ABSTRACT
In Southeast Asia, the second half of the early modern period-roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-witnessed dramatic transformations in many realms of society and culture that we examined in the previous chapter. These transformations came about due to a number of dialectically related processes involving the intensification of commerce, state building, and territorial consolidation conducive to political systems that were “more absolutist, centralized, and bureaucratic” (Lieberman 2003:16), as well as the heightened centrality, in courtly realms and beyond, of Sunni Islam, Theravada Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Iberian-style Catholicism. The doctrines of these World Religions, described by some as “male oriented, legalistic and hierarchical” (B. Andaya 1994:106) make no scriptural provision for the public ritual centrality of women or the transgendered. The spread and enhanced appeal of broadly encompassing canonical orthodoxies-many of which came to be rationalized in ways that reflected their morally and politically laden encounter with the Protestantism of Western missionaries and colonial elites-helped ensure that in many contexts the previously sacrosanct roles of women and transgendered individuals in public ritual and religion were subject to processes of questioning and, ultimately, to declines in prestige and overall legitimacy, as, indeed, were countless “purely local sources of sanctity” (Lieberman 2003:58, 192, 196, Reid 1993b:149-150, 162, Blackwood 2005).1 Such processes were especially clear in the Philippines. “The Spaniards always linked the female shaman with Satanism, and explained the identification of the ‘male’ with the ‘feminine’ with reference to either a supposed anatomical deficiency or what they labeled ‘the abominable sin against nature,’ or sodomy” (Brewer 1999:4). They also tailored their policies accordingly: “With the arrival of the Spaniards the privilege and social status that accrued to shaman men from actively identifying with the feminine in animist society was stripped away” (ibid., 16). Also questioned and subject to an erosion of prestige and legitimacy in many areas of Southeast Asia was linga-worship and much-but not all-of the sexual license and gender diversity that had long characterized the region, as well as tattoos, amulets, ear boring, and various other bodily practices, such as the use of penis balls (and attendant bells, pins, etc.) and the wearing of long hair by men (Lach 1965:553,
n298, Reid 1988:76, 77, 81-3, 150; 1993b:161-4 passim, Lieberman 2003:320, 355 passim).
