6 - Sharing the Sacred: Hybridity and Transgressing Boundaries

Summary

This chapter presents a contrasting sociocultural context to the previous two chapters that mainly discussed Muslim pilgrimage sites in the traditionalist Muslim setting of Loloan (chapter 4) and in the strong reformist Muslim village of Candikuning (chapter 5). It discusses another pilgrimage site, i.e., the Hindu temple of Pura Keramat Ratu Mas Sakti (below called Pura Keramat), in the Hindu village of Seseh in south Bali and the practice of sharing a sacred place by Muslim and Hindu pilgrims. In this chapter I employ the concepts of hybridity and transgressing boundaries to explain the characteristics of Pura Keramat and its pilgrims. Using the concept of hybridity has considerable implications when examining Pura Keramat and its religious category. It serves as an antidote to essentialism and offers the possibility of avoiding the ‘politics of polarity’ between Islam and Hinduism. Homi Bhabha uses the concept of hybridity in his postcolonial criticism and argues that hybridisation is a way to counter authority and is the product and consequence of colonial suppression. For Bhabha, hybridity – and ‘third space’ – is a kind of ‘in-between space’ that “provide[s] the terrain for elaborating strategies of ‘self-hood’ – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovate sites of collaboration, and contestation.” In the linguistic domain, Bakhtin defines hybridisation as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.”

Of particular importance to the concept of hybridity is boundary transgression. The term ‘boundary’ is used here to describe the complexities of geographical space. It has a wider connotation than ‘border’ as the former connotes interaction and exchange, and is often ambiguous and serves as “mental space”. For Fredrik Barth, the concept of boundary embraces three levels of abstraction. First, boundaries divide territories on the ground. Secondly, more abstractly, boundaries set the limits that differentiate social groups. And finally, boundaries provide a template for that which separates distinct categories of the mind. Boundaries exist in two forms: symbolic and social. Social boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorise people, practices, and even time and space. Symbolic boundaries separate groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership.