PART THREE
LOCAL TIME AND THE ENCOUNTER WITH "HISTORY"

10
A New Order of Time
Church and State

The house they enter on the seventh day
Weans them from the breast of the mother marapu
The office they go to on the other days
Pushes them from the lap of the father marapu
—From a song of protest by pagan Kodi villagers

In the last three decades, a new order of time has made itself felt on the island of Sumba. Control by the Netherlands East Indies did not become a reality until the twentieth century, and the spread of education, the market economy, and political surveillance was constrained during the colonial period. The horizontal expansion of the Dutch empire stopped when the eastern islands were brought under effective political control, but the vertical penetration of the state and its calendars, schedules, and history into the more isolated areas became complete only after control passed into Indonesian hands.

The period since 1950 is designated in Kodi traditional couplets as the time of the "land of independence, the stones of electoral campaigns" (tana merdeka, watu kampanye ). Awareness of a new and different temporality during this period grew thanks to dramatic increases in the building of schools, the establishment of literacy programs for both adults and children, and an expanding bureaucracy that recruited many local people as civil servants. The articulation of the goals of the state as a state—that is, as an institution that imposes a particular organizational structure on its citizenry—is characteristic of Suharto's "New Order" and the ideological agenda of Golkar, the ruling party (Anderson 1990, 94-95, 117). The participatory, cultural "imagined community" of the nation was married to an older, corporate structure of the state, first formed during the period of the Dutch colonial administration. The period immediately following independence (1950-66) was concerned primarily with the idea of the nation, and efforts focused on fulfilling Sukarno's vision of a new revolutionary coalition; the period since 1966, however, has seen an increas-

ing emphasis on administrative coherence and discipline, with much deeper consequences for local notions of autonomy, cultural diversity, and temporality.

New definitions of cultural citizenship within the nation have tied the increasing penetration of the state to evangelical activity. Conversion to a world religion (here, Protestantism or Catholicism) has become a prerequisite for participation in the wider world of government, schools, and trade. Although the history of missionary efforts on the island began in the nineteenth century with an ill-fated Catholic outpost, their success came largely after other important social changes took place which made the new faith attractive.

The triumph of Christianity in Kodi is in fact linked, I argue, to the appeal of a progressive model of time, a view of "history" as a global and linear framework for comprehending the evolution of man and society. Instead of defining themselves in relation to a distant past of origins, and a cumulative accumulation of traditional value, Kodinese started to frame their actions and expectations in terms of a model of future progress and achievement. This change is ultimately what explains the new success of conversion campaigns and the waning influence of the traditional calendar.

Entering the "Bitter House": Stages of a Dialogue

Christian missionaries first came to Sumba from Germany and Holland with the hope of bringing isolated pagan peoples into the wider community of the Catholic or Protestant church. They began a dialogue with the Sumbanese that initially paralleled other exchanges with significant outside interlocutors—the sultanates of Sumbawa, Flores, and Java and Dutch colonial officials. An important difference soon emerged: the missionaries wanted something more than accommodation to their power through the payment of taxes, the observance of regulations, and the acceptance of an overarching power. They sought conversion, a change in internal attitudes and convictions. "We came to bring them a totally new understanding of the spiritual world and a new way of acting toward it" explained a former minister. But few people in Kodi were convinced of these "new understandings" until other changes gave them relevance. Telling them of an omnipotent God, inescapable sin, and the promise of redemption did not make sense until the experience of secular power and material inequalities brought such notions home.

When the dialogue began, each side Saw the encounter in fundamentally different ways. The Christian and Catholic missionaries believed that they were negotiating a meeting of two competing sets of gods. This

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Ra Honggoro's tomb is painted to highlight images recalling his named horse
and dog, at the same time that his widow and most of his descendants have left
the marapu cult to convert to Christianity. 1988. Photograph by Laura Whitney.

perception is reflected in the title of a book, Marapu und Karitu , written by German Catholic missionaries about their experiences and describing mission activities as the meeting of local deities (marapu ) and Christ (pronounced karitu in the Sumbanese fashion). A response to directives issued by the national government, evangelization went hand in hand with development, so "teaching them about Christ was also teaching them about the modern world." The "understanding" the missionaries brought was an expanded world vision in which lineage ancestors and spirits of named locales in Kodi would begin to seem parochial.

From a Kodi perspective, the theology of the first missionaries was a mystery, and what could be identified and used to define them was not a difference in ideas but a difference in practices. Members of the new faith were called "people who go into their cult house on the seventh day [Sunday]" (tou tama urea lodo padu ) and observe prohibitions on noise-making and sacrifices on a weekly cycle. It was the ritual temporality of the first Christians—the way they demarcated sacred time—that set them apart from their fellows. Given the centrality of the regulation of time in the Kodi traditional system, this perception is not surprising.

The contrast in temporality marked the first stage of a process of conceptual reorientation, which shifted the notion of "religion" from one defined in terms of practices to one articulated as a system of beliefs. Indigenous worship of marapu was defined through traditional practices and rules of ritual procedure; only later did it become more self-conscious and concerned with doctrine. The terms of the dialogue changed in three separate historical moments: during the initial evangelical activity (late nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth), during a period of retrenchment and controversy in the newly formed churches in the 1950s, and when new debates cropped up in the 1980s.

The first dialogue, carried on during the period of the first conversions, focused on contrasts in ritual practice and the slow discovery of what actions were considered "un-Christian" by the Dutch and German missionaries. When control of the Sumbanese Protestant church passed into local hands, the problem of what was "un-Christian" was rephrased in definitional debates about the meanings of "paganism" "custom" and "culture."

The second dialogue, which began after independence, was formulated in response to a notion of religion presented by the Indonesian state. Religious tolerance under the principles of Panca Sila ideology was applied only to those systems that qualified as agama . In effect, this meant monotheistic world traditions that could document their practices with reference to an authoritative text. Embodied in the Sanskrit word was the

idea of a rich and foreign civilization with a tradition of learning and sophistication associated first with Hinduism, then with Islam and Christianity. Islam was in fact the clearest model, but Indonesia's early leaders, fearing the political power of Islamic fundamentalism, chose to specify religion as a "belief in one God" (Ind. bertuhan ), thus skillfully allowing for religious diversity in a nation whose population was predominantly Moslem. The minority religions of small pagan populations were excluded from this category:

Implicit in the concept of agama are notions of progress, modernization, and adherence to nationalist goals. Populations regarded as ignorant, backward, or indifferent to the nationalist vision are people who de facto lack a religion. Agarna is the dividing line that sets off the mass of peasants and urban dwellers, on the one side, from small traditional communities (weakly integrated into the national economic and political system), on the other.
(Atkinson 1987, 177)

On Sumba, the size and relative isolation of a large pagan population softened the initial impact of government policies to encourage conversion among those who "did not yet have a religion" (Ind. belum beragama ). Sumbanese did, however, think about the new category of "religion" and reexamine earlier practices, applying new notions of moral discipline, community values, and the ethical distinction between good and evil. Many wondered whether the presence of a Creator figure qualified their belief system as monotheistic and began to search for the "underlying principles" of the metaphoric imagery of ritual language. The rhetoric of nation building and New Order pressures for ideological uniformity put some pagans at risk. As peoples who appeared to reject the authority of both church and state, some were suspected of having communist leanings. In order to defend their ancestral system and to understand it better, a number of Kodi tried to articulate its tenets in terms of the new vocabulary of doctrine and precept, creating written accounts of dogmas to constitute a parallel system on the model of, but in contrast to, the Christian Bible.

These new forms of reflexivity and self-awareness resulted in both an increase in conversions and a retrenchment of traditionalists. It transformed the nature of indigenous conceptual systems even in the absence of a shift to an alien faith, since it permitted Sumbanese thinkers to build a new world of relationships between ideas and actions within the old house of ancestral custom.

The third dialogue, that of the 1980s involving a reevaluation of church

policy, was a response to continuing religious conservatism. Local leaders of the Protestant and Catholic communities wondered why they remained minorities in a society that in 1980 was still officially 80 percent pagan. New accommodations were made to allow for a return to the church after committing sins such as polygamy or sacrificing to the marapu . At the same time, word spread that the special "sixth column" on government census cards would no longer be an option in the 1990 census. Thus far, in addition to the five officially recognized religions of Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, local clerks had included a slot for agama marapu . Now, under increasing pressure to modernize, this would no longer be the case: an affiliation with a world religion, perhaps nominal at first, had become a requirement of full citizenship in the modern state. Church leaders were virtually assured a victory of numbers, but their prospective members insisted on a compensatory victory of content: they would convert, but only if conversion were redefined in a way that made the new faith more their own, a Kodi cocreation and not merely a foreign imposition. These incorporations of external authority into local social forms follow a pattern established in the distant past.

Finding "Religion" in the Indigenous System

The first task the foreign missionaries faced was to isolate the "religious" as a discrete category of experience from the wide range of loosely differentiated ritual, political, and economic practices of traditional society. At the beginning of this century, namely, the code of ceremonial etiquette and rules for interactions with the marapu also served to regulate marriage choices, the division of land, administrative prerogatives, and the exchange of livestock and cloth. Whenever a woman changed hands, whenever a promise was made, whenever a community shifted its residence, the ancestral spirits had to be informed and small offerings had to be made to them. They were the invisible witnesses of all important transactions, and they could hold the partners to their commitment by poisoning the very meat dedicated to them if such commitments were undertaken insincerely. The different domains of social life were so bound together that failure to follow the proper procedures in one—the performance of a burial rite, say—would have repercussions in another—failure of the crops, illness in the house, or destruction by fire or lightning. There was no separate "secular" realm where transactions could be carried out without summoning the ancestral spirits. Missionaries themselves constructed this division and so, unwittingly, became agents of secularization.

The relationship between the human community and the invisible

world of the marapu was one of complementarity and balance. Exchanges with spirit entities were made in order to receive tangible rewards and to satisfy cultural ideas of completeness. In the dualistic terms familiar to peoples of the eastern end of the archipelago, this was the principle of pa panggapango , the idea that things were "paired" and had a "twofold" nature—meaning that the opposition of inside and outside, male and female, cultural order and natural vitality, was inherent to any dynamic process. The oppositions were always shifting and unresolved; often they were not totally discrete categories but parts of a single whole. Major deities, addressed with a double name such as "Elder Mother, Ancient Father" or "Mother of the Land, Father of the Rivers," epitomized the synthesis of male and female and were portrayed as protective parents who defended and nourished their living offspring. The high degree of integration between elements in the system reinforced the dependency of each sphere on another and made religion difficult to isolate from the social and spatial totality of life.

Rules and procedures for ritual practice were clearly articulated, but abstract ideas about the structure of the cosmos and its attributes were hard to find. The Kodi describe the universe as made up of six levels of land and seven levels of sky (nomo ndani cana, pitu ndani awango ), but the spirits are not arranged on separate levels of this structure. The "highest deities" those who lived in the sky, were higher in altitude but not necessarily in status than those who lived in the ground. Relations of hierarchy and deference were expressed in an etiquette of address for speaking to the spirits. Only the less important spirits of the margin and periphery could be called on directly, while all of the higher deities had to be approached through spirit deputies and intermediaries, in a complex chain of communication that eventually led back to the Creator.

Foreign missionaries were intrigued by the fact that the Sumbanese did acknowledge a single maker and sustainer of human life. Yet they were somewhat puzzled by the fact that "the one who made us and formed us" (amawolo amarawi ) was portrayed in Kodi as both male and female, a mother who bound the hair at the forelock and a father who smelted the skull at the crown (inya wolo hungga, bapa rawi lindu ). Far from being an omnipotent and punitive God, whose divine justice was felt in the world, this Creator figure was rather distant from the lives of human beings. Referred to as the "one whose namesake cannot be mentioned, whose name cannot be pronounced" (nja pa taki camo, nja pa numa ngara ), she/he could not be addressed directly in prayer; rather, a whole chain of intermediaries was needed to send a message. Minor entreaties and pleas had to be brought first to the local guardians of the garden

hamlet, then to the ancestors of the clan village, and finally, carried by sacrificial animals, they reached the upperworld.

Both a cosmology and a theodicy seemed to be absent. Despite elaborate narratives about the voyages of the ancestors or the history of a particular sacred object, the Kodi had no detailed vision of life in the upperworld or the origins of deities and spirits. When asked about such issues, most Kodi simply confessed that they did not know. A particular, partisan version of the past was passed down a descent line or transmitted along with certain valuables, but no more all-encompassing questions were asked. Familiar themes in Western religious discourse, such as the ultimate destination of the soul, the origin of the human race, and the underlying reasons for suffering (beyond case-by-case instances of a given spirit's anger) were also largely ignored in the otherwise rich body of oral traditions. Explanations were undertaken piecemeal in terms of the context at hand, instead of being formulated in the abstract language of religious doctrine or dogma. A primary concern was for ritual correctness rather than cosmological speculation. The proper procedures for making an offering, reciting a prayer, conducting a feast, or erecting a gravestone were the focus of discussion and debate, but there was little need to reflect on how they fit into a wider model of understanding.

Ritual specialists who performed divinations, songs, and oratory saw their task as repeating the "words of the ancestors" preserved in the paired couplets of traditional verse, not as devising their own interpretations. Even the oldest and most respected priests would assert that they were only "repeating the words of the forefathers, stretching out the speech of the ancestors." Their role was not to assert or describe the order of the universe but simply to reenact the cosmic system in ritual procedures where the truth of the sacred mysteries would become evident: "We are just the lips told to pronounce, we are only the mouths told to speak."

This attitude of humility and self-deprecation before the unknowable meant that spokesmen for the traditional system retreated into disclaimers whenever their system of worship was challenged. It would be culturally inappropriate to claim a full understanding of the workings of the marapu , so all they could do was stubbornly insist that a logic informed the rites dedicated to the ancestral deities but it lay beyond their grasp. No single practitioner was qualified to serve as a prophet of tradition, and doctrines were not formally articulated as in the Christian church.

Early Evangelization

The period of early evangelization in Kodi was marked by three stages: first, a great curiosity and eagerness to receive the blessings of the foreign

god; second, a growing awareness of difference and the gradual development of an idea of tolerance, when the new faith was allowed to operate in the separate sphere of government service; and third, a definition of the Christian and traditional systems in terms of a contrast in ritual practice, particularly with regard to the timing of worship and periods of prohibitions. These three stages formed the necessary preamble to the final period, when the dialogue between the Christian church and the indigenous system assumed greater importance and when we can discern the beginnings of a shift from a contrast in terms of practices to a contrast in terms of belief.

Christianity came to Kodi with two different faces: that of the stern, Calvinist creed of the Dutch Reformed Church (Zending der Gereformeerde Kerken) and that of the more elaborately ritualized Catholic mission, made up primarily of German and Dutch priests of the Societas Verbi Divini. The Catholics built the first permanent structures in West Sumba when they established a Jesuit mission in 1889 at Pakamandara, in the domain of Laura—a site chosen because of its proximity to the northern port of Wai Kalo and the availability of fine limestone for building. Upon arrival, the two German priests in charge, together with their staff of seven young men from Flores, placed themselves under the protection of the ruler of Laura, who had once visited Java and was willing to welcome them (Haripranata 1984, 121). The ruler was asked to explain the benefits of baptism to his people, and within a short while hundreds of people showed up to be baptized. The priests immediately christened 610 young children, but told adults they should wait to receive religious instruction before entering the church. One of the two priests, Father Schweiz, reported that the sacrament of baptism was enthusiastically received by the parents, "who held their children in front of us with such happy faces, as if they were about to be given gold valuables and fine jewels" (Haripranata 1984, 123). People were also eager for their children to attend school, and soon twenty-seven students from prominent families were allowed to begin their studies.

In 1891, Father Schweiz surveyed the area and reported: "I went on a trip into the interior, traveling to the domain of Kodi, about a day's ride by horse to the west of Laura. Kodi is a very beautiful and fertile land, with a large population. I hope that many of them will want to join the church, since they received me well. I asked that the sons of noble families be sent to our school, but who knows if they will comply with this request" (Haripranata 1984, 131).^[1] His optimism did not endure, however. Ten

years after it was established, the mission fell prey to horse thieves, arson, and petty larceny. Conditions were considered too difficult to send nuns or supplies on a regular basis, and finally the political instability in the area caused church authorities to close down the mission. Very few adults had been baptized, and school administrators noted that as soon as boys reached adolescence they were taken back by their families, leaving no mature converts to build the Catholic community (Haripranata 1984, 172-73). In 1898, the mission in Laura was disbanded and its staff left the island.

In 1907, D. K. Wielenga, a Protestant missionary who had been working in East Sumba for three years, traveled to West Sumba and decided to use the abandoned buildings at Pakamandara for his own evangelical activities. He opened up a Protestant school, bringing Christian Indonesians from other islands (Roti, Savu, or Ambon) as teachers to educate the sons of local rulers and noblemen. Consistent with Dutch colonial policy at the time, the school was established to train future administrators, and admission was contingent on a hereditary claim to rank. Soon the Dutch Reformed Church built other elementary schools in neighboring districts. By 1913 there were seventy Protestant village schools and four secondary schools, as well as a "theological seminary" near the original mission station in Karuni, where promising students could continue their studies.

Competition between the two churches developed as soon as members of the Societas Verbi Divini asked to return to the earlier mission site. The Dutch controller Couvreur advised against the move, saying the presence of two foreign faiths would simply confuse the local population, making it more difficult to convert them (Haripranata 1984, 205). Invoking the 1913 "Flores-Sumba Contract" he reminded Catholic authorities of an earlier agreement by which the colonial government gave Flores to the Catholic church and Sumba to the Protestants (Luckas n.d., 18). The Catholics, however, having already established themselves soundly on Flores, now pleaded that their history of mission activity on Sumba was as long as that of the Protestant Reformed church and that they should be able to serve those converts left behind upon the Jesuits' departure. In 1929, the government finally relented, permitting the establishment of

Catholic schools and hospitals on the island but maintaining the policy that only the Protestants would receive government subsidies and the official stamp Of approval, since they were seen as operating within the parameters of a privileged relation to the state (Webb 1986, 51; Van den End 1987, 43-44).

By that time, an alternative pattern of evangelization had been established by the Dutch Reformed Church. Recognizing that many Sumbanese wanted to gain literacy and knowledge about the world, though not necessarily to become Christians, the Protestants organized their church using an extensive network of native evangelists (guru injil ), at first from other islands but soon largely Sumbanese, who carried the Malay Bible into distant regions. The evangelists were given literacy training, a small salary, and a prestigious link to the authority of the church. Their duties were to lead prayer and translate sections from Malay into the vernacular.

The Dutch Reformed Church placed great importance on language as a medium of conversion. The missionary-linguist Louis Onvlee published translations of the New Testament in Kambera and Weyewa, the two largest Sumbanese languages. But no foreign missionary, Protestant or Catholic, ever achieved proficiency in the Kodi language. Evangelists thus had much greater influence and autonomy in Kodi than in. many other areas, and they enjoyed considerable freedom to reinterpret the foreign message in Kodi terms—a point of attraction for many. The first Christian convert in Kodi Bokol was Yohannes Loghe Mete of Kory, a tall, distinguished older man who was still alive when I first came to Sumba. He was baptized in 1919, after having completed his studies at a Christian elementary school at the age of fifteen or sixteen. He was attracted to the church as a doorway to apprehend a much wider world:

At first we cannot really say that we were called by Jesus or by God, because we didn't really know what those things meant. I had gone to school to learn to read, to find out about how things were in countries across the seas. I became a Christian because my teachers needed help to translate hymns into Kodi and to explain the Bible stories to people here. They were very strict with all of us. I couldn't eat the meat at traditional feasts because it had been dedicated to the marapu . I had to tell people that polygamy was a sin. I worked as a village evangelist, going from one house to another to read the Gospels. People asked me if I wasn't afraid of the white foreigners, but I said no, I'm not afraid, they are the ones who can show us the path to move forward.

By the 1930s, two Kodi ministers had been ordained: Pendita Ndoda, a

descendant of Rato Mangilo in Tossi, and Pendita Kaha, a member of the village of Kaha Deta, Balaghar, guardian of the rites of bitter and bland in that area. Both had genealogical claims to positions of spiritual leadership but chose to throw in their lot with the new faith instead.

Two things marked the new Christian community: the respect accorded to the written word, which was treated as sacred, and the requirement to attend church services on Sundays. Literacy came to be seen as an attribute of Christianity, so conversion was expected of anyone who continued his studies to the secondary level or beyond. Those who remained in the villages and did not aspire to government service felt no call to convert. One old woman told me that she wanted her children and grandchildren to go to school and enter the church, but such a course was not appropriate for her: "If I held the Christian Bible in my hand, I would not be able to read it. I cannot even understand the Malay prayers. So what use does it have for me?" Mastery of Malay and reading skills were seen as prerequisites for ritual correctness in the new Christian system.

The church took the name of the new unit of temporality that it introduced: the week. The "house that one enters on the seventh day" (urea pa tama lodo pitu ) was associated with a series of religious prohibitions that seemed to parallel the prohibitions of the "bitter months" in the Sumbanese calendar: it was not proper to sing or dance on Sundays, frivolous activities and feasting were frowned upon, and the violation of these taboos was shrouded with threats of supernatural sanctions. Just as calling young rice seedlings and immature corn ears "bitter" was a way of setting them apart and designating them as inedible until the proper ceremony had been performed, in a similar fashion the Christian church regularly set apart a day for worship, and the interval between these worship days was also the unit used for reckoning market days and government-announced events. So the church became "the house of the bitter day" or simply "the bitter house" (uma padu ).

This label did not in itself indicate hostility or suspicion of the church; it simply acknowledged a different demarcation of sacred time. The Christian church was assumed to parallel the indigenous system in expressing its truths and mysteries indirectly, through a series of procedures that gave followers methods for communicating with and appeasing the higher powers. The two were presented as alternate versions of the same sort of conceptual system—an approach consistent with Kodi understandings of the cultural variation that existed between different districts of the island.

In the 1930s, the Catholic church returned to rebuild the mission in Laura. All of the nine hundred children who had been baptized by the nineteenth-century Jesuits had returned to their traditional system of

spirit worship, and many were now polygamously married. They could be traced only by the names they had been given on the basis of their day of baptism. On a Monday in 1889, for example, Father Schweiz had christened twenty boys as lgnatius, on Tuesday he called thirty girls Maria, and on Wednesday he called thirty others Theresia and Franziskus (May, Mispagel, and Pfister 1982, 23). The coming of the foreign faith to Sumba was presented as a new temporal cycle, a round not only of Sundays but also of saints and children named after the saints. In Sumbanese languages, the days of the week are now designated with numbers (Monday is lodo ihya , "day one"; Tuesday, lodo duyo , "day two"). Giving a personal name ("Domingus") to a day of the week (Ind. hari minggu ) only perpetuated the idea that children in Western countries were named after the days of the week. Indeed, the saints' calendar does locate names on a time line, and this time line is then linked to celebrations of saints' days and religious festivities, so their view was not entirely false.

The Catholic church came to be designated quite often as simply "the mission" (missi ). To recruit the early lapsed "Catholics" back into the church, a new temporal cycle of celebrations was established, and everyone was invited to attend. Huge festivities at Christmas and Easter, accompanied by traditional singing and dancing, became a hallmark of the Catholic mission. Collective ritual and dramatic spectacles attracted an audience, but these "entertainments" did not immediately effect conversion. A more powerful attraction came from the extension of social services—hospitals and schools—built by the mission with generous funds from Germany. Gifted Catholic students obtained scholarships, first to finish high school, then to study overseas, often with the express hope that a few of them would discover a vocation in the priesthood.^[2] By 1936, two large hospitals had been built, one in Weetabula, Laura, and the second in Kodi, in a garden hamlet called Homba Karipit. In 1980, eleven Catholic schools were in existence, including a secondary school in Homba Karipit, and over thirty Protestant ones.

The several hundred employees of the schools and clinics were not formally required to convert, but most of them did, partly out of gratitude for the help they had received. "The mission is a good older brother" one convert explained to me; "my family could never have helped me so much

to get into a job where I would wear the long pants of a civil servant." As a result, Catholics, who made up 6 percent of the population in 1980, were largely concentrated in pockets close to the mission itself. Those who lived at a greater distance had generally received their education under the auspices of the Catholic church and sent their children to board at the mission so that they could meet suitable candidates for marriage.

The First Dialogue with the Church

The first period of dialogue with the Christian church, in both its Protestant and Catholic manifestations, was marked by the gradual emergence of points of difference, points of conflict, and points of convergence vis-à-vis the indigenous system. As Christian concepts of true "religion" became more salient, local traditionalists began to speak to these concerns in their own formulations of marapu practice. Joining the Christian community or remaining outside it were alternative social strategies that defined one's relation to the powerful forces whose authority was represented by the church. The "bitter house" belonged to the "stranger mother and foreign father" (inya dawa, bapa ndimya ) who commanded from across the seas and told its followers how to act. Leaders of the local population differed on whether the new faith and the older system were basically complementary or antithetical.

The question was first articulated with regard to the definition of church membership. The church was the first voluntary organization that most people had ever encountered, and so there was initial ambiguity about whether baptism was enough to define a Christian, or whether compliance with the rules and regular participation in church ritual was necessary as well. Since many of the first converts were schoolchildren, baptism was often misrepresented as a prerequisite for school attendance. Indeed, few people joined the church unless they had already made a commitment to schooling, government service, and relations with the outside world.

The key symbols of the Christian world were the book and pen, instruments to record messages and communicate them to people far away. The Christian Bible could be carried far from home, and the Christian God could be prayed to for protection even when it was not possible to visit the traditional village altars of rock and tree. Worshippers of the local spirits had to return each year to the site of ancestral stone graves, bringing the first fruits of the harvest and new entreaties for continued health and prosperity. They could ask a spirit companion to accompany them in a particular journey, but they could not bring the full protection of their forefathers to Java for schooling, medical care, or trade. Christians, by

contrast, carried their altar with them, so to speak, in the Malay Bible, using it to enter another world, which ordered its worship schedule around the church gatherings on the seventh day.

Many traditional villagers who were not hostile to the church saw their own practices of spirit worship as operating in a socially and geographically separate sphere from that of the Dutch ministers. The Christian church extended the circle of ritually mediated interactions beyond the island to a wider world. In traditional practice, Kodinese who traveled outside their traditional domain made token invocations to the deities of the regions into which they ventured. In their first experiences of Dutch schools, hospitals, and local administration, many Kodi converts followed the same pattern: while the marapu kodi were worshipped in the ancestral village, the marapu dawa ("foreign gods") were invoked on the foreign terrain of government offices.

Christianity and the Critique of Colonialism

In 1942, the Japanese army occupied Sumba and deported all Dutch ministers and their families to internment camps. Religious teaching was forbidden in schools (even those run by the Protestant and Catholic churches), and religious meetings were banned, with Sunday becoming an ordinary workday. Many village evangelists and early converts were suspected of being Dutch sympathizers. One Protestant church leader, Pendita H. Mbai, was arrested and apparently executed in 1944 (Webb 1986, 95). The churches once linked to the apparently omnipotent Netherlands East Indies and prestigious European culture suffered a heavy blow.

In 1945, the Zending staff returned to their congregations on Sumba, but the growing struggle for independence aroused a new cynicism concerning Dutch power and Dutch teachings. A derisive little verse in Malay reflected these feelings:

In other words, conversion represented a capitulation to Dutch authority,

and so long as the Sumbanese embraced their colonial masters' faith the Dutch would continue to exert their dominance over colonial subjects.

In 1946, Sumbanese converts left the Dutch Calvinist mission to form the Independent Church of Sumba (Gereja Kristen Sumba). They sought financial assistance from America and Australia rather than Holland, rebuking certain Dutch ministers for showing a "colonial mentality" toward native-born preachers (Webb 1986, 121). The leadership of the new church held its first synod at Payeti, Waingapu, opening the floor to a series of discussions about how to give the new faith a more Sumbanese flavor to speed up the conversion of the village population. Christian leaders thus allied themselves with the nationalist struggle for independence, thereby assuring the Independent Church of Sumba an important role in the government of the newly formed Indonesian state.

Beginnings of Conflict Between the Church and Local Practice

Conflict emerged in the restructured Independent church when the church leadership moved to expand its authority over the lives of its converts— this in a political climate already strongly influenced by Sukarno's vision of national culture and intense ideological debate at the state level. The specific point of contention was burial of the dead and, tied to that, the destination of the soul after death. For Christians, death was an immediate point of transition, the instant when an individual's soul was united with God and severed from the living. For Sumbanese, however, the dead continue to be enmeshed in social relations, growing in a sense even more powerful after death than before because of their ability to enforce supernatural sanctions and make demands on their descendants.

The church initially tolerated burials in the ancestral villages but discouraged communication with the dead through divination. Since dead parents and grandparents seemed to use the diviners only to demand new stone graves and the fulfillment of past ceremonial obligations, their requests were in direct violation of Christian practice. Once a temporary church structure had been erected in the district capital of Bondo Kodi, some land was set aside to serve as the consecrated burial ground for converts. Schoolchildren were among the first to be buried there, as well as some older people who chose the site (according to local gossip) in order to avoid the high costs of sponsoring a stone-dragging ceremony to erect a megalithic tomb in their own village. Yet as the number of bodies resting beside the small Protestant church grew, traditional diviners began to receive messages that some of the souls of the dead were unhappy there.

In the early 1950s, those dead souls whose family members had erected impressive stone graves now asked to be transferred to those socially more prestigious structures. Recurrent illnesses and hardships were explained by local ritual practitioners as resulting from the failure to bury the dead in the appropriate traditional manner. Soon the whole lineage and extended kin network began to mobilize for the transfer. Not only the bones of those buried on consecrated Christian ground would be moved, but also those of many younger wives, children, or poor relatives who had received initial burial in the garden hamlets before stone graves were ready for them. Many Sumbanese, it seemed, saw a Christian grave as only a temporary resting place before an appropriate ancestral site was ready.

To the church leadership, such a move was unacceptable. They claimed persons committed to Christianity were being "stolen back" into paganism after their deaths. The church also refused to accept the evidence of traditional divination, in which the spirits concerned were questioned through the medium of a sacred spear and made to reply at the base of the central house pillar. Communications from the invisible world were listened to more attentively by local government officials, who sought to avoid conflict by proposing a new use for the disputed land. They suggested erecting a government office and desacralizing the whole area.

The church firmly refused this plan. In 1952, after a long and tumultuous debate about the value of the church versus the importance of traditional obligations, a whole group of early converts seceded from the Christian community. Repudiating church rules, they insisted on returning the bones of their kinsmen to the ancestral village. The church leadership immediately banned them from attending further services and labeled them apostates, betrayers of the true faith (Ind. murtad ). The division established at this time between those who had chosen the church and those who rejected it was to become very influential in molding the shifting concepts of church membership: did simple adherence to a series of practices (such as attendance at services or reading from the Bible) suffice, or was a strong commitment to the ideas and principles underlying the belief system necessary? Through conflicts over such issues as burial, marriage, and feasting, differences in doctrine and wider interpretations of the universe began to emerge.

Other discrepancies between church teaching and traditional practice were less dramatic. Polygamy was the most common reason for someone to be suspended from church membership and forbidden from taking communion. The strategy of early evangelization had been to focus on local leaders and important families, encouraging them to draw in their friends and relatives for large group baptisms. Polygamy, although prac-

ticed by only 10 to 15 percent of Kodi men, was the mark of a prominent social figure. As a consequence, the rate of polygamy after a generation or so of Protestant evangelizing was actually higher among baptized Christians than among the unconverted. The church, while continuing to condemn the practice, allowed the guilty husbands to continue to attend Sunday worship services but not to take communion. Their many wives and children, however, were still welcomed to drink the blood and eat the body of Christ.

When the Catholic mission was established in Homba Karipit in the 1930s, the German priests were stricter than the Dutch ministers had been, barring both men and women from the communion table if they were polygamously married. In the 1980s, a reevaluation of such rules by both churches allowed for a final forgiving of the "sin of love" (Ind. dosa cinta ) for those older men, perhaps close to death, who agree not to marry again. Many prominent elders were brought into the Christian community by this leniency, but it understandably weakened the battle against polygamy. Virtually all men who took extra wives now hope to be forgiven before they die.

Participation at feasts, curing ceremonies, and divinations, though initially condemned by the leadership of both churches, was later accommodated under the rubric of family and community obligations. The early Dutch missionaries, to discourage attendance at feasts with a religious purpose, forbade their converts from eating meat dedicated to the marapu spirits. But in fact, almost no ritual killing of pigs and buffalo—such as for marriages, funerals, and naming ceremonies—occurred without the protection of the marapu being invoked. Christian converts, many of them important people who relished the honors conferred on them by active participation in the ceremonial system, objected that the church was in effect prohibiting them from eating any meat at all. Within a few years, this restriction was revised to a rule that prayers of consecration could not be pronounced by anyone who called himself a Christian. The rule was absurdly easy to follow, since almost all ceremonial ritual speech was recited by traditional specialists: the emphasis on message bearers and mediated communication with the spirits in the indigenous system meant that no man was allowed to be priest in his own house.

The last regulation also raised the question of what criteria distinguished a Christian ceremony from a marapu rite, particularly in light of the increasingly common practice of holding family rituals that included elements of both systems: a Bible reading and Christian blessing in Malay, followed by an invocation in Kodi ritual language by a traditional elder. A compromise was reached by dedicating one share of the sacrificial feast

to the marapu and another to the Christian God, then dividing it among the guests according to their religious preference. When policemen or government soldiers from other islands were present, Islamic prayers and sacrifices were also included. The local church leadership finally concluded that it was best to tolerate such "feasts of syncretism"; after all, they provided a forum for people of different persuasions to hear the Christian message and benefit from it.

Christian prayer meetings (Ind. pembacaan ) and "thanksgiving celebrations" (Ind. pengucapan syukur ) were often performed on the same occasions that traditionally had required the mediation of marapu spirits: at times of illness, transition (marriage, a shift in residence, or adoption of new lineage members), or hardship (after a fire, lightning bolt, or crop failure). As responses to a need for spiritual counsel and assistance, they followed the same pattern as nightlong marapu ceremonies: first the reasons for the gathering were explained, followed by the dedication of the animals to be slaughtered and the distribution and consumption of food. The most marked differences were in the languages used—biblical Malay versus traditional ritual speech—and the replacement of the sacred authority of the central house post with the portable gospel. There was also an important shift in the kinds of knowledge obtained from such encounters: whereas in traditional divination rites questions could be asked directly of the house post, with yes or no answers provided by whether the diviner's thumb reached its mark at the tip of the spear, the answers provided by the Bible were most enigmatic.

One informant told me that the major difference between Christian and marapu beliefs was that the marapu divination provided a much more specific explanation of human suffering and misfortune. Although Christian preachers, too, interpreted illness and calamities as signs of divine displeasure, they could not pinpoint either the precise cause or the proper procedures to appease the high God. Speculation could run wild as to the cause of the affliction, and there was no way for the human community to know if the ritual compensation offered was adequate. Marapu divinations, by contrast, allowed the victim to identify the angry spirits by name, to ascertain the precise chain of events that led to the misfortune, and to mediate the problem in ritual fashion.

Local religious teachers presented this moral and philosophical uncertainty as the consequences of original sin; humans had an obligation to repent and suffer, even without full knowledge of the reasons for this suffering, because of a burden of wrongdoing inherited from the ancestors. Since Dutch missionaries had internalized the notion of intrinsic human depravity and the resulting guilt, they constantly prayed for strength over

weakness, forgiveness for their bodily urges, and acceptance of their uncertain fate. When uttered by native-born religious teachers, these messages took on a somewhat different hue. In traditional Sumbanese understandings, the living are always laden down with obligations to perform ceremonies and arrange burials because of their duties to preceding generations; the idea of original sin was therefore interpreted as unfulfilled obligation to make it sound more compelling and convincing. The biblical story of Adam and Eve was recast in a Kodi idiom by village preachers, who spoke of the sin of "eating wrongly" in the Garden of Eden. A common consequence was the local perception that the sins of Adam and Eve lay not in eating the forbidden fruit of wisdom, but in failing to perform the necessary rites to "cool down" the land on which the apple tree stood, which would bring its fruit within the circle of ancestral protection so it could be eaten. The sons of Adam were condemned to suffer, in other words, not because of a thirst for knowledge, but because of disrespect for ritual boundaries and the category of bitter foods.

The distinction that the Kodi themselves make between the spirits associated with the inner, social world of ancestral authority and cultural control and the outer nature spirits of the wild was likewise reinterpreted in Christian terms. Early religious teachers, trying to convince the people to stop worshipping the invisible spirit powers, translated the local term marapu as setan . Although missionaries understood that marapu was in fact a very complex and multivalent term (Lambooy 1937), this gloss was the one most frequently used in village evangelizing, sometimes modified by the adjective kapir , "pagan." It identified all the members of the complex cosmological structure of Kodi with those malicious, capricious spirits at the periphery, similar to the Moslem jinn . When spokesmen for the traditional system protested that spirit beliefs provided a bulwark for community discipline and personal morality, some members of the church leadership began to distinguish between the "good marapu, " which they identified as the ancestors, and the "bad marapu " or setan , who were the autochthonous inhabitants of the forests and fields, seashore and ocean. The spirits of natural surroundings were seen as innately evil; those of the established village centers were presented as good. This application of a moralistic, ethical creed to an opposition that was rooted in complementary principles of control versus vitality proved difficult to uphold. Death and suffering, after all, were more often attributed to sanctions imposed by the ancestors than to the nefarious activities of the wild spirits. Likewise, the setan of the forests and fields could appear as companions on long journeys through wild lands, who provided medicines and magical powers in return for small sacrifices.

The critical Christian interpretation of marapu beliefs stigmatized the worship of a certain class of spirits—significantly, that class of spirits most often addressed in a private, individualistic context. Hence it allowed the church to take a relatively tolerant attitude toward those large-scale rituals that would tend to come to the attention of its leadership and condemn only smaller-scale interactions, which were harder to observe. Clearly, this was a policy of "turning a blind eye" in some directions in order to maintain the momentum of conversion on other fronts.

Christian prayers were often granted a magical efficacy similar to that of the ritual language associated with ancestral centers. They were used to ward off wild spirits and extend the protection of the social community to newly planted crops. The church thus played a parallel ritual role in "cooling the land," bringing it into the realm of cultural control. To the extent that church leaders were aware that they were borrowing the local idiom, they tried to identify the Christian message with the nurturing, protective care of the Great Mothers and Great Fathers of the ancestral centers, in opposition to the more volatile spirits of the outside. The blessings of ancestors was expressed in the metaphors of Sumbanese ritual speech as the flow of cooling waters. For this reason, Onvlee, the Dutch linguist who translated the gospel into the West Sumbanese language of Weyewa, called it li'li amaraingininga , the "cooling or salutary words."

Translating Sumbanese religious concepts was a challenging task because of the very different semantic weights assigned to words in the two systems. Writing about his difficulties in finding an appropriate gloss for the Christian concept of "the holy" Onvlee (1938) provides some insight into the thinking of the early Protestant leaders. Initially, he thought that "holiness" could be invoked with metaphorical representations of fertility, prosperity, and well-being, the "cool waters" that are beseeched in traditional prayers to cure fevers. But it was soon clear that "holiness" could just as easily be identified with the opposing pole: those "hot" spiritually charged objects in which divine power was supposed to dwell—sacred houses, village altars, or the divination pillar. The Sumbanese ritual oscillation between hot and cold, bitter and bland, is part of a cyclical movement of spiritual energies that simply does not fit well into Christian theology. It assumes that the bitter, hot, or prohibited nature of certain things is merely a transitory stage through which they must pass before they are brought inside the circle of ancestral control where these energies are harnessed to social tasks.

Onvlee's discussion of the possibilities he considered supports an interpretation of the early dialogue between the church and local spirit worshippers as one phrased in terms of practices rather than beliefs, and one

that privileged one temporality over another. His search for a parallel to the Christian concept of "holy" also led to terms that convey a sense of social distance from everyday life. The East Sumbanese term maliling , for instance, refers to the stipulations of respect and avoidance that must be observed between specific kin categories, such as father-in-law and daughter-in-law. However, in suggesting that the church could be described as a uma maliling , or "respected, separate house" he was unwittingly associating it with prohibitions and restrictions that made it suitable only for slaves. Many of the most sacred objects of the lineage are stored in the uma maliling : spirit drums, gold crests, heirloom water urns, and magical weapons obtained from overseas trade. These objects are seen as charged with so much spiritual energy that ordinary men are afraid to handle them. Taboos against defecating, swearing, or spitting in their presence mean that most people will not risk even living near to such objects. Only slaves are expendable enough to guard this sacred patrimony. Needless to say, it would hardly help the cause of village evangelization to define the church as a building so sacred that people would fear to gather inside it. The West Sumbanese term uma padu , the "bitter house" or "house of the seventh day" had something of the same sense but temporalized the associated prohibitions. Once a week, church members had to be set aside and appear as a community, but after this brief separation they could take part in daily life; the house of worship, in short, was not permanently dangerous. Onvlee's discussion underlines the irony that he himself observed in the process of translation: any word that seemed, in local terms, to define the Christian ritual center as important and sacred also set it apart from ordinary life and limited the number of converts who dared to cross its threshold.

Evangelization and Development: New Routines and Disciplines

After 1966, the New Order government asked foreign missionaries to devote most of their energies to "development" the main national priority. While evangelization could continue (and was encouraged, since the "Islam politics" of the new Indonesian regime was also fearful of Moslem fundamentalism), the emphasis was now on improving the standard of living of local peoples.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Protestant and Catholic churches were already quite distinct in Kodi perceptions. The Gereja Kristen Sumba was an independent organization, staffed entirely by native ministers, and received no more funding from the Dutch Reformed Church. Its ministers

became increasingly involved in politics, with two of them holding positions as elected representatives to the National Assembly (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat) and all called upon to assume a role in Golkar election campaigns. The Catholic leadership, still primarily German priests, were forbidden from political activity, but concentrated instead on building projects.

In Kodi, the most important of these projects were digging wells and providing pumps to make fresh water available to the population. In early 1980, the small river that ran through Kory, the largest and most densely populated administrative ward (desa ), went dry. The Catholic church built a large cement cistern to store rainwater, which it supplemented with clear water from an underground water source. In Bukambero, a solar-powered project at Payeti pumped an even larger cistern full of clean, fresh water, which villagers carried to their homes in buckets hung on the ends of long bamboo poles.

Water was a symbolically charged resource in an area where control of the rains and the seasons was once the supreme office. To get access to the underground rivers that they tapped, mission officials had to use a sacred source, which had lain untouched for generations. Special marapu ceremonies were held, and buffalo sacrifices were performed to make the area "bland" (pakabaya ), compensating local wild spirits so they would allow the nearby inhabitants to drink this water. In agreeing to perform these sacrifices, the mission tacitly accepted the authority of local priests who stated their necessity. But the priests also showed that new technology and labor could provide people with a critical resource, one that they could not obtain by simple prayers and offerings to their ancestors. The wells and pumps made a deep impression on the population of the wards nearest them, now almost half Catholic.

The Catholic mission's concern with hierarchy and decorum gave it a different character from that of the Protestants, with their stress on village evangelization. Practical skills were taught in Catholic schools as well as basic literacy. Boys received lessons in carpentry and masonry, and their labor was used to build new cathedrals at each mission. Girls learned cooking, sewing, and household hygiene. At the Homba Karipit mission, students lived in a dormitory; where they learned to set their routines by the clock, responding to bells that both announced the passage of each hour and corresponded to duty stations in a schedule of daily chores. The day was divided into segments, so that a girl would spend one hour helping in the out-patient clinic, another scrubbing floors in the kitchen, a third preparing food for guests, and a fourth mending sheets and bedding.

At the mission school, girls were prepared for roles as wives and moth-

ers, boys as wage laborers and mission employees; all the while their "spiritual guardians," the nuns and priests, convinced that temporal discipline would instill a sense of responsibility and orderliness, believed that they were encouraging young people to think for themselves and become free of the constraints of custom and tradition (Mispagel in May, Mispagel, and Pfister 1982, 91-92). Local people clearly perceived the mission as a training ground for Westernized gender roles and social habits. Kodi commentary on the value of the Catholic "housekeeping school" (sekolah rumah tangga ) and "craftshop" (sekolah tukang ) reflects this:

We send our daughters to Homba Karipit so they can learn to cook things that only Westerners eat, like bread and cookies. We send our sons so they can see how to build Western furniture—tables, chairs, cupboards, things that never existed in Kodi until they came. But now, in this time of foreign ways [pata dawa ], we need them. The girls learn to sew dresses and sarungs, and uniforms worn in schools and offices. These skills can bring in money later. Kodi women all learn to weave and tie ikat designs into thread. Women on Java and other islands learn to use a sewing machine and to make the national costume of sarung and kebaya, or the skirts and shirts of government bureaucrats. We say that the Catholic school teaches them "foreignness" [kejawaan ] so they can go other places.

The missionaries, aware of the commercial value of their teachings, commented that "a girl with a sewing machine brings in a bigger brideprice." The investment made by parents who paid tuition for this training was returned to them in water buffalo when their daughters married (Mispagel in May, Mispagel, and Pfister 1982, 91).

The missionaries valued promptness, cleanliness, hourly routines, and schedules as ends in themselves, not only as preconditions for wage-earning employment. Yet although the new "techniques of power" embodied in the regimentation of time, through its segmentation, seriation, synthesis, and totalization, were an attribute of missions and schools in Kodi, as they have been attributes of a great many other disciplinary institutions (Foucault 1977 , 139), they were not perceived as confinements and enclosures, but as ways of "opening up" their inhabitants to a wider world of historical forces.

Protestant schoolteachers learned a pedagogical practice that also emphasized timetables, homework, and examinations. Traditional training, by contrast, was through apprenticeship and an initiation. A small boy, for example, might accompany a famous ritual speaker, at first simply carrying the meat but later beginning to assist in sacrifices, to answer his

elder's orations with affirmations, and eventually to comment on them and even speak on his own behalf. His fitness for this final stage would be determined by divination. In both government and religious schools, however, a multiple and progressive series of tasks was set, with each stage followed by tests and students constantly supervised to keep them from being distracted from their exercises. Such discipline, according to Foucault (1977), opens up an analytic space that coerces not only bodies but also minds: in learning to obey the new routines of elementary schools, Kodi children also learned to think in the new ways of the churches and offices.

Ideas of discipline and order become ingrained in mundane habits of everyday life; the attention that foreign missionaries dedicated to these more subtle aspects of "education" may constitute their most enduring legacy. While these ideas were cast as part of "development" rather than "evangelization" the two projects were intricately linked, and the first, though avowedly "apolitical" may in fact have had the greater impact on indigenous perceptions and practices. Studies of missionary activity in other parts of Indonesia (Kipp 1990; Bigalke 1984) have noted that in instilling the authoritative imprint of Western capitalist culture, missionaries have often introduced a new worldview but been unable to deliver the world to go with it. Converts, freshly inspired, were frustrated by their inability to maintain the standard they had been taught in school. The newly "rationalized" concepts of time and discipline they had learned could not be easily transferred to distant hamlets where they married and had children.

Recent Reinterpretations

Contact with foreign missionaries and an official, national vision of mono-theistic religion has altered both daily routines and intellectual habits on Sumba. In the 1980s, the period of my fieldwork, Kodi debates about what was included within "religion" and what was not included two camps. The first, defenders of the church, put together notes on Kodi language and beliefs, which preserve the coherence and complexity of their own village traditions while comparing them to the principles and events of the Bible. The similarities between Kodi custom and ritual and sacrificial practices described in the Gospels are highlighted. The apostates or exiles from the Christian community, by contrast, have taken a different tack: they record traditional beliefs and practices in the hopes of constructing a parallel system, one that rivals the Bible with alternative explanations of religious problems.

The best-known and most influential document of this antichurch group

is a buku agama marapu kodi , or "book on the Kodi religion" composed by my teacher Maru Daku and dictated to his schoolteacher son. The author had converted to Christianity in the 1930s after graduating from the first school to open in the region. In 1952, however, he seceded from the church during disputes about the proper burial of the dead. By the 1980s he was a well-known ritual speaker and an authority on traditional custom (Hoskins 1985). Toward the end of my stay he showed me the book he had compiled in response to our discussions of the relations of marapu beliefs and Christian dogma. Both its form and its style of argument were shaped by and in opposition to the teachings of the church, which he had learned as a young man. Its originality lay in insights into differences between the two systems and attempts to justify the marapu system in counterpoint to the Christian one.

The book begins with a list of the seven classes of spirits that are worshipped—moving from the Creator, on to the first man and woman, the house deity, the clan deity, the spirits of the house and garden, and finally the spirits of the dead. He then noted that "the marapu religion has things that are forbidden, just as every religion has its prohibitions." Given the Kodi fondness for the number seven, seven commandments were presented in traditional ritual language, which translated into biblical-like injunctions against stealing, killing, or deceiving one's kinsmen. Obligations to feed the deities and make offerings at certain points of the year were first negatively phrased (highlighting the dangers of presenting the invisible powers with impure food), then positively presented in an outline of each household's calendrical round of sacrifices. In this way moral discipline and temporal order were brought to the forefront, but again in a traditional context.

Sensitive to Christian criticism of the rhetoric of traditional offerings, Maru Daku went on to explain the humility and apparent deception that Kodinese conventionally used in addressing the spirits:

It is said that the marapu religion is a false one, because it is founded on lies contained in the prayers. . . . Even after a large harvest, one must still say that the bag of white rice where the cockatoos play is not full, and the sack of foreign rice where the parrots scamper does not burst at the brim. . . . Even if one has many buffalo and horses, dogs and pigs, one must still ask for more . . . so we always ask for more rice to eat and more water to drink. But this is not greed or deception: it is [done] because in our religion you cannot make yourself appear rich in front of the spirits, you cannot brag or show off in front of them. . . . The marapu religion teaches

you to make yourself seem poor to those above, to belittle yourself in their direction and make all that you do appear insignificant.

The contradiction he addresses here has to do only partly with modesty in pleading with the ancestors for fertility and prosperity. It also concerns the crucial difference between the Christian model of personal prayer, with its idiosyncratic expression of desires, and the formalized collective model of traditional prayer. What Dutch ministers interpreted as deception and lying was in fact integrated into traditional religious practice as an etiquette of respect and deference; these strategies defined appropriate attitudes toward the deities and stressed that worldly wealth can never rival the mythological opulence and abundance of the heavenly kingdom.

The book continues by elaborating other Kodi systems of order: a traditional numerology that equates the seven holes in the human body with seven classes of spirits and seven stages of ceremonial accomplishment in the feasting cycle. Social stratification was represented on the model of the human hand, moving from the thumb, which stood for the prominent leader, to the little finger, representing the slave. Rules regulating the performance of ceremonies to shift residence or to call back the souls of those who had died a bad death were included. Local practice was defended as simply "another path" that led in the same direction as that of the Christian church, but one that was known to its followers only through word of mouth (Hoskins 1987c, 156-57).

Finally, he finished with an extended history of the oldest Kodi villages and a genealogy that traced the inhabitants of certain lineage houses back seventeen generations. Obviously modeled on biblical genealogies, this evidence was marshaled to demonstrate the historical depth of Kodi tradition and the fact that links to the time of the ancestral mandate were still intact. "The Christians have their book, but we have our stone ship and our tree altars, whose heritage has been transmitted to us by the language passed down through the generations and the speech sewn up into couplets."

The very eloquence of this plea for understanding and tolerance for marapu practice is couched in the terms of universal principles introduced from the outside. As a catalogue of rules and ritual practices, the book is an accurate document that stresses sequences and regimentation. As a dialogue with Christian critics, it presents an apologia in a new vocabulary, an effort to abstract dogmas and principles from a mode of symbolic action whose logic was until then basically implicit. By dictating this text to his son, Maru Daku transformed traditional worship even as he interpreted

it, for he believed that only by assimilating marapu ritual to the categories of monotheistic religions could its true value be recognized and articulated.

Maru Daku died in 1982, but his work influenced a new generation of Kodi ministers who have also tried to rethink the relations of Kodi custom and Christian belief. In 1984, I attended and taped a synod of ministers and evangelical teachers in Bondo Kodi. Discussion was carried on by three Kodi ministers—Hendrik Mone, Martin Woleka, and Daud Ndara Nduka— who sought to establish a unified church policy on three topics that had been problematic in the past: ritual feasts, marriage, and burial customs. Significantly, the most frequent interpretive strategy was to find a parallelism between Christian theology and the implicit doctrines of local practice, so that an accommodation could be established.

The analysis of worship at traditional altars and feasts provides an illustration of this method of resolution. Pendita Daud, speaking first, noted that in the Old Testament when Jacob dreamed of meeting with God he took a large stone and set it upright as a sign that his land had been given to him by God. He promised God that if He continued to give him blessings and help him along the way, later he would build a house and hold a feast there, to thank the Lord for his blessings. Pendita Daud then explained:

This is the same sequence that we follow in Kodi feasts, when we start in the gardens, and promise the marapu that if they give us prosperity, later we will hold a bigger feast in the ancestral village. Then, if we are allowed to live to continue our efforts, we will drag a gravestone and consecrate it with another feast. In all of these prayers, we may mention the Creator, but we give the requests to our ancestors, since they must serve as messengers. In fact, the Creator is always connected to them, as if by a slender thread. But since the Creator is too far, the Kodi embraces first those who are closer to him—his ancestors. Local customs such as we have here do have a religious content, but it is still obscure. Since it was handed down by oral tradition, the names may have been confused.

It is common for local evangelists to invoke the authority of the Old Testament and its parallels with Kodi ritual practices. The peoples of ancient Israel, indeed, are presented as having had almost exactly the same customs as the Kodi ancestors, with practices like polygamy, interregional warfare, the taking of heads (although the Bible's most famous "headhunter" Judith, is confusingly female), and the levirate often being cited. The story of the ancestral migration from Sasar to Sumba and the division into different language groups is interpreted as a variant of the Tower of

Babel story, with present generations diverging from a more complete and unified order.

The New Testament was the text first carried into Kodi villages, and it is the only one so far translated into Sumbanese languages. Increasing literacy, however, has made the Old Testament more accessible; as a result, that book is often cited to furnish legitimating links to the ancestral past. Its reports of feasting, sacrifice, and political conflict appear familiar and understandable and are used to justify the continuation of local practices they resemble. "Our ancestors were like King Solomon and his companions, who did not know Jesus but prayed to the Supreme God under their own name for him." With this argument, the fulfillment of obligations to hold a promised feast or to rebuild an ancestral house can be defended even after conversion. Since it provides a Christian context for pagan practices, the Old Testament also reveals their value in maintaining the fabric of collective life and especially the integrity of exchange networks. "Even if we do not listen to the voices of the dead, we must respond to those of the living," some converts explained to account for their participation in feasts. Debts are reckoned not only to the ancestral spirits, but also to living companions who had given shares of meat at earlier feasts and deserved to be repaid.

Pendita Daud defended local custom in remarkably relativistic terms:

Custom [Ind. adat ] cannot be considered paganism [Ind. kapir ]. Culture [Ind. kebudayaan ] cannot be considered paganism. Neither custom nor culture is the enemy of the church. A better term than agama kapir is agama suku , the religion of a particular ethnic group. Marapu beliefs are the indigenous religion of the Kodi people, but we cannot say that they are all wrong. The gospel came into the world through the culture of Israel. In Sumba, the gospel has to be brought in through local culture, so that custom can help to communicate the gospel message.

What is most remarkable about this passage is the way it takes the "national" Indonesian concepts of "custom" and "culture" and uses them to bring traditional practices in through the back door, so to speak. If only "paganism" is the enemy of the church, and these traditional practices, rather than being really pagan, are in fact simply misapprehended versions of the gospel message, then it is possible for a person to be both a practicing marapu worshipper and a good Christian. That would seem to be the syncretistic message of his remarks, though still veiled in the rhetoric of a national vocabulary.

That same year, a woleko feast was held in Kaha Deta, Balaghar, at which these principles were put into practice. Sponsored in part by the family of the first Christian minister in the area, it was held in his ancestral village and featured prayers in ritual language and sacrifices. The ritual orators were asked to give a full history of the obligations and promises that formed the background to the feast, but to mention neither the seven layers of heaven and six layers of land that their words would travel past nor any specific upperworld deities. The Creator was named and praised, and the ancestors were acknowledged as honored predecessors, but no message-bearers were invoked.

The innovations of this feast were intensely debated. Some praised the revitalization of Kodi feasting in a "modern" mode; others condemned it as a woleka tana dawa , or "feast from a foreign land" which did not remain faithful to any traditional norms. One old priest said it was a bungkus tanpa nasi (Ind.), a "leaf bundle without the rice"—that is, although the top and bottom of a spiritual hierarchy were left, there was little filling in between. "If marapu are listening, they will refuse to hear this message" he said, "since it doesn't follow the stages [katadi ] that we know from custom."

Rationalized Paganism: Old Rites in New Times

Debates about the validity of these innovations continue, informed by an awareness of the different temporalities at stake. On the one hand, some people proclaim the entropic view that posits a gradual but irrevocable moving away from origins and ancestral completeness, with the recent wave of conversion just another aspect of this decline. For them, the past represents an ideal that cannot be realized in this world, an actuality lost to subsequent generations. On the other hand, there are those, like Pendita Daud, who employ a "historicist" view of tradition to argue for the continuing relevance of the past to the present. In the following passage, for instance, he interprets the meaning of sacred objects to a audience of Protestant religious teachers:

When Kodi people pray to stones or trees or sacred objects, they are praying to them as objects that contain a history, that are part of their past. They are used as reminders and intermediaries [Ind. penyalur lida ] to carry messages to the Creator, who is the ultimate audience of these prayers. The wudi pa hamulla, watu papendende

["tree planted, stone erected"] is simply a proof from the past which shows that they, too, called the Lord for assistance.

His remarks were controversial and provoked a response from his superior in rank, Pendita Woleka, that "Jesus Christ is the only intermediary needed by Christians. They do not need rocks or trees or ancestors." Many, however, were convinced that the church should accept that ancestral rites provide a form of indigenous education with regard to culture and history: "Christians can go to them because they should also learn from the past, but their prayers must be addressed only to the Creator."

This appeal did not fall on deaf ears. Although some church leaders insist on a narrower interpretation of the content of "religion,' many followers clearly wish to accept Christianity along with traditional practices. They want someone to develop an argument for syncretism that makes sense to its real judges—the ambivalent and divided villagers of the region, who do not want to abandon their ancestors yet still seek to move into a new and wider world.

The canons of modesty exemplified by traditional prayers suggest that in the distant past there existed a form of perfection which has gradually been eroded; as a result, contemporary ritual speakers are actively struggling against a loss of knowledge and diminished spiritual powers. Yet even as they suffer this loss, they are at the same time acquiring the means to record these traditions in writing and compile authoritative texts of ritual observance. Because of these new technologies and the influence of notions of "religion" and "belief" introduced by the Indonesian state, any form of Kodi marapu worship that survives into future generations will endure in transformation. Already today it is becoming a "rationalized paganism" inscribed in a new temporality and articulated in a new language.

The historical changes described here detail a gradual shift from a focus on ritual action and standards of correctness to one on religious dogma and belief. In this process, an "internal conversion" (Geertz 1973) occurs as religious concepts are gradually lifted "above" or "outside" the concrete realm of ordinary life and integrated into systems whose aim, at least nominally, is a more logical coherence. The multitude of concretely defined but only loosely ordered sacred entities that "involve themselves in an independent, segmental and immediate manner with almost any sort of actual event" (Geertz 1973, 172) are giving way to a more developed and integrated body of religious assertions. The wider problems of meaning—the reasons for suffering and for death—are coming to be addressed on an

abstract plane, instead being attacked piecemeal and opportunistically by the search for a particular person or spirit who happens to bear a grudge.

"Belief" is a category of rationalized religions, and conversion is possible only once beliefs have reached a level of conscious articulation (Hoskins 1987c). "Conversion" implies a historicist temporality, for it requires an awareness that a great change is involved and that new forms of worship will substitute for older ones instead of simply supplementing them. Conversion is usually limited to prophetic religions, which are exclusive and require an unqualified commitment. "Adhesion" by contrast, is typical of traditions that more pragmatically seek "to satisfy a number of natural needs, to set a seal on the stages by which a life is marked, and to ensure the proper working of the natural processes and sources of supply on which its continuance depends" (Nock 1933, 8).

Kodi marapu worshippers were born into the cult of their ancestors; they did not consciously choose it or have an opportunity to examine its basic tenets. For these reasons, earlier generations are best described as simply "adhering" to a tradition passed down from their forefathers. In the first period of dialogue with the church, many prominent Kodi tried to "adhere" to the prestige and power of the foreign creed without fully "converting." For many years the two systems were seen as complementary modes of ritual action, one attuned to the ancestral villages, the other to the world of education and government service. Conflicts over ritual procedure (the burial of the dead, participation in feasting and sacrifice) led to an awareness of logical inconsistencies and abstract principles implicit in marapu ceremonial. The potential for conversion thus emerged only gradually, as part of a dialogue conducted initially in terms of notions of ritual correctness and contrasting practices and only later reformulated using the "religious" vocabulary of doctrine and belief. In the face of the challenges of state pressures and missionary activity, however, the marapu tradition must now be chosen or rejected, reinvented or lost.

Can a "rationalized paganism" have a viable existence in the late twentieth century? Perhaps not as a formal religious affiliation, since the politics of New Order "progress" do not tolerate the marapu label. But as an element of a syncretic Christian church, led by native ministers who are nevertheless fundamentally sympathetic to the traditions of their ancestors, Kodi ritual practices will, it seems, continue in a somewhat altered form. By breaking down a holistic indigenous world of ceremonies related to the ancestral spirits into the officially defined domains of custom (Ind. adat ), culture (Ind. kebudayaan ), art (Ind. kesenian ), and religion (Ind. agama ), government officials and church authorities conspired to

erase the dangerous "religious" elements of traditional practice while preserving a bit of local color and pageantry. Their tactics, though, have been turned back on them by a new generation of native interpreters, who use these very categories to keep alive a heritage that maintains "the thread going back through the ancestors" as a meaningful time line.

Tradition lives on in the age of "history" (sejarah ), but only by being reinvented in ways that separate it from stigmatized categories and exploit a national rhetoric of cultural diversity and village democracy. These are the debates to which we turn next.

11
The Past as Ideology
New Heroes, New Histories

The stranger mother speaks with oil in her mouth, the foreign father has sugar on his tongue; but the bridges remain to be built, and the rivers remain to be crossed.
—A Kodi commentary on the Golkar electoral campaign of 1987

In the last chapter I argued that "religion" emerged as a category of Kodi life only after important historical changes occurred in the twentieth century. The same could be said for "history" which in the Indonesian term sejarah is also a relative latecomer to local discourse. The concept has come, moreover, with a very specific form and intent: in creating "history" Kodi commentators joined the nationalist quest for an Indonesian past (Reid 1979) and committed themselves to an ideology of progressive, directed time that would take them "out of darkness and into light" (Anderson 1990).

The "darkness" of the past was, in this vision, recent, coinciding with the period of colonial domination. Before the shadows of Dutch conquerors fell across the islands, there was an earlier, glorious past of Indonesian unity. The concept of historical progression was thus presented as the recovery of a national destiny, a "return" to the splendor of the precolonial empires and a realization of indigenous social democracy in a new era.

A great many aspects of modernity came very suddenly to Kodi, telescoping stages of a long historical development into an encounter of just a few years. The meeting with the Indonesian sejarah gave "history" a very specific ideological content.^[1]Sejarah in its current sense refers not

so much to a discipline as to a vision of the past, described by a prominent Indonesian historian as a response to the "insistent demands for a nationalist historiography and for national myths, from which new confidence can be gained and sustenance drawn" (Soedjatmoko 1965, 404). This form of history emerged as an authoritative form of discourse in postindependence Indonesia, one with its own rules and precedents.

Indonesian nationalist history contrasts with earlier genres such as silsilah (genealogies), babad (court chronicles), or hikayat (dynastic accounts). Like Kodi narratives, these written texts were connected to a particular descent line or specific heirloom objects, and they described additions to the past and a variety of instantiations of the traditional order. In the genealogies, metonymic links to the past were defined by descent, whereas in narratives the links were metaphoric, defined by successful precedent (Valeri 1990, 169). Traditional Malay sources include the biographies and autobiographies of important persons, which come somewhat closer to the modern genre of historiography. The particular dynastic standpoint of a royal family, for example, provided a subjective window on the past and transmitted the traditions and values of the ruling class. The life of a usurper, by contrast, showed that events did not follow an unbroken line but could deviate in arresting ways. The progressive, directed "history" of national liberation developed mainly in imitation of Western models, but it was not without some patterning on earlier forms of discourse about the archipelago's past.

History and Heritage

It is a truism in anthropology that societies of any complexity try to "make history repeat itself" (Peel 1984, 111), because such repetition serves to legitimate the present. The importance of the "past in the present" has been associated with the lines drawn between "traditional" and "modern" societies, or between hierarchical and egalitarian ones (Bloch 1977). I would offer another set of polarities as offering a different perspective on the past, one pole stressing a continuing "heritage" from the past, with the other emphasizing a rupture between past and present that is "history." In the first view, the past is still alive and used day after day to provide moral examples, to interpret the future, and to invest both the individual human life and the nation with a sense of destiny. In the second, the past is dead, and "history" performs an autopsy on its corpse, gazing with an objective and disinterested eye on the illusions of another era. The exponents of critical history trace its emergence to the collapse of a unified, coherent vision of the past:

History . . . is not the past. The past is always a created ideology with a purpose, designed to control individuals, or motivate societies, or inspire classes. Nothing has been so corruptly used as concepts of the past. The future of history and historians is to cleanse the story of mankind from those deceiving visions of a purposeful past. The death of the past can only do good so long as history flourishes. Above all, one hopes that the past will not rise phoenix-like from its own ashes to justify again, as it often has, the subjection and exploitation of men and women, to torture them with fears, or to stifle them with a sense of their own hopelessness. The past has only served the few; perhaps history will serve the multitude.
(Plumb 1969, 17)

While I do not share the view that modern historians can escape the limitations of time and perspective with which all chroniclers of the past have had to deal, I preserve this distinction in order to turn it in another direction: "history" I argue, presents an ideology of cumulative, irreversible change, a process that contrasts strongly with the "heritage" of many non-Western societies. The two perspectives must first be defined as ideal types, opposing interpretive stances, so that we can then focus on their interaction in concepts such as the Indonesian sejarah .

"History" and "heritage" offer contrasting views of the relation of past and present. If the past is seen as "history" it is part of a linear time line, marked by distinct, nonrepeating events in which individuals emerge as actors and their exploits are unique occurrences. In this case, the past refers to a particular and concrete series of actions, which are discontinuous with the present. "History does not repeat itself" in the strict sense of the term. If, however, the past is seen as "heritage" it can be repeated, though always in somewhat transformed form because it contains not specific events but somewhat richer and vaguer potentialities. Instead of a line of unique occurrences, the past is an array of established sequences, like the stages of a ritual, which can be instantiated in various forms. Thus, a headhunting raid may be carried out by many different actors, but they must follow the proper procedures. Its characteristic ritual forms (songs, dances, offerings) can even be adapted to other contexts without a total loss of meaning. The "heritage" of the past allows for a more flexible synthesis of new senses that are attached to a shared sequence.^[2]

The contrast of the two is most marked in terms of individual action. When people act to realize a historical consciousness, they expect their acts to rearrange the order of things irrevocably. They see themselves as individuals who leave their signature on the past, creating a finished chapter that may be reopened and reread but not rewritten. When people act as members of their wider cultural heritage, they see themselves as taking the place of an ancestor, avenging an inherited "debt of blood" and thus continuing a pattern of reciprocities that is itself timeless. They impersonate an ancestral persona, negating their own individuality and historicity at the same time that they emphasize the importance of their heritage.

If events happen only once, they must emerge as "history." If they can happen many times, with minor variations, then they embody a living tradition that no mere event can alter dramatically. "History" in this sense is largely a product of the discontinuities of Western civilization, and the view of the past that it inspires is every bit as ideological as that of "heritage." Each of these views is, in practice, an emphasis and not a global, deterministic vision. There can be local and regional variations in the degree to which each term holds sway.^[3]

The Indonesian notion of sejarah was born in the context of revolutionary struggle, which repudiated the colonial past by nostalgically evoking an earlier, precolonial heritage. Visions of the glory of Majapahit, Srivijaya, and Mataram were used to erect the idea of "Indonesia" as a moral community that preceded and yet somehow survived Dutch colonial interventions. The new nation had to be created in the imagination as well as in practice. The bases of unity were laid by asserting that despite the great linguistic and religious differences which divided Indonesian peoples, they shared a common cultural background and the experience of common struggle against colonial domination. While some Indonesian intellectuals favored the internationalism of Islam or Marxism, they were eventually defeated by a "nationalist orthodoxy" which wedded the progressive view

of "history" to reclamations of a lost past (Reid 1979, 295-98). The need for a radical rupture of the prevailing power structure was justified by arguments for a return to an earlier order. This earlier order was not examined too closely, however, since the specific attributes of the remembered past threatened to dissolve rather than confirm the newly defined unity of Indonesia. Nationalism fed on a view of the past as heritage^[4] to legitimate the models it provided for the future.

Nationalism on Sumba

The slow pace at which Indonesian national history developed was due in part to tensions between groups that sought a revival and strengthening of their own heritage and resisted identification with an artificial new polity of Dutch making (Reid 1979, 282). In creating a nationalist movement, Javanese and Sumatran leaders often clashed, and their priorities were markedly different from those of leaders in the more distant, eastern fringes of the archipelago such as Sulawesi or the Moluccas. Sumba, too, already in the colonial period a backwater, remained more a witness than a participant in the formative years of Indonesian nationalism.

The center of the nationalist movement of the Lesser Sunda Islands was the Timorsch Verbond, an organization formed in 1922 under Rotinese and Savunese leadership. After the 1945 declaration of Indonesian independence, it was transformed into the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, a political party that continues to the present. Support for national unification and independence was unwavering in the region; it continued strong even through the formation of the State of Eastern Indonesia (Negara Indonesia Timor), when Dutch forces temporarily regained control of the Timor archipelago. Chronicled by I. M. Doko, a Savunese leader who oversaw the transfer of civil authority to local officials in Kupang, the seamless progression of the popular will to nationhood was finally realized in the new state of Indonesia (Doko 1982).

Although political consciousness on Sumba was relatively low, the sons of noble families who were sent to school in Timor, Java, and Sulawesi supported the nationalist movement. Japanese forces tried to play on nationalist aspirations when they invaded the island in 1942; the Japanese occupation, however, was a time of brutal deprivations which, if anything, provoked a nostalgia for the colonial period. Nevertheless, when the Japa-

nese left, Sumbanese leaders joined others in calling for immediate independence (Kapita 1977).

The transfer of power from the Dutch colonial officer to the local nobles who held positions in the State of Eastern Indonesia was achieved without a single shot being fired on Sumba. H. R. Horo, the Kodi administrator who headed the Council of Sumbanese Rajas, simply ordered a change of flags in the regency capital of Waingapu. The ease of the changeover on Sumba contrasted sharply with violent and drawn-out conflicts elsewhere. On this isolated island, at any rate, there was a marked disjunction between the rhetoric of armed struggle (Ind. perjuangan ) that was used generally to describe resistance to foreign domination and the bloodless cession of colonial authority that occurred in 1949.

Perhaps because they perceived that "something was missing" in their experience of the changeover, Sumbanese writers looked to their own past for people who would fit the new category of national hero (Ind. pahlawan ): "Through the anti-Dutch struggle of the pahlawan , each people in the archipelago found a formula to relate its own unique experience of the past with the new nationalist identity" (Reid 1979, 294). Because struggle conspicuously did not occur at the time of independence, legitimation for the "Sumbanese spirit of resistance" (Ind. semangat perlawanan Sumba ) was sought in a more distant time of violence and unrest. Finally, the search came to focus on the Kodi figure of Wona Kaka.

The Headhunter Before History

Wona Kaka was the warrior from the headhunting village of Bongu who led the resistance against the Dutch from 1911 to 1913 (see chapter 4 and the discussion of the urn and staff as competing symbols of governmental rule). Here, we look back at this period through a different lens, that of nationalist historiography. The retrospective glance of many present-day people in Kodi has come to emphasize these early raids on the colonial army as a model and justification for the legitimate use of violence in a struggle for local autonomy. In this way headhunting has been invested with a new ideological content owing to its association with the leader of an anticolonial resistance movement.

Headhunters in contemporary Kodi are described in Indonesian as "heroes" (pahlawan ), and the tradition of predatory raids on enemy peoples has been reinvented as a tradition of heroic opposition to appropriating native lands. Like many peoples who have felt driven to refashion the past in order to establish precedents for the revolutionary transformation of the present (Hobsbawm 1983), the people of Sumba have raided their own

past, creating a new form of "local history" that fits a mold cast in the steaming caldron of the struggle for national independence. Understanding the new meaning given to headhunting requires an excursion back into the period of colonial contact, followed by an analysis of the stages of its reinterpretation in the 1950s through 1980s.

Headhunting came before history for the people of Kodi, in the sense that no explanation or justification of the practice based on past events was summoned. The lowlanders of Kodi, Laura, and Bukambero were bound in an unending cycle of deadly reciprocity that opposed them to the highlanders of Weyewa, Rara, and Ede. Raids would be undertaken because of a message from the unhappy ghost of a former victim, who asked to be avenged. They were an intermittent form of warfare; war parties were not formed unless some misfortune had provoked a divination, revealing the ghost's anger. In certain cases, vengeance was more immediate, and raids were performed to end the mourning period for an important noble (Hoskins 1989a; Djakababa 1988). The cycle of raiding and revenge that bound highlander and lowlander together in a deadly reciprocity was described as resembling the long-burning coals of ironwood and tamarind (api kyomi, api kyaha ), which can never be extinguished. In contrast, the murderous feuds that to this day occasionally erupt between Kodi clans are described as shorter-term flare-ups, like fires in the elephant grass or undergrowth (api ngingyo, api kahumbu ). Within the same language or dialect group, feuds can be resolved through negotiation and a payment of blood compensation (tapo ) in horses, buffalo, and gold. Outside these boundaries, the ancestral spirits demanded a more exacting revenge.

Heads were taken only as the "replacement of throats cut, share of limbs twisted in anger" (koko ngole helu, kalengga langa mbani ). No new raid could be undertaken without a specific mandate from the ancestors. The grief and passion of the community had to be expressed in signs of spiritual anger: in the language used in divinations before a raid, the skull tree itself was said to "boil with heat," the stone circle surrounding it to "steam with anger" (nyawako katoda, wyuhuka kalele ). The memory of an unavenged death could cause fevers, fires, and other misfortunes, which would afflict the village until its members agreed to take up arms to seek a replacement for the head taken. The implements set aside for boiling the captured heads to remove the flesh were anthropomorphized into greedy spirits that were also hungry and asked to be fed:

[Full Size]

Human skulls stored in the ancestral village of Ndelo commemorate a violent
and glorious past. These skulls were unearthed and displayed when the
headhunting house was rebuilt. 1980. Photograph by the author.

A divination was held whenever the headhunting implements were found to exhibit this "heat" and diviners used a spear intermediary to question the spirits about the reason for their anger. If a headhunting raid was asked for, a chicken had to be sacrificed to "raise up" (manu kede ) the warriors for the raid; auguries read in the chicken's entrails predicted the success or failure of the strike.

Headhunting was deliberately ritualized: done only in large war parties, riding horses decorated with fine red cloth and jingling bells, the headhunter aimed to "dazzle" his opponent and hence unnerve him. The splendor of the hunter of human heads was deliberately contrasted to the simplicity required of the hunter of wild animals, who could wear no finery or gold ornaments and had to move in silence and secrecy through the forest.

The Origins of Local Resistance

Dutch forces received a relatively warm welcome when they came bearing a gold staff of office, which they planned to bestow upon the local leader chosen as raja by a Kodi council of elders. As long as they remained trading partners who recognized local leaders and contributed to the sacred patrimony of Kodi villages, Europeans did not threaten the coherence of local categories. Earlier heroes, after all, had courted the favor of foreign powers, using objects acquired from them to prove their mastery of leadership qualities. But when, contrary to earlier foreign powers, the Dutch tried to control local affairs, they were perceived as enemies rather than sources of power and authority. A new kind of hero was needed to challenge and oppose them, one who would tap a larger regional base and create a new form of resistance.

The first violent clashes occurred after a period of several months in which labor was conscripted to build a bridge across the Kodi River. One day Tila Gheda, the wife of a nobleman from the headhunting village of Bondo Kodi, returned home and showed her husband a Dutch coin she had been given to secure her silence after the Dutch commander made sexual advances on her and a slave attendant. Her husband, swearing revenge, immediately recruited two companions to help him ambush and kill the four soldiers guarding the construction site at the bridge. The heads of the victims were cut off but not taken away; their rifles, however, were seized and taken back to the headhunting cult house, where they were stored in the right front corner (mata marapu ), home of war trophies and harvest offerings. A messenger was sent to Rato Loghe Kanduyo, the first raja (toko ), to tell him what had happened.

Dutch forces retaliated before Kodi leaders could assemble. They burned

Tossi, destroying the center of calendrical rituals for the whole region and killing several older inhabitants in the blaze. The urn and other heirlooms, fortunately, were hidden safely in the gardens. The raja called an emergency meeting to respond to the attack, then sent a delegation to Bongu, home of Wona Kaka, to ask him to lead a war party. The warrior leader, already famous for taking Weyewa heads on raids to the highlands, refused their pleas three times. Only when the rifles captured from the Dutch and stored in the headhunting house of Bondo Kodi were brought to him and ceremonially presented did he accept. He knew how to use firearms from experiences with shotguns in a neighboring region; thus he was able to attack the Dutch with their own weapons.

Many of the taboos that traditionally applied to severed human heads were transferred to the guns: they could not be brought into any of the villages associated with nale and the promotion of life and had to be stored as ritual objects in headhunting cult houses. The new enemy was called the "foreigner with bound buttocks, stranger with clipped hair, white man with cat eyes, yellow fur on the snout" (dawa kalambe kere, dimya klippye longge, kaka mata wodo, ryara wulu ngora ), enlarging the older category of a "foreign mother, stranger father" to include the peculiar attributes of white men.

The Dutch commander fled to the other side of the river, where he and his troops sought refuge with the subraja of Bangedo, Rato Tende. The Dutch forces were allowed to stay in the village of Parona Baroro, under the protection of Rato Tende, who seemed to have taken them in as his own fictive kin. Rato Loghe set off with his gold staff of office to negotiate a payment of blood compensation. Since no Dutch heads had been taken in this round, his offer of buffalo and gold was, he thought, a reasonable proposal to restore peaceful relations.

The Dutch, however, understood a ruler's responsibilities differently. They captured and beat Rato Loghe to punish him for the deaths of the soldiers, forcing him to march in a wooden harness for several days to the Dutch fortress in Memboro, where he eventually died. The death of the first Kodi raja turned the whole population against the Dutch. For the next three years numerous raids and large armed battles were mounted against the Dutch forces. Warriors came to join Wona Kaka from all the villages of Kodi Bokol, hiding in small hamlets in the interior where they were fed and housed by the local people. Casualties during those years were much heavier than they had ever been under traditional intermittent headhunting raids. Some Kodinese from Bangedo fought briefly for the Dutch forces (cf. Hoskins 1985) and were killed as traitors, their deaths lamented in dirges that also note their kinship bonds. A famous battlefield

was renamed "the place where many people died" (hamate tou danga ), and almost every clan village set aside a special area outside its gates for those who had died a violent ("hot") death and could not be brought inside the circle of ancestral tombs.

Finally, all the people dispersed through the fertile interior were ordered to move to their ancestral villages along the coast, where they could be kept under better supervision by the Dutch. Abandoned gardens were burned to prevent rebel forces from harvesting the young corn and tubers. Most of the rice harvest was completely lost, the neglected fields becoming choked with weeds. Hardship and hunger soon translated into popular pressure for a negotiated settlement. A Dutch civilian named Theedens who had taken seven Sumbanese wives served as the intermediary, promising personal safety to Wona Kaka and his men if they would surrender.

The truce was negotiated in a ceremony held on the hill facing Bondo Kodi, a place renamed the "cliff where the shields were burned, the incline where the spears were surrendered" (tanjulla tunu tonda, tawada waro nambu ). The gallantry of Wona Kaka's warriors was praised by a famed orator, Ndengi Wyanda, whose words have been preserved within oral tradition:

Exhausted by the long struggle, Wona Kaka and his band were finally betrayed by the Dutch. They were not physically harmed, but they received a punishment almost worse than death. They were sent into exile on a great white ship, which came to pick them up in the harbor at Bondo Kodi and carried them off to Java. Wona Kaka himself was never to return. Haghu Ndari, a fellow clansman from Bongu, did eventually come back

to Sumba after fifteen years away. But the spirit of armed resistance to the Dutch colonial power was effectively broken.

From Headhunting to Regional Resistance

Several analytical questions emerge from this account: (1) Why were Dutch heads not taken, since the task of waging war was delegated to members of a headhunting clan? (2) How were the events of Wona Kaka's time used to create a sense of regional unity, which emerged only through this resistance movement? And (3) how has local identification of headhunters and heroes effected the transformation of these events into an anticolonialist "history"? Answering these questions demands further explanation of the historical context in which new forms of opposition took shape.

The Dutch could not be assimilated into the traditional category of enemy, used for the highland people specifically, because of differences in both their technology of warfare and the rules of combat they observed. Raids to take heads from neighboring peoples assumed that both groups were fighting by the same rules, which invariably involved reciprocity: heads were taken only to avenge earlier beheadings, and since the Dutch did not take Kodi heads, there was no reason to take theirs. Yet these categories were not so clear at the time. One man told me his grandfather in Bondo Kodi had cut off the head of a Dutch soldier "out of rage" after his brother was killed, but then shamefacedly left the head beside the body because it could not be properly consecrated. Another informant said the warriors must have held a divination in the skull-tree house after the first killings to ask the ancestors whether or not heads should be taken. He supposed that the ancestral spirits had forbidden them from doing so, saying that "a foreign head could never cool the anger created by the loss of a Sumbanese."

Members of headhunting villages traditionally avenged deaths among their close kin and affines or by specific request. Because Wona Kaka's mother had come from Bondo Kodi, he had a reason to fight on behalf of the men from that village, whom he addressed as his "steps and doorway" (lete binye ), the source of his own life and home of his mother's brother. But it was not members of his mother's village who asked him to lead a war party; rather, the first Kodi raja had asked him to do so, to avenge the members of Tossi who had died in fires set by the Dutch soldiers.

The legitimacy of the first raja was established by the same events that created Wona Kaka as a regional resistance leader. Messengers who brought news of the ambush to Tossi wanted Rato Loghe to serve as a mediator in

resolving a violent dispute, as was often done in the past. But because the Dutch colonial government had created the office of raja as head of a polity, they decided to hold him responsible for the actions of his "subjects." Their retaliatory raid on Tossi thus determined new lines of opposition by punishing a ruler for actions taken without his knowledge. It was not until he had died for them that Kodinese carne to regard Rato Loghe as their true representative. Eventually his request for revenge, made through the gift of rifles to Wona Kaka, assumed the grander dimensions of a mandate for organizing a large-scale regional resistance.

The problem of the ritual significance of Wona Kaka's war party, therefore, is more than a macabre curiosity. In a political transformation, the first Kodi raja was posthumously recognized as speaking for the region as a whole. In a second transformation that followed, new rules for warfare were developed that bound all Kodinese in opposing foreign invaders. The delegation of power from Tossi to the headhunting villages that carried out the raids acquired a new sense: without the sanction of the ceremonial center, Wona Kaka's resistance would have fallen into the category of local feuding, and antagonism between Greater Kodi and Bangedo could have been played up to take on the proportions of a civil war. But the Dutch commander made himself into the enemy of the whole region by refusing to negotiate with his own appointed ruler. By assuming a regional political unity that did not yet exist, he created a ruler who would suffer for the rebelliousness of his people and a hero who opposed outside invaders from a large popular base.

Wona Kaka's acceptance of the gift of the captured rifles is now interpreted by Kodi commentators as the acceptance of a mandate to lead a regionwide resistance movement. His willingness to fulfill an unprecedented historical role is explained through the magical power of the rifles and the influence of the skull-tree altar. His descendants in Bongu told me, "If he had not already felt the heat of his ancestors within him, he would not have dared to hold the Dutch weapons." They continue to identify him as a headhunter, emphasizing the gory details of earlier raids rather than playing them down, much as others do in regions where headhunting once flourished and has now been suppressed (Rosaldo 1980). The reasons for this emphasis, I suggest, lie at the intersection of Kodi martial traditions, an imported model of the past, and a new kind of nationalist rhetoric.

The Javanese-derived Model of the Past

The first written documentation of Wona Kaka's resistance (besides brief mention in the Dutch administrator's report; Couvreur 1915) comes from

the Kodi native administrator of the postcolonial period, H. R. Horo. Horo's account (1952) was written partly to legitimate his own position as a local leader who served the Dutch as a colonial raja, administered the island during the Japanese occupation, and authorized the first raising of the Indonesian flag. He wanted to show his respect for Rato Loghe, his predecessor whose quarrel with the Dutch led to death in prison, and at the same time to endorse the colonial system of choosing local leaders from among prominent elders and elevating their position into that of a hereditary ruler.

Horo's version of Wona Kaka's "life story" presents him as a brave warrior who defended the prerogatives of the first Kodi raja. Instead of emphasizing the oral tradition of the rape accusation that triggered the initial attack on the Dutch soldiers, he lists a series of insults to the authority of the first raja and a contemptuous gesture made by the Dutch lieutenant when Rato Loghe complained of the rigors of forced labor on the bridge. The story becomes more a drama of violations of a sacred ruler than one of territorial invasion. Its narrative organization is like that of military histories of the independence struggle on Java, detailing battles and losses and naming those Kodinese who are known to have died from each village. No mention is made of the fact that Rangga Baki, Horo's own ancestral village, is located in Bangedo and that its members were among those who originally supported the Dutch forces and, indeed, held Rato Loghe captive under one of their lineage houses. More important, no mention is made of the fact that the office of raja did not exist before the colonial period. In fact, the two Tossi rajas (Rato Loghe and Ndera Wulla) are legitimated by traditional narratives that associate their home with the center of calendrical ritual. After both had died without leaving any direct descendants, the Dutch colonial administration chose H. R. Horo as a successor, thus filling the position by appointment instead of hereditary succession.

The Kodi raja signed a "short declaration" of annexation (Du. korte verklaring ) that recognized his right to represent the people of the region during his own lifetime but did not constitute a continuing claim to rule in future generations. Since there was no Kodi "king" before the colonial period, Horo's references to insults inflicted on the "sacred power of traditional rulers" (Ind. kesaktian raja-raja ) borrow an idiom of divine kingship that applied to other parts of Indonesia, but not to precolonial West Sumba. Despite its linguistic and ceremonial definition as a domain, Kodi's constitution as an independent polity was as imaginary as those historical fictions that first linked Indonesians into a single national community.

The development of regional identities in relation to a national center

involved a continuing process of identifying local heroes and communicating this narrative to higher authorities. Copies of Horo's manuscript were sent to Jakarta for a "cataloguing" of national heroes in government archives. In 1975, the first junior high school built in Kodi was named after Wona Kaka. This recognition prompted the principal of the new school to write his own biography of the hero (Gheda Kaka 1979). In a style spiced with nationalist rhetoric and claims of suffering and injustice at the hands of the Dutch, Gheda Kaka describes Wona Kaka as opposing "350 years of colonial subjugation" of Indonesians in the Netherlands East Indies. In that the colonial presence in Sumba lasted less than three decades, identification with the longer period of colonial control in Java and the Moluccas is, to say the least, somewhat misplaced. The principal's account begins with the struggle, then moves backward and forward in time to provide details. Here is the rather florid opening passage:

Day after day, week after week, month after month, the blood was falling in great floods on our beloved homeland, from both the bullets of the White armies and the waves of flames that swallowed up the houses and gardens of the local populace, since it was imagined that these could threaten the colonial system of control. The horrifying events and cruelty of the past months had made the members of Wona Kaka's resistance force all the more hot-livered and ready to fight.
(Gheda Kaka 1979, 1)

Using accounts of heroes elsewhere in the archipelago as models, these Sumbanese writers strove to create a local "history" that conformed with other patterns of immortalizing resistance leaders—in which statues of them were erected in public places, universities were named after them, and official honors were posthumously bestowed upon them (Anderson 1978). Wona Kaka is made "Indonesian" by being identified as a "Sumbanese Diponegoro" (Horo 1952)—an identification that serves not only to legitimate a Kodi leader within the national context but also, indirectly, to assimilate Sumbanese models of leadership to Javanese ones.

Diponegoro was a prince of the Jogjakarta royal house who led the Java War of 1825-30, in which a number of aristocrats throughout Central and East Java rebelled against Dutch colonial policies. For centuries before Diponegoro arrived on the scene, ancient Javanese stories had told of a "just king" (ratu adil ), the renewer and maintainer of cosmic order, who would fuse Indic notions of successive cosmic periods with the Islamic belief in the coming of the Mahdi. Diponegoro himself had a vision that

convinced him he was the divinely appointed future king of Java and would be aided by the spiritual power of the earlier kingdom of Mataram and the Goddess of the South Seas (Ricklefs 1981, 111). His actions revived this myth, and although his revolt failed, his five-year anticolonial struggle prefigured the nationalist movement of the twentieth century. When independence did come over a hundred years later, the memory of Diponegoro was given a new place of importance in awakening the Indonesian people to the struggle for national pride and independence (Kartodirjo 1972; Locher 1978). After independence, a new myth of Diponegoro was born, one not oriented toward a future seen simply as a repetition or partial restoration of the past, but shaped by interactions with the Western world and expectations of autonomous nationhood (Locher 1978, 78).

Sumbanese heard of the rebellious prince through inspirational accounts of Indonesian leaders published after independence and school textbooks that highlighted the history of local resistance to colonialism (Notosusanto et al. 1976). Wona Kaka's resistance and Diponegoro's had numerous parallels: the anger at violations of local authority, the building of a series of "fortresses" throughout the interior to serve as bases for guerrilla activity, and the leader's eventual betrayal by a promise of safety followed by imprisonment and exile.^[5]

To praise Wona Kaka's rebellion, both Horo and Gheda Kaka use the format of nationalist narratives that describe Diponegoro's life. The capture of Dutch rifles is compared by Horo to taking possession of a Javanese kris, and the violation of Diponegoro's ancestral lands at Tegalrejo by the construction of a railway is linked by Gheda Kaka to the construction of the bridge at Bondo Kodi. Differences in time and circumstances are collapsed to promote the fiction of a single anticolonial history that was repeated in different places throughout the archipelago.

Sumbanese chroniclers joined in the wider task of creating a new mythical pattern based on the modern notion of the hero. Some early nationalist histories suggested that the twentieth-century Indonesian independence movement in fact revived an ancient polity that had territorial and political viability as far back as the fourteenth-century kingdom of Majapahit (Hadhi 1952; Nichterlein 1974). Others followed the more moderate pol-

icy of tracing the beginnings of nationalism to nineteenth-century uprisings and revolutionary organizations (Sitorus 1951; Tirtoprodjo 1961) but still anachronistically described local rebellions as opposing the whole colonial system. One contemporary Indonesian commentator on this process ascribes these retrospective identifications to "the impact of the historical attitude of Indonesian traditional culture" on students and the public: "This influence can be seen in the strong inclination to mythologize, the precipitous inclination to see relationships of moral significance between events that are not necessarily related at all. The popularity of pseudo-Marxist teleology may be indicative of a predisposition rooted in traditional Indonesian culture towards deterministic or eschatological forms of the historical process" (Soedjatmoko 1965, 411). His reference to "traditional culture," however, has little to do with Sumbanese traditions of tribal warfare and headhunting; it refers instead to Javanese prophecies of a world renewer, whose concentration of mystical power would eventually turn around an unjust social order.

This idea of "Indonesian tradition" clearly ignores certain crucial differences in indigenous notions of history, power, and authority. The Javanese polity has been described as centripetal, focusing on a "syncretic and absorptive center" (Anderson 1972, 47) where power is concrete, homogenous, constant in quality, and lacking moral implications (Anderson 1972, 8). Ascetic practices store and concentrate power in an individual for later use, but the rigors of self-denial are directly related to the creation of a "potent self" who will receive the delayed rewards of the sacrifice it has made (Keeler 1987, 45). Although the accumulation of power is stressed more than its exercise, a single ruler can be both a "passive center" and an "active executor" at different moments in a temporal process.

Both asceticism and the mystical concentration of power in a single center are alien to the Sumbanese symbolic world. In sharp contrast to the centralized Javanese polity, in Sumba those who legitimate power do not exercise it. Instead, a division of powers opposes the priests of the "source villages" to the warriors at the periphery (Hoskins 1987c). The right to take up arms had to be ritually sanctioned by the Sea Worm Priests and the first Kodi raja, and the military commander could never be the same person as the priestly authority. The dispersion and delegation of powers from the source village did not weaken its influence; rather, it displayed the power structure's diarchic form. A Java-centric interpretation of the Sumbanese political scene alters the structure of these power relations in an important way, for it galvanizes historical significance into a single "hero" with mystical powers rather than spreading it among different figures. Wona Kaka, namely, was only half of a symbolic polarity

that also included Raja Loghe Kanduyo. The headhunter was not a hero who claimed his own spiritual power, but rather the military "master of force" who served the supposedly immobile and constant source of ritual authority.

Thus Diponegoro was in fact a very different figure from Wona Kaka. Written accounts, even by local chroniclers, tend to "Javanize" their portraits of local heroes because of the literary and narrative conventions that they follow. When Jakarta-based historians read such accounts as source materials for the construction of a national history made up of composite local histories, they are dealing with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have already been cut to more or less uniform size and dimensions. Center-periphery relations within the new nation-state are structured by a play of mirrors: literate representatives of peripheral cultures in the outer islands (particularly those of relatively small scale) reinterpret their own traditions to fit a given narrative mold, reflecting back a version of historical events acceptable and familiar to the centralized power.

The Conflict of Heritage and History: Local Reimaginings

Reactions to these developments among Wona Kaka's clansmen and descendants have been ambivalent: while they are grateful for the attention he is receiving, they are embittered by what they feel to be distortions of the events, and there is a feeling that he has somehow been taken away from them, both literally and figuratively. In the literal sense, it is believed that because he died in exile in Java, his soul has not been able to return to the ancestral village and is still wandering lost through the skies. It must be called back with a special ceremony to allow him to assume his proper position as an honored ancestor in the village. Wona Kaka's figurative removal derives from the fact that his memory has been invested with an ideological content taken from the nationalist movement. The ritual meaning given to headhunters as a category has been lost, while his role has a defender of regional autonomy has been distorted to fit externally imposed categories.

Wona Kaka's descendants say he fought the Dutch to defend Kodi against outside invaders. His new role as a symbol of anticolonial struggle on a large scale is part of a campaign by the distant Indonesian state (called the "foreign mother, stranger father," as were the Dutch) to bring Sumbanese more fully under the control of national officials. Their awareness of this paradox is indirect, but it underlies current movements to initiate

a ritual cycle to "call back" Wona Kaka's soul and reincorporate him in the ancestral community of Bongu.

The impetus for this new ritual cycle comes from pagans in a new situation of religious diversity. In 1980, Christians made up 20 percent of the population, and there was much debate about the place of ancestral observances for Christian converts (Hoskins 1986, 1987a). The cult of Wona Kaka as a "historical figure," an official "hero," played an interesting role in the debates that took place in the 1980s regarding how he should be called back into the local community. Since he was sent into exile before any Kodinese had converted, even Christians agree that he must be called back with pagan ceremonial. But local Christian leaders are uneasy about the implications of official sanction for the ceremony, which would also legitimate implicit claims for local autonomy.

In 1984 and 1985, elders in Bongu expressed their fears and their hope for the impact of the ceremony:

We cannot pronounce his ritual names now because that would be already calling him. He would feel a twitch when we said his name, and his spirit would awake for no reason. We need a consensus, with the Christians helping us to give him a proper burial. They say the days of headhunting are past and cannot be passed on to our descendants.

Yet the fierceness [mbani ] that burns inside us is not only to take heads. It can also focus on new enemies. People are afraid to bring his soul back among us. They say it will make us rise up again to defend insults to our honor. The village will become "hot" again, even without the smoking and burning of the skull tree inside it.

The self-promotion of this passage does not conceal the implicit threat of returning Wona Kaka's soul from exile: once he is again among his descendants, the rebellious spirit of this once-powerful ancestor could infect them anew.^[6]

Rivalries between Bongu and Tossi also play on the balance between the obligations of the source—the passive authority of the raja—and the active executer—the headhunting clans. A popular song at the time of my fieldwork was the farewell sung by Rehi Wyona, Wona Kaka's second wife, as she saw her husband standing on the ship that would carry him into exile—an ironic reflection on current transformations concealed in a poignant lament about the loss of a local hero to overseas powers. Biting criticism of the nation-state and local-authorities lies under the veil of poetic allusion:

The text ridicules foreign notions of heroes, speaking of the white ship of exile as "hanging him on top of the white hero's horse"—using the conventional name of the heroic protagonists of Kodi epics. The singer reproaches the leaders of Tossi for not acting to return Wona Kaka from his

exile. Once he had finished serving for them, he should have been returned to a hero's welcome—depicted here by gifts of many fine clothes from the great mother-father village. Since none of this was forthcoming, the song implicitly attacks the authority of traditional leaders and jeers at efforts to fashion Wona Kaka as a "hero" without doing anything to help him or his descendants. The song is thus inscribed in a potentially volatile local context where the diarchic division of authority is being debated. Her search for Wona Kaka in the waters and valleys is a conventional expression of loss, but here it takes on an additional edge: she says that the territory no longer appears as Wona Kaka's own land, but as another one, where headhunters are made to serve new masters. The warrior delegated by Tossi to fight the invaders. ("the spear they threw off, the sword they stabbed with") has become the "weapon" of new invaders who twist local traditions to fit new ideological ends.

Regency-level government officials spoke favorably of subsidizing traditional rites to recall the soul of this lost hero (much as they subsidize funerals of government officials), but local leaders expressed caution. They were nervous about mixing an ancestral ceremony with national propaganda efforts, especially concerning a rebel whose heritage could ignite political clashes between government authorities and the prime symbol of resistance to outside forces.

The traditional ceremony would require "finding" and "summoning" the soul in a yaigho ceremony (Hoskins 1987b), then making more sacrifices so that the stone sarcophagus prepared by his descendants might be safely opened. When a body is irrevocably lost (as in deaths through drowning), some of the person's belongings may be placed in the grave to represent the corpse—most often his betel pouch, accompanied by a weapon, headcloth, and some clothing. None of these has survived for Wona Kaka, but his descendants made two requests of me in hopes of acquiring what they considered acceptable substitutes. The first was to look for his gun, which they thought had been sent back to Holland (where it proved untraceable). The second was to make a special photographic copy of an old plate depicting a group of men in Kodi warrior dress, identified as the rebels who were sent into exile on the "great white ship" that sailed to Java in 1913. Lota Mahemba, a Bongu man who accompanied the Kodi raja to Java in the 1950s, saw the plate hanging in a hotel in Surabaya, with the subjects identified only as "Sumbanese." He obtained the negative, which he brought back to Sumba, but no one there had the equipment to print it. In this instance, the use of a photograph to substitute for a corpse, as is sometimes done in other parts of Indonesia (Siegel 1985), epitomizes the ironies of the situation: if he is the one in the picture,

Wona Kaka may have been the very first Kodinese to be photographed, immortalized and frozen into a glass plate image for Western eyes. His physical reality, however, the bones that by rights should repose in the village center, remain missing from his ancestral home. To reassume his proper position among his descendants, an image formed by foreign technology must be introduced into Kodi, ritually processed, and transformed from its alien substance into a local product. Only once the faded photograph has decayed within the traditional stone grave will Wona Kaka have really come home.

The Hero Created by History

The many versions of Wona Kaka's life and deeds that have emerged over the past sixty years allow us to reflect on the meaning of the notion of "hero," the extent to which heroes are seen as the appropriate actors in "history," and the notion that individuals "make history" with an awareness of the consequences of their actions.

As argued in chapters 3 and 4, Kodi origin narratives are often attached to objects and locations rather than to persons. Although they are bound, as the persons are, to these heirlooms by ties of genealogy, the sense of a "Great Man," a single protagonist who plays a decisive role in reshaping the concepts of his time, is missing. People provide links, not ruptures, in Kodi thinking about the past. Thus, a new notion of "history" was required to produce a "hero" fit to carry such a burden on his shoulders. The first generation of people to settle the Kodi region, the ancestors evoked in marapu rites, were personalities remembered in narratives, but they were not assigned a decisive role in changing the course of events. While the ancestors were a crucial link to the past and could serve as intermediaries in ritual communication, they were "path breakers" only in the sense that they established precedents, not in the sense that they inspired a new sort of consciousness. What Wona Kaka actually intended to bring about by his actions will remain a mystery, for after he was sent into exile he was never heard from again. But as he sailed away from his homeland his importance as a symbol of other events over which he had no control was only beginning.

The particular meaning that headhunting assumed in "history" (sejarah ) was the legacy of Wona Kaka's defeat. The warrior leader became the hero of a rhetoric of local autonomy, a symbol not of despotic rule but of collective vigor and the desire to repel foreign invaders. Simultaneously, headhunting came to be seen as a contested tradition, a proving ground for the ideological control of the past. The idiom of enmity remained in

ritual commemorations of this earlier era, but the content of these commemorations was now peaceful rivalry, not military confrontation.

A volatile ambiguity remains about what exactly might constitute "external domination." Kodi oral traditions speak of Wona Kaka as fighting against the "heavy hand of the foreign mother, stranger father," which in 1911 referred to the Dutch colonial forces. In the present, the "foreign mother, stranger father" is the national government in Jakarta and its representatives who rule from Java or the provincial capital on Timor. If Wona Kaka was a defender of "village democracy" who opposed subservience to any power from outside the island, his struggle should continue even after Indonesian independence. When he is anachronistically praised for "opposing 350 years of colonial subjugation," a deliberate effort is made to transfer the longer and more brutal history of Java's colonial domination to islands where the Dutch were in control for less than thirty years.

Wona Kaka is praised in local written accounts as the first Kodi person to stand on the stage of history. As the earliest "historical figure" (Ind. tokoh sejarah ), his rupture with the past brought about a new awareness of the wider global context and the ability of local people to respond to this context. The category of headhunters was decisively historical because it has always been problematic in relations with outside forces. When the Dutch first took over administrative control of the island, they prohibited headhunting, the slave trade, and the raiding of foreign ships. The headhunter thus came to epitomize Kodi's precolonial traditions, nostalgically portrayed in nationalist slogans of a "primitive villag_e democracy."

"History" (sejarah ) was defined by its having been written down, recorded for an audience, and also by the idea of a tradition of illustrious examples. Wona Kaka was a hero because he could be compared to other heroes, because he instantiated a recognizable type. "History" comprised an accumulation of events, irreversible in the direction of their progress and not repeated at specific intervals. Narratives about the ancestors, by contrast, involved constant repetitions—the same games played and re-played, the same ritual powers transferred from one valley to another.

The Sumbanese focus on Wona Kaka as the first actor in the new heroic mold might appear to suggest that they shared the view of traditional society as "cold," unheated by history, and thus unchanging (Lévi-Strauss 1966). By starting "history" with the colonial encounter, the Sumbanese do not deny earlier transformations of their society; they do, however, assess their significance differently. History, in their usage, is not "about" the society it depicts; it is the process of that society's emergent self-consciousness. Before the resistance against the Dutch, there were trade relations with European powers, local feuds and headhunting raids, narratives and ancestors whose chronologies were uncertain. "History" began

when regional autonomy was challenged and the Kodinese became part of a larger world of interacting forces. It was not the presence of written documents that made these events "historical," but their consequences—the awareness of cultural identity through loss of autonomy.

In the early years of this century, Mauss ([1920] 1969, 576) noted that the concept of nation had "a negative content before anything else: often a rebellion against foreigners, a hatred of all others, even those who are not oppressors." Indonesian nationalism had its genesis in an awareness of cultural difference and a realization of the asymmetries associated with colonial hegemony (Nawawi 1971). It was also, from the beginning, linked to a heroic tradition and a construction of individual actors that depended on Dutch intervention. Pluvier (1968) has shown that an image of the native as rebel was part of the polemical content of much Dutch colonial writing, and Vlekke (1959, 384) argues that even Sukarno, leader of the Indonesian revolution, was a colonial creation: "Paradoxically, one could say that Mr. Sukarno owes his present high position to the attention given to him by the governor-general De Jonge, for his long terms of imprisonment and internment made him a hero in the eyes of his people."

The history of nationalism is related to the history of individualism, because the nation itself is conceived as an acting subject, a sentient being with certain rights to self-determination and self-rule. In creating themselves as a collective subject, Indonesians stress the deeds of a few extraordinary individuals booth as models for others and as imaginative vehicles for the nation's subjectivity. Resink (1986) has noted that the notion of historical subjectivity is wore accepted in "Indocentric" accounts of the colonial period, attributing this acceptance to the pluralist and syncretic character of the Indonesian population. It was the aim of the Kodinese "native intellectuals" who wrote the first accounts of Wona Kaka's life to present him as a model for Kodi subjectivity, to create a hero who would embody the values and ideals of his people and would show how these agreed with the national goals of integration into the newly independent state.

The ambiguities that surround the development of a nationalist historiography are evident to Indonesian historians themselves, who may participate rather reluctantly in the process of creating new national myths, from which confidence can be gained and moral sustenance drawn. Soedjatmoko (1965, 405) notes:

The passage from a scientifically justifiable historical interpretation ' into a historical myth signifies the social process through which society at large takes possession of this image, digesting it, grossly

simplifying it and thereby suiting it to its own often subconscious purposes. In a period of heightened self-assertion which nationalism constitutes, there is a great intensification and acceleration of this process of socialization of historical images and of this search for a new and significant relationship with the past and even for national self-justification through history. There is an acutely felt need to view history from a particular perspective which derives from an intensified expectation of the future.

Myths such as the one that presented the great Majapahit empire as the forerunner of Indonesian unity have been most influential when linked to a deterministic view that the historical process was guided by natural design: here the nation's uniqueness was stressed alongside notions of a manifest destiny, with traits of the traditional agrarian regional cultures being elevated into immutable virtues.

Modern Indonesian notions of history are influenced by both the nationalist model of heroic resistance and an earlier (largely Javanese) tradition that emphasized mythic precedents for present actions. Messianic expectations that surrounded Diponegoro's rebellion were later partly converted into expectations concerning national independence. Retrospectively, Diponegoro, like Wona Kaka, has been given a place as one of the precursors of the struggle for national liberation. In a similar fashion, small-scale armed resistance in isolated parts of the archipelago has been reinterpreted as expressing a unified anticolonial struggle. More sophisticated local historians acknowledge that "Indonesian nationalism was not produced by the local struggles although it later fed on their memory" (Nawawi 1971, 163). Nevertheless, the new "heroic tradition" uses the legitimating power of the past to link early anti-Dutch resistance to current loyalties to the nation as an imagined community.

If history is defined simply as public knowledge of the past, then its status as an artifact of cultural systems must establish a relationship between the present and-the past. The crisis on which Indonesian historians have concentrated in creating their own history was not the making of a society, but rather the confrontation with a colonial power. The part of the past set aside and given a new meaning as history was not a narrative heritage of ancestral journeys and the founding of villages; it was instead the part that contained a clear historical protagonist, a likely candidate for the preestablished type of the "hero."

The headhunter who was asked to use magical new weapons to attack Dutch colonial control was thus assimilated to the "heroes" that most Indonesian schoolchildren read about—guerrilla fighters in the indepen-

dence struggle. Traditional narratives and songs concerning his exploits were collected and recorded in Indonesian writings as "history." The rebel who opposed Dutch control has thus, ironically, become the tool of a new kind of ideological control: the integration of distant regions into the nation-state through assertions of a shared past.

Although Wona Kaka's resistance has been reinterpreted as a part of nationalist history, his own descendants have been reluctant to embrace this view, preferring to see him as a leader of local warriors who fought against external domination. Their position maintains a view of the past as "heritage": Wona Kaka was fulfilling a traditional role, repeating the acts of vengeance carried out to many times in the past by his ancestors. He did not intend to appear on the stage of "history" by initiating a unique event—an act of anticolonial resistance; he wished only to defend the honor of his own house and region. His descendants may enjoy the glory that his actions have brought to them; even so, they insist that they owe him the ritual duty of a reburial before they can claim to tap the power of that spiritual heritage.

My distinction between a Kodi construction of the past, which I call their "heritage," and the externally introduced ideology of sejarah has many dimensions. The one preserves evidence of the past and procedures for evaluating it that valorize a vanished order; the other encourages an alienation from much of the past but preserves records of certain persons and events who are seen as meaningful to the course of nationalist struggle. The one looks to objects and their locations as the starting points for narrative accounts, while the other prefers biographies of heroic protagonists. The one emphasizes continuities and the legitimating power of the ancestors, while the other seeks out discontinuities and the ruptures that gave birth to a new society.

In the contested interpretation of the Wona Kaka story, "history" and "heritage" compete against each other. The first resorts to official channels for support—naming the local junior high school after him, printing and distributing brief biographies; the second proposes a ritual resolution—a rite to call back his soul from Java and build a grave for him on Sumba. If Wona Kaka is made a fully "historical" figure, it will be necessary to admit that the old age of glory is definitively past. If, however, he remains part of an ancestral heritage that defends the integrity and autonomy of Kodi, his soul can be invoked in traditional ceremonies to provide new energy for a continuing struggle. Although efforts have been made to construct a memorial to Wona Kaka's resistance, the tension between these two interpretations, still unresolved, has blocked a resolution in the ceremonial idiom of either traditional ancestral ceremonies or government commemorations.

12
The Embattled Chronologer
The Politics of the Calendar

Those who count the months now whisper in the shadows
Those who measure the year now move in silence
The knots they tie are left unheeded
The lines they carve are disregarded.
—A Kodi reflection on changes in calendrical authority

As should be clear from the preceding chapters, for the Kodinese as for many other peoples, a calendar is not a piece of paper to be hung on the wall but a highly charged arena of interaction—a debating ground, at times even a battleground. The political significance of time reckoning in the area was evident in narrative traditions about the origins of Kodi social institutions, where the priest of the calendar is the symbolic anchor of the whole polity. The politics of time has attracted considerable attention in recent years, for with conversion came the new Christian time unit of the week (the naming and defining attribute of the church), and with nationalism and independence the new historical time unit of the epoch. Both constructs have transformed local notions of time, to the extent that the Kodinese sometimes speak of recent changes as a shift in the temporality of the heavenly bodies themselves. Although units such as the day, season, and year have a local origin, they are now perceived in a wider context; thus it seems that "the sun now sets differently, the moon now rises strangely" (ha pa hekango a pa tama lodo, napa hekango a hunda wulla ).

Nowhere is the disjunction between traditional and recently introduced modes of reckoning time more evident than in the conflicts over the timing of the pasola . While the authority of the Rato Nale to "measure the months and count out the year" is not directly challenged, hardly subtle pressures have been brought to bear to "rationalize" the timing of Kodi calendrical rites to correspond to the Roman calendar. Such pressures stem both from a misunderstanding of the flexibility and negotiability of Kodi time reckoning and from a failure to appreciate the importance of the Kodi calendar in a regional system that includes most of Sumba.

As a result of such pressures, the nale festivities and the pasola have become out of sync with the ecological rhythms they were supposed to mirror. A highly inauspicious event has become commonplace: the sea worms often do not swarm on the morning of the ritual performances. Nale ceremonies, therefore, must frequently be performed without the presence of the nale themselves. To understand why this happens, we must first examine the social consequences of this disruption, then the technical problems of primitive calendars involved.

The Politics of Sea Worm Festivities

It was at the height of the rainy season, in the damp, muggy months of the Kodi new year in 1980, that I first went to visit the Rato Nale of Tossi in his ritual confinement. Sitting calmly in the shadows of his veranda, he was pounding betel nut as he watched the sky cloud over for another downpour. For the past month he had remained within the Sea Worm House at the center of the village. He did not join the others who went to work in the gardens and could not touch or eat the newly ripened crop of corn that they brought home. He could not travel by motor vehicle, sing or speak in a loud voice, or even wander outside the stone walls of his own village. He was the highest-ranking ritual specialist in all of Kodi, yet he appeared at that time to be the most afflicted. His "brooding" in that particular year concerned a new series of threats to his authority and to the health and prosperity of the people of the region, which I was not to hear about for some time.

Ra Holo, the "holder of the new year" (na ketengo a ndoyo ) in Tossi, was a dignified, retiring man of fifty, with a lean face and large, haunted eyes. He had been called to assume the office when he was in his thirties, "just a child" as he described himself, after a period of several years when the office had been vacant. The House of the Sea Worms had been burnt down in the sixties, and none of the proper rites could be performed until it was rebuilt.

His reticence, despite his cordiality and hospitality, sprang in part from a profound ambivalence about his role as guardian of such a sacred tradition. "I was asked by my grandmother to do this," he would say humbly, referring to the divination in which the spirit of Mbiri Kyoni spoke to designate him as the next Rato Nale. "She was a great priestess, a person who knew the secrets of the months and the years, and I am an unworthy successor."

Supposedly the Sea Worm Priest is not just a carrier of important knowledge and mythological narratives; he is also their shaper. Yet unlike

[Full Size]

Ra Holo's position as the Rato Nale has become increasingly embattled as
government officials take over many of the functions once held by
calendrical priests. 1988. Photograph by Laura Whitney.

other chronologers such as the Mayan daykeeper (Tedlock 1982) or Incan calendrical priest, the Rato Nale does not possess a large amount of esoteric knowledge. He has rights to certain narratives that are fairly well known, and in his task of counting he observes the seasons and pays some attention to the stars; but his astronomical competence is scarcely more than that

of the average layman, in a society where the names and attributes of constellations are little known or commented on.

The Rato Nale, then, represents less an ideal of knowledge than one of ritual discipline. By his own immobility, he brings unruly forces into control; by his own confinement, he keeps disorder at bay. Ritual action, and in this case inaction as well, are the key to his ceremonial importance. He is, in short, less a sage than a moral exemplar.

In the first year that I attended the festivities referred to as the "Kodi New Year," I was received by Ra Holo in the central ceremonial village of Tossi and followed him as he made offerings to the ancestral spirits. On the morning that the worms were supposed to begin their swarming, though, as I rushed to the coast along with others carrying baskets and small troughs, there was a disappointment: the worms had not arrived. Despite several evenings of ribald singing along the beaches, offerings of betel nut scattered on the tombstones, and all the complications of arranging the pasola combat, the deities from the sea did not show up to watch these festivities held in their honor.

"Why has this happened?" I asked the others who ran down to the beach expectantly. "What does it mean?"

Most of them were not particularly distressed. "It means that the big swarming will not come until March," they said. "It isn't a good sign for the year, but the worms are certain to come after the next moon. Their absence now means the harvest will be poor in Kodi this year. The rains have shifted away from us and will fall on Wanokaka instead [where the pasola is held in March]. We will have to plant more corn and more tubers to fill the empty bellies of the next months."

The failure of the sea worms to arrive was obviously inauspicious but not catastrophic. It was—as I was soon to learn—an occurrence that was not unexpected in this particular year, for reasons concerning the now-contested area of calendrical authority. The reference to fertility being transferred from the harvest to other domains played on a form of rivalry between Kodi, the acknowledged source of the sea worm ritual and the pasola combat, and districts like Wanokaka, Gaura, and Lamboya, which have more recently incorporated the celebration into their ceremonial system.

More mysteriously, the Rato Nale himself had very little to say about the worms' absence. He was not surprised and simply stated, stoically, "This is what we should expect nowadays. There have been so many changes." I tried to get him to interpret the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of the event, but he would comment no more. The only other thing he said, a bit sourly, was that "Ra Ndengi was right to stay home."

Although I knew that Ra Ndengi was the Rato Nale of Bukubani, his ritual counterpart, and I had been told that he was sick on the day of the pasola and would not be attending, I did not immediately link these two comments. It was only later, when Others filled me in on some of backstage drama surrounding the events, that I came to see what was going on.

In January of that year, both Ra Holo and Ra Ndengi had been visited by officials from the governor's office in Waikabubak. They announced a new policy: in order to "improve and upgrade" the quality of traditional ceremonies, they would need to be told the dates of the pasola ahead of time so that important guests could be notified and "distinguished outsiders" could be brought to witness the spectacle. "The pasola has become a symbol of the local culture of Nusa Tenggara Timor," they argued; "it shows our courage, our skills in horsemanship, and our heroic resistance to Dutch colonialism." They revealed that a statue of Sumbanese men on horses and carrying lances had been erected just outside the main airport of the provincial capital of Kupang, and there were new efforts to discover how this "exercise for war," as they called the pasola , may have contributed to the regional resistance led by Wona Kaka. Ra Holo, as a man who had received an elementary education and spent some time in government service, understood that this was a form of pressurge, and one very hard to resist.

Traditionally, the date for the swarming was not announced until seven days before the event, when the Rato Nale told the people that he had sacrificed a chicken to mark the first day of the seven-day countdown after the full moon. His decision that this moon was Nale Bokolo meant that others could begin preparing their chickens and rice for the move to the coast.

Impatient with delays and uncertainties, a former district administrator declared hotly: "I can count the days and nights as well as anyone!" and asserted that all he needed was a calendar telling him when the new moon would appear in February. Other people protested this claim: "You are not the .priest who holds on to the year," he was told by a rival. "The Kodi months are not the same as the foreign months, so you cannot know unless you have been watching the stars and the seasons as the priests have."

The Roman month of February was usually, but not always, the month when the pasola performance was held. By imposing an external calendrical system on the traditional ceremonial season, the district administrator was trying to establish an exact correspondence that was not, in fact, possible. He knew that the Roman months did not begin with a new moon and so recognized part of the problem; nevertheless, he countered

that "we know the worms come in the second month of the year, so why should we wait for the priests to count it out?"

Ra Ndengi withdrew from the conflict and refused to comment on it at all. Ra Holo, called into the district office by the current head of government, confessed to a certain confusion. "I know only what I was taught and the way they told us to count," he said simply. "The Kodi months are not the same as the foreign ones, but if you want to announce the date when you think it will be, we will not fight you. Still, it is dangerous to try to dictate to the marapu . Who knows if the sea worms will come?"

Other commentators, more forcefully, said that they thought the government efforts to meddle in the traditional calendar would endanger the health and prosperity of the whole region. Using the veiled language of ritual speech, they whispered to me:

Their words suggested ominous consequences. And indeed, when the pasola was held on the date announced by the government spokesman, no sea worms swarmed off the western beaches. Only after the next moon did they appear, making March 6 the "large swarming" instead of the "leftover one" (hale wallu ). The harvest that followed, moreover, was a 'very poor one, the rains were sparse and insufficient, and many young rice plants never filled with golden kernels as they should have. The damage was worst in Mbali Hangali, the home of the former district administrator, but all over the area traditionalists speculated that it was related to efforts to meddle with the traditional calendar.

Ra Holo himself declined to given an opinion on the issue. Instead, on my next visit, he asked me to make a chart of the Kodi months to show to government officials, so if they decided to set the dates again they could do so more accurately. He said it was important to explain something of how the system worked but confessed that he could not fully understand

what was involved in "shifting" the months from one year to another. Although he knew well that it was difficult to predict exactly which day the sea worms would swarm, he had no idea that he was grappling with the abstract problem of intercalating the lunar calendar and the solar year.

The Problems in Primitive Calendars

Ra Holo was not alone in his confusion. The study of variation in notions of time and time reckoning has long been vexed with such problems, and it is increasingly difficult in the modern world to find groups whose original, preliterate temporalities have not been clouded or even permanently distorted by comparison with the now ubiquitous Western calendar.

In the earliest description of Sumbanese notions of time, Samuel Roos, the first Dutch official to travel on the island, reported that "there are no names for the days or the weeks. The Sumbanese live, in what concerns the reckoning of time, as in all else, in a continuing state of ignorance." He did record fourteen different names for periods of time within the year, which corresponded roughly to the Malay category of "moons," but noted a high amount of inconsistency in informants' statements: "Among fifty Sumbanese, only one will be encountered who is able to give the names of the periods in the proper order or who can say which is the present month" (Roos 1872, 70).

Inconsistency is not, however, the same thing as ignorance. Many students of non-Western time systems have found people hard to pin down on which lunation it is, and they have often interpreted discrepancies as signs of laziness or lack of care. More recent and sophisticated analyses, however, have revealed that a certain flexibility may be necessary to keep annual cycles adjusted to seasonal variations in variable ecological regions (Aveni 1989; Turton and Ruggles 1978). Temporal knowledge is an attribute of individuals as participants in organized societies, and it varies with the social needs of the group.

Two of the most famous peoples in the ethnographic literature, the Nuer and the Trobrianders, have lunar calendars that are complexly calibrated to conjoin natural and social needs. Evans-Pritchard (1940, 100) tells us that the Nuer conceptualize the named moons in relation to the activities that they perform, and are much less concerned with the lunar cycle than the round of subsistence activities in which it is inscribed: "Nuer do not to any great extent use the names of the months to indicate the time of an event, but generally instead to some outstanding activity in process at the time of its occurrence." Similarly, in Kodi many events are situated in time as before or after the harvest, before or after planting,

and to a certain extent people may try to figure out what name to give a month on the basis of these activities. However, the degree to which Kodi month names are fixed varies throughout the annual cycle.

Malinowski (1927, 211) believed that the Trobrianders did not have a calendar in any full sense because he could locate only ten common names for the months of the year (he thought, on the model of the Roman calendar, that there should have been twelve). He noted, however, a fair amount of regional variation in which month was given which name, and this was related to the timing of the milarnala harvest festival, which—as in Kodi was supposed to coincide with the swarming of sea worms (also called milamala in the Trobriand language). Edmund Leach (1950, 245), relating Malinowski's data to other Pacific societies, provides clues to unravel these differences; he also suggests an underlying pattern that is found, in a different form, in the Kodi calendar as well.

The purpose of any calendar, lunar or otherwise, is to measure the progress of the seasons and make possible the accurate prediction of their arrival. But the concept of the year as a fixed number of days (365.24 for the solar year) is an artificial temporal development associated with an advanced state of astronomical knowledge. Therefore, it is the periodicity of the seasonal cycle that is appreciated first, by all early chronologers, and not the duration between successive periods.

If, as in most primitive calendars, the year is first divided into periods by naming the moons, some mechanism must exist for intercalating the lunar and solar years. Because the lunar month consists, astronomically, of 29.53 days, a lunar year of twelve months would be only 354.36 days long. Each year, as the months were named and passed in succession, there would be a gap of 10.87 days, and after three years the months would have fallen behind by one in relation to the solar cycle. If an extra month is inserted in the lunar year once every three years, the two calendar years will be closely synchronized but not completely congruent. Once every twenty-nine years or so, a further intercalary month would be required. The problem that faces every user of a lunar calendar, therefore, is how to keep the "counting of the moons" in pace with the passage of the seasons—the part of Kodi chronology referred to as the "measuring of the year" (ghipo a ndoyo ), so that the wet and dry seasons do not slip away from the months named for the activities of planting and harvesting.

Evidence from the Wogeo, Yami, and Trobriand calendars surveyed by Leach (1950) suggests that this is done by adding—in certain years—an additional lunar month. Obviously, some ritual authority is needed to decide when the addition must be made, and some external check is needed to keep the two calendars in synchrony. Materials from many parts of the Pacific suggest that the annual swarming of sea worms is often what

provides this external check, with the sequence of ceremonial activities coordinated around this event.

If, as in the Trobriands, the festival of the sea worms is staggered from one district to another, the total number of month names may not add up to thirteen or even twelve, because a group of month names may be counted but not named, or counted only after the occurrence of the festival itself. Malinowski had argued that the use of month names by the Trobrianders was not calendrical but simply a haphazard correlation of gardening activities with the sequence of the moons; "gardening seasons" he said, "constitute the real measure of time" (Malinowski 1927, 211). Gregory Forth's meticulous examination of temporal classification in Eastern Sumba likewise does not address the issue of intercalation. He says Rindi wula are periods "of varying and indeterminate lengths . . . and do not coincide with the lunar months" (G. Forth 1983, 59), so they cannot be used for intercalation.

Yet even if we grant that the occurrence and naming of a particular moon is reckoned according to natural phenomena and social activities, this does not mean that there is not also a rudimentary calendrical function. The Rato Nale's role in "counting the months and measuring the year" after all, permits measured numerical prediction of coming events and is thus an independent scheme of time reckoning that goes beyond haphazard empiricism. As Leach (1950, 249) says, "if some event in the seasonal cycle is required to occur at some point in a lunar sequence, then a true calendar must exist, and this implies the existence of a correlation." The correlation is perhaps less evident in East Sumba, where the annual appearance of the sea worms is not ritually celebrated, but it is nevertheless indicated in the names of the months.

In addition, inconsistencies in the names reported for moons in Kodi and other districts of Sumba suggest that (1) there is a definite period of "forgetting the moon name" which is where the flexibility and possible intercalation must be found; and (2) the festivities held in Kodi require the prediction of the worm's swarming and thus work a bit differently from the Trobriand example. Thus, I argue that a Kodi lunar calendar does exist and that its functioning was once of great political significance. Reconstructing how it works today involves a delicate and complicated examination of a tradition under fire and a continuing struggle to keep an indigenous temporality alive in the face of new incursions.

Lunar Calendars in a Regional System

Leach proposes that the swarming of the sea worms off the southern edge of the Trobriand island chain each year following the full moon that falls

between October 15 and November 15 (our time) is used to "restart the year" and keep the ten-month lunar calendar in concert with the seasons (table 5). The "sea worm month" of Milamala, he argues, must in fact be considered as a set of four months that are broken down regionally among the different districts of Kitava, Kuboma, Kiriwina, and Vakuta. Only the people of Vakuta are able actually to observe the swarm, so their calendar serves as the checkpoint for the others. Once the swarming occurs, the people of Vakuta call the next full moon "the moon just past milamala. " In order for the intercalation to work, that is, they must name the moon retroactively : the year is "extended" if the worms fail to show up at the appointed time. In practice, then, one year in three has thirteen months, since the milamala is duplicated periodically to keep the moon names in sequence with the worms. As Leach (1950, 254) sums it up:

The whole territory can thus complete a 12-month cycle without any one area bothering to count more than 10 months. So long as each group knows the relative position of its own "calendar" to that of its neighbor, the system is complete. . . . Clearly it is a much

simpler piece of intellectual analysis to know that one celebrates milamala one month later than someone else than to bother working out whether the year really contains 12 or 13 months.

Leach's case that the sea worms can be used to restart the year and keep it in sync with the seasons is convincing on a hypothetical level, and it explains the staggering of Milamala in different districts to permit adequate prediction of the festive season's approach. Yet it is not necessarily the only method used by the Trobrianders, or even the predominant one in all districts. One wonders what other social factors are involved when the moon "goes silly," to use the Trobriand term, and the Milamala is extended. Is this inauspicious? Does it confirm or threaten the position of Vakuta relative to the other districts? One commentator compares the event somewhat facetiously to "those of us in northern climes celebrating another December if snow didn't arrive in time for Christmas" (Aveni 1989, 176). In fact, a more complex system would seem to be involved, one that involves potential conflict between Vakuta, the "standard-bearer" and other districts that use alternate methods.

Leo Austen, the resident magistrate whose description of Trobriand calendars forms the basis of Leach's discussion, believed that observations of the stars were the defining feature of Trobriand garden periods. Native astronomy involved a "counting or reckoning" not only of the moon but also of constellations and was centered on a man in the Wawela village of Kiriwina who held the office of "local astronomer." "Garden times" corresponded not to lunations but to named star groups, most notably the Pleiades, Aquila, and Orion's Belt. All of the garden magicians (towosi ) had some knowledge of the seasonal garden times, which they needed to regulate the phases of work involved in cultivating taitu yams. The old man in Wawela, however, was the greatest authority, and his knowledge became the basis of Austen's own standardization of the calendar, since "the native himself often needs leading in the right direction, especially in those years when there are thirteen months (when the moon goes 'silly')" (Austen 1939, 240-41).

In describing and systematizing the Trobriand garden times in terms of European months and dates, Austen effectively destroyed the functions of the traditional astronomer and garden magicians. He assumed the familiar "white man's burden" of "rationalizing" the calendar in the name of progress and increased productivity:

There were famines in ancient times, but that may have been due to poor tools and late planting (owing to the moon having gone "silly")

but nowadays the yearly harvests should be greater than in the olden days, and the native should have more spare time. It is most important for the European, be he missionary, government official or trader, to understand Trobriand horticulture, for by knowing the important phases of gardening and the times when they should be taking place, he will be able to regulate his contact with the Trobriander so that he will not interfere with most necessary work. Again, the European will be able to watch that the native himself does not waste his time when he should be doing important garden work.
(Austen 1939, 251-52)

As on Sumba, local government assumed the task of ordering people back into their gardens when the rains seemed to be approaching, thus displacing the traditional authorities who had once fulfilled that function.

Austen (1939, 247) notes, however, that astronomical knowledge was unevenly distributed throughout the Trobriands; in particular, he wrote, "the Vakutans have lost most of their star-lore, since it was unnecessary when they could always adjust their calendar correctly by the appearance of the palolo annelid [sea worm]." This comment suggests to me that both systems of intercalation—one based on astronomical observation, the other on the sea worm swarming—coexisted but were of greater or lesser importance depending on the region. Leach (1950, 256) acknowledges that his model may have required a "supplementary stellar check" three months later, or a judgment based on the Pleiades, but is unwilling to sacrifice the principle that the different regional calendars depend on one another for verification.

Sumbanese regional calendars show a similar range of similarity and difference. Month names collected in four districts of East Sumba (Kambera, Kapunduk, Umalulu, and Mangili; table 6) and West Sumba (Lauli, Wanokaka, Anakalang, and Lamboya; table 7) all contain references to the swarming of sea worms, which they may use for coordinating annual cycles. Months are named after seasonal activities, and because the onset of rainfall and the blossoming of particular plants vary slightly in time across regions, some deviation is to be expected. All over the island the sea worm swarming is called nale or ngeli , and it falls in the moons that correspond roughly to February and March. Most calendars name two moons after the sea worms, in Kodi there are three (with the center one marked as the largest swarming), and in Lamboya five. Significantly, the word nale itself is sometimes given the Indonesian translation musim ("season"); in other words, it can be used as a phase of the solar year and not only to refer to the worms themselves. All of the Sumbanese calendars

have a period of prohibitions and ritual silence, called the "bitter months" in the west (wula padu, piddu , or podu ) and the "older months" (wula tua ) in the east.

The amount of agreement between the calendars is strongest concerning the moons when the sea worms are said to swarm and—in the west—the timing of the bitter sacrifices. In the seven interviews I conducted in different districts,^[1] all my informants situated these events at roughly the same period in relation to the Roman calendar. There was much less consistency in the naming of the moons that fall toward the end of the dry season—roughly July, August, and September. One person, speaking about the Lamboya calendar, said that there were no month names for that period (Mitchell 1984). In Wanokaka, this period includes a month that "has no name" (wula dapangara ); in Anakalang it is a month that "is not counted" (wula dapa disa ).

Austen (1939, 244) also noted a period of "calendrical amnesia" among his Trobriand informants, which he situated in the period following the first new moon in June and extending until the heliacal rising of the Pleiades. In this "time of confused ideas" it would be possible to intercalate a thirteenth month without much popular awareness of the fact, because very few people know the moon's name at that time.

My field experience revealed a similar pattern in Kodi (table 8). After wula padu (the "bitter months"), people were well aware of what lunar month they were in and could give the Kodi name for the moon quickly, especially as the dates of Nale Bokolo approach or are still in the recent past. If asked for the name of the Kodi moon toward the end of the dry season, however, most informants will stop to count the months out on their fingers, consulting others and trying to remember the proper sequence of named moons. Inconsistencies that I recorded in eliciting the sequence of named months all concern the period from June to September, the common pattern being to invert the order of the two month pairs named for flowering plants (Rena Kiyo/Rena Bokolo and Katoto Lalu/Katoto Bokolo).

It therefore seems reasonable to expect that if there is slippage in the

traditional lunar calendar, it will occur in the period of vagueness and confusion, when people are distracted by the accelerated temporality of the feasting season with its large-scale gatherings.^[2] From the time of the rice harvest of April-May until the bitter sacrifices that precede planting, people say that "the moon is watched only for dancing." What this means

is that since singers and orators face dancers across the central plazas of the ancestral villages, if the feast can be coordinated with the full moon, spectators will enjoy it much more. The full moon of the ceremonial period, indeed, is sometimes called "the full moon of dancing" (wulla taru, nenggo ore ), instead of one of the conventional calendrical names being used. Thus, I side with Austen over Leach in supposing that an intercalary month must come in the period of the "dancing moon" and not at the sea worm swarming, but I agree with Leach that the swarming can work as checkpoint and corrective device. In the end, therefore, I think that both seasonal indicators in the dry season and the sea worms are used to keep the lunar calendar synchronized with the solar year.

The evidence concerning Sumbanese "native astronomy" is more difficult to assess. The calendars of West Sumba make no reference to the movement of other celestial bodies, focusing exclusively on social activities (harvesting, singing, ritual silence) and natural phenomena (the blossoming of certain plants, the nesting season for birds, the appearance of animals in the sea).^[3] The last month of the East Sumba calendars is called the "time of the Pleiades" (tula kawuru ; lit., "the prop of the cluster") and falls in late November or early December. G. Forth's (1983) informant in Rindi used this month as the starting point for his list of month names. An Eastern Sumbanese myth about the Pleiades tells of a brother and sister who committed incest and were separated by being banished to opposite ends of the sky. They turned into stars and became associated with the all-knowing and all-powerful deity of the heavens (Kapita 1976a, 166). In one version, their exile was the beginning of the division of the year into a wet and dry season, and hence essential to the genesis of garden crops. They were sent away "so the maize may reach its early stage of growth, and the rice may make its first appearance above the ground." When one of the three children born of this union was killed, furthermore,

food crops were created from the body (G. Forth 1981, 86-87; Kapita 1976a, 166).

The myth is a variant of one collected in West Sumba, which interprets the constellation as representing the "seven brothers and eight sisters" who migrated to the island together and intermarried. The last sister had no one to marry, so she became the wife of Lord Rat, who cut open her pregnant body to pull her down the hole into his underground home. After four days, her body was transformed into rice (Hoskins 1989b, 434). (See also text #4 in chapter 3, on the origin of bitter and bland months.)

Many other Eastern Indonesian peoples recognize that the Pleiades and Antares are never present in the sky at the same time (Arndt 1951, 1954; Barnes 1974, 117-18), and throughout the Pacific these celestial bodies assume an important place in the mythology of Polynesian peoples, including the Maori, Hawaiians, Marquesans, Tahitians, and Marshall Islanders (Nilsson 1920, 126-27).

In Kodi, the Pleiades are called the "signs of the year" (tanda ndouna ), and many people are aware that the heliacal rising of these stars corresponds to the coming of the rains and thus to the period of planting. A few other stars and star clusters are named, but they seem to designate general seasons rather than specific months. Antares, for example, is called the "man in the sky" (tou ela awango ); the evening rising of this star marks the start of the feasting period (as in Rindi; see G. Forth 1981, 86).

The presence of Antares and the "morning star" (presumably Venus) is considered necessary to the ritual singing of the dry season (July—October). The end of a long night of yaigho orations is signaled by a verse that explicitly mentions the constellations:

Orion is observed and a story is told: In the early hours of the dawn, first three smaller stars become visible, followed by a large red one, which would seem to be Betelgeuse. It is perceived as the procession of a great lord (tou rato pinja ) and three companions: his pig (mandune wawi ); his slave, Lero Nggata (tou papawende ); and his warrior guardian, who carries a Savunese shield (mandune tonda haghu ).

Astronomical observation apparently plays a greater role in East Sumba, where the sea worm swarming is not ritually celebrated and in fact rarely

observed. G. Forth (1983) suggests that the Pleiades and Antares are used in a binary Sense as seasonal indicators, but they are not explicitly pegged to the moons or the lunar-based calendrical system. Kodi materials tend to support this idea, with the addition that a greater reliance on the nale has supplanted extensive stargazing.

The idea of "major" and "minor" sea worm swarmings may be something of a fiction, or at least open to conflicting interpretations. Affected by factors such as rainfall, tides, and ocean currents, the exact moment Of the swarming of the sea worms is triggered by the waning light of the moon. The tail end of each worm swells and fills with eggs or sperm; then the worm travels to the beaches and buries its head in the sand as the posterior, genital parts break off and swim to a rendezvous at the surface. Each large female cluster of eggs is surrounded by a knot of smaller males, which twist and writhe in a sexual dance. The scientific literature on this marine annelid, a segmented worm of the Eunicid family (Leodice viridis ), mentions two swarmings (Saunders 1977) but does not explain how the lunar illumination might work differently in neighboring districts. As a Zeitgeber that entrains the animal to a lunar periodicity, it is also reported to produce two swarmings on the southern coast of Savu (Fox 1979a, 153).

It is perhaps more accurate, therefore, to say that the swarming occurs in either February or March, with a few of the worms showing up early or late. The Kodinese say they catch "the heads" the first day, then "the bodies" at the main swarming, and only "the tails" on the last day. The conventional wisdom that there are two swarmings, with the most abundant one on the predicted day, allows the Sea Worm Priest's prediction to be considered accurate if it holds true for a two-month period .^[4] He can use the major swarming to check the intercalation and then, if needed, correct his predictions for the following year.

What happens elsewhere on Sumba if the sea worms fail to show up? Edgar Keller, who did ethnographic research in Lamboya in 1984-86, reports that the big swarming that is supposed to occur there at the time of pasola (also "in February" according to official sources) does not happen most years. The explanation he heard was that the priests in the ritual center of Sodan "made a mistake" in the past, and as a result the ancestral spirits sentenced the Lamboyans to perform the rituals of the nale month

without the sea worms being present. Even when the festivities do coincide with the swarming, the priests are not allowed to collect the worms or consecrate them in their ancestral homes (Keller, personal comm.; Hoskins 1990a, 58-59). Geirnaert Martin (1992) confirms this account.

I suspect that this "mistake" had to do with the Sumbanese moons being confused with foreign months; that is, the worms were predicted to arrive "in February" instead of during a particular phase of the lunar cycle. Whether any of the traditional calendars on the island can now operate independently of the printed Western calendar, in fact, is very much in doubt.

The 1980 Controversy over the Dates for Nale

Using our knowledge of other lunar calendars, we can now reexamine the events of 1980 to understand why the synchronization of the sea worm swarming and the nale festivities did not work in that particular year. Traditionally, the Rato Nale used seasonal indications and rudimentary astronomy to fix the advent of the "bitter months" (wulla padu ). Once that date was fixed he simply "counted out" and named four other moons (Habu, Mangata, Nale Kiyo, and Nale Bokolo) to determine when the worm swarming would come. Usually this date fell late in February. My records, for example, indicate that sea worms did swarm in some abundance on February 27, 1981, and on February 15, 1982. However, this disjunction between Kodi moons and Roman months has meant that at times the dates predicted by the Rato Nale do not fall in February—as in 1980, when the worms swarmed in greatest abundance on March 10.

Only much later did I realize that the Rato Nale had in fact forecast this date, but no one had listened to him. On October 30, 1979, just a month after my arrival on the island, I went to visit him in Tossi because of rumors that "a ritual" was being performed that day. The ritual, at which we arrived too late to hear the full invocations, turned out to be the "roasting of the bitter chicken" (tunu manu padu ), which began the four-month ritual silence of the bitter months. On that day, the Rato Nale had put in motion the naming and counting of months: hence, the moon during which the ceremony occurred bore the name Wulla Padu; the following one, which began November 19, was called Wulla Habu; on December 19 came Wulla Mangata; on January 17, Nale Kiyo; and February 16 signaled the first appearance of the Wulla Nale Bokolo. By consulting an astronomical almanac,^[5] one can reconstruct the lunar months

as they were named in the traditional system and realize why the Rato Nale had told government officials he was "not yet ready" to announce the date of the pasola at the beginning of February. The new moon, which made its first appearance on February 16, did not become full until March 1, and it reached its zenith on March 3; the sea worms swarmed seven nights after that moment, on March 10, 1980. The swarming of the nale worms is a particularly appropriate event for this intercalation, because it is pegged both to a lunar phase (the seventh night after a full moon) and a solar season (the height of the rainy season). In contrast, the padu sacrifices do not occur at any specified phase of the moon but are determined purely by seasonal markers—and their impact on the "measuring of the year" can be understood only retroactively by checking the lunar phase in which the sacrifice occurs so the significance of naming the new moon for the yearly calendar will be appreciated.

The functioning of the traditional calendar and its mode of intercalation can be further checked by reconstructing the rest of the lunar months for the period 1979-88 (table 9). We know that the sea worms swarmed for the nale festivities and pasola performances on February 27, 1981 (because I saw them), and on February 15, 1982 (because I asked an informant to send me a letter to confirm the date). We also know that on two recent occasions—in 1984 and again in 1988—the pasola was held in February, but the worms did not put in an appearance until March (March 6, 1984, and March 10, 1988). Performing the rituals without the sea worms is considered inauspicious, since the timing and abundance of the sea worm swarming is said to indicate the timing and abundance of the harvest. "If there are many sea worms, then the year [ndoyo ] will be a good one," people say, using the term ndoyo in its original Austronesian sense (Nilsson 1920, 96) to mean "season" or "agricultural produce."

The blame for mounting these rites at an inauspicious time does not belong to the Rato Nale, for my records of the padu ceremonies indicate that they were held at the correct time to keep the named moons in sync with the seasons. Rather, the government officials did not heed the priest's predictions but insisted on holding the nale festivities "in February" adhering to the Roman calendar. In 1980, namely, the padu sacrifices—which I attended were held on November 5, at the end of a lunar month (October 9-November 8) that was designated Wulla Padu Kodi. This naming of the month could have been determined in either of two ways: (1) the Rato Nale could have observed seasonal indicators and decided that

the bitter months must come "later" in that particular year, or (2) the Rato Nale could have used the timing of the sea worm swarming in 1980 to determine the moon names retrospectively . Since the worms swarmed on March 10, he would consider the moon from February 16 to March 15 as Wulla Nale Bokolo and simply count out eight more moons until the proper time for Wulla Padu.

Either method would have allowed him to predict the next swarming, which occurred in the moon that ran from February 4 to March 5—coming, on schedule, seven nights after the full moon "sat" on February

20. My questions about what method he used to determine this chronology elicited an ambivalent response:

My grandmother Mbiri Nale told me to watch the signs of the year [tanda ndoyo ]. She repeated these verses about the coming of the bitter months:

The signs she said to watch for were the winds of the end of the dry season, which blow the dust in little circles, the closing of dedap blossoms [nduka katota , also the name of the moon just before Padu Lamboya], and the absence of small fish [teppe, ighya katapa ] in the ocean. These all show that the rains will not be long in coming.

The interview that I conducted in 1980 did not go further than this, because at the time I did not realize how important the timing of the padu sacrifices was to the whole calendar. When I returned to Kodi in 1988, however, and once again saw the pasola performed in the absence of the sea worms, I realized that a more complex calculation was necessary to keep the Kodi moons in accord with the solar year, and nale with pasola . I asked if the task of the Rato Nale involved not only counting the moons but also watching the stars, and in particular if he paid attention to the Pleiades. He responded: "There are some stars that are called the signs of the year [tanda ndoyo ]. They are seven stars [mandune pitu ] that appear low in the horizon at dusk at the end of the dry season. This is a sign that we should begin planting soon [tanda tondo ] because the rains will be here soon. But the bitter sacrifice [padu ] must be performed before these stars are visible, so the stars do not tell us how to count the moons." On Sumba, the Pleiades are usually not seen until late November, when they rise just

after sunset. Ra Holo's response here seems to admit to some use of astronomical observation, but he distinguishes between his own task—which is a specialized ritual duty, that of naming the moons in order to predict the arrival of the sea worms—and the more generalized popular knowledge of the wet and dry seasons.

It might appear, from the speculative model I have presented, that the gaps in the sea worm swarming form an almost exact analogue to the Western calendrical "leap year" and that, therefore, it would be possible to achieve the intercalation simply by inserting an additional month every fourth year. This may in fact have been attempted (as it was in Western history), but such a solution would approximate the relation between solar and lunar years only inexactly. If three months were inserted over the course of eight years (as the dates I have given suggest should be done), the remainder after the solar year (365.24 days) was divided by the lunar synodic month (29.53 days) would be approximately 3/8, or .368. If four months were intercalated over the course of eleven years, the remainder would be about 4/11, or .3636 (Aveni 1989, 113). However, any simple mechanical rule would allow for some slippage, and thus probably for some retrospective correction. In fact, the system only works at all because it is determined to be vague and open to social interpretation (Leach 1954a, 120).

Regional Calendars and the Control of Time

A third possibility could explain how the task of intercalation is managed within this calendar, and in particular why many districts of Sumba that do not celebrate the swarming of the sea worms nevertheless name certain moons after this event. The arrival of the worms could in fact be used as an anchor for a more complex system in which one region "checks" its moon names against those of its neighbors. Leach's analysis suggests that such a system exists in the Trobriands, but he does not provide enough ethnographic data to ascertain how it works.

His hypothesis about regional coordination has been taken considerably further by Frederick Damon (1982, 1990), in a study of calendrical transformations along the northern side of the Kula ring. Looking from the vantage point of Muyuw, Woodlark Island, he concludes (1990, 20) that "New Year" ceremonies are not tied to specific phases of the moon but reflect a spatial progression from east to west, with different regions differentiating themselves with respect to equinoxes and an intervening solstice: "The system's rigor concerns space (and kinds of time), not the amount or sequence of time" (1990, 9). While the Trobrianders are vitally concerned with "catching time reckonings" (Malinowski 1927, 205) and

"great arguments take place over the naming of the moon" (Austen 1939, 243), in Muyuw a spatial vocabulary is more important than a temporal one for modeling the culture's main principles and institutions (Damon 1990, 17). Damon's analysis suggests a pattern of cultural differentiation, with one area designated as the "timekeeper" and others focusing on other criteria of order. The local astronomer of Wawela would thus occupy a ritual office quite similar to that of the Rato Nale in Kodi.

Looking at the whole set of Sumbanese regional calendars as a system and considering their interrelationships, we see that relations between districts are related to moon names. It would seem that even in the precolonial period there was communication about the timing of seasonal rites. As in many other "primitive" systems of time reckoning (Nilsson 1920), the names of certain moons are either duplicated or distinguished as "greater" or "lesser" versions of each other (thus the Kodi Nale Kiyo and Nale Bokolo, the Umalulu Tua Kudu and Tua Bokolu). In addition, the moons named for crucial calendrical rites (nale and padu in the western districts) are staggered over several districts, often occurring one month earlier in one district relative to its neighbor. The calendars in fact refer to each other constantly, naming moons after the ceremonial practices of a neighboring domain.

The names of the moons indicate a coordination not only of natural events (sea worm swarmings) but also of social events: the ritual celebrations associated with these swarmings. Kodi, as the source of the sea worm festivities, is indeed the "base of the year" (kere ndouna ) for the whole island. The importance of coordinating the festivities is suggested by the fact that Wanokaka, Lamboya, and Gaura (the other coastal districts that celebrate nale ) acknowledge Kodi as the source of the rite.^[6]

The complex interrelations between the calendars of the districts of West and East Sumba suggest several conclusions:

1. The different regional calendars could have been used, as Leach suggests, to coordinate a common system for the whole island, loosely

based on the nale swarming. This coordination would be based on a shared understanding of calendrical principles, rather than on direct communication between the ritual officers concerned. The counterpart of the Rato Nale of Tossi is called the Rato Wulla in Wanokaka and Lamboya, but they have never met and, without a common language, could not communicate even if they did meet. Before the recent paving of roads in the 1980s, each district was several days' travel from the next, across dangerous rivers and rugged mountains. In addition, the districts of Kodi and Gaura once took heads from each other, as did those of Wanokaka and Larnboya. Nevertheless, the calendrical priests in the other districts affirm that the method of "counting the moons and measuring the year" originated in' Kodi. It must have been through inland districts (Ende, Rata, Weyewa, and Lauli) that the names of the months spread, and the nale swarming was used to coordinate a calendrical system shared, with minor variations, by all people on the island.

2. The moment of intercalation occurs at the padu sacrifice, when a new planting year is begun; this point is thus the real "beginning" of the calendar. Immediately before padu , people have only a hazy idea of the Kodi moon and are aware that the "bitter sacrifices" can come early or come late, depending on whether or not the rains seem about to fall. The Rato Nale thus performs the important social function of shutting down all ritual activities so as to concentrate the attention of the population on preparing their fields, and he has the delicate task of coordinating this moment with the seasons and the rains. He may use some astronomical signs but relies primarily on seasonal indicators (dust, plants, the sea) and the moon in which the swarming occurred eight months before.

3. Within the moon called Nale Bokolo, seven nights are counted from the moment at which the moon reaches its zenith in the sky and prepares its descent. In Kodi, this is called the time when the moon "sits" (londo a bei wyulla ) in the sky, temporarily immobilized in its fullness. Although the swarming is said to occur seven nights after it sits in Nale Bokolo, it takes place only six nights later in Nale Wallu; this is expressed in the couplet pitu nale ndoyo, nomo nale wallu , "seven for the sea worms of the year, six for those that are leftover." The training of the Rato Nale includes instruction in "reading the moon" to determine the moment it reaches its zenith—as opposed simply to its fullest phase. The moon's temporary immobility, hesitating at the edge of transition, is symbolically expressed by the ritually enjoined immobility of the Rato Nale.

4. Within each domain, the lunar calendar appears as an annual cycle with a defined phase of "looseness" or "slack" before the padu sacrifices; as a regional system, however, it has a permutational aspect. Different

domains punctuate different parts of the year by holding their most important calendrical ceremonies in various months. The two different months for nale festivities (the first celebrated in Kodi and Lamboya, the second in Wanukaka and Gaura) are only one instance of the rotation of "New Year" rites. In Lauli, the most elaborate ceremonies are held at padu , so the "New Year" is said to fall in October-November. In Anakalang, the annual cycle climaxes in the "descent to the priest valley" (purungu ta kadonga ratu ), which usually falls in April.

Social and cultural differences are marked by varying punctuations of time, which also allow members of neighboring domains to attend calendrical rites in other regions as spectators. Damon's argument that the northern Kula ring calendars are structured as a system of continuities and discontinuities could also be made of the Sumbanese months. Although the swarming of sea worms continues to serve as a temporal checkpoint, at least to a certain extent, on Sumba the cultural significance of calendrical variation clearly lies in its character of ordered diversity. While the people of Kodi are still proud to be the "time masters" (mori ndoyo ; lit., "the masters of the year") of the island, the political centrality of the traditional calendar is coming under ever greater threat.

Epilogue: Stepping In and Out of Time

The two persons who occupied the office of Rato Nale in Kodi Bokol during the 1980s negotiated their positions quite differently. In 1980, when the idea of government intervention was new and its consequences uncertain, neither one of them would discuss the changes openly. Ra Ndengi indicated disapproval by his absence. His younger associate, Ra Hupu, had to shoulder the mantle of priestly functions for the whole region, but did so reluctantly and with many misgivings. In 1988, when the sea worms once again failed to swarm in February, he was willing to speak a bit more openly.

"It is not my business to tell the government when they should invite their guests," he told me. "But neither should they tell us how to count the moons. The pasola of our ancestors was staged to greet the sea worms as they swarmed on our shores from across the sea. If we do it without their presence, we are not keeping our promise to the ancestors. Now that so many people are Christian, however, they may not care."

I asked him if the government edict would affect the timing of the padu sacrifices, since these set in motion a cycle of month names that effectively predicts the arrival of the sea worms once Nale Bokolo has begun. "No,

we will perform the padu sacrifices as we have always done, but say the names of the Kodi moons softly and under our breaths so there will not be an overt conflict. They pay no attention to the names of the moons anyway, since they close off the feasting season themselves with government orders."

He referred rather ruefully to a series of government orders issued in the regency capital that put an early halt to livestock slaughter in order to limit the "wasteful" consumption of animals. Citing regional goals of improving economic conditions, these orders preempted traditional calendrical authorities from beginning the four-month ritual silence by roasting the bitter chicken. Since Kodi had sponsored the largest feasts of recent years (several of them involving over a hundred buffalo), the new restrictions were enforced particularly strictly there. Once again, his words implied, official bureaucracies had acted first, leaving him in the position of simply reacting or of offering a retrospective traditional legitimation to events that had already occurred.

In 1980, a government letter, dated September 2 and signed by the regent and district administrator (camat ), announced that no feasts would be permitted after September 15, "so that all activities could be oriented toward village development, including the cleaning and preparation of gardens in order to await planting and the coming of the rains." The letter came as no surprise, since an earlier announcement in 1976 had expressed the same sentiment, followed in 1987 by yet another. Periodically, the inflationary spiral of feasting was contained by government restrictions, only to burgeon out again in the intervening years. In particular, the government outlawed "chain feasting" (Ind. pesta berantai ), or feasts that required a "chain" of participants, each one obliged to contribute because of membership in an ancestral village.

The next month, a small group of villagers gathered to roast the bitter chicken in Tossi, making the government-enforced de facto silence into a de jure compliance with the traditional calendar. The Rato Nale held up a small chicken with these words:

As the ceremony came to an end, a young man standing next to me said,

In earlier times, if someone needed an extension to finish building his house or constructing a grave, he would come to the Rato Nale with a simple gift, a chicken, a piglet, a length of cloth, and ask for the time needed to complete his task. Now when people want to hold a feast after the padu sacrifice, they do not come to us. They go to the district office and are. told to pay a fine of 35,000 rupiah [approx. $30] so the government will extend the deadline. We were kinder time masters than the district officer.

Ra Holo had decided to make what he could of a situation in which his authority over the calendar was being increasingly diminished. By choosing not to confront his new rivals directly he kept his dignity, but he could only resign himself to the usurpation of his powers. Ra Ndengi, who was perhaps more offended by government interference, was also less concerned to carry on a tradition that seemed broken and devoid of meaning. He avoided conflict by withdrawing completely, retreating into the safety of old age and infirmity. "My eyes have turned foggy," he told me as he turned his gaze toward mine and showed the pale outlines of cataracts. "I cannot be a spectator at the pasola . I cannot see what they are doing to it. Why should I go?"

The master of time, thus, expressed his mastery by making himself into an anachronism. He was above time, he could step out of it, and by leaving it behind he could show himself indifferent to the debate about secular activities. His junior associate, wanting others to understand his priestly functions and respect them, asked for my assistance to explain his task to government officials in "rational" terms. We prepared a list of the names of Kodi moons and a suggestion that the date of the sea worm swarming could vary from one month to another.

But a sacred narrative can be "rationalized" only if it loses its unquestioned, separate status. In a modern world with easy access to printed calendars, many people saw little need for the elaborate knowledge that had been transmitted along a line of hereditary priests to keep the lunar calendar coordinated with the solar cycle of seasons. The arrival of the worms and the renewal of the natural world became less important than a performance staged for important visitors who did not care how to "count the moons and measure the year." It was easier to conclude, as regency officials did, that the sea worm festivities occurred "one week after the

full moon in February." Local time, first invented and given shape by ritual practice, ceded its place to an imported tradition of literate records.

Kodi, the domain that prided itself on being the "base of the year" (kere ndouna ) and the "counter of the months" (ghipo wulla ) for the whole island, was becoming increasingly aware of its own parochialism. "The numbers of people who listened when we spoke was once very great," Ra Holo complained to me, "but now it is shrinking." Competition with bureaucratic calendars was no longer possible: "They cannot hear our prayers anymore, they hear only the district office's loudspeaker at the market." If local temporality was forced to surrender to a more encompassing national and even international time reckoning, it was not without a protest and a nostalgic sense of loss.

13
Revolutions in Time, Revolutions in Consciousness

The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

The transformation of a traditional ritual local calendar into a modern, secular, and universal one can properly be called a revolution in time. For much of human history, the calendar has served as the primary instrument of social control, regulating the duration, sequence, rhythm, and tempo of life and coordinating and synchronizing group activities. The legitimacy of the traditional calendar rests on commemoration. It celebrates the past and inscribes the "pathway followed by the ancestors" (a lara ambu nuhi ) on the annual round of activities. When the calendar remains the most encompassing vision of temporality, the future takes its meaning from the past. Past experience is resurrected and honored as precedent that will provide guidance for future action. As the ritual centrality of the calendar has been displaced and Kodi has entered into a wider global culture, time and temporality have changed dramatically.

Revolutions in time are also revolutions in consciousness. An awareness of the progressive, linear, and cumulative notion of historical time gives a different ideological cast to local notions of the past. Even when efforts are made to preserve tradition, this preservation can no longer be based on simple ideas of continuity but requires a consciousness of possible ruptures and a deliberate decision to maintain "the heritage of the ancestors." The displacement of a ritual calendar that made Kodi the center for the ordering of time caused a shift in temporal perspectives that was to a certain extent irrevocable. It created "history" as an alternative to "heritage" and moved the locus of debate from the various evidences of narratives, objects, and actions to a new form of totalizing vision.

In this final chapter, I pull together the various strands of my argument and show their relevance to wider theoretical issues. My conclusions are of three types: (1) a local-level conclusion, which maps out the particular forms of Kodi temporality as described and analyzed in the chapters of this book; (2) a comparative conclusion, which places Kodi in the wider context of the politics of time within Indonesia and other nations of the developing world; and (3) a theoretical conclusion, which reexamines the relations of totalities and practices from a historicist perspective.

Kodi Temporality

The first problem I address is the difference between a naturalized, immutable concept of "time"—the apparently universal cycle of days, months, and seasons—and a culturally constructed view of the "past" which in Kodi was manifested in the "imported past" of objects and institutions. Looking at ordinary-language time concepts in Kodi, we saw that they are diffuse and form several logical series: one based on celestial bodies, another on domestic routines, a third on genealogy and the succession of generations. Time, born from the moment of human mortality, appears to individuals as many intervals attached to assorted meanings and not part of a grand narrative sequence. While each individual is most directly concerned with "how his or her days are numbered" and his or her own inevitable path through life toward death, this is indeterminate and the anchors of a wider social life must be sought in other, more determinable regularities. The coordination and synchronization of these very different phenomenological notions of time was the task of a ritual actor: the Rato Nale, or "Lord of the Year" custodian of sacred objects that enabled him to construct an overarching cyclical chronology from a diffuse and varied round of annual activities.

The Rato Nale was conceived as a timekeeper, a chronologer, only in the very specific sense that he constructed synchrony , the movement of different modalities of time with a coordinated rhythm or as part of a single cycle and a cultural master narrative. The synchronization of social activities depended on a fragile and often diffuse consensus; nonetheless, it is this consensus, expressed through participation in the shared ceremonial system, that constituted Kodi cultural identity. The Rato Nale did not create this synchronized temporal unity by telling stories or explaining the common basis of all the people of Kodi. He did so, and continues to do so, by performing rituals.

The authority of ritual derives from its association with cultural tradition and the power of the past to inform the present. The person who

holds the objects also "holds" the stories. Sacred "timepieces" like the trough for the sea worms or the net that once held the moon are connected to the narratives of their acquisition and the regulations concerning their ritual use. This socially constructed time is enacted in ritual performances. By performing the sacrifices of the "bitter" season, the renewing auguries of the sea worm festivities, and the harvest rites before feasting, the Rato Nale creates the "Kodi year."

The rituals of the New Year are texts without authors. In the narratives that trace their origins, a ceremonial welcome is required for the sea worms, and the worms and urn together "choose" the persons who will perform the offerings each year. The content of the rites, what is "said" by their performance, is not attributed to any specific individual. Agency is displaced from persons onto objects and a collective, anterior author, "the founding ancestors" who prescribe the form and procedures to be followed. It is only when the ritual cycle is disrupted, when contingent moments cause a disjuncture in the interlocking cycles, that a new author is needed.

The silence, passivity, and immobility of the Rato Nale was important to his ritual role as the unspeaking priest who kept the whole annual cycle in place. He became almost an object himself, as a representative of what is eternal and unmoving in a shifting world. However, when new forms of political authority and control were introduced under the colonial administration, the single figure of the "master of the year" (mori ndoyo ) came to be divided in two. The first division was within Tossi, with the active younger house of Rato Pokilo assuming an executive position but still owing ritual deference to the senior, passive "female" house of Rato Mangilo. The second division, which followed the turmoil of the extended resistance struggle at the turn of the century, redefined the "female" house as literally the province of a female priest, and introduced a male counterpart in Bukubani whose ritual role later became preeminent.

The historical shifts caused by the colonial encounter were not the first, nor the last, changes to affect the Kodi ceremonial system. We also saw that the very bases of sharing remain contested in Kodi life. Origin narratives do not trace present institutions back to a single, cosmogonic creation, but to a series of more contingent historical processes. Genealogy, skill in competitive games, and the ability to restore the fertility of the fields—"ritual efficacy"—all interact in establishing the ceremonial hierarchy. Ritual "acts out" these narrative conventions in offerings to the ancestors and in the pasola battle, but it does so in ways that highlight social differences and tensions. Rather than simply enforcing conformity to ancestral ways, ritual events provide a reflection on the past that can be

critical. They provide an open space within which the relations of objects and persons, events and structures, are constantly renegotiated and adjusted to fit the demands of each new situation.

Exchange plays out temporal relations in a similar kind of open space. A series of exchanges takes the form of a temporal chain, with each exchange creating an obligation that can only be fulfilled in time. Through such temporal chains, cumulative processes are represented and shifts between past and present are reorganized. The particular form of each exchange transaction casts its shadow over the next one. In contemporary Kodi, traditional exchange is regulated by a standard that sees time as determinant of value, but the emerging importance of market relations and wage labor offers a contrasting model by which "time" is reckoned in smaller, monetary units, less closely inscribed on individual biographies. In the not too distant future, the continuity of the temporal chains may well be threatened by this new standard of value. Recent conflicts concerning exchange have focused on the use of time and ritual intervals as a strategic resource, and on the reconstitution of social groups through a rearrangement of the temporal chains of affinity and alliance.

The "New Order" of Suharto's Indonesia has made the externally introduced temporalities of the Christian church and state bureaucracy into realities to be reckoned with on Sumba. Since independence, conversions have dramatically increased, and the power of nationalist ideology has spread to the most distant corners of the archipelago. In Kodi, a new consciousness of the past as "history"—a form of authoritative discourse that is discontinuous with the present—has begun to compete with the earlier perspective, in which the past was seen as a "heritage" a continuous tradition passed down through the generations. Nationalist history situates the real location of the past elsewhere: in Jakarta, on a world stage, in relation to a different heritage.

"History,' as experienced by isolated Small societies, breaks past and present apart and creates a radical discontinuity between ancestors and their descendants. When the heritage of ancestral precedent is still vital, only those who are able to legitimate their present actions in terms of some past paradigm are respected. When the link between past and present is broken, the past is evoked nostalgically rather than efficaciously, and its power to recreate society disappears. The traditional concept of the past was complex, based on much more than the stereotyped reproduction of earlier events. Innovations appeared and were justified as continuities of a special kind, chosen from an array of alternatives to fit new circumstances.

The idea that time is constitutive of value informs Kodi temporality, making the passage of time into a form of legitimation. The authority of

the ancestors and the distant stems, in part, from the perception that their actions have withstood the test of time. If some customary practice has been a part of Kodi society "since ancient times" (wali la mandei la ma ulu ), this fact in itself is a proof of its validity. If an ancestor brought an exchange valuable into his house and retained possession of it for generations, that continuity legitimates his ownership of the object and its power. If someone has produced many descendants and multiplied the number of people who speak his name in ritual offerings, these new generations are living proof of his importance as founder of the line. Thus, "the past" is not simply inflicted on "the present" to reproduce a static pattern (as is argued in Bloch 1977); rather, it has value because of the passage of time and the success demonstrated by longevity.

"The past" is a variable and unstable resource; its connection to calendars and ritual time is equally variable and not always reinforcing (Appadurai 1981). Knowledge of the past is highly valued in many societies precisely because, by revealing that present states are not permanent ones, it supports a consciousness of history and the possibility of change. The play of continuity and discontinuity between past and present can be particularly intense in hierarchical societies, with their complex diversity of temporalizing and detemporalizing narrative genres (Valeri 1990). Hierarchy is necessarily involved in the creation of a notion of "tradition" however contested, since in that process one part of the past is always placed on a higher level than the others.^[1]

The amount of the "past in the present" is taken by some as an index of hierarchy, and thus of "systems for hiding the world" and perpetuating social inequalities (Bloch 1977). Yet it is misleading to maintain that the past serves as an instrument of mystification and domination simply because "social theory is expressed in the language of ritual" (Bloch 1977, 288). Rituals provide a system for knowing the world as well as for hiding it, in that they constitute an arena for imaginative reconstructions and new totalizations of existing knowledge. In origin narratives, the manip-

ulation of exchange objects, and annual calendrical rites, the Kodinese reflect on their past and reinterpret it to deal with present problems. Although there is no written historiographic tradition, these traces of the past are critically evaluated as sources of knowledge about the ancestors, and there are clear standards of debate and discussion.

It is now commonplace to assert that no society is truly "without history." If history is defined as simple knowledge of the past, certainly some memory of earlier times is a human universal. What is not universal is the perspective taken on the past, the significance that it has in daily life, and the way the past is used to legitimate more encompassing orders.

Kodi presents an illuminating context in which to explore the relations between past and present for three reasons. First, as a society whose ritual system is based on the authority of the ancestors, it shows us that there is no incompatibility between a continuity of ancestral ways and a historicizing perspective on past events. Second, as a society whose social life is dominated by exchange and alliance, it shows that these temporal chains,-which are constituted across long and short time spans, are not simply individual "strategies" but more enduring "sequences." Third, as a society now in dialogue with external forces such as the nation-state, the market economy, and the Christian church, it demonstrates an imaginative resilience and an ability to recapture past values with new meanings.

Indonesian Calendars and Chronologies

Although the indigenous calendar of Kodi has provided a focus for this discussion, it is not an anomaly within Indonesia, a nation with an impressive array of systems for reckoning time and preserving knowledge of the past (Ammarell 1988; Casparis 1978). Detailed accounts of the traditional calendars of Kedang (Barnes 1974), Rindi (G. Forth 1983), Tana Ai (Lewis 1988), and Savu (Fox 1979a) have emphasized the place of time-keeping within a wider classificatory order. By contrast, the study of historical narratives on Flores (Howell 1991), Roti (Fox 1979b), and Timor (Traube 1986, 1989) has revealed the great variety of ways in which the past can be constructed even in closely related, neighboring societies.

A significant axis of variation concerns the strategic importance of the symbolic control of time, and thus the position of the timekeeper or calendrical priest. In Kodi, the Rato Nale is the "master of the year" (mori ndoyo ) and stood traditionally at the top of the ceremonial hierarchy. His authority was connected to the fertility of the soil, the rhythms of nature, and agricultural production. His power was identified as "female" tied to female objects like the urn and located in a female ritual house. In contrast to the Rato Nale stood the Rato Katoda, the warrior leader who hunted

heads to enhance the fertility of the region. The equality and sharing emphasized in the calendrical rites of the New Year were related to the most fundamental and unquestionable grounds of social existence, where each person was united to the others by a common humanity. In contrast, the rites of warfare and feasting serve to differentiate persons and establish inequalities, creating "nobles" and "commoners" as well as hierarchy of another sort, based on conquest, redistribution, and debt.

The societies of East Sumba, though they share a ritual calendar related to the arrival of the sea worms, give this regulation of time a very different political significance. Here the priest is no longer an autonomous figure, but subservient to the authority of the noble ruler (maramba ). In Umalulu (Melolo), the priest (ratu ) can be killed by the ruler and have a slave substituted in his place (Kapita 1976b). In Kapunduk (Kanatang), his genealogical claim to priority has been usurped by the noble lineage, although he can still regulate the agricultural calendar (Adams 1971a). In Rindi, the nobility have appropriated virtually all the functions of the priests, and calendrical rites are now celebrations of noble privilege (G. Forth 1981).

On the island of Roti, a similar process seems to have displaced the ritual leader known as the "head of the earth," who now has only commoner status (Fox 1979b). On Timor, the Great Lord of Wehali now presides over a miserable little house, emptied of sacred objects, but maintains his traditional authority as the "source" of the island's ritual and political system (Francillon 1980; Traube 1989). The priests of Tana Wai Brama on Flores trace a line of precedence back to the distant past and use origin narratives to legitimate their control of calendrical ceremonies similar to the Kodi rites of "bitter" and "bland" (Lewis 1988).

It would appear that wherever political power was centralized and consolidated under the leadership of a single ruler, the authority of the priest was undermined. Bali, with its famously complicated water temple system, may be a partial exception, since there a commoner priest (the Jero Gde) has been able to claim partial autonomy in the context of regulating irrigation and agricultural processes (Lansing 1991; Valeri 1990). Even so, this autonomy was never such that it could directly challenge the royal ruler. In other areas of Indonesia, calendrical priests like the Batak datu once seem to have had greater political power than they do today; now they function mainly as diviners and healers (Steedly 1989). The Toradja priest of the seasons (called the indo pare , or "rice mother" expressing his symbolic femininity) has much greater influence in the egalitarian northwest region of Toradja land than in the more hierarchical south (Coville 1989).

Thus we find an incompatibility between the primacy of a ritual cal-

endar and the more complex political systems of kingship and, eventually, nationhood. This incompatibility, moreover, underscores a tension between ideals of local autonomy and indigenous self-determination, on the one hand, and attempts to synchronize diverse social activities, on the other.

J. T. Fraser (1989) has noted that a society's view of the world is, to a great extent, its view of time, whether this time is seen as a directed, unilinear progression, a punctuated series of interlocking cycles, or a constant oscillation between past models and present practice. It is not only in Kodi that timekeeping instruments and notions of chronology were once part of the "imported past." In ninth-century Java, one of the most complex calendars in the world was developed by integrating an indigenous system of nine weekly cycles with the lunar-solar calendar of the Indian year (Casparis 1978, 5). A 3-day cycle of named days intersected with a 5-day market week and a 7-day week labeled with Hindu terms for celestial bodies, culminating in a 210-day calendar "year," in which each day was defined in relation to its position within the nine cycles. The most propitious day for planting and harvesting, getting married, building houses, or burying the dead was calculated by diviners, who read wooden (tika ) or palm-leaf (wariga ) calendars that charted the combination of particular days in the weekly cycles (Casparis 1978).

In Bali, that system is still used to set the dates for festivals and religious holidays, and it has been interpreted as providing the basis of a detemporalized, static concept of time (Geertz 1973; Goris 1960). Gregory Bateson (1970, 135) was the first to articulate this calendrical attitude as a specific relation between past and present: "The modern Balinese . . . does not think of the past as a time that was different and out of which the present has sprung by chance. The past provides him with patterns of behavior, and if only he knows the pattern he will not blunder and need not be tongue-tied. . . . The past provides not the cause of the present but the pattern on which the present should be modeled." This idea of the past as exemplary, providing paradigms for present action, is very close to the idea of a continuity between past and present that I have called "heritage." It does not imply a radical departure from Western notions of time and the past, which include both "history" and "heritage" and are so multiple and various that attempts to describe them often founder on the diversity of possible perspectives (Lowenthal 1985).

Geertz's famous essay "Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali," first published in 1966, continued Bateson's lead in adducing the linkages among systems of personal names, status titles, the taxonomic calendar, and the "immobilization of time" into a "motionless present" (Geertz 1973, 404).

Critics have noted that while many Balinese may share this perspective, it is not necessarily that of people in positions of power and authority, such as kings and high priests, who are more interested in the narrative legitimation of the past (Vickers 1990, 169). Geertz's focus on the ceremonial, the aesthetic, and the immediate turned attention away from other contexts of Balinese life (such as healing and black magic) that emphasize the personal, emotional, and historical (Wikan 1989, 1990).

Geertz's essay acknowledges an interplay of historical forms but does not dwell on discords between them, maintaining that court chronicles (babad ), Shaka chronology, and Hinduistic notions of successive epochs are "of secondary importance in the ordinary course of everyday life" (Geertz 1973, 391). If, however, the idea of the "past as pattern" is maintained as a cultural heritage, it is now being challenged by a new template of historical action associated with national struggle. Geertz wrote that Balinese were becoming acquainted with a more progressive concept of time, which involved "pushing events toward their climaxes rather than away from them" and introduced a new scheme of "original greatness, foreign oppression, extended struggle, sacrifice and self-liberation, and impending modernization" (1973, 410).

In retrospect, this new concept of time can be seen to have much greater importance than Geertz assigned to it in his original essay. Based on fieldwork in the later 1950s, that piece was written just before the bloody slaughters of 1965, which brought home the relevance of a "developing nation state whose center is elsewhere" (1973, 409). In the last years before the most dramatic climax of Indonesian history, time may have appeared immobilized, but after many thousand Balinese were killed in the wake of an alleged coup no one could deny the force of national history and its ability to disrupt even the most carefully calibrated ceremonialism.

Geertz raised an issue in that essay which has informed this whole book: What is the relation of conventional notions of time to the culturally constructed concept of the past? And how have these notions been transformed by historical events? A quarter century later, the methods we use to propose answers may be somewhat different. The present study emphasizes the diversity of perspectives in narratives, the interpretation of objects, and ritual action. The integration of culture that Geertz referred to as an octopus, "a viable if somewhat ungainly entity" (1973, 408), is in the end less important than the existence of dialogue between mutually contradictory and competing points of view.

Traditionalist proponents of cultural continuity, I argue, now consciously ascribe to an idea of "heritage" that opposes the externally introduced form of "history" they have encountered. We need to understand

how things were made meaningful in the past, the forms of meaning and coherence that they were given, before we can interpret how they have changed and how that change is significant. A "historical event" does not exist as an abstract, absolute entity. It is a moment selected from a temporal continuum by an act of remembering. The memory of events is preserved in various forms of reflecting on the past, which include telling stories, assigning specific locations to houses, heirlooms, and graves, and performing the rites of the New Year. Each genre of knowledge about the past helps to make sense of events and continuities in its own way. Narrative chronology does not assume the privileged form of historical discourse it has in Western historiography but interacts with other traces of the past.

Totalities and Practices

These questions bring us back to the wider debate about the genesis of historical consciousness and the role of totalities versus practices. Bourdieu (1977, 164) has argued that indigenous calendars perpetuate a "synoptic illusion," which is divorced from the "real, practical time" of everyday experience. They are, he says, part of a totalizing, objectifying system of classification through which "every established order tends to produce . . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness."

When the social world is so taken for granted that its order appears natural and immutable, then the instruments of knowledge of the social world can indeed said to be "political instruments," with the theory of knowledge becoming a dimension of political theory (Bourdieu 1977, 165). My analysis has established that the calendar is an institution that belongs not only to the perception of time ("the system of knowledge") but also to the indigenous political system ("the system of domination," in Bourdieu's terms). Yet it does not follow from this that indigenous calendars are merely, or even primarily, tools of political domination or that their articulation is part of the "objectivist fallacy" of the anthropologist (Bourdieu 1997, 106).

Bourdieu's critique of earlier studies of the calendar (primarily, it would seem, the work of Evans-Pritchard) is based on what he sees as the disengagement of theory from practice:

A calendar substitutes a linear, homogeneous, continuous time for practical time, which is made up of incommensurable islands of duration, each with its own rhythm, the time that flies by or drags, depending on what one is doing , i.e. on the functions conferred by the activity concerned. By distributing guide-marks (ceremonies and

tasks) along a continuous line, one turns them into dividing marks united in a relation of simple succession, thereby creating ex nihilo the question of intervals and correspondences between points which are no longer topologically but metrically equivalent.

The calendar, in his view, is created as a false object of thought, "a totality existing beyond its 'applications' and independently of the needs and interests of its users" (1977, 105-6).

There are two problems with this criticism. First, it ignores the conventional and constructed nature of all perception of time. Second, in trying to dissolve "objectified time" into the play of "needs and interests" in practice, it imposes an ethnocentric folk model of human motivation (the calculating "rational man") on the diversity of social action. I will treat each problem in turn.

Since Kant we have been aware that our notions of time are not imposed by a physical reality but created by an activity of the mind. Temporality is a form of sensibility, in that time is not abstracted from experience but presupposed by it. Durkheim ([1912] 1965, 10) showed long ago that it was not possible even to conceive of time "without the processes by which we divide it, measure it or express it with objective signs." Hubert's classic study of temporal representations begins with the principle that time cannot be studied in the abstract, but only as a system of relations between the points that divide time and the intervals they create (1909, 197). As Leach (1961, 135) points out, "We talk of measuring time, as if it were a concrete thing to be measured, but in fact we create time by creating intervals in social life. Until we have done so there is no time to be measured." An all-embracing notion of time that includes both repetitive and irreversible change is, he argues, a religious notion, "one of those categories which we find necessary because we are social animals rather than because of anything empirical in our objective experience of the world" (Leach 1961, 125).

Thus, an important purpose in holding festivals is to order time and provide a way of discussing concepts that cannot be expressed without some social or cultural convention. In an earlier article on the attitude of the Algerian peasant toward time, Bourdieu (1968, 56) acknowledged the necessity of a social structuring of time perceptions: "The Kabyle peasant lives his life at a rhythm determined by the divisions of the ritual calendar which exhibit a whole mythical system." Technical and liturgical acts are integrated in a system he termed a "mythology-in-action" (1968, 57), in which the peasant does violence to the nourishing earth in order to fecundate her and wrest her riches from her.

The disjunction that Bourdieu asserts exists between "practical time" and "ritual time" emerges because the intervals of subjective experience are not equal and uniform and do not correspond to measured time: "The islands of time which are defined by these landmarks are not apprehended as segments of a continuous line, but rather as so many self-enclosed units" (1968, 59). Duration is estimated on the basis of the time it takes to perform a certain task, and space is evaluated by the "experience of activity" (thus, a given location is said to be "a day's walk away").

A problem with this formulation is that it is still based on social conventions, which are needed for people to communicate about time. The week is named on the basis of the time lapse between two markets, and the experience of time is perceived and remembered in terms of collective categories. The diagram of seasonal activities recorded by the anthropologist is said by Bourdieu (1977, 106) to misrepresent the practical reality of the experience of time passing:

By cumulating information which is not and cannot always be mastered by a single informant . . . the analyst wins the privilege of totalization . . . . He thus secures the means of apprehending the logic of the system which a partial or discrete view would miss; but . . . he will overlook the change in status to which he is submitting practice and . . . insist on trying to answer questions which are not and cannot be questions of practice, instead of asking himself whether the essential characteristic of practice is not precisely the fact that it excludes such questions.

The "totalizing privilege" is a particular perspective on social life that is not the exclusive prerogative of the analyst. It can also be exercised by an insightful and reflective member of the society and is, to a certain extent, enjoined on persons in certain important ritual positions, such as that of guardian of the calendar. This is not to say that a high-ranking priest perceives the whole logic of the system, or understands it in the same terms as an outside observer, but only that a form of "totalization" is involved in indigenous systems of knowledge.

Calendars form an important part of the cultural heritage passed down from the ancestors in a great many societies, and certainly in Kodi the sequence of ritual performances (katadi marapu ) constitutes an ordering of time. Bourdieu's criticism of the authority of calendars is not convincing because of abundant evidence that local people articulate calendrical knowledge in their own genres (origin narratives, spatial maps, the ritual functions of objects). The calendar cannot be seen as the result of a simple

"connivance between the anthropologist and his informant" (Bourdieu 1977, 219) or an "illusory order." Nonetheless, his argument can bring us to ask another important question: What is the role of different kinds of knowledge in the collective representation of time, and what are the political consequences of the distribution of this knowledge?

For some peoples, temporal concepts are "encyclopedic," in the sense that they describe their knowledge of the world and its processes (Sperber 1975). This sense would seem to correspond in some way to Bourdieu's notion of "practical time," since it is rooted in empirical activity but is nevertheless a shared convention. For other peoples, temporal concepts are "symbolic," because they point to other constructions and constitute a model around which much of the culture is explicitly interrelated.^[2] In Kodi, the symbolic centrality of the calendar means that time relations—ideas of age, precedence, duration, and temporal location—are used to express political positions and social asymmetries. The fact that temporal knowledge is not uniformly distributed only contributes to its hierarchizing functions, by limiting access to a valued and codified cultural competence.

Yet the very fact that certain privileged persons may "totalize" their knowledge of the calendar means that competing alternative perspectives will inevitably arise. Thus, Bourdieu's attack on the "officializing strategies" of those anthropologists who neglect the diversity of local perspectives is completely justified. The very processes of contesting and debating the significance of temporal intervals in feasts, exchanges, and calendrical rites demonstrate the importance of this form of symbolic knowledge.

The idea that "needs and interests" are revealed in "practical time" is reminiscent of Bloch's theory of an opposition of "ritual" and "practical" time, where practical time provides the language with which to criticize and change the prevailing structure of ritual inequality. Many of the criticisms of Bloch's argument (Bourdillon 1978; Howe 1981; Appadurai 1981; Peel 1984) also apply to Bourdieu's construction, with the caveat that at least Bourdieu does not assume that "practical time" is universal in its forms. However, in proposing that rational, calculating "strategies" are universals, Bourdieu commits his own version of economism.

Bourdieu castigates the "economism" of many Marxists and materialists for idealizing precapitalist economies as ruled by "disinterested" con-

cerns for honor or ceremonial redistribution. He argues instead, and rightly, that we must include not only material goods but also honor and prestige within the sphere of sought-after valuables. His insights into the tempo of exchange transactions and the sense in which "time must be invested" and "symbolic capital is always credit " (1977, 180, 181) have revitalized the study of exchanges over time, and I have incorporated them in my analysis in the second section of this book.

Yet while I agree that forms of prestige and renown attached to a family may be readily convertible into economic capital, I still find the basis of the notion of "symbolic capital" problematic. Knowledge is not, and cannot be, a commodity in the same way that materials goods are. It can be made "scarce" by rules that limit access to certain types of knowledge, but scarcity is not an inherent property of systems of knowledge. Nor, more importantly, is the commodity the best model for valued objects, qualities, or attributes generally. In arguing that time is constitutive of value in Kodi ceremonial exchange, I maintain that sacrificial animals are not commodities but rather expressions of an investment of human life. Time measured along a full life span is not "time converted into money" but a merging of individual biography with its symbolic expression in horns, tusks, or other measures.

The metaphor of calculation cannot be extended indiscriminately into all spheres of life without falling into a tautological utilitarianism which asserts that people are always pursuing their "real" advantage even when they seem to be pursuing "symbolic" goals such as the favor of the ancestors, the fulfillment of kinship obligations, or the splendor or ritual display (Errington 1989). What is "real" to the analyst is ultimately only that which can be converted into economic goods and thus is subject to a minute calculation of advantage.

Western economism is a folk theory that developed in the particular historical context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Albert Hirschman (1977) argues that before the triumph of capitalism, the ideological groundwork for an economistic perspective was laid when "rationality" came to be merged with "calculation." Reason was put in the service of maximizing wealth, and the calculation of advantage became the hallmark of the "rational man." A historicist perspective thus relativizes some of the claims of economism to universal truth by detailing the specific conditions that led to its appearance. Since the time of Malinowski this prototypical Economic Man has been little more than a straw man, an easy target to be attacked when developing contrasts with other forms of economic rationality (Malinowski 1922; Sahlins 1972). It seemed, in fact,

that substantivist theorists in the tradition of Polanyi had given this limp stuffed shirt a proper burial some time ago.

The effect of Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic capital" has been to pump new life into the old straw man, who has been resurrected as Calculating Man or the Great Strategizer.^[3] Bourdieu's valuable insights into the temporal rhythms of exchange have been obscured by excessive attention to his model of strategic manipulation. The concept of "symbolic capital" homogenizes the differences between gifts and commodities, qualities and quantities, and goods and services. In the vague, generalized sense in which the term is used, we could certainly say that time constitutes an important form of "symbolic capital" among the Kodi people. But to do so would accomplish very little; indeed, the ultimate result would be to cast the mechanisms by which time is given value into the shadows.

"Time" is valued in Kodi in more than purely economic terms. It is not simply "bought" and "sold,' "wasted" or "well spent." Time is the line that runs through people's experience of the world, defining its poignant brevity but investing our search for meaning with an urgency and passion that produces vitality in the face of death. On this shared, universal surface of time, the Kodi people have constructed a cultural image of their past as a heritage worthy of preservation. And, in the face of a new, more ephemeral concept of "history" this is what they still strive to do.

The Calculating Man enshrines an individualism of a particularly callous and ruthless kind, for it assumes that the "agents" involved in exchange transactions and political manipulations are atomized individuals out for their own gain. Yet in fact, the "agent" in any given society is not a universal category but a cultural one. One must not assume that the temporal span of a collective strategy can be reduced to the manipulations

of individuals; after all, frequently the "transacting parties" are not people but houses, villages, or even larger groups. Notions of personhood vary across cultures and include complex forms of interrelationship extending back through time and often including ancestors as "transactors." The invisible witnesses to a promise or covenant are more likely to "act" to enforce it (by inflicting illness, misfortune, or other sanctions) than the visible witnesses, who are constrained by social norms to wait in silence. In a society like Kodi, some very valuable objects are also invested with agency and become part of the field of action.

While I do not propose to include ancestors and heirloom valuables among the "agents" who "calculate" the fact that they are perceived in this way by the Kodinese means that a theory of social action in Kodi cannot be limited to autonomous individuals. The person as a social actor is suspended in a web of relations that must be taken into account in any analysis of individual motivations and goals. Because these goals concern the general problems of the quality of life, they cannot be reduced to simple calculations of material or "symbolic" advantage.

The past is itself a totalizing vision that transcends the perspectives of individual actors. A view of the past is necessary to the notion of collective identity implied by the idea of "culture" which is rooted in the perception of a common and distinctive point of historical departure. Kodi origin narratives tell us what it is to be Kodinese, providing models of shared action and experience for all members of the society. The existence of an image of the past does not imply that all present actions must be adjusted to fit an ancient prototype; rather, they are understood in relation to a corpus of ideas inherited from the past. When the past is a living heritage, there is a clear preference for incorporating precedents into contemporary action. When it is seen as a more discontinuous history, the passage of time is acknowledged by getting it on record that things used to be different.

The desire to break away from earlier illusions or injustices has motivated some modern historians to declare "the death of the past" (Plumb 1969), in the naive belief that modern historiographic techniques can put an end to mythologizing and misrepresenting what actually happened. I cite this view of "history" not because I find it plausible, but because its claim to a complete separation of past representations from present interests is the logical extreme of a position based on the (largely Western) ideology of a progressive, linear conception of time. In opposing "history" of this type and "heritage" I highlight two extreme visions of the past: one valorizing a total severing of ties between the present time and that of our ancestors, the other valorizing the forging of new linkages wherever possible.

The new Indonesian national history, or sejarah , incorporates notions of both history and heritage to mobilize identities within a new communal framework, searching for precedents in diverse regional heritages while insisting on a directed historical trajectory. The glorious past of Majapahit and Mataram is evoked alongside accounts of the sufferings of the colonial period to create a sense among all Indonesians that their fates, in the future as in the past, must hang together. Thus "history" is seen as a series of episodes of anticolonial resistance that occurred, in different places and at different times, all over the archipelago. It transformed many peoples, with different languages and varied cultural traditions, into a single national community, conscious of a shared past and a shared destiny.

The vision of the collective Indonesian past presented by sejarah has achieved a remarkable degree of national integration across great geographic, linguistic, and cultural barriers. The occasional notes of disaffection and resistance that are sounded in places like Kodi reflect the resilience of indigenous notions of time that stress continuities with an ancestral tradition, but even these are gradually giving way to the wider vision of a more encompassing historical progression. Local perspectives, however, retain the power to inflect world processes at the level of the imagination. When nationalist historians try to present an image of Indonesia as a moral community, unambiguously bounded and filled with a historical mission, their own ideological practices can be turned around. New forms of "local knowledge" resist domination from the center by formulating their own version of heroic history, proposing alternative versions of the life of a hero like Wona Kaka or the meaning of a category like "custom" (adat ). The indigenous temporality of the ritual calendar is ceding to the power of printed, "universal" calendars, but at the same time notions of cycles, synchrony, and intersecting trajectories are emerging as important components of what could be called a new national mythology. Most of this new mythology comes from beyond Sumba, as it has for centuries, when the past was imported and reshaped to fit local social and political institutions.

One major concern of this study has been to highlight the internal diversity of notions of time, the past, and the calendar. The time of the ancestors, of the world of exchange, and of present ritual performances is complex and has many interpenetrating levels. As J. T. Fraser (1989, xii) puts it, "What used to be regarded as a uniform flow which embraced equally all structure and processes is revealed as a nested hierarchy of qualitatively different temporalities." These "nested levels" in his formulation, are the seasonal successions of the calendar (the "ecotemporal"), the cumulative time of living bodies (the "biotemporal"), and the more

encompassing awareness of finality and the place of the past (the "nootemporal" time that is "known" and not simply experienced).

Each of these "levels" corresponds to a form of Kodi temporality discussed in this book, notably the calendar, the temporal chain of exchange value, and the culturally constructed image of "heritage" or "history." Contrary to Fraser, however, I do not see these temporalities as permanently "nested" and would prefer to describe them as "strands" that can be pulled up into certain contexts but that remain largely invisible in others. As an anthropologist I regard the problem of the hierarchical integration of temporalities as an empirical rather than a theoretical question; that is, I assume that the relationship of different temporalities may vary between cultures and within a single culture over time.

A multistranded temporality permits us to understand the interactions of the representations, uses, and significance of different notions of time without foreclosing the question of which is more encompassing and hierarchically superior. The idea of absolute time is being called into question by a number of other scholars, who have documented the merits of earlier relativistic chronologies (Wilcox 1987) and discussed a diversity of time concepts (Bender and Wellbery 1991).

In Kodi, the ritual superiority of the Rato Nale gave preeminence to a social synchrony modeled on seasonal changes and the cycle of the moon, which provided, at least to some extent, a vision of a wider cultural order. The assessment of exchange value in the measurement of time using animals' bodies complemented calendrical time with a biotemporal measure of cumulative change, which was totalized by a series of origin narratives that constructed the past around a series of contested objects, locations, and ritual offices. The recent privileging of one specific strand—the view of the past as "history," although placed within a wider national "heritage"—an be seen as a highly specific cultural expression that is neither universal nor necessarily desirable. By looking at the "play of time" on a distant island that has been only partly integrated into wider world systems, we bring our own assumptions into sharper relief and come to see them differently.

Playing Back over Time

Recent years have seen a new interest in the study of temporality, partially as a result of the "postmodern turn" and its questioning of the universalist assumptions of time and history (Bender and Wellbery 1991). Many of these studies, however, have unconsciously reproduced an ethnocentric interpretation of the place of time in the modern world, at the expense of

other forms of temporality in all their complexity and diversity. Reinhart Koselleck (1985) argues that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the historical threshold of a new temporalization of experience—a conception of unified and all-pervasive change as occurring in and through time. Time, in his view, is no longer a locational marker but a medium that generates new experiential configurations: the a priori of the modern world.

Has modernism reinvented time, or has it simply provided additional variations on certain familiar themes? As an anthropologist skeptical of the forms of temporal distancing that can lead to the devaluation and dismissal of the conceptual schemes of other peoples, I am not easily convinced. Stephen Jay Gould (1987) notes that metaphors of lineal progression ("time's arrow") and recurrence ("time's cycle") have long been with us, and recent reconceptualizations in physics and geology have tended to make distinctions between these two metaphors relative rather than absolute. While people in our own age may want to conceive of themselves as inhabiting a "new" time, this conception is suspect for its ties to implicit evolutionism, a hidden agenda based on notions of "progress," and the assumption that Walter Benjamin (1969) notes of a homogeneous, empty Time.

The temporalization of experience in a different mode can be discerned in Kodi concrete symbols. like the arc of the buffalo's horn, the unmoving authority of the heirloom urn, and the sea worms washing up on the shores in anticipation of the rice harvest. These work as metaphors for the passage of biographical time, the enduring importance of the past, and the recurrent cycle of the seasons. It is unfair to argue that a world in which notions of time are different from our own is detemporalized —as if one era could really be said to have "more time" than another.

The particular consciousness of time realized in Western historical writings is, of course, culturally constructed; it is especially evident in the forms of history that assume a collective unity encompassing all individual sequences of events. Whiggish history is, however, not the pinnacle of temporalization but only a peculiar variant on it. Homogeneous Time and its links to progress no doubt owes much to the invention of the clock and the revolutionary effect that its mechanical model of time's passage has had on modern life (Landes 1983, 1990); but the chronological time of printed calendars and the mechanical time of hours and minutes has always coexisted with lived experience, in which other models and perceptions may be more immediately relevant.

Phenomenological studies remind us that although homogeneous Time expresses a notion of progress that has struggled to achieve mastery over

other, homelier metaphors of time's passing, its success has been only partial. Local knowledge and individual concerns and motivations continue to affect our perception of time, giving priority to significant ancestors, particularly vivid memories, and the quest for meaningful patterns of life.

In the writings of philosophers, historians, and social thinkers, the problem of time has been looked at through three major lenses: classificatory, with a focus on the "total" system; phenomenological, with a focus on variable "lived experience"; and historical, with a focus on periods and epochs. The argument of this study is that these domains should not be seen as discrete, but as connected. The interpenetrating representations of calendars, human biographies, and historical events draw them together in both social experience and social memory (Connerton 1989).

Ethnographic writing about time has followed a similar tripartite division, with some studies stressing the collective classification of time (Evans-Pritchard 1939, 1940), others its phenomenological aspects (Tedlock 1982), and still others its place in world history (Bloch 1985). A recent critical review of the literature (Munn 1992, 113) notes that this separation of topics has resulted in the "compartmentalization" of calendrical time, biographical time, and historical time. No other study to my knowledge has analyzed the interaction of these three modes in a local context, including the impact of changes associated with "modernization."

By bringing together a large body of ethnographic materials pointed toward questions of time, I have tried—in a modest and incomplete way—to question the validity of the notions of "modern times" that are often bandied about. Kodi temporality is not, in fact, a "premodern" form, located along some ladder of temporal stages that will ultimately culminate in fully "temporalized" consciousness. It provides an alternate temporality, which is expressed metaphorically in stacks of buffalo horns or the eyelashes plucked from exported animals so the herd can be regenerated back at home. The time of individual lives is meted out in comparison to the lives of domestic animals and the pathways of exchange valuables. The time of collective tradition is preserved in "history objects" that remain the inalienable property of a constantly shifting descent group. The time of the calendar and the repetitive cycle is expressed in ritual commemorations of original sacrifices and the playful, festive mood that celebrates life owing to a heightened awareness of its brevity.

Death is a part of our consciousness of time and of our own self-concept. None of us escapes the finality of an end to our own temporal existence; but the example of an alternate temporality can show us other ways to bear this burden and other ways to understand the significant ties that bind both past and present to conceptions of a future life.