The ToIssilita' at Saludengen

On the face of it, the mappurondo community in the village of Saludengen should be an ideal shelter for ritual tradition. For one, the community is determinedly endogamous, admitting no males from other villages as sons-in-law, and letting no daughter move off in wedlock. The community has also sequestered itself topographically: after several years of bitter dispute with Christian residents of the village regarding ritual and ritualized planting practices, the community exchanged terraces with the churchgoers and moved upstream along the banks of the Salu Dengen, leaving the Christians to occupy contiguous sites downstream—a tactic not unlike the one used to check the advance of Islam during the last century (see Chapter 2). Historically, the community has been a center of resistance to exogenous forces that threatened mappurondo tradition. For example, it refused to accommodate Dutch-sanctioned leadership in the district (Smit 1937), and it served as headquarters of local resistance during the rebellions

Fig. 21.
"Mandar! She's speaking Mandar!" 1985.

of the late-1950s. With respect to internal politics, succession to the position of tomatuatonda' has been undisputed since the beginning of the century. The village also has a full complement of ritual specialists. Saludengen, then, is the most striking case in which a mappurondo community has resisted social and ideological admixture from without.

The piety and resolve of this community are acknowledged by ToIssilita' and ToSalu throughout Bambang. For those in Minanga and Rantepalado, ToIssilita' tradition resides in Saludengen in authentic and practical form. Emblematic of its authenticity is the ToIssilita' sumengo melody, now lost in Minanga and Rantepalado. The ToIssilita' melody and its accompanying textual structure (see Figures C and D, Appendix III) are quite distinct when compared to the ToSalu sumengo, differing especially in terms of choral patterning.^[7] In contrast to the closure of the ToSalu sumengo, ToIssilita' song structure creates the illusion of an "unfinished" or "interrupted" text. Performing a song, a chorus will go through its lyrics from beginning to end. They then begin to repeat the third lyric phrase or line (see musical lines VII-IX, Music Figure C, Appendix III). But the repetition of that phrase goes "unfinished," for the chorus always stops singing upon reaching the sixth syllable. For example:

Usually, the close to the song does not fall so neatly on a word break:

As soon as the singers come to a halt, a different tomantokko and chorus take up another song. The performance consequently gives the illusion of one chorus interrupting the other (specifically, males interrupting females and females interrupting males, as I shall explain below). In my view, the alternating interruptions of male and female choruses are an artful representation of ludic dialogue between husbands and wives. The very structure of the performed text anticipates the conventionalized "interruption" from another chorus. Agonistic song exchanges—which make up the performa-

tive milieux for the ToSalu sumengo—are incorporated as a formal internal feature of the ToIssilita' genre.

By March 1985 I had yet to witness ritual life in Saludengen. In fact I knew very little about the village, having visited there but once, and then in the context of running a household survey, during the planting season of 1984. A chance to take part in pangngae there following the 1985 harvest was one I did not want to miss. Given the rhetoric of authenticity that I had encountered when discussing Saludengen with other ToIssilita', I looked forward to going to the village and working with a sacred oral tradition unsullied by writing. My romantic and utopian views set me up for a real surprise: since 1980, the villagers of Saludengen have put down sumengo lyrics in writing and have forged them into a song cycle. The cycle posed a fresh set of problems and mysteries with respect to representations of violence and to the character of mappurondo ritual tradition. My time in Saludengen was limited to just a few days, but nonetheless I hope I can convey some of the complexity that the cycle poses for the understanding of local headhunting ritual.

The Sumengo Cycle At Saludengen

Villagers at Saludengen reserve the evening before the concluding ceremonies of dipandebarani to perform the sumengo cycle. Replacing what is elsewhere called umpaningoi ulunna, the song cycle consists of 67 sumengo that depict a headhunt from start to finish. The community repeats the whole cycle three times through the course of the night—an effort that takes about eight hours. When performing the cycle, villagers divide into two large semi-choruses, one throng exclusively male, the other exclusively female. The two groups do not intermingle but sit on opposite sides of the house centerpost. In performance the semi-choruses take turns, and the sumengo cycle thus unfolds as an alternating dialogue between men and women.

The cycle has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. A well-knit plot is replaced by a series of tableaux, images, scenes, or "stations" that capture particular moments or episodes in pangngae. There is no development of character, no foreshadowing of events, no moral conflict. The cycle instead presents a sequence of themes and events, and in this sense has the cast and tenor of epic theater. At the same time, the community of singers also imposes a dialogic counterstructure on the cycle's narrative. The narrative moves forward through the alternating voices of husbands and wives. For that reason, specific songs assume a gendered voice and perspective. As

will become clear below, a song dialogue between men and women not only provides a performative context for the cycle, but enters into its very constitution as a narrated scene of encounter. Representation and performance fuse as one: the dialogue that narrates and quotes is also a dialogue that is narrated and quoted.

The narrative cycle begins with a liturgical invocation to the debata, and in the course of the next two songs makes a problematic and ambiguous statement about the fate of the community and the topangngae. The 25 songs that follow recount the headhunters' departure, the felling of a victim, the headhunters' trek homeward, and their sudden arrival at the village. Thereafter, the sumengo portray a long conversation between the headhunters and their wives, consisting of questions and answers (including riddles). The remaining songs depict the ritual celebration that follows a head-hunt, and close with a melancholy coda.

It falls to men to begin the narrative by singing the first three sumengo. When choruses repeat the cycle later in the night, women will sing the second song:

The lyrics to the second song, readers will recall, hold out hope for the measure of prosperity that will let the uplanders assert their power over the coast. The third sumengo shatters the illusion of hoped-for prosperity and power. The realities of power bring the uplanders humiliation and failure.

The cycle next moves on to songs about the departure of the headhunters:

The cycle now moves to the headhunters' journey home. The men first sing about preparing their tambolâ:

The next two sumengo are in the form of direct address, with the singers speaking to the returning headhunters:

The headhunters now approach their homelands, which are still darkened by mourning:

The moment of a'dasan comes at last. The headhunters stop near the village and let loose their first blasts on the tambolâ flutes:

The portrayal of a'dasan continues in the next six songs. The headhunters pose three questions to their wives. Their wives answer in turn, always in the affirmative.

Here the cycle comes to a momentary halt, as singers rest their voices for a minute or two. The pause in singing is coincident with a shift in scene. Up to this point, the songs have dealt with episodes from the headhunters' journey. Subsequently, the scene shifts to the village, where celebratory events take place. The pattern of alternating choruses would ordinarily call for men to perform the next song, but it is the women's semi-chorus that resumes the cycle. (Suspending the normal order of chorus turns also helps formally mark the change in scene and action.) The cycle now takes the form of a face-to-face dialogue between the reunited husbands and wives. The wives first speak to the head that has been carried back to the village by their husbands, asking about its parentage:

In reply, the men identify the origin of the victim:

The dialogue moves on to details of the ambush:

As a coda to their questions, the women admit the worry and concern they felt while their husbands were off headhunting. They also confess their envy for the adventure and glory that only men may savor:

Now it is the men's turn to query their wives. They look for flattery and reassurance.

Next, the chorus of men sing out riddles to the women. The riddles and their minimalist answers go:

Following the exchange of riddles and answers, singers reflect on the virtue and good fortune of the upland village.

The message of the song: the headhunters act at the coast, but the outcome of their deed is felt in the uplands. The women follow with a song about the severed head:

Like the men's previous song, the next sumengo is tinged with irony. The Mandar light incense during their invocations and prayers to the debata, but the smoke (i.e. providential gifts of well-being and prosperity) sweetens the uplands, not the coast. Note the contrast of swirling images: the sinking whirlpool down fiver, and the smoke that spirals upward through the mountains—the former dropping in the direction of death and the afterworld, the latter rising in the direction of the debata.

Now come songs in praise of the hamlets, the singers, and the fate of the village and its headhunters.

The final eight songs of the sumengo cycle deal with the ceremony of dipandebarani:

The cycle ends with a pair of sumengo that lament the close of dipandebarani:

Organizing the sumengo into this coherent narrative, dialogic, and cyclic structure has also led the community to put aside a special time for these songs. During my brief visit to Saludengen, there was but one occasion when I heard someone—an old woman working in her houseyard—sing a few of the lyric strains from this genre. In the ritual gathering of dipandebarani, sumengo performance is next to absent, except when a chorus of male elders and the topangngae sing the first three sumengo as a prelude or coda to liturgical acts. In short, the written cycle has become a canonical text, the reoralization of which has resulted in (or more precisely, been constructed as) a communal liturgical act. Communal song, in this village, is a scene of collaborative reading, not a site of improvised, agonistic play.

The Project Of Writing And Reading The Sumengo Cycle

Elders at Saludengen told me that the main reason for writing down sumengo lyrics was simply to keep them intact for a community that was increasingly literate. As one explained, "The ancestors remembered well, but these children like to read." Some youths had already begun writing down sumengo lyrics, so as to be able to sing along with older performers, and around 1980, elders in the community decided to help the younger singers shape a collection of lyrics in notebook form. I have no way of being sure, but Christian hymnals and choirs may have provided the models for this collocation of song lyrics. In any event, no effort was or has been made to inscribe sumengo melody; the tune itself remains in oral tradition. The presence of writing notwithstanding, the very sign of an authentic ToIssilita' tradition is thus a tune known by heart, an embodied memory of rhythms and tonal movement never traced in ink and recaptured only in performance.

In the context of passing on sumengo lyrics, songleaders began to craft a song cycle within and outside of performance contexts. Although song performance remained both a reference point and the ultimate end of the effort to preserve lyrics, skilled singers had to step outside of performance to contemplate and discuss the songs. From the start, then, there emerged a dialectic between oral performance and the work of inscription.^[14] In my brief time in this village, I was unable to learn precisely how the villagers set about selecting the lyrics and organizing them into a narrative whole. Judging from the sumengo traditions elsewhere in Bambang, singers rarely did more than couple lyric triads into song pairs. Yet I think it is safe to say that the songleaders at Saludengen were conscious of a narrative waiting to be put together. Thus, writing did not bring about a narrative or narrative logic previously missing. Instead, it facilitated the work of reclamation. The entire project of dictating, copying, comparing, and recomposing lyrics provided a context in which collaboration could retrieve a narrative scattered through the separate memories of individual songleaders. As one might expect, the ludic or agonistic song exchanges so typical elsewhere are wholly missing in performances at Saludengen. There is no impulse to challenge and outperform. In fact, playful behavior seems antithetical to the smooth completion of the cycle narrative. What the project of writing has done is produce an authorized text that has since supplanted the memories and competitive interests of songleaders. Ironically, the making of the sumengo canon led the tomantokko to drop those songs that would not fit into the cycle. Far from preserving all remembered song, the project of sumengo inscription has led to the narrowing of the genre.

The cycle text typically appears in small, paper-covered notebooks—much like the blue books used for exams in American college classrooms. In the several manuscripts I was able to examine, writers invariably put down each set of lyrics as a sentence of prose, unmarked for meter, pauses, or vocal part. It was customary, however, for writers to arrange the songs in the order of their performance in the cycle, and a few people went so far as to number them. It was also common to find each song marked so as to indicate who was to sing it—men or women. Greater numbers of books were in the hands of children or teens. Of the three tomantokko in the village, only a lone male and a young female counterpart kept a notebook of sumengo lyrics close at hand during performance, and one senior female songleader did without. The organization of the singers into two semi-choruses strikes me as a good way to take advantage of this proliferation of song scripts. Indeed, the proliferation of scripts opened the way for young singers to swell the ranks of the chorus. The scripts also made it possible for larger numbers of singers to perform together smoothly and cohesively. In particular, the scripts brought the tomantokko and chorus into greater concert.

But the cycle text has also changed the role of the tomantokko. The songleaders still have an important role to play in leading off each song and driving the melody, but the sequence of songs is completely out of their hands, dictated instead by the authority of the cycle text. Indeed, the memory and performance of the songleader are subordinate to a "correcting" and determining written text. While visiting Saludengen, I witnessed a moment when the tomantokko leading the men's semi-chorus skipped songs, despite the notebook of lyrics beside him. The sumengo "fell into the water," as they say. When the chorus did not join in, the tomantokko broke off his singing. After a moment of muted conversation with some of the men beside him, the tomantokko took up the opening strains of the correct song.

Without question, the villagers in Saludengen used writing and reading-in-performances as a way to make recall of the sumengo easier. Aside from this consciously pragmatic effort, younger singers had already begun to trust and favor writing as a way to "handle" song. After all, in the context of their schoolwork, writing (or print) appeared as the authoritative and outward mark of critical knowledge. In that light, writing down sumengo lyrics formed a strategy for turning the songs into a genre of "critical knowledge," or, to put it somewhat differently, for incorporating the sumengo into a body of inscribed "critical knowledge." That strategy of cultural reproduction is wholly consistent with the village ethos at Saludengen, an ethos aimed at recovering and strengthening local mappurondo tradition.

This project of inscription did not free villagers from habits and views

shaped by orality, but came to their service in a more detailed and thoroughgoing organization of song performance than the economy of an endangered oral tradition allowed. Those who shaped the cycle had to take into account singers and songleaders who could not read. Indeed, I would argue that the narrative and dialogic structures in the cycle have more to do with the traditional arts of storytelling and ludic song exchange than they do with an innovative "logic of writing." Writing and reading catered to the desire to get performance right, to fell the sumengo so that they dropped "into the village." Putting a check to lyric variation was one way to coordinate song performance. But it was not the intrinsic function of writing to bring a stop to variation. Rather, villagers had to oversee the writing, standardization, and distribution of lyrics. In short, the authority of the written cycle text was not an intrinsic one, but one ascribed by the performers themselves.

Dialogue, Narrative, And Representation

As I have already suggested, writing down the sumengo was not simply an effort to put song into a (relatively) fixed textual form, but was, as well, part of the project of narrativizing the communal memory of headhunting. The cycle is a work of reclamation and rationalization. Following the narrative path of the cycle is much like walking the Stations of the Cross, except that it begins rather than ends in violence and death. With each song, the community is witness to the heroic feats of the topangngae and to the celebrations that erupt upon their return home. Once the text is entered and engaged, the community obliges itself to travel the narrative trail to its end, in accordance with its chronologies and thematic emphases. On the way, the reading and performing community discovers itself present in the cycle text.

Read a certain way, the cycle narrative is very caught up in what Johannes Fabian calls "the agitations of voice" (1992:84), not only in its reoralization, but in its constituent narrative moves. The cycle is about the headhunters' violence, to be sure, but it is also about ritual performance. It provides a scriptural and reoralized representation of commemorative orality and exchange. The song cycle recreates ritual performance at the level of narrative representations (that is, at the level of the narrated). Simultaneously, it re-embodies ritual performance in its narrating activity. It is a revisiting of ritual tradition, and a filling up of the present with commemorative and thus regenerative work.

The cycle offers a scene of ritual exchange and orality, a scene conjured as sung dialogue between husbands and wives. The ludic and agonistic

exchanges so typical of sumengo performance elsewhere here appear in the narrated rather than the narrating dimensions of song. As I have noted, agonistic song play potentially threatens narrative closure. It also introduces inequality between the male and female semi-choruses: one group wins and the other loses. Eliminated in performance, agonistic song exchange is recollected, nonetheless, in the narrative itself. The song-dialogues, of course, make up a lyric counterstructure to the story of heroic deeds and spectacle. It is in that dialogue that one grasps the positioned outlook of husbands and wives. But the dialogue represented in the cycle is not the speech and song of unruly and unconstrained subjects: in the alternating songs and interrogations portrayed by the cycle, there can be no refusal to answer. There are no improvisatory subversions, no parodies, no failures, no uncertain outcomes. The narrative has exiled chance and the tactics of play. The cycle has thus turned into ritual—it produces conjunction, not disjunction. So in contrast to performances in Salutabang, where the song play of husbands and wives is the context and site for commemorative work, the sumengo cycle at Saludengen is a commemorative representation and textualization of gendered, dialogical play.

The song-dialogue is perhaps less "about" ritual violence than it is about two political paradigms affecting the fate of the community: the heroic and the incorporative. The headhunter-husband inhabits the narrative as its principal heroic figure. Yet judging from many of the songs, he is an uncertain hero, even in his boasting. He repeatedly turns to his wife, whose desire and approbation prevent his being politically diminished. It is curious, too, that the cycle contains little sign of the envy young inexperienced men might feel toward the headhunter. After all, the headhunter is a figure for emulation, and in the context of the mappurondo communities, envy and emulation are important motivating forces in the reproduction of social and moral order. The narrative thus tends to flatten the hierarchy of males. Women, meanwhile, appear as figures of incorporation. They worry over the headhunter and reassure him. They' represent what the hero desperately needs—recognition from a community of subjects whose own accomplishments are occluded.