Weathering Disaster: Contagious Affect among the Jahai and Batek of Malaysia

In recent years, anthropologists have documented an explosion of shamanic activities among indigenous peoples attempting to regain control over extreme weather events in contexts marked by widespread environmental degradation and socio-economic marginalisation. But what happens when people, weather events and the spirits get really out of control? In this paper, I explore how ecological degradation and meteorological conditions can trigger involuntary, disturbing, and often highly contagious, affective states. While controlled trances and rituals may be used by shamans to temporarily slow down, retune, and readjust the “the chaotic qualities of reality” (Kapferer 2004), I suggest that spontaneous involuntary trances and affective states, by contrast, often amplify socio-environmental anxieties causing ontological disorientation and vertigo. Importantly, they often have a contagious nature that resonates through other subjects beyond the immediate context. This encourages me to discuss affect’s contagious nature, which although initiated by environmental catalysts at particular sites, can quickly spread between people and across locations, generating debilitating socialities marked by withdrawal, disengagement and restraint. The paper draws upon two case-studies. The first considers a young Jahai woman spontaneously entering an uncontrollable trance state triggered by a thunderstorm. This event took place in a resettlement village amidst a landscape of intense resource extraction where social life is marked by extreme levels of poverty, marginalization and tensions with neighbouring Malays. The second case considers an elderly Batek woman spontaneously breaking down into a state of trembling, weeping and lament, triggered by place-based nostalgia and anxiety about environmental degradation.