A dance of life; The Seblang of Banyuwangi, Indonesia

R. Wessing A dance of life; The Seblang of Banyuwangi, Indonesia In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155 (1999), no: 4, Leiden, 644-682 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl ROBERT WESSING Introduction The seblang2 is a trance dance performed once a year in two villages in the Banyuwangi area in East Java, Indonesia, which are home to the Using (also spelled Osing), a Javanese sub-group. Thanks are also due to Rens Heringa for bringing the 1935 article by Stutterheim to my attention, to Jos Platenkamp for pointing out Adelaars work, to Ben Arps for his critical comments on both this article and my Javanese, and to my audiences at the 25th Annual Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies at Seton Hall University (October 25-27, 1996), at the Institut fr Ethnologie at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat in Munster, and at the meetings of the Indonesi Kring at the University of Leiden, where I presented earlier versions of this paper, for their generous comments. 2 In the literature there is some discussion about the meaning and derivation of the word seblang. Perhaps, as Van der Tuuk (1896:9) suggests, the word seblang only means 'a woman possessed by a deity who performs dances', especially considering that there is no general word for 'dance' in Javanese (Hughes-Freeland 1997:481). Since the dancer is only seblang when possessed (see below), the word would indicate a state of being. 3 In both villages there are some people who claim that theirs is the only seblang performance (see Anonymous n.d.:l). According to an Olehsari source (Anonymous n.d.), however, seblang should not be seen as an art form (kesenian), but rather as a traditional ritual.