Divine Resistance: Vivid Spiritualties in a Control Society

Commissioned to paint a political dignitary, a Muslim-Malay artist faced a dilemma of compliance over resistance. Previously, the Foucauldian turn in the anthropology of resistance traced the “hysteria” of women factory workers protesting factory discipline through spirit possession, to challenge earlier class-based explanations of everyday peasant resistance. A Deleuzian perspective on cultural resistance, applied to a hypermodern city-state, suggests a new hypothesis: where civil society is muted, vivid spiritualities (spiritualités vivantes) arise as cultural protest. Investigating divine art in control societies reveals vivid spiritualities as forms of cultural protest in circumstances where regular forms of resistance (free media, trade unions, opposition parties) have been effectively quashed.