The vernacular religious practices of Chinese peoples have been a subject of ethnographic fascination defying simple theoretical understanding. This is because of the complexity and multiplicity of Chinese religious symbolism in an encompassing cosmology that has been known to absorb the deities, spirits, and mythologies of world religions such as Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. For ethnographers working among the diasporic Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, the constantly evolving character of Chinese religious practices opens up the forest for analytical explorations through historical and contemporaneous comparisons.
Fabian Graham, a SOAS-trained anthropologist, has done a decent job foraging in a particular section of the forest involving Hell deity worship and spirit mediumship popular in Singapore and Malaysia. Voices from the Underworld offers rich ethnographic as well as historical documentation of this unique practice. It is also ambitious in adopting the historical sociology approach championed by Peter van der Veer at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen, where Graham spent some years as a postdoctoral fellow. This makes for a genuine attempt at an interdisciplinary study, which is both a strength and a weakness of the book.
Not content to document the cultural evolution of the practices between Malaysia and Singapore and the contribution of the religious practices to overseas Chinese identities, as other anthropologists such as Jean DeBernardi have done, Graham seeks to explain divergences and differences in terms of the political and urban realities faced by Chinese communities in the context of rapid modernisation and nation-state formation. For example, Graham attributes the implausible cross-worshipping of Chinese, Malay and Indian deities and spirit mediums at a Singapore temple as influenced by the postcolonial government's nation-building promotion of racial integration and multi-religious harmony (pp. 50–53). This offers the prospect of an intriguing analysis, especially if one digs deeper, the agency of the state fades away and we see the working classes mocking the racial and religious boundaries of middle-class social mores. But Graham often cuts short his forays to return to anthropology; in the case of the interracial temple, he does so to dwell on the ethnographic voices of the ‘oil wok’ ritual at the temple.
Graham engages a persistent tension in the anthropology of religion in the ethnographic voicing of the Chinese underworld, siding decisively with a ‘relational non-dualism’ that ‘allows the emic voice to be literally heard’ (p. 4; emphasis original). It is somewhat contradictory to ascribe the ‘atypical inversion of religious emphasis’ from the worshipping of Heaven deities to Hell deities in Singapore and Malaysia to ‘ongoing socio-political developments’ (p. 21), which invokes the theory of the state, while rejecting any attempts at cross-cultural understanding of religious phenomena as the Cartesian etic ‘theft of integrity from practitioners, their cosmologies and ritual practices’ (p. 4). Nevertheless, Graham stays true to the relational non-dualism by quoting his dialogues with the deities being channelled by spirit mediums. The dialogues provide for raw and sometimes provocative readings.
Consider this interaction during the ‘oil wok’ ritual between Graham and a Tua Ya Pek binge-drinking on cans of Guinness stout and Martell Cognac chasers, in which Graham asked why a Chinese spirit drank Irish stout (p. 57). The deity laughed and showed him his diverse alcohol collection, and said he drank Guinness because he liked it. This was followed by a concluding discussion of the ethics of alcohol consumption and ritual intoxication at a temple. In another conversation, Graham asked Tua Ya Pek about his ‘sense perceptions when drinking alcohol’, questioning how a spirit could feel thirsty, to which the deity answered, ‘I am in a body!’ (p. 79). In yet another interaction, Graham asked whether Western people go to the Chinese underworld, to which Tua Ya Pek replied, everyone must pay their dues (p. 50).
It is satisfying reading these honest dialogues. Graham is courageous to lay bare the conversations that might expose his prejudices. These prejudices are inevitably of the etic perspective, since it is impossible for him to completely suspend the ingrained Cartesian thought any Doctor of Philosophy graduating from Western universities would imbibe by virtue of the disciplinary traditions. Thus, Graham asked dualistic transcendental questions about the body and ethnicity as he confronted entities that he compelled himself to respect as spirits, but which he keeps referencing as ‘Chinese’. Importantly, the underworld deities did not interpellate him as ‘White’ until he did so himself.
There are several errors in the book that reveals the inadequacy of the historical sociology. Muar is not the royal capital of Johor state (p. 142), but was only recently declared a royal town, with implications for multiracial politics in Malaysia. It is not true that the Thai migrant and cultural presence in Singapore is negligible compared to Malaysia (p. 173), which is an argument Graham uses to explain the popularity of Thai child-spirit dolls in Chinese religious practices in Malaysia compared to Singapore. Graham also wrongly cites sociologist of religion Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce as ‘Eng’ (p. 106).
Notwithstanding the inadequate historical sociology, Graham's book is a must-read for students of Chinese vernacular religious practices. The most instructive takeaway for me is the struggle with our scholarly transcendentalism. In the concluding part of the book, Graham paradoxically reverts to tracing the origins of ‘the modern Underworld tradition’ (p. 187) and finds it in Penang. This is forgotten once Graham ends the book with an ethnographic vignette of himself standing on the upper-floor balcony looking down at Di Ya Pek's birthday party in Klang and reflecting on his fieldwork, when Di Ya Pek walked up the balcony and Graham gave him a birthday present of an ammonite fossil he found in Dorset and a bottle of his favourite liqueur unavailable in Malaysia (p. 228). In an instant, the need to take sides on the etic versus emic debate, the transcendentalism of looking down on one's fieldwork, disappears in an encounter that refuses culture, steeped in inexplicable mutual respect.
