Ritual, Sex and the Body: Heterodox Ritual Practices at Pilgrimage Sites in Central Java

Abstract

This article compares three pilgrimage sites in Central Java known for heterodox ritual practices. These practices include sexual activities between partners who are not married to each other (ritual seks). Since the sexual partners meet each other as strangers, they ignore the possible differences of rank and status between them and encounter each other as equals. These practices are part of a ritual repertoire that is constitutive of a current within Islam for which the controversial category abangan has established itself in anthropological discourse. The fact that these ritual practices have been enjoying an unprecedented boom in the context of local pilgrimages since the 1980s sheds a different light on the widely held thesis of a decline in this social category. Rather, this boom makes it clear that the Islamisation of Indonesia is not a linear process, but is ambivalent and contradictory.