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Boundaries of Humanity Boundaries of humanity Non-human others and animist ontology in Eastern Indonesia A submission to “Animism in Southeast Asia. Guido Sprenger and Kaj Århem (eds.). London: Routledge. To be published in January 2014. Timo Kaartinen, Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki <[email protected]> Introduction Animism refers to cosmological thinking which presupposes a common ground between different kinds of subjects, typically humans and animals. 19th century anthropologists defined it as an early form of religion which attributed a soul to animals and objects and endowed them with imagined, human qualities (Tylor 1903: 247). When Émile Durkheim argued that the object of belief was not the spirit of animals but the sacred power of society (Durkheim 1965), he continued to support the idea that religious worldviews project the human, institutional order onto nature. Recent efforts to move anthropology beyond its humanist, Enlightenment underpinnings has called into question this human-centric theory of religion, even as it has revived animism as an anthropological topic. This theoretical agenda is not entirely new: it rehearses the intellectualist approach to religion introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Turner 2009). Nevertheless, it has produced new ethnographic descriptions and debate which point to animism as a valid epistemology (Bird-David 1999), an ontology in which people and animals differ in their bodily nature but share a human, spiritual essence (Descola 2006: 141; 2009), or a type of intentionality which is expressed in hunting, healing, and other actions that transmit life force from one species or cosmological domain to another (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 469). In this article, I ask what elements of this new concept of animism apply to the ethnographic context of Maluku, the vast archipelago of Eastern Indonesia. This article is organized around three arguments made in the new animism debate: that animistic peoples attribute human consciousness to non-human beings (Descola 2006: 141), treat certain 1 animals, plants and objects as persons (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 469), and sometimes assume their mode of perceiving reality. The celebrated cases of animism are drawn from the ethnography of Amerindian peoples, who often frame the interaction between humans and animals as exchange, seduction or warfare. My ethnographic reference is to societies for which the commercial, social and political interaction with strangers presents similar ontological issues as hunters face in their encounters with animals. Among these is what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “perspectival exchange,” the assumption of an animal perspective on humanity. Spirit guardians, free spirits, and the spirits of the dead People in the Kei Islands often refer to the taboos and metaphysical punishments as an “unwritten law.” This law does not pretend to be a universal moral code. Its rules and punishing agents are immanent in each local island, a local world which is centered on a real or imaginary mountain in the interior of the island. New visitors and settlers are warned that people who transgress the law risk being attacked by invisible beings which populate the forest. These beings guard springs, rivers, rocks and large trees. They dwell in places where an open beach changes into a bush, or around rocky capes which mark the boundary between two village settlements. The unwritten law was also recognized by the people of Banda Eli, the coastal, Muslim community in the eastern coast of the Great Kei Island where I did fieldwork in 1994-1996. This village was founded by people exiled from the Central Maluku islands of Banda after the Dutch East India Company conquered their ancestral home in the early 17th century.1 The descendants of the Bandanese have kept their own language and Islamic faith, but on settling in Kei four centuries ago they also promised to observe the taboos and rituals through which people in Kei manage their relationship to the invisible world of guardian spirits, ancestral shadows, and other invisible agents in their environment. Even if “spirit” is not an entirely satisfying word for describing such beings, I will use 1 For a summary of this history, see Kaartinen 2010: 35-53. Field research in the village of Banda Eli took place over 15 months in 1994-1996, with funding from the Academy of Finland and the Väinö Tanner Foundation and under the sponsorship of the University of Gajah Mada, Yogyakarta. In 2009 I did fieldwork in Ambon and the Kei Islands with funding from the Academy of Finland, sponsored by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) at Jakarta and Ambon. I would like to express thanks to these agencies and the Banda Eli community for their generous support to my research. Thanks are due to the editors and two anonymous readers of this article for their encouraging, constructive comments. 2 it as shorthand for different types of metaphysical entities. The word spirit has a connotation of immaterial existence and determined moral qualities, neither of which are central for Eastern Indonesian concepts for such beings (Valeri 2000: 24). For present purposes, the most important question about “spirits” is how they resemble humanity and what kind of relations they form with humans. The main clue to the human qualities of different spirits is the way they interact with humans. Spirits react to the breach of taboos, things which are forbidden and yet the object of suppressed desire. This means that they respond to human intentions, and not merely to people’s external acts or gestures. To do so, it seems, the spirits also have to be intentional agents. But how can we know if they have human intentions? One way of measuring this is to ask whether it is possible to establish and maintain relationships with them. A relationship with a spirit means that one gets a predictable response when one repeats a certain act or gesture in the spirit’s presence. This response – imagined or not – is a sign of the spirit’s awareness of rules, or positive schemes of action, an awareness which is one hallmark of human consciousness. In this section, I discuss different types of spirits in the light of these diagnostics of their intentional and human qualities. Three kinds of spirits are worth mentioning because of their family resemblance to similar categories over a wide area. The first kind is the “owners” or “guardians” of trees, springs, and various sites in the forest and along the coast (see also Nikolas Århem and Janowski, this volume). In spite of their low status in Banda Eli society, shamans (sewa) are in a privileged position to communicate with such beings. As they divine the cause of illness or affliction they turn away from the human audience and speak to the “people of the mountains.” People of Banda Eli also address spirit guardians with prayers and material offerings when they plant a garden, build a house, or exorcise illness from their village. In these contexts, the spirit is called the “lord of the land” (Ind. tuan tanah). The widespread concept of “landlord” conveys the sense in which Eastern Indonesian places and landscapes are always already owned by spirits and people. A similar notion of spirit ownership is found in the highland societies of Papua-New Guinea (Robbins 2004: 168), and Janowski (this volume) reports it among the Kelabit of Sarawak. An imagined chain between present and former landowners extends beyond village boundaries and historical memory and connects particular groups and places to each other. The link to the original land-owner is recognized explicitly in a house-building ritual which takes place just before sunrise and repeats the mythical event at which the spirit of the first human, together 3 with a rooster, arrived in the village (Barraud 1979: 81).2 I have witnessed this ritual on my very first visit to the Banda Eli village in 1992, and as late as in 2009 among villagers who had recently moved to an urban area in the Kei Islands. The residents of the new the house present betel leaves and areca nut to the spirit owner of the land where their house will stand, and smear each house-post with the blood of a young chicken offered on the site. After this they raise the central pole which will hold up the roof. The relatively localized spirit owners or guardians stand in contrast with another main type of metaphysical agents: the free spirits. Free spirits is my gloss for entities known as bel wab in the Kei Islands, and also called “satans” (setan) by Muslims and Christians. These potentially malicious entities are described as “small, angry men who act quickly” to punish people for breaking taboos. They are a species of hilang-hilang, the ‘disappeared’ or ‘unseen,’ which also include people who died on long travels or drowned in the sea, and therefore never received a proper burial. The forest teems with these beings, and people avoid bringing young children to garden sites because of their vulnerability to illness and affliction. They suspect that a person suffering from mental illness, unconsciousness or fever has been made to disappear by the bel wab in punishment of some major breach of taboo, such as marriage or sexual relations between siblings, or between a man and a woman who are kin and belong to different generations. When illness or death is attributed to such spirit attack, the remedy is a ritual called hukum in which a slight amount of material from a valuable object is “scratched” and dropped to a hole in a ground.3 A third type of spirit agents are associated with recently dead people. A properly conducted funeral localizes the dead permanently in the village. Over a few years’ time they cease to exist as distinct personalities and become part of the anonymous community of ancestors which is seen a protective, benevolent power.
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