Part 1

• Hantu Kum Kum: Malay Syncretic Beauty and Monstrosity Ikhlas Abdul Hadi Globiz Professional University

  This paper examines the Malay contemporary legend of hantu kum kum, a woman who drinks the blood of youths to attain beauty. Based on narrative accounts collected from Malaysian respondents in 2018 and 2026, the legend initially circulated while the respondents were in school and features recurring motifs that regulate young women’s behavior within Malay Muslim communities. Although tellings vary, this paper focuses on the narratives that function as regulations on feminine beauty regarding vanity and Muslim spirituality. In particular, there is an association between women using susuk, a charm needle, to obtain beauty that results in facial disfigurement, and thus potentially creating the monstrous hantu kum kum. Analyzing interviews as well as popular discourse on the hantu kum kum, this paper suggests that Malay women’s anxieties over contemporary beauty ideals and an Islamic edict on female modesty are mirrored in this contemporary legend. This paper further asks whether Malay women’s role in the circulation of this legend indicates their complicity in the entrenchment of beauty ideals among their communities.

• Spirits, Ghosts, and Mobility: Transnational Cosmologies among Myanmar Migrants in Northern Thailand Thanyarat Apiwong Chiang Mai University

  This paper examines the role of spirits and ghosts beliefs in the border regions of Northern Thailand (Lanna) and Myanmar (Burma), and their relationship to local historical narratives and cultural practices. It focuses in particular on ghost stories among Burmese (Myanmar) diaspora and sojourner communities over a century of profound regional transformation. Situating ghost lore within a winder framework of spiritual culture, the study explores how beliefs about ghosts and spirits articulate connections between place, marginality, and belonging. It argues that ghosts, as a distinct category within broader spirit traditions, function as embodiments of marginalized or alienated experiences, and thus serve as alternative vehicles of historical memory. In doing so, the paper highlights the interplay between ghost narratives, spiritual culture, and the social histories of Myanmar diasporic and borderland communities.

• The girl at the foot of the hospital bed: the case of Dekying Phimphiwadi and Thai ghost stories spanning multiple lives Paul Lewis McBain Thammasat University

  A doctor lies sick with chronic head pain in a bed in Sriraj Hospital in Bangkok. It is late at night. A nurse he has never seen before announces that he has a visitor. A young girl approaches the end of the doctor’s bed. He says he has never met her before but the girl assures him that he has – when he was a torturer over a hundred years ago in a past life, he had tortured her when she had been a male rebel by putting her head in a vice. The story of Dekying Phimphawadi was widely-known in the 1960s when the doctor, Mor Jinda, a respected cardiologist, reported his personal relationship with the ghost. Her shrine in Thonburi flourished. This talk briefly explores the case and puts into the context of other ghost stories in Thai involving past lives, as well as near death accounts as well as moral ghost stories with a Buddhist flavor. What does the success of such a story at that particular time in Thai history tell us about the ways in which Buddhism was being espoused? As well as this, the talk examines why Phimphiwadi’s ghost story more than so many others did and continues to be accepted as genuine by so many.

• Two archipelagos and one haunting: colonial legacies and the politics of climate adaptation Atina Rosydiana Utrecht University Jeimy Alejandra Arias-Castano Universite de Montreal Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero Utrecht University

  This paper mobilizes the figure of haunting to examine how climate-water vulnerabilities and infrastructural failures persist accross temporal and spatial scales. Centered on two popular coastal neighborhoods—Tambaklorok in Semarang, Indonesia and New Guinee in San Andres, Colombia—it explores how colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary adaptation efforts. The Caribbean and Indonesian archipelagos, once pivotal to colonial and capitalist expansion, are today framed as laboratories of climate adaptation, where projects such as sea walls, polders and desalination plants promise resilience while often reproducing historical exclusions. Three interrelated dynamics sustain these inequalities: long-standing disinvestment in low-income areas rooted in colonial (and racial) historical constructions; enduring distrust and suspicion toward residents, which limits their inclusion in contemporary urban planning; and persistent engineering decisions that physically and socially harm specific communities and ecosystems. Through collaborative ethnographic work in both neighbourhoods alongside historical analysis, the paper argues that climate adaptation is a deeply political process. The past continues to haunt contemporary infrastructures and the futures they claim to secure.

Part 2

• Living with Uncertainty: Semangat Healing across Contested Worlds in Aceh Nabila Ulamy Alya Leipzig University

  This paper examines one healing practice among the Gayo people of Aceh, Indonesia: semangat (vital force) healing, as an ethical practice of navigating contested worlds surrounding illness, self, and religious legitimacy. Healing in this context is directed not only at the body, but also at the restoration of human, spiritual, material, and moral relations. Yet in contemporary Aceh, such practices take place within a contested landscape, shaped by expansive biomedical authority and increasing Islamic norms, in which certain ritual forms come under suspicion.
  Against interpretations that reduce these practices to “magic” or residual “beliefs” from the past, I argue that Gayo healing is better understood as an ethical and practical negotiation of ontological difference. In this study, ikhtiar (effortful striving) emerges as a key concept: every healing practice—including biomedicine and Islamic healing—is viewed not as truth or certainty, but as a persistent effort amid unresolved questions of efficacy, legitimacy, and truth itself. Through ikhtiar, healers and patients move between semangat-centered healing, forms of Islamic healing, and biomedical treatment without requiring these worlds to collapse into one, or placing them within a particular hierarchy.
  I argue that this movement is not merely pragmatic pluralism, but rather an ethical response to conditions of moral and ontological uncertainty. Gayo healers sustain a livable coexistence among contested worlds: they neither reject orthodox Islam and biomedicine nor abandon their own ways of knowing. In this way, this paper contributes to discussions of enchanted worlds in Southeast Asia by showing that Gayo healing practices should not be understood as superstition, but rather as careful practices of navigating uncertainty, difference, and multiple truths through social care and humility.

• Rituals before the Flood: Spirits, Dams, and Moral Uncertainty among the Punan of North Kalimantan Rhino Ariefiansyah Universitas Indonesia

  As the Mentarang Induk hydropower project advances in North Kalimantan, Punan communities living in areas marked for inundation confront more than the loss of land, rivers, swiddens, and old village sites. They also face the disturbance of places still understood as inhabited by ancestral spirits and other non-human presences. In response, some villagers have returned to former settlements to perform customary rituals, including offerings and pig sacrifice, while others have turned to church-led prayers and thanksgiving. Still others move uneasily between these forms, seeking protection without openly affirming practices that many churches condemn as remnants of “old belief.” This paper explores these unsettled responses as a form of spectral politics.
  Based on ethnographic fieldwork, repeated conversations, and mediated communications with interlocutors in dam-affected communities, the paper argues that spirits are not marginal to contemporary politics but central to how dam development is interpreted, negotiated, and morally evaluated. The coming flood threatens not only material livelihoods but also graves, sacred places, and relations with beings whose presence has never been fully abandoned, even where conversion to Christianity has been profound. Ritual in this setting is therefore neither a simple revival of custom nor a transparent expression of a stable cosmology. It is a fragile and ambivalent practice shaped by fear, memory, moral hesitation, corporate funding, and competing claims over what counts as legitimate care for the future.
  By foregrounding how Punan villagers negotiate between spirits, churches, and dam developers, the paper shows that green infrastructure projects do not merely transform landscapes. They also reactivate older obligations and expose the precarious coexistence of capitalist development, Christian morality, and more-than-human worlds.

• Selective Visibility: Kejawén and Enchanted Precarity in East Java Pavla Putrová Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences

  In contemporary East Java, many practices associated with kejawén persist in socially fragile conditions, neither absent from public life nor fully acceptable within dominant religious and moral norms. Rather than being directly prohibited, they occupy an ambiguous space: only partially accommodated within official categories of belief, yet still subject to suspicion from wider orthodox religious publics. In this context, kejawén persists through selective visibility: enchanted practices are maintained, but often concealed, muted, or relocated into socially protected spaces.
  Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malang, this paper examines how kejawén practitioners negotiate precarious spiritual worlds in everyday life. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, it explores how interlocutors restrict ritual exposure, withhold certain practices from neighbors or non-practicing relatives, carefully regulate when and with whom spiritual knowledge is shared, and selectively allow practices to enter public view through culturally sanctioned forms. These strategies reveal how more-than-human relations are sustained under conditions where their public legitimacy remains fragile. Rather than framing marginalization only in legal terms, the paper shows how kejawén is shaped by diffuse forms of social regulation, in which legitimacy is negotiated not only through state categories but also through the moral judgments of dominant religious communities.
  The paper argues that the Indonesian case reveals a form of enchanted precarity grounded in contested public legitimacy: kejawén is neither absent nor prohibited, but rendered conditionally visible within a social environment that constrains how spiritual worlds may appear in public life. By tracing these dynamics, the paper contributes to debates on spectral politics in Southeast Asia by showing how invisibility can function not as disappearance, but as an active strategy for sustaining marginalized forms of spiritual belonging.

• Spirited Waters: Flood, Kramat and Water Sensibilities in Java Abbie Yunita Utrecht University Panggah Ardiyansyah University of Sheffield

  This paper brings together two sites of spectral water sensibilities: Jakarta’s flood-prone urban fabric, where infrastructure renders rivers dead - kali mati - by seeking to contain its flow, only for it to return as flood, at times figured in news media as hantu (ghost); and Sendang Duwur on Java’s northeastern coast, where the spring associated with the 16th-century saint Sunan Sendang sustains a living cosmopolitics of care. Through vignettes that draw out these vernacular sensibilities, we attend to the spectral registers through which relations to water are activated, maintained, or disrupted. Different as they are, both sites illuminate a shared epistemology where water is vibrant and ultimately uncontainable, and always relational. Together, they teach us to live with, and make kin with, spirited waters; not by treating water as inert matter, but by rekindling the reciprocal obligations and attentiveness that water’s sacred, unruly presence demands. What “haunts” Jakarta’s flood plains and gathers at Sendang Duwur are, in short, alternative ways of living with and relating to water - ones that recognise its spirited, persistent presence and the ethical sensibilities that presence generates.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Borderlands
• Climate adaptation
• East Java
• Haunting
• Historical memory
• Indigenous cosmology
• Indonesia
• Islamic modesty
• Kejawén
• Malay Muslim femininity
• Marginality
• Myanmar migrants
• North Kalimantan
• Semangat
• Spiritual culture
• Urban inequality
• Water infrastructure
• beauty culture
• colonial legacies
• contemporary legend
• enchanted precarity
• gender regulation
• ghost beliefs
• ghosts
• ikhtiar
• infrastructural transformation
• more-than-human relations
• ontological difference
• past lives
• religious marginality
• ritual healing
• science
• selective visibility
• spectral politics
• supernatural belief
• vital force