HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Spirited Encounters

From Sumatra to The Citadel, Mary Steedly Explores Cultural Dynamics

By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff

Mary Steedly, professor of anthropology. In the background are a Timorese textile, a banned Indonesian magazine, Tempo, and a copy of her book, Hanging Without A Rope. Photo by Rose Lincoln.

It was a difficult question - "Do you believe in spirits?"

As an anthropologist, Mary Steedly was inclined to say that she neither believed nor disbelieved, that her position was to maintain a stance of skeptical neutrality. But she knew that this answer would not be very satisfactory to her interlocutors.

They were Christians who lived near her in Medan, the third largest city in Indonesia. They knew that she was studying the work of spirit mediums among the Karo people of northwestern Sumatra, folk practitioners who professed to cure disease or favorably influence a person's luck by entering into a trance state and taking on the personality of an entity from the spirit world.

Steedly assumed that her Christian neighbors were challenging her to declare her belief either in a traditional, animistic world view or in a Western, monotheistic one. Then it occurred to her that she had misunderstood the question.

"Eventually I realized that they weren't asking me whether I thought the spirits existed. They all believed in spirits. The real question was, do you trust the spirits, do you go to them for help?"

For Steedly, this temporary lapse in communication illustrates one of the values of anthropology as a discipline. Through sustained encounters with other cultures, researchers learn to understand difference, a skill that is becoming increasingly valuable in today's world.

At the same time, anthropological fieldwork teaches an awareness of the connections among cultures - the problems, needs, and aspirations they share. These differences and similarities often coexist, Steedly points out. For example, one common reason people in Medan visit spirit mediums is for help in getting their children into college.

Between Two Worlds

Steedly was promoted to a tenured position in the Anthropology Department this past July. She has been a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 1990 and, since 1995, has held the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professorship. Her colleagues are confident that she will continue to extend her reach as a creative and original ethnographer and interpreter.

"Mary Steedly's promotion to tenure has added a scholar of original talents to the social anthropology wing of the Department of Anthropology," said Stanley Tambiah, the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology. "The hallmark of her research and writings is rich ethnography and evocative, polyphonic interpretation, crafted in beautiful prose."

Steedly's 1993 book, Hanging Without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland, describes her investigations into the world of spirit mediums. The book's title comes from an Indonesian song that compares a lover's situation to the image of a seagull seemingly suspended in the sky without a rope.

In the song, the image conveys a sense of being stuck, without any way of extricating oneself. Steedly thought it applied equally well to the practitioners she had studied, shamans who maintain a precarious position between two worlds and two belief systems.

"These folk practitioners can't do things in the traditional manner anymore, and yet they can't not do them. They're in the modern world but not of it."

These urban shamans are largely older women, many of them widows, whose clientele consists largely but not exclusively of members of their own ethnic group. In addition to treating disease or increasing a student¹s chances of getting into college, they might also stave off a run of misfortune or help a woman get pregnant.

Being stuck between worlds gives the work of these spirit mediums a special poignancy, Steedly said. To illustrate the point, she held up the cover of her book, which bears a photo of a spirit medium dancing in a trance state, a woman Steedly studied extensively.

The arrogant expression on the woman's worn, high-cheekboned face together with her strutting posture give the woman an androgynous look, explained perhaps by the fact that she was possessed by a male spirit at the moment the photo was taken.

"She grabbed a broom and did this exquisite, extraordinary dance. It was a wonderful moment, and yet there was a sense of loss in the substitution of a broom for the beautifully carved staff that would have been used in the past."

Stories of the Past

The past plays a major part in Steedly's book, which she describes as "a history of Karo experience over the last hundred years as refracted through stories of encounters with spirits." Through these stories she not only explores spirit healing, but colonialism under Dutch rule, the impact of Christianity, the Japanese occupation during World War II, and political upheavals under Soekarno and Soeharto.

Steedly's focus on storytelling reflects her early training in folklore. (She earned a master's degree in folklore from the University of North Carolina in 1979 before going on to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1989.) She believes the study of folklore has a lot to offer anthropology in terms of understanding social transformation and the ways in which the past is reconfigured in the present.

Her forthcoming book, Rifle Reports, uses personal narrative to explore a tumultuous period of recent Indonesian history, the revolution against colonial rule from 1945 and 1950. Her Karo informants were eager to describe their experiences in this conflict, during which they had enthusiastically supported the nationalist effort. Dutch plantation owners dominated much of the region, and the fight for control was bitter.

"I thought it was a project that had the potential of giving something back to the community," Steedly says. "I was interested not so much in what actually happened, but in how the stories were put together. I particularly wanted to look at the women's stories because no one had written about them."

Steedly's next project is methodologically consistent with her earlier work, but is a complete departure geographically. She plans to do an ethnographic study of The Citadel military college in Charleston, S.C. Her father taught chemistry there, and she has early memories of growing up in what she now realizes was a very strange and distinctive culture.

"Anthropologists today are turning increasingly to the study of their own societies, and looking at key social institutions like the military. I want to look at the transformation of The Citadel's mission in the post-Cold War period as a result of military downsizing, gender integration, and the shift from an ethos of national defense to one of international peacekeeping. Besides, it's very interesting to look at The Citadel as a culture. There are age sets, rituals, symbolism - it's got everything!"