Hanging without a Rope

Based on the author's years of fieldwork in rural Indonesia, this study focuses on the curing practices of Karo Batik spirit mediums, powerful individuals who keep their communities in touch with the spirit world.

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When Mary Steedly went to North Sumatra, Indonesia, she intended to study the curing practices of Karo Batak spirit mediums, the gurus who keep a community in touch with its ancestors. She became fascinated by the stories these women and men told of their encounters with spirits in the ritual arena and on the borders of the everyday social world. In these stories, Karo mediums conveyed their sense of historical out-of-placeness, which they described as "hanging without a rope," in Indonesia's state-proclaimed Age of Development. Based on the author's three years of fieldwork in urban and rural Karoland, this account focuses on issues of experience, memory, and narrative plausibility. Steedly approaches mediums' stories not simply as reservoirs of information about "what happened" at a particular moment, but as efforts to map a pathway across the shifting landscape of historical memory.