Reclaiming The Healing Arts of The Ancient ... - Wacana Seni

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64Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse. Jil./Vol.11. 2012PROLOGUE: BABAYLANISM AS STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISMThis article invokes – as a form of strategic essentialism – the figure of the babaylan, theancient pre-colonial Philippine priestess as signifier for women's life-giving, nurturing andhealing powers. By reclaiming her legacy, I will present the outlines of what could be apossible model for Southeast Asian feminist framework. This model revolves around the termbabaylanism, – which I borrow from the historian Fe Mangahas and which I link with thenotion of embodied spirituality – a concept where the body is construed as an anatomical,spiritual, social and psychic space grounded on fluidity and wholeness, instead of hierarchyand dualities. Drawing from my ongoing study and engagement with contemporary womenartists in the visual arts of Asia, I will present examples of how selected Indonesian, Philippineand Thai women artists articulate and embody the babaylan in their life and their works. In theprocess, I put forward the following theoretical points.My first point: Instead of positing Southeast Asia as a derivative of the Great Traditions(as in diffusion theories centered on Indianization and Sinification), it is more productiveto demonstrate how certain practices from China and India were actively reconfigured,reinterpreted and TRANSFORMED. A case in point is the Goddess of Mercy Kuan Yin, a cultfigure among Chinese devotees, believed to have originated in India, where she was calledAvalokiteshvara, the personification of divine assistance and compassion. Known in Vietnamas Quan Am, her statue appears in countless forms and has come to dominate Buddhist andnationalist imagery in Vietnam.My second theoretical point: Reclaiming the goddess in the name of nationalism can also berisky, as can be seen from two most visible examples in Japan: (1) The 1942 Kyoto symposiumof intellectuals, academics and critics, which targeted "Japan's course of modernisation interms of refuting Westernisation" (Munroe 1994: 24); (2) in the appropriation of Japan's first
65Flaudette May V. Datuinancestral goddess Amaterasu by Takamure Itsue – a pre-war feminist philosopher and historian(albeit with no professional training as one). According to Ueno Chizuko (in Buckley 1997),Takamure proposed the idea of a "maternal self" as a Japanese cultural ideal set in oppositionto the Western "individualist self." By identifying herself and all Japanese women with thefirst, great goddess, she offered a feminist counterpart to a larger anti-Westernisation andcounter-modernism project. Framed by what Ueno described as "reverse Orientalism," thismaneuver led to Takemure's active participation in the war, which she justifies as a "sacredwar" that fights for a rapidly disappearing maternal self, as seen for instance in individualistfeminists' focus on such issues as the woman's vote, rather than on their feminine virtues,power to give birth, raise a family, lead and mediate between the community and individual.Takamure is heir to the tradition of the first maternalist feminist – Hiratsuka Raicho – thefounder of the first feminist journal in Japan. As early as the 1900s – at a time when the firstwomen's association in the Philippines was also being formed – feminism was already presentin Japan, and a debate was already raging between individualist feminists and maternalfeminists, of which Hiratsuka was a key figure. She argued for a Japanese indigenousfeminism distinct from Western individualism by asserting the specificity of womanhood andin more practical terms, by demanding maternal welfare from the state and the community. Ineffect, this debate in the 1900s defines and intimates the contours of similar fissures betweenfeminists from the pre-war (Takemura's time) period till the present, as in for instance"radical" versus "liberal" feminism; between feminists arguing for legal reforms vis-à-visthose who have shifted attention back to the private domain of male-female relationships(Miya Yoshiko in Buckley 1997). There are also present-day "versions" of maternal feminism,exemplified by what Ueno (in Buckley 1997) calls "maximalists" or "ecofeminists," whosecritique of Japanese industrial society resemble the maternal feminists counter-modernist andanti-western idealization of local virtues of motherhood, nature and nation.
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Reclaiming The Healing Arts of The Ancient ... - Wacana Seni

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