ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the reconstitution of illness, bodies, and consciousness is involved in the deployment of healing practices in multinational factories. It focuses on spirit possession episodes in modern organizations adopt the assumptions of medical science which describe illnesses independent of their local meanings and values. Anthropologists studying spirit possession phenomena have generally linked them to culturally specific forms of conflict management that disguise and yet resolve social tensions within indigenous societies. Different forms of spirit possession have been reported in Malay society, and their cultural significance varies with the regional and historical circumstances in which they occurred. Spirit beliefs in rural Malay society, overlaid but existing within Islam, are part of the indigenous worldview woven from strands of animistic cosmology and Javanese, Hindu, and Muslim cultures. For Malays, the places occupied by evil spirits are nonhuman territories like swamps, jungles, and bodies of water.
