the production of possession: spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia

The sanitized environments maintained by multinational corporations in Malaysian "free trade zones"' are not immune to sudden spirit attacks on young female workers. Ordinarily quiescent, Malay factory women who are seized by vengeful spirits explode into demonic screaming and rage on the shop floor. Management responses to such unnerving episodes include isolating the possessed workers, pumping them with Valium, and sending them home. Yet a Singapore2 doctor notes that "a local medicine man can do more good than tranquilizers" (Chew 1978:Sl). Whatever healing technique used, the cure is never certain, for the Malays consider spirit possession an illness that afflicts the soul (jiwa). This paper will explore how the reconstitution of illness, bodies, and consciousness i s involved in the deployment of healing practices in multinational factories. Anthropologists studying spirit possession phenomena have generally linked them to culturally specific forms of conflict management that disguise and yet resolve social tensions within indigenous societies (Firth 1967; Lewis 1971 ; Crapanzano and Garrison 1977). In contrast, policymakers and professionals see spirit possession episodes as an intrusion of archaic beliefs into the modern setting (Teoh, Soewondo, and Sidharta 1975; Chew 1978; Phoon 1982). These views will be evaluated in the light of spirit possession incidents and the reactions of factory managers and policymakers in Malaysia. Different forms of spirit possession have been reported in Malay society, and their cultural significance varies with the regional and historical circumstances in which they occurred (see Maxwell 1977; Skeat 1965[ 19001; Winstedt 1961 ; Firth 1967; Endicott 1970; Kessler 1977). In the current changing political economy, new social conditions have brought about spirit possession incidents in modern institutional settings. I believe that the most appropriate way to deal with spirit visitations in multinational factories is to consider them as part of a "complex negotiation of reality" (Crapanzano 1977: 16) by an emergent female industrial workforce. Hailing from peasant villages, these workers can be viewed as neophytes in a double sense: as young female adults and as members of a nascent proletariat. Mary Douglas' ideas about the breaking of taboos and social boundaries (1 966) are useful for interpreting spirit possession in terms of what i t reveals about the workers' profound sense of status ambiguity and dislocation.