Temiar Religion, 1964-2012: Enchantment, Disenchantment and Re-enchantment in Malaysia's Uplands - Softcover

Benjamin, Geoffrey

9789971697068: Temiar Religion, 1964-2012: Enchantment, Disenchantment and Re-enchantment in Malaysia's Uplands

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9971697068 ISBN 13: 9789971697068

Publisher: National University of Singapore Press, 2014

The Temiars, a Mon-Khmer-speaking Orang Asli society living in the uplands of northern Peninsular Malaysia, have long attracted popular attention in the West for reports that ascribed to them the special psychotherapeutic known as 'Senoi Dreamwork'. However, the reality of Temiar religion and society, as studied and recorded by Geoffrey Benjamin over 50 years, is even more fascinating than that popular portrayal - which is shown to be based on a serious misrepresentation of Temiar practice.

When Benjamin first lived in the isolated villages of the Temiars between 1964 and 1965, he encountered a people who lived by swidden farming supplemented by hunting and fishing. They practised their own unexportable, localised animistic religion in an area where the main religion of civilisation was formerly Mahayana Buddhism and is now Islam. Fifty years later, the Temiars have become much more embedded in broader Malaysian society, while retaining their distinctive way of life, including continuing involvement with their complex shamanic religion.

Benjamin's ongoing fieldwork in the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s followed the Temiars through processes of religious dis-enchantment and re-enchantment, as they reacted in various ways to the advent of Baha'i, Islam and Christianity. Some Temiars even developed a new religion of their own. In addition to its rich ethnographic reportage, the book proposes a novel theory of religion and develops a deeply insightful account of the changing intellectual framework of anthropology over the past half-century.

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From the Inside Flap:

Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Foreword (by James C. Scott)
Preface
Orthography and Pronunciation
Chapter 1. The Historical and Intellectual Background
Chapter 2. The Temiars and their Religion
Chapter 3. Temiar Religion (1967)--Preface and Introduction
Chapter 4. Temiar Religion (1967)--The Cosmos
Chapter 5. Temiar Religion (1967)--Species
Chapter 6. Temiar Religion (1967)--Souls
Chapter 7. Temiar Religion (1967)--Spirit-mediumship
Chapter 8. Temiar Religion (1967)--Theology
Chapter 9. Field-report Correspondence with Edmund Leach
Chapter 10. Temiar Mediumship in Context
Chapter 11. Indigenous Religious Systems of the Malay Peninsula
Chapter 12. Danger and Dialectic in Temiar Childhood
Chapter 13. Rationalisation and Re-enchantment: Temiar Religion, 1964-94
Chapter 14. Temiar Religions, 1994-2012: Islam, Christianity, ʔalʉj Səlamad
Afterword
Appendices 1-4
Bibliography
Index

From the Back Cover:

"If you would like to make sense of the Temiar world and, at the same time, wonder at an example of ethnographic analysis at its very best, you can do no better than to start here." From the Foreword by James C. Scott, author of The Art of Not Being Governed.

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