J. Platenkamp The severance of the origin; A ritual of the Tobelo of North Halmahera In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Rituals and Socio-Cosmic Order in Eastern Indonesian Societies; Part II Maluku 146 (1990), no: 1, Leiden, 74-92 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:45:40AM via free access J.D.M. PLATENKAMP 'THE SEVERANCE OF THE ORIGIN' A RITUAL OF THE TOBELO OF NORTH HALMAHERA '[...] the participants' views are made clearer by contrast, and the ideals are more sharply defined by conflicts'. (P.E. de Josselin de Jong 1977: 247) 'Presque toujours il s'agit, non simplement d'evacuer, mais de reconduire vers son foyer d'origine la substance mystique que le transgresseur s'est indument appropriee'. (R. Hertz 1988: 56) 1. Introduction Robert Hertz' research into the nature of sin and expiation, published posthumously by Marcel Mauss, led him to define 'sin' as 'a transgression of a moral, order that is conceived to produce by its own virtue fatal consequences for its actor, and that concerns exclusively the religious society' (Hertz 1988: 51-2). Whereas the last part of the definition serves to distinguish, within the context of western secularized society, sin from crime and from transgressions of aristocratic codes of honour, this restric- tion does not apply to his definition of expiation. This involves 'certain . generally ritual actions [which] can reestablish the state of things prior to the transgression, abolishing the latter and satisfying justice without the transgressor and his near kin being crushed' (Hertz 1988: 55; my transla- tions, JP). These definitions, qualified by Mauss as 'excellent [...] and worthy of being classic' (Hertz 1988: 55), will serve as a guideline for the analysis of a ritual performed by the Tobelo of North Halmahera. It is called 'the severance of the origin' (o ahali ma dodoaka (Indonesian: putus asat); o ahali (< Indonesian: asat), 'the origin'; ma dodoaka < ha toaka, 'to sever', 'to cut'). This name refers to the consequence of its performance. Upon the contraction of a marriage between partners who belong to the same House, the relationship which the groom's relatives maintain with this House's ancestral 'origin' becomes severed. This consequence is considered an extremely serious one, since the highly valued relations of solidarity be- tween 'the people of one House' are disconnected and transformed into the potentially hostile relations among 'strangers'. Therefore the ritual is seldom performed. Whenever it is, it is inserted into the marriage ritual. The ritual is an austere one. Immediately after the major exchanges of weapons, money, plaited artefacts and foodstuffs have been made by the relatives of the bride and the groom in the yard of the bride's house, an Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:45:40AM via free access 'The Severance of the Origin'. A Ritual of the Tobeb 75 elder representing the bride's relatives leads male adult members of both parties to the nearby river or lake. There he utters a short formula, throws one or more valuables into the water, and the ritual has been completed. We shall observe how the 'severance of the origin' represents an overt expression of a particular hierarchization of the values that constitute Tobelo society as a socio-cosmic whole (Van Wouden 1968; Barraud et al. 1984). Since this society is conceived of in terms of different represen- tations about 'origin' and 'ownership', I shall first present a synopsis of the way in which these ideas are formulated in myths and are operative in structuring the marriage exchanges. 2. The differential origin of society The Tobelo1 are a non-Austronesian language speaking society living in the eastern part of the northern peninsula of Halmahera and on the isle of Morotai, off the peninsula's northern coast. They number about 20,000 people, most of whom inhabit coastal villages in the subdictrict (Indon.: kecamatan) of Tobelo. A large majority has been converted to the Protes- tant denomination of Christianity that was introduced by Dutch missiona- ries from the beginning of this century onwards. This conversion, and the incorporation of Tobelo society into the larger polities of the Ternatan sultanate, the Dutch colonial government, and finally that of the Indone- sian Republic, have resulted in a formal tripartition of agama, hukum and adat (Indon.) that nowadays is applied by some village elders to order the corpus of current socio-religious concepts. Agama thus refers to the Bib- lical teachings and the Christian rituals such as baptism, the funerary service and the Sunday service. Hukum designates, in contrast to the administration of justice at village level by the elders acting as 'supporters of adat' (o adati majqjo), the legal procedures conducted by the represen- tatives of the Republic's Ministry of Justice in the subdistrict's capital of Tobelo. It is adat (o adati), however, which signifies all the precepts that set apart 'the way of the inhabitants of To-beloho' (o To-beloho'ka manga dodagi) from those of the societies of Galela to the North, Loloda and Tobaru to the Northwest and Tobelo Boeng to the South. The ideas and precepts that are discussed below pertain to this domain of adati. Tobelo villages consist of households formed by nuclear families that are joined sometimes by the families of one or more in-married children. Households maintain ideally patrilineal relationships that form a fam (< Dutch: familie). A fam represents a 'stem' (o utu), a metaphor which The fieldwork among the Tobelo, conducted mainly in the southern part of Tobelo district from July 1979 till December 1980, and for some months in 1982, was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), The Hague, under the auspices of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta. I wish to thank C. Barraud, D. de Coppet, R. Jamous and M.-J. Jamous, and the members of the Leiden research team CASA-Erasme for their perceptive comments on a previous version of this article. Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:45:40AM via free access 76 J.D.M. Platenkamp encompasses two aspects that are expressed in the rule that 'the male children.hold on to the stem, the fruits/flowers they can give away' (o utu o ngohaka ma nauru ya so, ma hohoko y 'akunu ngongike). On the one hand there is the permanence of the stem of the tree. This relates to the con- tinuous occupation by male members of the jam of those territories where forest land, after having been transformed into ladang, has been turned into plantations of fruit-bearing trees. This association between a jam and its cultivated lands is closely related to the/am's name. Dissociation of jam members from these lands, usually as the result of an elder brother's refusal to share with his younger brothers, may induce the latter to reject that name. On the other hand, and in contrast with this male continuity, there is the transitivity of the female 'flowers/fruits' (ma hohoko) issued from the 'stem'. This refers to the rule that sisters and daughters do not perpetuate the fam, since they marry.out. They 'wade through the river to the other side' (yo tobongo o ngaere ma hononga-ika) to be 'planted in the yard' of the husband's house. Marriage creates relations between people 'at the woman's/female side' (o ngoheka-ino) and people 'at the man's/male side' (o naur-ind). The former represent the 'stem' from which a woman as 'fruit' is taken in marriage by the latter. For each person, therefore, his father's 'stem' is a 'stem at the side of the man' (o utu o naur-ind), whereas the 'stem' of his mother's brother and that of his sister's children are 'stems at the side of the woman' (o utu o ngoheka-ino). The relationship of 'stem at the woman's side' is valorized by the idea that the woman-as-fruit embodies the ca- pacity to regenerate the 'life' (ogikiri) of the person. The 'stem' from which the woman was issued therefore occupies a superior position in relation to the 'stem' that received the woman in marriage whenever this 'life' of a person is at stake. We shall observe below that ideologically this life originates in the primordial transformation of the soil into the bodies of the first human couple. In contrast to this idea of the living body of man stands the idea of his 'image' (o gurumini). A common origin (o ahali) of image is shared by the fam that mutually relate as elder and younger 'stems at the man's side' and constitute a House (o tau).2 Whenever the House acts ('stands up') as a collectivity these ideally patrilineal relations of 'elder and younger brothers' (o ro-ria-dodoto) between the 'stems', and the affinal relation- ships that (under particular conditions, see below) may have been establis- hed between them, are all subsumed under this encompassing idea of 'origin-in-image'. This emerges for instance from the formula with which in certain ritual contexts 'the people of one House' (o tau moi ma nyawa) are addressed. Even if some of those present relate both as members of 'elder and younger stems' and as affines to one another, they are never- 2 I shall use the capital H to distinguish 'house' as a social category from 'house' as a material structure. Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:45:40AM via free access 'The Severance of the Origin'.