Transgender, Transgression, and Translation: A Cartography of Nat Kadaws: Notes on Gender and Sexuality within the Spirit Cult of Burma (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Nats of Myanmar: spirits, gods or devils?
Dieux, génies, anges et démons dans les cultures orientales, Acta Orientalia Belgica, Royal Belgian Society for Oriental Studies,., 2017
On the semantic field of "nat" in a sample of popular Buddhist literature in Myanmar language.
"Deities and Divas: Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond", Jackson/Baumann (eds.), NIAS Press, 2022
Within the complexes of Thai and Burmese religions, Theravada Buddhism, the culturally and politically dominant religion in both countries, is a domain of normative masculinity whose doctrines, rituals and institutional framework all support patriarchal gender cultures. In contrast, both historical and contemporary ethnographic evidence reveals that, while spirit mediumship is a subordinate religious form across the region, it is a domain of diverse modalities of non-normative gendering, both feminine and masculine. Indeed, contemporary commodified, urban and mediatised forms of spirit possession and mediumship are providing expanding spaces for queerly gendered ritual specialists compared to older forms of popular ritual. The complex amalgams of new forms of Southeast Asian spirit possession rituals represent a markedly contrasting cultural logic to the exclusionary doctrinalism of fundamentalist religio-nationalism. Spirit possession and mediumship cults constitute an increasingly queer-friendly dimension of the religious field across mainland Southeast Asia and we can speak of spirit cults as spaces of queer recognition, even privilege, with the social standing of queer people often being enhanced by their roles as ritual specialists. Furthermore, spirit cults open up new opportunities to make a living in socio-cultural contexts in which transgendered persons often have difficulties finding jobs.
Male cross-gender behavior in Myanmar (Burma): A description of the acault
Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1992
Cross-gender behavior in Myanmar (formerly Burma) is reported. Western concepts of transsexualism, gynemimesis, transvestism, and homosexuality are not distinct categories by the Burmese. Males with cross-gender behavior are referred to as acaults. Although Myanmar is a profoundly Buddhist society, the people still have strong animistic beliefs with an elaborate system of 37 nats (spirit gods). One of these nats is a female named Manguedon who may take possession of males and impart femininity on them. The cross-gender status of the acaults is sanctioned by their spiritual marriage to Manguedon. The acaults, while not envied, are respected for their roles as shamans and seers.
Folded Persons: Shamans, Witchcraft, and Wayward Souls in Laos
Taiwan Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2021
Religious phenomena in Laos contain numerous examples of decentered and relational concepts of personhood, manifest in shamanic trance, wandering witchcraft spirits and soul loss. Possession in particular represents a connection between non-Buddhist uplands and Buddhist lowlands. The Rmeet, Mon-Khmer-speaking uplanders, provide examples of folded personhood – persons whose various aspects sometimes represent a coherent whole and sometimes split off, forming separate person-like entities. Folded persons can be positively valued, like in shamans’ relationships with their helping spirits, or negatively, as in witchcraft spirits. Both forms are associated with other phenomena, like soul journeys and dangerous shapeshifters. These forms all relate to the manipulation of processes that recreate life, particularly marriage. This also links them to lowland Theravada Buddhist forms of witchcraft, that equally derive from an abusive form of a central exchange relationship.
This article on visions, possessions, and healing examines the Burmese cultural atmosphere in which stories, devotional literature, and religious magazines all recognize, endorse, and publicize the ways Buddhist weizzā (wizard-saints) interact with their female devotees to heal specific illnesses. Devotees possessed by a weizzā and carrying out his bidding can be seen as a creative yet culturally sanctioned response to restrictive gender roles, a means for expressing otherwise illicit thoughts or feelings, and an economic strategy for women who have few options beyond traditional wifely or daughter roles. They are able to renegotiate the often silent and passive roles assigned to them by the religious and medical cultures by setting the experience of sickness into a new narrative framework in which the weizzā are the source of all healing. Through the power of their wishes and within the flexible parameters of devotional practice, these women enact significant and positive changes in their lives and those around them.
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2020
This article examines the figure of the shaman in contemporary South Korean cinema. By taking a close look at Cho Jung-rae (Jo Jeong-rae)'s feature Spirits' Homecoming (Gwihyang, 2016) and Park Chan-kyong (Park Chan-gyeong)'s documentary Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (Mansin, 2013), the article argues that the figure of the shaman is deployed in such a way as to articulate South Korean postcolonial anxiety in two diverging ways. Whilst the former film draws on shamanism and nostalgizes the Korean past in relation to the issue of the 'comfort women' (military sex slaves) in contemporary South Korean politics, the latter eschews a coherent historical national narrative in favour of a more fragmented and interrogative account of not only South Korean shamanism but the country's troubled relationship with the Korean War and the postwar modernization project. The article argues that where Cho Jung-rae's film employs ethnocentrism as the primary lens for a nostalgic memory, Park Chan-kyong's documentary disarticulates the historical trajectory of nationalist invocations of a shamanist past, as it aligns the nativist tradition with the wider pro-democracy minjung movement.