Politics of Local Occultism:An Ethnographic Study of Tarot Community in Java

Abstract

As a global occult practice, Tarot has been practiced by local people,
including Javanese practitioners, and it is perhaps that a study of localization is
necessary to determine how strongly influential Javanese belief system has been
upon Tarot practitioners, or how Javanese Tarot practitioners have adopted and
modified Javanese esoteric and occult practices into Tarot. My thesis is that
localizing Tarot could be possible in terms of adaptation, acculturation,
indigenization, or—in some extents—hybridization in Javanese society, either in the
levels of superficial, practice, or values. By using ethnography as method of
research, this study has resulted in two major findings: (1) Javanese Tarot
practitioners have negotiated themselves in the cultic milieu they live in by
localizing their alias, communities, Tarot reading strategies, Tarot decks, and their
personal preference to gather in candi, and (2) Tarot practice in Java has closely
been related to some Javanese belief systems, such as rasa and kahanan, and it
makes them consciously or unconsciously practice Javanism in their daily activity
of Tarot with different levels. However, these have implications and challenges
they should deal with: cultural ambivalence, a cultural implication that they can‘t
be free from it, because as much as they play Western Tarot, they are still Javanese.
This ambivalence also indicates an inseparable concept of globalization as dynamic
one in the term of ‗localizing‘. The idea of localizing Tarot makes it possible to be
a global phenomena in which local Javanese belief system embedded into Javanese
Tarot practice became a part of global network. The involvement of Javanese
practitioners in e-commerce or international market suggests a juncture between
particular occult practices and global ones to celebrate the cultural hybridity within
Tarot.