History Objects and the Reification of the Past

A number of the most important ritual objects are described as "history objects" (Ind. barang bersejarah ), a term that corresponds to the Kodi expression "the traces of the hands, prints of the feet" (oro limya, oro witti ), which sees these things as the physical marks left by the ancestors. Although many have a utilitarian function—a water container, a weapon, an item of clothing, or an ornament—their most important role is to mark a particular historical moment. They are used didactically, as "evidence" of the past and a reminder of what has been lost, giving a permanent, external form to contingent events and preserving the memory of a promise, a covenant, or an alliance.

These objects are material signs of the past that exist not only as expressions of history but also as objects in history. They can even help to make history by "choosing" their proper location and exerting a mystical force on their human guardians to assure that they end up there. Some "history objects" fit the wider category of heirlooms or the more narrow one of regalia: they legitimate the claims of whoever may come to own them and as repositories of magical power are sometimes believed to affect the processes that they represent.

Most of the "history objects" I studied on Sumba were imported items that came to the island through trade. They included porcelain ceramic urns and plates, gold jewelry, swords, and gongs, which were stored high in the lofts of traditional houses, removed from circulation in exchange. Through a ritual dedication they became the "possessions of the ancestors" (tanggu marapu ), attaining a status at which they were equated with persons. At each important ceremony they had to be addressed in prayer with respectful kin terms and fed with rice and animal sacrifices. If they were sold, mistreated, or lost, they could curse their former masters and exact supernatural revenge. Power objectified in a concrete object preserves an impression of stability even when the object comes into the possession of a rival; thus it can legitimate usurpation while maintaining a fiction of continuity.

A few, however, were objects of local manufacture, including a spindle

that once pierced through the heavens (kinje maniki ), a drum covered with human skin (bendu kalulla toyo ), and a fiddle and flute (dungga mono pyoghi ). Stones used to summon lightning or earthquakes were found in the local area, but their power was revealed to an ancestor by a special vision. Some villages kept not an object but an animal, a horse or dog given a ritual name who served as the "placeholder" for a ritual office. Others had stories of exchanges with crocodiles or pythons, coded as marriage alliances, which entailed a totemistic prohibition on eating the animal's flesh.

When I began to ask the people of Kodi about their past, the first stage of my investigation was not to establish a line of dates and periods, but to make a map and a catalog. The map showed the location of each ancestral village, and the catalog listed the heirloom objects or totemic animals located there. A summary of this catalog (table 2) notes the location of the forty most important named possessions in Kodi. Although many other important objects are also kept as reminders of the past in Kodi villages, for this catalog I limited myself to objects given ritual names, invoked along with the ancestors, and "fed" at sacrifices. I included only objects or spirit-animals that were addressed as ancestors, anthropomorphized to become part of the invisible community that "listens in" at each ceremonial occasion.

These forty possessions are distributed among thirty-one ancestral villages, out of the total of sixty-six villages found in Kodi. Thirty-five villages (many of them small and only recently founded) had no significant heirlooms and worshipped "using only the names of their ancestral founders." Almost all of these villages were "attached" to larger and older villages with a store of heirloom objects, drawing on the power and prestige concentrated in the "mother village" (bei parona ).

A Kodi interpretation of the catalog is that it provides "evidence" (Ind. bukti ) of the veracity of the narratives presented in chapter 3: Tossi's ritual preeminence, for example, is "proved" by the fact that it has the largest concentration of sacred objects. The redistribution of other objects to outlying villages, with separate posts for harvest offerings (in Toda, Bondo Tamiyo, and Kaha Malagho), metalworking tools (Wei Yengo and Wei Hyombo), and the skull tree (Ndelo, Bondo Kodi, Kere Tana, Bongu, Lewata, Ratenngaro, Parona Baroro, and Kaha Katoda) all display the narrative pattern of delegation from the source to an executor. The bush knife that belongs to the village of Watu Pakadu and its associates deserves a special explanation. The story is told that Landa Deta, the founder of this village, was a famous healer who was treating a pregnant woman at the time of the first division of ritual tasks and territories. Since he missed

Among the sacred objects stored in the ancestral village of Toda is an heirloom
spindle that once connected the heavens to the earth by a line of cotton thread.
1988. Photograph by Laura Whitney.

the demarcation of traditional boundaries, he was allowed to make his gardens in all of the tabooed areas, being given a special knife that "cuts without waiting and chops without hesitating, since it does not recognize the crown of sacred land or respect the forelock of forbidden ground."

The "evidence" of objects, however, sometimes contradicts the narratives. Why are the urn and plate entrusted to Rato Mangilo in Tossi now found in Bukubani? How has the skull tree given to Bondo Kodi spread to six other villages? How have metalworking and rain magic traveled into other regions ? The answers to these questions are usually offered in other narratives, which tell, for instance, how the nephew of a famed headhunter in Bongu or Kaha Katoda achieved so much renown that he was allowed to cut off a sapling from the earlier skull tree and plant it in his own village. In some cases, though, a more complex accommodation has occurred, in which supposedly "unmovable" objects have been moved. The most important of these is the great porcelain urn "discovered" by Mangilo and Pokilo near the site of Tossi. When I pursued the question of the urn's location, I found that it had been moved only relatively recently, as a result of events during the colonial encounter.

The story of the urn reveals a present division between the functions of objects as traces of ancestral heritage and their new involvement in a more disruptive, discontinuous "history." The conceptual framework for this discussion therefore begins before the colonial encounter itself, in the constitution of an "imported past" in the form of ritual treasures brought from faraway places.