Introduction

One of the central threads running through the study ofreligion in Southeast Asia is the question of whatmakes religion distinctive. Religion as a field, asystem, a functional element – whatever theory onesubscribes to – implies a differentiation from otherfields, other types of action and communication,other ways of relating events, people and groups. Astatement to the effect that religion permeates allsocial activity in Southeast Asia will not answerthis question, nor will the insight that all groupsof people or categories of communication haveblurred boundaries and easily slip from the grasp ofdefinition. In fact, people consistently practicedifference-making as a way to render theircommunications meaningful. Although scepticism ofthe term ‘religion’ as an analytical device ishighly warranted, the notion commonly covers typesof communication which are, in various ways,separated by actors from other types ofcommunication. Therefore, ‘religion’ or ‘ritual’imprecisely indicate social systems that aredifferentiated from other systems, each defined bytheir specific relationships.

However, it is more appropriate to speak about ‘ritual’instead of ‘religion’, as this term more immediatelybrings to mind communication, action and process,rather than doctrine or orthodoxy. The movement froman orthopractic set of rituals towards a type ofreligion with canonical texts and a doctrine is byitself a local, specific and reflective process(Hornbacher 2008). Therefore, I define a ritualsystem as a more or less coherent set ofcommunications, structured and bounded by aparticular semantic, and based on the assumptionthat ritual reproduces both social and cosmologicalrelations. This makes rituals like marriage,funerals, calendrical rites, etc. the central andmost differentiated events of a community, but italso addresses certain other systems structuring acommunity, like kinship. A ritual is therefore a setof actions recognized by a particular community asmeaningful and as necessary in order to create,maintain or transform relations among human beingsor between human and non-human actors; this isaccomplished by reference to a level which, in thecommunity's ideology, is situated above that of thehuman participants (Sprenger 2006: 13).