When the bird flies

This book will be of relevance to Orang Asli/Malay/Indonesian studies, shamanic studies, medical anthropology and performance studies.

How do shamans therapeutically heal? This monograph explores the processes and techniques of the Orang Sakai of the Upstream Mandau area of Riau (Sumatra). The focus is on some of the therapeutic techniques that shamans employ to reconstruct and affect individual and group identity in relation to indigenous concepts of consciousness and selfhood.

The therapeutic techniques this book focuses on are; the aesthetics of healing expressed through language -song, the semantics of tropes, quatrains, phonological icons and ribaldry - and kinaesthetics. Through the use of these aesthetic techniques, local healers creatively generate a series of imageries relating to the patient's illness. In a similar vein, healers also provide meanings for threatened group-identity. They meaningfully relate their healing techniques to the social-conditions that affect the local group.

In the Malay-kingdom's political-cultural reality, the Orang Sakai of Riau did not have a consciously ethnic frame of reference for their identity. Shamanic therapeutic-techniques help people create novel meanings within a universal-cosmic frame of orientation. Finally, the book explores the contradictory effects that modern concepts such as "ethnicity" and "culture" have on these healing practices.