these functions of symbolism are undoubtedly important, the more direct socio-ecological function of symbolisms in mediating the relationship of people to their natural environment must be entertained.

Briefly, it can be said that symbolisms directly mediate the boundary between people and the social group, and their relationship with the natural world. Symbolisms serve to locate, mobilize and transform people within natural landscapes. Symbols will also locate nature and the social body or state within the body. Symbols serve to express and to map the relations between the body and the primarily social, humanized world of nature, and then between the world and the cosmos.

In Southeast Asia, these symbols are primarily spatial and a-temporal in orientation. It is this same boundary-mediating mechanism which defines the ecological relationship, the relative equilibrium or imbalance of people within their world, that also defines human social relationship and identity with one another, and which thus serves to bridge the important gap between natural and historical patterns of adaptation and change.

Symbols are both religious and aesthetic, and have been a vital agency in the mobilization and organization of human actions and in providing direction for the development of human civilization.

Ethnographic evidence supports the belief that for the most part primitive man was both more environmentally aware as well as aesthetically sensitive to its natural environment than modern humankind, and that they had long ago worked out complex cycles and strategies that were rooted in the natural rhythms of their environmental settings. They knew which plants to eat, and which to avoid, which plants could cure and which could kill. They knew when to burn off the forest underbrush, and where to clear the forest for their new settlements. They knew where they were in the forest, and which direction they wanted to go in. They had a time for peace and a time for war, and even instituted complex ritual and symbolic cycles to help signal and regulate the management of the environment.

It is in regard to the symbolic ecology of human adaptation in its natural world that various aspects of Southeast Asian civilization will be considered: the role of basic nature symbolism in Southeast Asian cultures and in Southeast Asian statecraft the transformational and frequently destructive effect of Western Acculturation in the symbolic alienation and redefinition of the basic social-environmental relationship that had been long worked out in Southeast Asian civilization; the rise of revitalization movements in response to Western contact; the symbolic ecological contradictions that are inherent to predominant nation-building policies of development in the modernization of Southeast Asia.

Finally, basic linkages between symbols and the environment is hypothesized, rooted in human nature that entails that similar symbolic forms and functions will be independently adopted by historically unrelated peoples, and that historical relationship will tend towards the convergence of such shared symbolism. Furthermore, basic differences that are symbolically defined and ecologically rooted will tend to be positioned between peoples in a predictable and cross-culturally consistent fashion, and will lead to a predictable pattern of status-role identification and boundary-maintenance between peoples.

Humankind everywhere has had a fascination with snakes. Primates are claimed to have an instinctive fear of snakes, and some have specific calls for snakes. Human fear and horror towards snakes is certainly widespread, if not universal, although many mythological traditions exist that claim great snakes as benefactors, as creators of the land, and as symbols of good and fertility.

The myth of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden; is certain very ancient and probably has its origin in the Gilgamesh era during early Mesopotamian and Sea of Sunrise civilization. Snake skeletons were found buried in pottery jars with pearls, and sometimes other precious stones, in Dilmun. Bibby, in his Looking For Dilmun (1970), describes the discovery of pots at the level contemporaneous with the temple circa 2000 B. C., in which they had found, "coiled up at the bottom, the skeletons of snakes." "...In over half the bowls there was found in addition, loose among the coiled snake-bones, a single bead, in most cases a tiny turquoise....Beyond a doubt we have here clear proof that the legend of Gilgamesh was still a living and integral part of the religion of Bahrain at the time when the palac was built and inhabited. We have since found many more of these snake-burials, beneath the floors of other rooms, and their total must be well up into the forties." (Bibby,1970: pg. 164-5).

It is perhaps fitting in this regard that the beautiful queen Cleopatra should end her life by being bitten in the breast by an adder. The latter Christian mythology that associates the snake with both wisdom, death, the devil and evil, is clearly an elaboration rooted in the earlier Gilgamesh epic, which in turn was probably based upon every earlier myths.

We can find mythology, folklore, superstition, magic and religious ritual associated with the snake in practically every major region on earth. In Europe there were Cretan and Danish snake goddesses, Medusa of Greek mythology, the Caduceus, the medieval Danish tradition of burying an adder beneath the threshold to keep out evil spirits. The European style Dragon is clearly a snake-like creature who hoards treasure and steals young maidens. In Indigenous North America the Indians of the Pueblos had a rattlesnake cult-ritual in which costumed men danced and carried the rattle snake that was captured, and latter returned, to the wild. Similar snake rituals have been reported in Meso-America and in South America.

In contemporary North America there is a snake handling cult of Southern White Anabaptists who believe that the handling of venomous, feral snakes is a gift from God, and who also practice trance, eating of fire, drinking of strychnine. In the American Southwest there are annual rattlesnake roundups where rattlesnake dens are raided, the snakes killed and dressed and sold for meat, and the skins, heads and tails are also sold as tourist trinkets. From the crowd that these roundups draw, one must wonder about the symbolic character of the great interest and energy people put into this activity.

In India, the snake has a different mythological tradition. A Great python is held to have created the land, and is held as a great benefactor. The snake is therefore more positively associated with fertility and annual renewal than in the more Occidental tradition. The linggum itself an eti-phallic symbol, is associated with the raised head of the hooded cobra. It is no wonder that a resident cobra is considered a sign of good luck for an Indian village, that snake charmers abound and form their own caste in India. In Sri Lanka the albino cobra is considered a sacred creature and is the object of many pilgrimages.

In East Asia, among other things, the snake is considered as an aphrodisiac and thus as a source of renewable fertility. In Okinawa, once rife with the habu snake until the introduction of the mongoose, it is still possible to buy saki fermented with snakes as an aphrodisiac and as a rejuvenator of life.

It is in Southeast Asia that we might expect, and find, well developed mythology and cultural practices associated with the snake, for snake fauna in this region is perhaps some of the most diverse, representing most of the major genera and all of the forms of venomous snakes, and in which human contact and consociation with the snake is the closest. It is the region with by far the highest number of annual snakebite deaths in the world. And this close association between humans and snakes can be taken as a direct measure of the extent to which nature intrudes upon and surrounds human life and cultural adaptation in the region.

Thus the overseas Chinese and Thai people of Bangkok regularly eat snake flesh and drink snake blood, sometimes sucking it directly from the snake, as a source of strength and sexual potency. This market has been so thriving that locally it is serving to upset the ecological balance of the snake fauna--leading to an increase in rats, the main prey package of snakes, and to the lose of grain.

In Burma, tribal women capture a king cobra and train it as a dancing partner. During their dance they will kiss the raised snout of the cobra, before releasing it back into the wild. King Cobras, natural culture fliers will during courtship in the wild do a kind of mating dance.

The snake-temple in Penang, Malaysia, is world renowned for it's lithe green tree adders that are very venomous. The snakes were said to have come on their own to the temple after it was constructed, and this was considered to be a propitious sign. The number of snakes have dwindled there over the years, and now the temple is not as popular a tourist attraction as it once was. Presumably, the snakes have stopped coming on their own to the temple, and the local care-taker/photographer must go out and find fresh snakes.

The "Thanatophidia hypothesis" holds that the symbolic and ecological relationship between humankind and snakes, as well as other natural forms, are interconnected. It is this common relationship which lies at the core of so many common themes of mythology, religion and folklore, and which can be counted as thematic convergences about a central symbolic complex that does not have to be explained in historical terms of diffusion or common origin. We might refer the "Thanatophidia hypothesis" as a concept of the symbolic unity of human experience and culture that is rooted in common thematic relationships with the natural environment. While certain specific thematic motifs, such as the story of Gilgamesh, are likely candidates for diffusion and elaboration, symbolic complexes as a whole that are thematically recurrent do not need to be explained in terms of a common historical connection, but can be used instead as a basis for cross-cultural comparison.

Snakes and serpents as symbols are clearly common, even pan-human motifs. As such, the symbolic associations are inherently ambivalent and ambiguous--they may simultaneously be symbols of death, fear, evil as well as of fertility, rebirth, strength, and benevolence. A part of the "Thanatophidia hypothesis" is that such symbolisms and their thematic complexes are what might be called marginal symbols that have the common thematic characteristics of dealing with marginal experiences--death, alienation, asymmetry and separation, of being universalistic and cosmological in orientation in providing a sense of unity of experience and in serving to orient or locate such experience in space and time, they are organic in being based upon natural forms, and of being dialectically synthetic and syncretic. We may only speculate upon the connections of such symbolism in the depths of the human psyche. They are basic and prototypical and thus might be counted as collective archetypes of the pan-human symbolization of experience.

As marginal symbols, they serve a totemic function reinforcing the normal boundaries of cognitive and normative experience that are rooted in human social relations and human relations with the environment. They serve to annihilate and to reincorporate the marginal experience, and shape and modify our expectations of such experiences. Because of their inherent ambivalence, they serve to embody and represent the very existential contradictions of the historicity of our constructions of reality, and thus by their reification serve to cover over the facticity and objectivity of our constructions.

As marginal symbols, they can be thought of also as boundary symbols which define and demarcate the normal bounds of experience from the marginal, and which help to shape and give substance to our expectations of experience. It is small wonder that they come to express basic divisions such as male and female, life and death, good and evil, and that they often serve as emblematic representations of group identity.

Their functional capacity and versatility is derived from several aspects of their design: their basicness and rootedness to natural motifs and themas, their capacity for the "incorporation of contradiction" and the resolution of opposites by embodying as a single, substantively real referent those dialectical differences which otherwise threaten or undermine the identity and unity of experience; their symbolic structure in which open-ended symbolic chains and complexes are built up on the basis of loose associations; their transferability and flexibility in being adapted to a range of alternative experiences and reinterpreted to fit changing circumstances; and their capacity for accreting new symbolic forms and associations, or for accreting to other symbolisms.

The question to be answered is the conservatism of such symbolisms, their potential for being carried and diffused across space in some basic form, and how we might readily identify an old from a new form, or a primitive versus a derived form or an original versus borrowed form. Certainly, the connection of the snake with the Gilgamesh epic underlying western mythology and religious cosmology is a very old one, but one which probably would not have been guessed had not the tablets been discovered in which the epics had been inscribed. There seems to be no straightforward way of showing a common thematic origin to stories which have a similar thematic structure or that employ similar forms of symbolisms.

Finally, it must be emphasized that thematic aspects of design can be borrowed as ideas as readily as the actual symbolic elements themselves as the forms in which the ideas take shape. Thematic design expresses recurrent patterns of ordered relation between elements that has some form of intentional, symbolic significance that is beyond the significances of the individual components. It is possible that themes may remain pretty much the same, while the elements that compose the design have been replaced.

In Vietnamese Mythology, the snake, the crocodile, and the dragon are all closely associated symbolisms which seem to have an inherently ambivalent nature. They are both creatures of the land and the sea, and are thus both symbolic of death and life, male and female, yin and yang. While the dragon is clearly a patriarchal symbol of Kingship and authority, in Vietnamese mythology Kings and men regularly transformed into snakes that dove into the sea.

In Feng Shui, of geomancy, the Mountains are the backs of dragons and the streams the concourses of their movement. Supernatural power is held to originate in the highlands of Tibet and flow through dragon's veins along the mountain ranges, branching out and carrying spiritual energy to all corners of the earth. This energy of the earth collects in certain propitious, and inherently dangerous, locations.

In Vietnamese folklore, "Long do" or "Dragon's belly" is the geographical and spiritual center of the Vietnamese realm, and it represented the political center of gravity and stability--in the location of Hanoi--and this position was elaborated by the emperors in a special spirit cult. "Coiled Dragon" was the god of the earth that the Vietnamese Kings who sought to maintain control over the heartland worshiped, and that subsequently became the national symbol of the Vietnamese.

It must be understood that the Dragon-Man-Snake motif is clearly associated with the water, a female element. Snakes in Vietnamese mythology are the Water King's children and announce floods and deluges to come" and are associated with magical amulets and talismans. Lac Long Quan, the dragon king and original father of the Vietnamese, made his home in the sea. The renewed fertility of the sea is unsurprisingly associated with female fertility--and with the power of both giving and taking life.

Thus water symbolism associated with snakes are, in this tradition, symbolisms of darkness and death as well as rebirth. The water kingdom is an important netherworld in Vietnamese mythology associated with fertility, death and the female-principle of am, or darkness. In popular folklore, it is often confused with Hell. The way to the underworld and to hell is often through the Water Kingdom--the great womb of Vietnamese mythology from which many of its culture heroes issue with their mandate to rule. In Vietnamese mythology, the tortoise and the lotus are two symbols that are clearly associated with the female, fertility and the water element. The tortoise is a symbol of longevity and perfection that is "usually found with a coral branch in its mouth and a crane on its back." The crane usually has a lotus in its mouth--a Buddhist symbolism of the female principle--the "most popular flower in Vietnam" standing for femininity, sexuality and grace.

The lotus was associated with the florescence of Buddhism in Vietnam, that was linked to the art of rain-making, and Buddha spirit cults of "clouds, rain, thunder and lightening" as well as the worship of trees and aquatic powers. Buddhism became a widespread religion among the common Vietnamese as "a new method of controlling the vagaries of nature in the interests of agriculture"

The moon is another female symbol associated with beauty and fertility, and that is understandably implicated in the calendrical rites associated with the lunar calendar that is so important in the timing of seasons, tides and fishing. (Taylor, 1983:p. 83) Many village temples were founded Buddhist spirits of agricultural fertility.

Water is also associated with death. For Vietnamese, drowning is a particular horrible form of death, associated with errant and wandering ghosts. There are a host of water spirits possessing ambivalent forms of power--"some are inherently wicked, and some occasionally wicked, and others capricious or benevolent."

The Water Goddess, or Ba Thuy is associated with "Noi" or "an irresistible urge to plunge one's face into water." "It is not surprising that many legendary culture heros and fallen kings killed themselves by drowning. The T'rung Sisters, or Rain maidens, drown themselves in the Hat-Giang River after their defeat. Lady Trieu rode her elephant into the sea. The Thuch family overthrew the last king of the old dynasty who threw himself into a well, and Thuc Phan himself, subsequently defeated by the Chinese, 'walked into the ocean' while his son also jumped into a well. The last of the Tran rulers, Buy Khoach, jumped into the sea from a boat that took him to China etc." (Buttinger, 1959:p.113) Many Vietnamese culture heros and heroines alike returned to the watery realm in apotheosis, from which their mandate originally derived.

The "Man-Dragon-Mountain-Water" thematic motif provides evidence of "symbol chains" that are found on the early Dong S'ong bronze drums. Apparently these drums were power and status symbols of aboriginal chiefs among the Yueh tribes throughout Southern China--their distribution covered an area embracing many of the sub-cultures of the region, and their symbolic function was closely associated with government, rain-making, fertility rituals, decision-making, justice and war. Frog motifs and a "water-chain" are associated with water animals, the dragon, frogs and fish, and bronze boats. Another motif is that of the ship of the dead, associated with drowning, drowning sacrifices and female shamans.

Finally, it is worthwhile to consider the extent to which nature symbolisms are found in the poetry and the Vietnamese language. Early erotic poetry contain a great many references to nature. The character of the Vietnamese is closely connected to an almost romantic love of nature. The Vietnamese language lends itself, in its tonality and homophonous resonances, to double punning and word play, as well as to a musical quality of speech which can frequently, when the mood is right, erupt into melodious singing.

Bateson described the Balinese as being in a "steady state" in which equilibrium and the balance of the middle ground is valued over extremes. It is said that the Balinese desire a continuing "plateau" of intensity in interactions than the attainment of climactic junctures. This lack of climax is notable in its music, in its art, in trance, in quarrels. Competition and direct conflict are thus avoided, and, under these circumstances, hierarchy is rigid.

Bateson notes several points regarding Balinese ethos: they are a culture of plenty; they are penny-wise but pound -foolish; they are very dependent upon spatial orientation; they value activity for itself, aesthetically, than as goal-oriented or purposive; there is evident enjoyment of doing things in large crowds; many Balinese actions are accounted for sociologically rather than psychologically in terms of individual goals or values; culturally correct actions are acceptable and aesthetically valued, permissible actions are regarded with neutrality, and inappropriate actions are deprecated; postural balance and coordination are highly valued for their correctness of form, such that there is fear of loss of support, there is preoccupation with elevation as a means of asymmetrical support, there is a preoccupation with problems of balance.

In comparing Balinese culture with Von Neumann games, he considers it the primary problem of the Balinese to maintain a complex steady state of the cumulative factors of the system. "In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance." (ibid.: pg. 125)

Bateson searches for the self-correcting mechanism which underlies this "nonschismogenic system" and finds it in the balance of opposite poles of turbulence and serenity as is evident in the style of Balinese artwork-- "....The unity and integration of this picture assert that neither of these contrasting poles can be chosen to the exclusion of the other, because the poles are mutually dependent. This profound and general truth is simultaneously asserted for the fields of sex, social organization and death."(ibid.: pg. 152)

Clifford Geertz has writing about the cultural preoccupation and pervasiveness of cockfighting in Bali, and refers to the "migration of the Balinese status hierarchy; into the body of the cockfight." (Clifford Geertz "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" in The Interpretation of Cultures : pg. 436) He refers to cockfight as the symbolic reenactment of the "status bloodbath" of the participants social matrix. It is fundamentally "a dramatization of status concerns." (ibid.: pg. 437)

"Along with everything else that the Balinese see in fighting cocks--themselves, their social order, abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power--they also see the archetype of status virtue, the arrogant, resolute, honor-mad player with real fire, the ksatria prince."(ibid.: pg. 442)

The cockfights help to render everyday experience more comprehensible in its presentation in forms that are not "really real" but in which forms the basic themes of such experience have been raised to a level where they can be more powerfully articulated. It is a construction, a medium of expression of these basic themes. The aggression of the fight is a reversal of the normal experience of the reticent Balinese--while it shares as a focused microcosm a characteristic of ordinary Balinese life, the "lack of temporal directionality"."...Their life, as they arrange and perceive it, is less a flow, a directional movement out of the past, through the present, toward the future than an on-off pulsation of meaning and vacuity...(ibid.: pg. 446).

For Geertz, the Balinese cockfight does not reinforce the status quo of the Balinese system, so much as it is a cultural text, a meta-social dialogue in which fighting cocks are connected to status--and it effects a transfer of emotions, perception and value from the former onto the latter. Culture is an ensemble of such texts.

In another important text by Geertz which describes Balinese worldview, he lays out a theory of culture and its integration as "significant symbols, clusters of significant symbols, and clusters of clusters of significant symbols-- the material vehicles of perception, emotion, and understanding--and the statement of the underlying regularities of human experience implicit in their formation." He refers to this symbol system as "more variable, less tightly coherent, but nonetheless ordered 'octopoid' systems of them, confluences of partial integrations, partial incongruencies and partial independencies." (ibid.: pg. 66)

He sees Balinese culture as rooted in a tightly integrated system of person perception and identity, conduct and propriety, and conceptions of time. He refers to the ceremonial formalization of interpersonal relations--the contemporizing of relations and identities in shared time but not shared space, to the "stage fright" that accompanies shame, and to the "absence of climax" found in social life and action, as the three main characteristics of Balinese culture. "What binds Balinese symbolic structures for defining persons (names, kin terms, teknonyms, titles, etc.) to their symbolic structures for characterizing time (permutational calendars, etc.), and both of these to their symbolic structures for ordering interpersonal behavior (art, ritual, politesse, etc.), is the interaction of the effects each of these structures has upon the perceptions of those who use them, the way in which their experiential impacts play into and reinforce one another." (Clifford Geertz Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis, Cultural Report Series No. 14: Southeast Asian Studies, Yale Univesity, 1966: pg. 65-66.)

Other analysis of Balinese culture and character have yield similar interesting aspects which point to the symbolic spatialization of the culture--the geographical orientation of the Balinese about the central mountain Gunung Agung  and the sense of confusion that results from disorientation in relation to the mountain. The Balinese, for instance, are a rather extreme example of a people whose orientation is spatial. (Errington, Shelly Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1989: p. 65.)

The phenomenological aspects of Balinese experience, especially in ceremonialism, the trancing, and the religious symbolism. These describe a cultural orientation that is well adapted and integrated to its island homeland.

J. Stephen Lansing describes the Water Temple system of Bali that had been used traditionally to regulate the irrigation system of the island according to the agricultural calendar. This system had eluded Dutch interest, who had established their own separate system of regulation, and its elucidation has figured importantly in the debate between Geertz's argument for the peasant regulation of the irrigation, or for the Wittfogelian hydraulic theory of a despotic centralization.

The temple system is enmeshed in a wider temple system, and, like these is hierarchically stratified such that the chief Temple of the Crater Lake devoted to the water goddess that spiritually regulates with holy water the water that flows through the irrigation network. "The entire mandala of the lake forms the center of a much larger mandala, consisting of the island of Bali and the seas that surround it."

"The 'flow' of holy water from temple to temple establishes hierarchical relations between temples. Thus water temples define the institutional structure--the hierarchy of productive units--that manages the rice terraces as a productive system." (ibid.: pg. 128)

Lansing emphasizes the "sociogenic" aspects of the water temple rituals which "provide a deep reading of what the institution is about--it's specific relationship to a social microcosm....In the absence of a "hydraulic bureaucracy" to manage irrigation, in the temple system itself must contain a kind of "hydraulic solidarity," by persuasively articulating the common interest in watershed management. The symbolisms of temple rituals is driven by a powerful logic..." (J. Stephen Lansing Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991: p. 52.) In this regard, he considers Marxian theory, retaining its relationships between nature, society and history while transposing its levels of analysis to the symbolic system and its constitutive role, of the humanizing of nature as the mapping onto the physical geography and cosmos of the social order, as civilization transforms the landscape it occupies with each succeeding generation and the new generation come to regard the transformed, manmade, reified landscape, as if the embodiment of society.

The images of society that the Balinese see in their terraced landscape do not reflect the progressive linear order that Marx and Hegel understood as "history." Instead, for the Balinese nonlinear patterns of temporal order emerge from the regular progression of natural cycles, the seasons of growth and change. When Balinese society sees itself reflected in a humanized nature, a natural world transformed by the efforts of previous generations, it sees a pattern of interlocking cycles that mimic these cycles of nature. Whereas Marx looked at nature and saw evolutionary progress, a Balinese farmer may look at nature and see the intricate patterns of the tika calendar or hear the interlocking cyclical melodies of a gamelan orchestra. (p. 133).

It is evident from these illustrations of Balinese culture and character that in many aspects it can be considered prototypical of the degree of symbolic-ecological integration and adaptation of Southeast Asian civilization to its local and regional environments. Symbol systems have a direct part played in the constructive articulation of the social forces of history, in the dynamics that have brought about historical and social change. Such systems can be both conservative and adaptive at the same time.

It is worthwhile to consider in this regard a more basic cultural substratum that is widely held to be characteristic of Southeast Asian civilization. This is the common and pervasive spiritual animism and animistic ethos that underlies even Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. It can be called the Dionysian id of the Southeast Asian, over which is laid the Apollonian superego of one or another of the Great Religions traditions. Because animistic beliefs are held to represent the projection of impure beliefs, while beliefs of the later religions are associated with pure ideals, the later are much more powerful in commanding social veneration, such that the dialectic between the Great Tradition and local spirit cult is always asymmetrical, with the local animistic beliefs always yielding ground before the Grand traditions.

There are several basic traits that can be expected with this animistic complex: 1. The belief in a supernatural spirit world which interpenetrates the natural order such that a pantheon spirit beings, ghosts, local deities and spirit-familiars may inhabit local sites; 2. The use of a shaman who may go into trance or spirit possession; 3. The use of magic amulets, potions, poisons to affect human beings in certain ways; 4. A belief in the supernatural power which suffuses the natural world and which may come to reside differentially in powerful human beings; 5. The use of ritual ceremonies in affecting cures, purification, fortune telling.

It can be argued that this kind of animistic complex is to be found wherever a traditional non-hierarchical style of society is found. This is true, but the particular combination and style of this complex is uniquely Southeast Asian. Take for example the widespread practice of the ritual bath in Southeast Asian animism. Water is held to be the boundary weakener that allows passage between states of being.

"Power exists, independent of its possible users...In Javanese traditional thinking there is no sharp division between organic and inorganic matter, for everything is sustained by the same invisible power. This conception of the entire cosmos being suffused by a formless, constantly creative energy provides the basic link between the 'animism' of the Javanese villages and the high metaphysical pantheism of the urban centers." (Benedict Anderson "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture." In Culture and Politics in Indonesia edited by Clare Holt Benedict Anderson, and James Siegel 1972: pgs. 1-69; p. 7)

It is the manner in which this animistic complex has intermeshed itself into the mythos, ethos and pathos of Southeast Asian civilization, and how it has come into a dialectical tension with the organized religions in the areas with which it is associated. Even modern secularism has not gone unaltered by its contact with this spirit animism. The key quality of this complex seems to be in its encompassing and syncretic character, in its capacity to absorb new symbolisms and to coexist with contradiction, and to adapt itself to a wide range of situations and alternative interpretation.

Melford Spiro, in his ethnographic analysis of Burmese supernaturalism, emphasizes the expressive, affective, instrumental and mechanical aspects of animistic beliefs, which he contrasts with the repressive and meditative aspects of Buddhism. The two systems are complementary--"Using Buddhist means, they pursue nat like, non-Buddhist ends; cathecting Buddhist goals, they attempt to achieve them by nat like, non-Buddhist means. In short, between the polar extremes of animism and Buddhism, we see a continuum of beliefs and practices which show attributes of both systems." (Melford Spiro Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of Suffering, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Printice-Hall, Inc. 1967: pg. 270-1.)

When viewed as ideal types, Spiro contrasted Buddhism and animism in terms of the moral, ascetic, rational, serene personality and otherworldly social orientation of the former, against the amoral, libertarian, non-rational, turbulent personality and worldly social orientation of the later. (p. 258) Whereas Buddhists seek wisdom and enlightenment, animists seek the possession of power. This basic conflict is the source of an inner ambivalence of Burmese towards animism.

The animism which is common to Southeast Asia may be accountable for the remarkable religious and symbolic syncretism which has characterized many religious revitalization movements in Southeast Asia. Cao Daoism and the Hoa Hao movement in Vietnam were well known examples of such syncretism

Hue-Tam Ho Tai's study of the "Buu Son Ky Huong" (Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain) sect which flourished in South Vietnam since its precolonial founding on the very frontiers of Vietnam along its border with Cambodia, is a fitting example of such syncretism combining animism with elements from several religions, that was almost unknown outside of South Vietnam. The prophet named Doan Minh Huyen, or "Buddha Master of Western Peace," began his movement during a great cholera epidemic in 1849 which claimed half a million lives. He practiced shamanistic curing in which he was said to be particularly effective against madness, and legend holds that he soon attracted a large number of pilgrims seeking cure, such that his credibility as a Buddha master grew. He preached salvation and apocalpyse, and provided a powerful spiritual motivation for the early pioneers. This religious tradition, characteristic of South Vietnam, was rooted in the Sino-Vietnamese folk religion.

The contrast between the temple priest in the articulation and mediation of the authority of the state and the interest of the populace, and the shamanistic prophet in being the divine voice, or the direct incarnation of the divine, and the healer and revitalizer of the populace, is a basic, recurrent theme throughout the world

According to the study by Susan Ackerman and Raymond Lee of religious movements in modern Malaysia, animism was the only truly indigenous religion of Southeast Asia. (Susan E. Ackerman and Raymond L. M. Lee Heaven in Transition: Non-Muslim Religious Innovation and Ethnic Identity in Malaysia. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1988) Subsequent introduction of different religions created a competition among a number of alternatives. Secularization meant a detachment of political involvement in religion, a greater degree of choice in the selection of religion, and an individual atomization of religion as a personal affair. Such secularization, particularly prominent in urban areas, has brought with it greater experimentation. The presence of a number of alternative religions sets up a relational field between them which define, at various levels of mutual compatibility and incompatibility, define the ways and degrees to which such religions can coexist or become integrated.

Symbols and the systems they construct, have played an important part in Southeast Asian Civilization and its scholarship. Symbols mediate the boundaries of identity between person, place, experience, the social world, and the supernatural cosmos. In Southeast Asia, such symbolizations are commonly "spatial" in organization, and time is conceived as circular. Power which symbols contain, which pass through symbols, becomes centered in local places, and levels of power are concentric rings from the center. Such centers exist in the thoughts, in the being and body of the individual, in the home, in the public realm, in the state and the nation, and in the world and universe.

In regard to this Southeast Asian spatialization of symbols, several points can be made:

1. Symbols come to express and contain a spiritual energy invests the universe and can come to reside in certain places, persons or things which are centers of power.

2. Symbols as spatial metaphors of place mediate the boundary between the body and person hood and the state and social body, such that the state becomes embodied in the person, and state becomes the embodiment of the person.

3. Symbols as spatial metaphors of centers mediate the boundary between the state and the cosmos, such that the humanized natural world becomes the mapping of the supernatural world and the supernatural world becomes the projection of the state.

4. Symbols also spatially mediate the boundary between the individual, his/her body and person hood, and the cosmos, such that they orient and locate the individual spiritually in the cosmos and spiritually map the cosmos in the individual.

5. Symbols form multiple overlapping "network hierarchies" of relations that serve to locate power differentially in people, places, social relations and the cosmos.

6. Symbols serve an anti-structural mediating function which allows for the manipulation of power relationships which are otherwise uncontrollable and can be expected to be emphasized or exaggerated when power relationships are inherently, structurally ambiguous.

7. Symbols come to coalesce into chains and complexes, which define topographically uneven regions of a shared, social "symbol scape" that form the multiple network-hierarchies. In these complexes we can recognize core and dominant symbols, distinguished from peripheral and antithetical symbols. We can distinguish as well between "basic" symbols and "elaborated" symbols.

Magic and Animistic religious beliefs were originally held by Western observers to be chaotic. Subsequently scholars have taken notice of an underlying order of such symbol systems, the parallelism between "micro-cosmos" and "macro-cosmos."

"...According to this belief humanity is constantly under the influence of forces emanating from the directions of the compass and from stars and planets... Harmony between the empire and the universe is achieved by organizing the former as an image of the latter, as a universe on a smaller scale." (Robert Heine-Geldern; Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca, New York 1958: p. 1)

This parallelism between the state and the cosmos, occurs also between the macrocosm of the universe and microcosm of the person, as well as between the macro-cosmos of the state and the microcosm of the person. Symbolism mediates the relationships between spirit and matter, and their ritual manipulation as "receptacles of spirit" is a means of manipulating and regulating these boundaries. The manipulation and management of symbols through religious ritual and magic, is a form of power, or a "playing with power" that is supernatural.

Clive Kesseler notes a similar parallelism between "the body personal and the body politic" that is evident in the ritual performances of the Malay bomoh--"....the body is a realm, at once unitary and multiplex. Its various components are ideally coordinated and integrated, subordinated to a governing center, the palace of personality, the head. Since this conception of the body as a realm is not merely abstract and static, it permits illness or disorder within the person to be presented in political terms." (Clive Kesseler "Conflict and Sovereignty in Kelantanese Malay Spirit Seances" in Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian: pg 319)

According to Kesseler, this parallelism is not simply a dualism, but a parallelism between the body, the state and the cosmos, and in this matter the state is the political embodiment and mediator of the power--"Hence, mediating between person and cosmos, the state, in its concretized conceptual form as the balai, provides the appropriately potent instrument or receptacle...for ritually manipulating and transferring powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, spiritual essences." (p. 321)

And if the social body constrains how we define the human body, as Mary Douglas would have it, it might also happen that the human body may become the metaphor for the state. The political idioms shared by a variety of symbolic complexes becomes the fundamental organizing idea or design of a culture.

To what extent do symbolic complexes, as partially integrated networks in the patterning of culture, overlap or are congruent with the ecological patterns of adaptation, as well as the historical patterns of borrowing and alteration. For instance, if we compare two cultures known to be historically related, that nonetheless diverged in different environments, would we be able on the basis of their comparison to select those aspects of symbolic complexes that remain basically unchanged. Alternatively, if we compare cultures that are known not to be related but which seem to share similar kinds of environments, or cultures which are distantly related and which share similar kinds of environments, though they presumably have never been in contact.

As J. S. van Leur quotes in full the working method of Werner Sombart in culture history as it applies to economic history (J. C. van Leur Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History, The Hague, Bandung: W. van Hoeve, Ltd. 1955: pp. 42-3.), there is no reason that such a method could not be applied as well to other topical aspects of cultural symbolism. There are different analytical levels of complexes of meaning--the more primary the complex in which concrete individual phenomena are given a place, the more available it is to our senses and our understandings and the less equivocal in interpretation. But the more the complexity of meaning is removed in terms of its inferable connotations, the more it will depend upon its appropriate placement within a systemic framework, such that lower order complexes become subsumed within higher order complexes.

Symbols also have an ecology about them, about their use and their meaning, one that was well described, if in somewhat overly functionalistic terms, by Roy Rappaport. ( Pigs For the Ancestors, Yale University Press, 1968)

The connection between symbols and the human world does not need to depend upon a functionalist, materialist or ecologist account. Symbols are "direct metaphors" of experience which allow both apperceptive disembodiment of the experience through the symbols incorporation and representation of that experience. It is therefore no great surprise that symbols should be widely employed by human beings to for the expression of relationships and significances which are either not directly available to experience, or for one reason for another, must be repressed from experience. Among all other things, symbols can stand for other symbols as well as for themselves--because they may mean so many different things, they may mean no one thing at all.

Georges Condominas has built upon the notion of the symbolic significance of production, or work, in social life, and the use of symbol systems in the regulation and expressive reiteration of the value of such production. (George Condominas We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. New York: Hill and Wang, Inc., 1977) thus agricultural ritual becomes an integral component of the technology of farming, which in turn becomes an intrinsically "social" as well as technical productive process, "..it is a meaningful series of interactions between social groups and the natural world. The field rituals that accompany each stage of agricultural labor form a kind of commentary on the productive process. Moreover, the rituals of work in the fields may be 'performative,' in that they call forth particular social groups to engage in activities such as planting and harvesting." J. Stephen Lansing Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) p. 6.

A common theme shared by symbolism in Southeast Asian civilization is the belief that all beings are hierarchically ranked according to relative proximity to the sacred. The higher one's rank, the more sacred power one possessed in one's being and one's place. Status was legitimized by one's sacred power and rank. Because of this rank, higher status people were regarded as more efficacious channels in tapping spiritual and supernatural powers, which could be distributed to the followers. This belief therefore defined leadership and the expectations that surrounded it in traditional Southeast Asia.

Linked to this belief is a "circular conception of space in which potently charged centers were thought to radiate power outward and downward toward less-charged peripheries. Not surprisingly, higher-status people were found in centers--were, in fact, conceived to be centers--and were surrounded by people declining in proximity to power and hence in status as one moved outward." (Lorraine Gesick, editor. Centers, Symbols and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia Monograph Series No. 26: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983 pp. 1-2).

This preoccupation with a certain style of leadership that animated Southeast Asian politics, statecraft and hierarchy, can be thought of as the distinctive pattern of stylization and genius of traditional Southeast Asian civilization.

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction