Conceiving Spirits: Birth Rituals and Contested Identities among Lauje of Indonesia by Jennifer W. Nourse, October 1999 Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry. ISBN 1-56098-850-9
320 pp. $19.95
In Conceiving Spirits, Nourse describes how Lauje attribute to birth spirts competing meanings that hinge on an individual's gender, social class, and religion. At the beginning of her fieldwork, Nourse collaborated with two Lauje men whose conce[pts of birth spirits as divided into good and bad, male and female, or local and foreign categories seemed to prevail in their respective villages. But after both men died Nourse came to understand that some individuals--most often commoners or female spirit mediums--disagreed with these dualistic views of birth spirits, preferring to focus on the mystery and potency of the spirit world as a whole.
Nourse argues that the anthropologist's role is to both present and interpret divergent indigenous voices, as well as to acknowledge that some informants are more compelling and influential than others. Concluding that highland, lowland, and coastal Lauje are not as distinct or homogeneous as once thoughty, she synthesizes structuralist and postmodernist perspectives to explore the birth spirit beliefs and rituals by which the Lauje define themselves.
Contents
Part One Conceiving the Past through Spirits in the Present
.........Meeting "The" Lauje
......... Sibling Rivalry: Competing Histories
Part Two Conceiving Sex, Birth, and Illness
..........Gifts to the Older Sibling: Siamae Sanji on Umpute
..........Fatal Attractions: Sumpitan on Umpute
Part Three Conceiving the Momasoro
..........Casting out the Foreigners: Sumpitan's Momasoro
..........Marrying the Foreigners: Erasing Sumpitan's Momasoro
..........Denying Difference: Siamae Balitangan's "Simple" Momasoro
Part Four Conceiving Theory a Decade Later
..........Partial Truths and Layered Representations
