Dr. Nicholas Y. H. Wong (Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The University of Hong Kong)

Though inadequate, popular religion has been an outsourced space for democratic participation. In Malaysia, the street procession’s carnivalesque inversion of order allows ethnic groups to mingle and participate in each other’s rituals beyond the state’s Malay-Muslim ethnocracy. In this talk, I discuss Mahua (or Chinese-Malaysian) descriptions of spectatorship and spirit mediumship in religious processions, such as the Nine Emperor Gods Festival (Taoist) and Thaipusam (Hindu). What aspects are highlighted and to what ends? What ritual aspects evolved from the intertwined histories of Chinese and Indian migrant communities that worked at tin mines and rubber plantations? I argue that Mahua authors, in their secular literary texts, piously channel a pantheon of gods to propose their versions of dharma (law) and reciprocity in the context of modern democracy or, as Étienne Balibar calls it, the “constitution of citizenship.”