Unintelligibility and imaginative interpretation in a Petalangan healing ritual

Abstract

This article explores how ritual unintelligibility reconfigures participants' engagement, based on an analysis of two video clips of a belian performance, a shamanic healing ritual practiced among the Petalangan of Indonesia. These video clips show two phases of the ritual: the shaman's performance of a magic spell and a ritual song. The analysis reveals how a specific mode of unintelligibility in each scene of the ritual emerges through the mismatches among semantic, pragmatic, and metapragmatic levels of meaning. Furthermore, each scene's unintelligibility intersects with the locals' conventional genre expectations, the violation of which leads to a reconfiguration of the participants' structure. In the first scene, the spell's semantic unintelligibility does not exclude the audience from understanding its pragmatic meanings. The audience expects the spell to be an ‘act’, in which referential meanings are not important for understanding the intents and functions of the ritual act. However, in the second clip, the shaman's semantically transparent but pragmatically ambiguous ritual song engages the audience more in the ritual process. Since the audience expects the ritual song to be understandable ‘talk’ between a shaman and spirits, the violation of the genre expectation leads the audience to participate in the ritual in a creative way through their imaginations. Unlike many previous studies that have assumed ritual unintelligibility blocks nonspecialists' access to ritual meanings, this article demonstrates that the unintelligibility in this particular ritual may also encourage the audience's engagement by stimulating their imaginative interpretations of the meanings.