Plate 5. Barong, Balinese mythical beast. Photo by J. Becker.

Plate 6. Balinese bebuten trancers. Photo by J. Becker.

Plate 7. Balinese gamelan ensemble. Photo by J. Becker.
Plate 8. A Bissu priest, Puang La Sékké, from Sulawesi. From Hamonic 1987:
frontspiece. Courtesy of the Centre N ational de la Recherche Scientifique, París.
deities, spirits, and demons. If sorne misfortune befalls a village, such as crop
failure, pestilence, or frequent cases of mental illness, or the ritual calendar pre-
scribes it, the village will stage an encounter opposing the great witch Rangda
and her followers against the mythic beast Barong and his followers. Before the
ceremony begins, all the participants are put into trance at the temple to the
accompaniment of long lines of classical poetry sung slowly, in unison, by a
chorus of women from the village. Rangda is fearsome to look at with her bulg-
ing eyes, long, flamed tongue, her mas s of unruly flowing white hair, her pen-
dulous, low-hanging breasts, and her skull necklace. Rangda is a death goddess,
demonstrated by her Hindu names Durga and Kali. Although her form is mon-
strous she is not a monster; she is at once revered yet feared. If treated well, she
becomes a protective goddess, and is sometimes even described as "beautiful"
(Aryati, Ni Wayan, interview 1996). (See Plate 4.)
The elaborate mask of the witch Rangda will be brought from its storage
place in the temple, blessed, and infused with spirit in a potent ceremony con-
ducted by a priest. An exceptionally tall and spiritually strong man will be cho-
sen to undergo the trance of becoming the witch. The sacred cloth that she car-
ries draped over her arm like a waiter's napkin is an anteng, the sling in which
Balinese mothers carry their babies. When attacked in the ritual by entranced
men, she needs only to hold out the anteng to freeze the approaching attackers.
The cast of performers in this ritual may indude up to twenty other minor
demons, followers of the magical beast Barong, who may dance, cavort, or mis-
behave in amusing or threatening ways. A number of men, also for the moment
followers oí Barong, will volunteer to undergo a special kind of trance called
bebuten, from the root buta, which means a creature of base instincts, low on
the ladder of sentient beings, often translated as "demon," These men will con-
front thewitch and with the help of the Barong ultimately neutralize her power.
(See Plate 5.)
Bebuten trance is not ecstasy. It is a feeling of rage directed toward the witch
Rangda, and may leave the trancer feeling embarrassed later by his behavior
during the trance and with an exhaustion that may last for several days (Eise-
man 1989: 153). Yet,the trancing is a social obligation that he fulfills voluntarily,
surrendering his own comfort for the betterment of his community. He expe-
riences a kind of homicidal rage (or, rather, "theo-cidal" rage).
As for me, it is as if there were someone ordering me to stab. When it's like that,
if 1 don't get hold of a kris [dagger], 1 should die, so strong is my anger. (Belo
1960: 128)

At the denouement of the drama, which may take several hours, the witch
Rangda puts a curse on the human followers of Barong, whereupon they turn
their daggers against themselves, pressing the blades against their sternum, or
upper arm, or sometimes on their cheek, or just aboye the eyeball. (See Plate 6.)
Seldom do the trancers cut themselves.' Gregory Bateson theorized that the
daggers were held in a tense state of perfect equilibrium between exerting
enough pressure toward the body to puncture the skin and exerting enough

Habitus of Listening 83
pressure away from the body to remove the blade from the skin." Gradually, as
the force of their anger subsides, they faHto the ground in the dassic "crisis" of
trance (Rouget 1985: 38). They are then disarmed and removed to the inner
courtyard of the temple where they are slowly brought out of trance. Through-
out the public, theatrical part of the ceremony, the gamelan ensemble plays con-
tinuously, (See Plate 7.)
Different melodic motifs are associated with the numerous characters of the
drama. At the point in the drama when the struggle between Rangda and the
entranced human followers begins, the gamelan plays a short, loud, and furious
ostinato pattern. The rnusic does not cause the trance nor the self-stabbing.
Members of the audience also hear the music but seldom go into trance. Some-
times a designated trancer will withdraw if his trance is shaHow. And some-
times, contrary to expectations, an audience member may be overcome with
rage and frustration and join the cirde of trancers, be given a dagger by one of
the attendants, and begin leaping about while stabbing himself.
The violent encounter between Rangda and Barong always ends in a standoff
but somehow serves to restore cosmic balance. All the characters in this sacred
drama are taken to the inner courtyard of the temple to be slowly brought
back to everyday consciousness. (See Figure 3-2.) The young men come out of
the trance feeling exhausted but relaxed, with faint memories of their spirit en-
counter.
In the BaronglRangda ritual, the continuously playing gamelan creates the
aura of a differing reality, a sound-mediated reality that renders plausible the
appearance of deities and demons in the realm of humans. As one after another
of the multitude of characters in the drama appear, the gamelan plays leitmotifs
for each, both signaling their presence and making real their transition from
the "other" world. The presence of these beings is in itself emotion-producing.
One is not likely to be indifferent to the denizens of the "other" world who so
strongly affect one's everyday life. Without their signature tunes, without the
aural envelop of the myth -making music, their presence would not be nearly so
affective. Music sets the stage, introduces the characters, fills the aural environ-
ment, and embraces all in its imaginary world.
Neither the trance, nor the ceremony, nor the pacification of the witch can
happen without the gamelan music. The habitus of listening of the bebuten
trancer on encountering Rangda would have to indude not only the gamelan
music and the presence of the witch but also a complex of beliefs about the
negative forces of the cosmos, their effects on human communities, the em-
bodiment of these forces in the divine witch Rangda, and the methods by which
she may be contained and controlled. His own emotion, culturally constituted
but felt interiorly, is a necessary component of the maintenance of community
well-being. His murderous passion has little to do with an interiorized self, with
his personal identity. His rage, in part musically induced, is in the service of his
community. Like the Wolof griots, musical emotion for the trancer in a Balinese
Rangda exorcism is public, situational, predictable, and culturally sanctioned.
The habitus oflisteningof a victim of the tarantula's bite, a Yak Tovilpatient,

84 Deep Ltsteners
Figure 3-2. Rangda and bebuten trancers in the inner temple court after the
Barong/Rangda ceremony. From deZoete and Spies 1938: 95. Courtesy of Faber and
Faber, Limited.

the .Wolof griot, an lndian sitar player, the Sufi listener, the Balinese bebuten
trancer, and the Western concertgoer involve a scripted sequence of actions,
[Link] interpretations. Within each of these scripts, musical, behavioral,
and emotional events will occur within a certain predictable frame. Simultane-
ously, each individual event will be unique and nonrepeatable, AH have devel-
oped habits of mind and body in response to specific musical events. These hab-
its are acquired throughout our life experiences of interaction with others in
similar situations, The emotions are private and public, interior and exterior,
individual and communal, Our habitus of listening as embodiment involves

Habitus of Listening 85
both embodiment as (2) personal, inner experience and as (3) involvement with
the world, interaction with the world.
No habitus of listening is entirely stable nor entirely fluid. As interactions
change, so do the interiors of those who are interacting. We may have developed
a habitus oflisteningthat inclines us to introspectively contemplate the colorful
fluidity of changing emotional states in response to Bach's Musical Offering, hut
if it would not disturb the viahility of our own structures, we could learn to
dance ecstatically in The Spirit with the Pentecostals.

86 Deep Listeners
4 Trancing Selves

Inextricably linked with a habitus of listening is the particular configuration of

the self who is doing the listening. Who are we when we listen to music or when
we trance?
A transformed "self" is both a hallmark of trance and a phenomenon fre-
quently associated with musical performance. Speculations concerning the on-
tological status of selves in or out of trance necessarily become important as-
pects of the study of music/trance relationships. With the rise of the theories
of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and the development of the field of so-
cial psychology, concomitantly carne an increase in the theories of "self" (Mead
1962; Lacan 1968; Taylor 1989).
Drawing on materials from evangelicals in colonial Virginia, contemporary
Pentecostals, and transvestite priests in Sulawesi, Indonesia, in this chapter 1will
explore the idea that only certain kinds of selves, only certain constructions of
selfhood are possible for one to participate in spirit possession. 1 suspect that
certain other constructions of selfhood not only obstruct the possibility of
spirit possession but also lead one to look clown upon, even despise, the practice
itself. 1suspect that these different selves may affect one's openness to the emo-
tional response elicited by the musical stimulation that accompanies spirit pos-
session. Extreme emotions are the correlatives of spirit possession-emotions
often attributed to the accompanying music. Like the obligatory roles of the
spirit possession narrative, aroused emotions also must be acceptable compo-
nents of one's sense of self.
The term "subjectivity" is often used among linguists and anthropologists to
designate the area of study concerning one's sense of self, or personhood. To
speak of subjectivity or one's -senseof self, and to assume as 1do that our sense
of selfhood is culturally constrained, is, for one who has never thought of it, a
profoundly anti-intuitive actoOur inner selves are felt to be so completely natu-
ral, so unique, so independent of the sodety around us that we may feel af-
fronted by any suggestion that what we feel to be our sense of inner being is not
our unique creation, and that selves can vary predictably across cultural bound-
anes.

The "subjectivity" we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit
himself as "subject," It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences
of being himself (this feeling, to the degree that it can be taken note of is only
a reflection) but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual

1. This chapter is essentially the same as printed in Becker 2000.

 experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness.
(Benveniste 1971: 224)

Benveniste has argued that the sense of person, the sense of self, is a product
of languaging, as have many others, including Buddhist philosophers. Although
the sense of personhood seems inextricably tied to the development of lan-
guage, one's sense of bodily boundaries, our sense of what (somatically) belongs
to us and where our bodies end, seems to escape the linguistic formation of
person and takes shape in areas of the brain not directly involved with languag-
ing (Melzack 1992; Damasio 1999: 108). Starting in the 1970s, an influential
group of anthropologists began to compile a series of articles and monographs
that described senses of personhood around the globe that sometimes seemed
far removed from Western understandings (Geertz 1973b; Myers 1979; Rosaldo
1980/1984; Errington 1983/1989; Shweder and Bourne 1984; Lutz 1988; Abu-
Lughod 1986; A. L. Becker 1999). Notions of personhood do not reside in the
mind as abstract entities, as disembodied, contextless images. They are imag-
ined as situated within certain cultural narratives. We project ourselves imagi-
natively within a situation, acting in a particular way, responding verbally and
gesturally to specific events and particular people. These imaginary narratives
are, in broad outline, already present in the society into which we are born. Our
subjectivities, our subject positions, our sense of personhood necessarily devel-
ops within cultural narratives that are preexistent.
The listening subject of a spirit possession ceremony, the self who may be-
come entranced, enters into a special kind of narrative, not of his or her inven-
tion. The roles in these dramas are more specified, more particularly detailed,
than the roles of either quotidian existence, or of the dramas into which we
enter while listening to music as an activity in itself. The potential entrancee
must be prepared to "receive the Holy Spirit," or to be willing to assume the role
of a lower being in order to curb the power of a great witch (bebuten trance in
Bali, Indonesia), or to become host to the "numinous energy of foreign peoples
and wild animals" (a patient in a Tumbuka healing ceremony in Malawi), or to
accept becoming a vehicle through which the spirits of the sky realm commu-
nicate with mankind (bissu priests in Sulawesi, Indonesia). Encounters with
holy beings are, it seems, never easy, especially if one is expected to surrender
(temporarily) a part of one's self as well. To participate in a ceremony of spirit
possession is to enter into a narrative not constructed by oneself but a commu-
nity narrative that gives moral purpose to the event. The narrative is both par-
ticular, (what happens for the duration of the ceremony, what might be called
the "script") as well as broadly cosmological (the ultimate truths about human-
kind and the holy that are being enacted). Entering a spirit possession narrative
means situating oneself as a certain kind of person-many ritual narratives may
be precluded for us because we cannot imagine ourselves participating in that
particular story. The story, the role, the emotional affect, and the moral purpose
must be compatible with who we think we are.
Among my humanistic, academic peers, a discussion of the relationship be-

88 Deep Listeners