ABSTRACT
This chapter explores human-spirit relations among the Bentian, a small group of shifting cultivators of Indonesian Borneo. It analyzes Bentian relations with spirits as expressions of a variety of Southeast Asian animism in light of the new animism literature. The Bentian social life is fundamentally dialectical, marked by oscillation between autonomy and integration, and relatedness and alterity, a pattern replicated in the field of human-spirit relations. In discourse and rituals, Bentians often refer to spirits in the capacities as malevolent spirits, spirit helpers, and protecting and custodian spirits. In Bentian animistic ontology, spirits articulate human society with the non-human world and are essential for the conceptualization and negotiation of various ontological, existential, and socio-moral dilemmas of being human and being-in-the-world. This ontology prevails in certain conditions, complementing a secular and objectifying relationship with the world which is maintained at other times.
