Sociality with nonhuman beings and among participants is central to Luangan healing rituals in Indonesian Borneo, yet it is not sufficient for success and can even conflict with it. A myth reveals that this ritual sociality is built on a 'conditional ontology' of not-knowing and human finitude. Because ritual outcomes are inherently uncertain, there is a constant risk of 'reversibility' that demands ongoing efforts and cautionary measures, including repeated dramatized acts of 'undoing and redoing' to manage that uncertainty.
Spirit communication among the Luangan Dayak of Indonesian Borneo is an ambiguous endeavor that relies on multisensorial forms of interaction—olfactory, sonic, visual, gustatory, and kinesthetic—to make spirits present and responsive during shamanic healing rituals. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article describes two dialogic encounters: one involving games played with spirits, and another involving spirit possession of a shaman. The unknowability of spirits and ritual outcomes encourages diversification of curing techniques, ritual genres, and poetic registers. Luangan rituals use beautiful ancestral language, joking, and perspectivism to both cultivate and cut spirit relations, making sensory resonance a central preoccupation in mutually making and unmaking human conditions and spirit dispositions.