AUSTRONESIAN PATHS AND JOURNEYS AUSTRONESIAN PATHS AND JOURNEYS EDITED BY JAMES J. FOX TO THE MEMORY OF MARSHALL D. SAHLINS We would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of Marshall Sahlins who was a brilliantly productive and remarkably insightful ‘Austronesianist’. His Social Stratification in Polynesia was an early, important and provocative comparative study (1958); his Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (1962) was a major ethnographic monograph of lasting value; and his Islands of History (1985) was an interpretive analysis that gave global significance to events in the history of the Pacific. His influence was profound on both students and colleagues. We have all learned much from him and his work. Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760464325 ISBN (online): 9781760464332 WorldCat (print): 1247151070 WorldCat (online): 1247150967 DOI: 10.22459/APJ.2021 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph: A gathering of members of the clan Nabuasa in the village of Lasi in the mountains of West Timor to hear the recitation of the journey of their ancestral name. Photo by James J. Fox. This edition © 2021 ANU Press Contents Abbreviations . ix List of illustrations . xi 1 . Towards a comparative ethnography of Austronesian ‘paths’ and ‘journeys’ . .. 1 James J . Fox 2 . From paths to traditional territory: Wayfinding and the materialisation of an ancestral homeland . 29 Wen-ling Lin 3 . Testing paths in shamanic performances among the northern Amis of Taiwan . 53 Yi-tze Lee 4 . Funerary speeches and marital investigations in highland Madagascar . 77 Denis Regnier 5 . Journeys in quest of cosmic power: Highland heroes in Borneo . 93 Monica Janowski 6 . Life, death and journeys of regeneration in Saribas Iban funerary rituals . 127 Clifford Sather 7 . The long journey of the rice maiden from Li’o to Tanjung Bunga: A Lamaholot sung narrative (Flores, eastern Indonesia) . 161 Dana Rappoport 8 . Paths of life and death: Rotenese life-course recitations and the journey to the afterworld . 193 James J . Fox 9 . Winds and seas: Exploring the pulses of place in kula exchange and yam gardening . 231 Susanne Kuehling 10 . On the word ked: The ‘way’ of being and becoming in Muyuw . 275 Frederick H . Damon 11 . Walking on the village paths: Kanaawoq in Yap and rarahan in Yami . 303 Yu-chien Huang Contributors . 337 Index . 341 Abbreviations BP//MT Bula Pe//Mapo Tena BS//BT Buna Sepe//Boa Timu DK//SB Dela Kolik ma Seko Bunak ENSO El Niño–Southern Oscillation IA//ML Iu Ai//Maka Lopo KF//BT Koli Faenama ma Bunak Tunulama KL//LB Kea Lenga//Lona Bala LD//KK Leli Deak//Kona Kek LL//KP Lo Luli//Kalu Palu LL//PD Loma-Loma Langa//Pele-Pele Dulu LP//MS Liu Pota//Menge Solu MK//TN Manu Kama//Tepa Nilu ML//BS Malungi Lai//Balokama Sina NE//FN Ndao Eli-Sama//Folo No-Do’o NL//LE Ndi Lonama//Laki Elokama PAN Proto-Austronesian PB//BL Pau Balo ma Bola Lungi PMP Proto-Malayo-Polynesian PP//SL Pinga Pasa ma So’e Leli TT//BL Tetema Taenama and Balapua Loni ix List of illustrations Figures Figure 3.1 The Amis’s spatial conception of the house and the location of spirits ....................................58 Figure 3.2 Household orientations for the Nangshi Amis ..........70 Figure 3.3 The major spirits (kawas) Amis shamans encounter during the Mirecuk ritual. As well as the eight directions on the plane, there is also a pasakudol (upper level) and a pasasaan (underground level) ..........................72 Figure 7.1 The ancestors of Nogo Ema’ according to the narrative (Waiklibang, 2006) .................................174 Figure 9.1 Going up and down for kula ......................249 Figure 9.2 The mwatui of kula .............................251 Figure 9.3 Overlapping gardening cycles in the kula region .......262 Figure 11.1 Diagrammatic icons of Beluan social relations ........305 Figure 11.2 The plan of a traditional Yami house ...............318 Figure 11.3 The profile of a traditional Yami house compound .....318 Maps Map 2.1 Map of Laipunuk .................................31 Map 7.1 The journey of Nogo Ema’ according to the sung narrative (Waiklibang, 2006) .................................167 Map 9.1 The kula region .................................237 xi AUSTRONESIAN PATHS AND JOURNEYS Map 9.2 Map of Dobu Island, with clans from census taken in 1993 ..........................................245 Map 9.3 Languages and winds of the kula region (red spots are kula communities) ..................................248 Map 11.1 Map of Ivalinu village ...........................320 Plates Plate 2.1 Bunun raise the banner of the first year of Laipunuk in 2002 in an old settlement ...........................41 Plate 2.2 Sacrifice to the ancestors ...........................46 Plate 3.1 Two shamans prepare a male bird trap for the Misatuligun ritual ...................................55 Plate 3.2 During the Mivava ritual, elders and shamans symbolically sweep away filth to reorder the main border path of the village. One shaman holds an invisible calai thread. ................55 Plate 3.3 During the Mirecuk ritual, shamans help a crippled man hop over the fire stack to cure his problem leg ..............65 Plate 5.1 Tuked Rini Luun Atar shimmering with lalud (cosmic power) and only semi-visible .....................94 Plate 5.2 Aruring Menepo Boong, Tuked Rini’s wife, carried inside his earring on the way to a feast Above the Sky (Palaii Langit) ......................................95 Plate 5.3 Baye Ribuh (‘One Thousand Crocodiles’) with Tuked Rini’s sharpening stone (batuh iran Tuked Rini) ............105 Plate 5.4 Kaya with giant batu angan (stones used to support a cooking pot over a fire) near Ba’ Kelalan, which is said to have been used by the culture hero Upai Semaring ........105 Plate 7.1 A rice maiden, dokan gurun ritual, Waiklibang, 2006 .....168 Plate 7.2 A rice maiden, helo nikat ritual, Waiklibang, 2007 .......169 Plate 7.3 Ema’ Klara Kesi Liwun, the opak narrator, performing the song of the origin of rice, 2006 .....................170 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Plates 8.1 and 8.2 Rotenese funerals are generally convivial gatherings spent in meeting, talking and feasting, often interspersed with drumming, gong-playing and dancing ...................194 Plate 9.1 Mwali named Lala, picture taken in Wabununa (Woodlark Island) at the house of Chief Dibolele in February 2016 .....234 Plate 9.2 Bagi named Komakala’kedakeda, held by Toulitala in Bihawa (Duau, Normanby Island) in February 2016 ........235 Plate 9.3 Chief Dibolele of Wabununa (Woodlark Island) displays some of his bagi valuables for inspection .................240 Plate 9.4 A kula canoe from Egom Island .....................256 Plate 9.5 Bagi Dilimeyana ................................259 Plate 9.6 Mwali Lagim (centre), held by Edward Digwaleu from Tewatewa .....................................263 Tables Table 3.1 Yearly ritual cycle of Nangshi Amis ...................54 Table 3.2 Comparisons of items in family and tribal rituals ........67 xiii 1 Towards a comparative ethnography of Austronesian ‘paths’ and ‘journeys’ James J . Fox Introduction The expansion and dispersal of Austronesian languages from Taiwan to Timor and across the Indian Ocean and through the Pacific, stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island, demonstrate a remarkable social mobility. Exploration of this mobility has been the implicit theme in the majority of the various volumes of the Comparative Austronesian series. This exploration has included not just the delineation of the distribution of Austronesian languages and the examination of the archaeological evidence for the spread of plants, people and their products, but also the consideration of the social factors underlying this mobility: technologies of travel, systems of exchange, forms of subsistence and their implications, trade patterns, demographic pressures on small islands, the reception of distant strangers, the role of status systems that propel individuals outward, the prestige of founder status and the recognition and celebration of multiple ancestral origins. This volume is a further, explicit exploration of this critical idea of mobility focusing on the concepts of the journeying and the paths this journeying implies. In addressing this topic, each of the individual chapters in this volume opens a path or paths to a wide range of other comparative issues. 1 AUSTRONESIAN Paths AND JOURNEYS The focus in this volume is as much on actual journeying on specific paths as it is on spiritual journeys in the realm of memory and imagination. Some of the most locally established Austronesian populations embrace the idea of distant journeying and may indeed perform such journeys in their ritual celebrations, as in practice, such journeys tend to be path specific and are often highly embellished in their details. There may even be an underlying basis for this path specificity. In a stimulating paper that examines motion events in several Austronesian languages, the linguists Shuanfan Huang and Michael Tanangkingsing argue that ‘path salience in the encoding of motion clauses appears to exhibit a strong diachronic stability, suggesting that Proto- Austronesian was probably also a path-salient language’ (2005: 307).1 Essentially, this argument provides a semantic-typological predilection for the prevalence of attention to path information in motion events. Of more general relevance is recent research on cognitive mapping. Based on the foundational identification of place and grid cells, Bellmund et al. have, in a recent paper in Science (2018: 8), titled ‘Navigating cognitions: Spatial codes for human thinking’, proposed ‘cognitive spaces as a primary format for information processing in the brain’. In this model, ‘cognitive spaces enable generalization and can reveal novel trajectories via the representation of positions along defined dimensions’ (Bellmund et al.