Contagious Affect: Environmental Degradation, Thunder and Involuntary Trance

In this paper, I explore meteorological and ecological catalysts of affect among Batek and Jahai post-foragers living in environmentally degraded Malaysian landscapes. The paper draws upon two case-studies. The first case considers a young Jahai woman spontaneously and involuntarily entering an uncontrollable trance state triggered by a thunderstorm. This event took place in a resettlement village amidst a landscape of intense resource extraction in which social life is marked by extreme levels of poverty, marginalization and underlying tensions with neighbouring Malays. The second case considers an elderly Batek Maia woman spontaneously breaking down into a state of trembling, weeping and lament, triggered by place-based nostalgia and anxiety about local environmental degradation. Through these cases, I explore how ecological and meteorological conditions can trigger involuntary, contagious affective states. I contrast these affective states with Kapferer’s ideas of ‘ritual as virtuality’ (2004), during which shamans and other ritual practitioners, reconfigure “the dynamics of cosmological, social, and personal construction.” Whilst controlled trances provide a productive means by which shamans are able to temporarily slow down’ or suspend “the chaotic qualities of reality, thus allowing the dynamics of reality formation to be entered within and retuned, readjusted,” I suggest the considered spontaneous involuntary trances and affective states, by contrast, amplify socio-environmental anxieties and cause ontological disorientation and vertigo. Importantly, they often have a contagious intersubjective nature that resonates through other subjects beyond the immediate context. This encourages me to discuss the contagious nature of affect, which although initiated by environmental catalysts at particular sites, can quickly spread between people and across locations, generating further affect-driven sociality.