Conceiving Spirits: Birth Rituals and Contested Identities

Among Lauje of Indonesia

Jennifer W. Nourse

Introduction: Ethnography and Theory

• Notion of collective representation (5).
• "Postmodern" approach (p. 9).
• Culture is not whole or static (Clifford) 10, criticism of structuralism.
• Anthropologist’s voice drowns out the natives’ voices because he/she has the authority of "science" (p.11).
• Subjective interpretations not "truth" (p. 11).

Postmodernism

• "In making such claims about the constructed quality of knowledge, Clifford implied that postmodern approaches were superior to those of earlier anthropologists because they erased bias and false unity, allowing locals to speak for themselves" (p. 11).
• How does Nourse critique this idea?
• Assumes multi-vocality and a contrived equality
• mere description leads to severe misinterpretation.
• Anthropologists are cultural brokers

What is Nourse’s solution to the postmodern problem?

• I believe equal, though not naively idealized, time for the anthropologists’ perspective is the only way the discipline can move forward if it wants, as Clifford now says, to avoid asserting ‘a naïve democracy of plural authors’ and if it wants as Marcus and Fisher say, to critique our own society. Rather than presuming that the locals’ perspective is more ‘real’ and more unbiased than the anthropologists’, it might be more fruitful to see both in equal terms… (17)

Discussion

• Contrast Descola’s statement that anthropology is like physics in that objectivity is "inversely proportional to one’s distance from the object observed" (p. 4) to Nourse’s criticism of the structuralist point of view (p. 6). What does she mean by "subject positions" (p.8).

Chapter 1/ Meeting the Lauje

• Oppositions in this area
• Highlands/Lowlands
• Primitive/Civilized
• Rural/Urban (city of Tinombo)
• Colonizers (Dutch)/Colonized (Indonesians), or Colonizers (Indonesian)/Colonized (Lauje)
• Commoners (Lauje)/Aristocrats (Lauje)
• Islam/Animist (Lauje)

Lowland People

• Sumptian (lowlands) (p. 34)
• What is the importance of the scroll?
• What is the olongian?
• Why was it important to Sumptian?

Highland People

• Why was professor Nourse more interested in the highland people?
• Siamae Sanji, who is he?
• Why did Nourse settle for working in Taipaobal and not the bela (p. 43)?
• Is there a strict isolation of the highlands and lowlands?

What are the umpute and Nourse argument here in the first chapter?

• Page 51

2) Sibling Rivalry

• Sumptian’s view (Lowland, regional core area, city, Islamic)
• foreigners split highland and lowland communities and broke up the unity of the olongian’s rule.
• Siamae Sanji’s view (Highland core area, village, Islamic-animistic)
• Women married outsiders in non-Muslim, bela communities, or in lowland Muslim villages, dividing kin from the homeland (p. 52).

What is Sumptian’s story of the coming of Islam and its relation to the olongian? (authority, see page 55).

What is Siamae Sanji’s narrative and its view of the olongian? (p. 57-58).

• Compare contrasting notions of legitimate authority.

Origin narratives

• Siamae Sanji’s notion of being "connected at the navel" (p. 62)
• Taipaobalers as younger siblings, puange as older siblings (p. 62).
• How is kinship, thus, a model for a kind of hierarchy of the region and world?
• Feeding and the politics of highlands/lowlands (p. 63).
• Females Olongian/bela are bad/ males raja/puange are good (p. 70).
• Sumptian’s view of "ethnicty" vesus foreigners. Saw Olongian as legitimate.

Discussion

• Compare and contrast the two origin narratives by Sumptian and Siamae Sanji. Which one do you like better and why?

Chapter 3: Gifts to the Older Sibling: Siamae Sanji

• What are umpute?
• Why are birth rituals important? How do they relate to Siamae Sanji’s authority?
• These spirits "act" on people through combining and separating. Ritual action is the "mover" of these processes
• Why the "white"/"black" classification of the spirits?
• How is "fatherhood" emphasized more than "motherhood" in birth?

Chapter 4: Fatal Attractions: Sumpitan

• How does Siamae Sanji’s view of spirits contrast with Sumptian’s?
• Colors
• Rank/Raja
• Ethnicity
• How do each have differing views on the relationship between "community" and legitimate authority? (see page 123, 124).

Chapter 5/Casting out the Foreigners/Sumpitan’s Momasoro

• What is the Momasoro?
• Curing rite writ large (p. 129), illness of foreigners.
• The rite enacted the creation myths where all spirits were in the "womb of the world" (p. 129).
• The sea became pestilent and arose (foreigners).

Momasoro

• Rite is reenacted the way the world was created.
• Begin at the mountains (the navel of the world) to bless umpute of all Lauje people.
• Later rites for Lauje Muslim umpute closer to the coast.
• Later rites for the umpute of the sea spirits (foreigners) are blessed.
• Later, a boat with offerings separates the sea spirits from the rest of Lauje and thus "heals" the wounds caused by foreigners.
• Sumpitan orchestrated the event to get his political message across (see pages 144-145).

Chapter 6/Marrying the Foreigners/Erasing Sumpitan’s Momasoro

• Based upon Sumpitan’s death (p. 175), people began reinterpreting his "message" and interpretation of the Momasoro. See chart on page 176 for differing points of view based on Elites/Commoners versus Youth/Elders.
• Olongian says that Sumpitan wrongly insulted the sea spirits by making land/river spirits superior (p. 176).
• Commoners thought that the Momasoro’s purpose was to bring together the river/land sprits and the sea spirits, in contrast to Sumpitan’s message of separation (p. 177-178).
• Elites want to make sea superior to land/rivers but commoners want to mix them as "one." Difference of hierarchical versus egalitarian world-view?

Chapter 7/Denying Difference: Siamae Balitangan’s Simple Momasoro

• Simae Balitangan is an elite/commoner born in Taipaobal (p. 192, highlands); he unifies the various interpretations.
• Talked of problem of youth not being involved in tradition and then of the "many" umpute spirits that he had not heard of "new lowland spirits").
• "Thus he preached against hierarchy, against the differentiation between poison and cure, and the differentiation between the male sea and the female land… for him umpute was a simple concept that should be worshipped as a whole, not divided into a series of entities that were somehow related to the social world" (p. 197).

Issue of Islam
Siamae Balitangan’s view cont’d

• Sumpitan wanted to show the world that the Lauje were not pagan but Muslim (p. 205). The message of "separation" is akin to a message of Islmaic conversion apart from "tradition."
• Siamae Balitangan’s view of the rite is one in which the "umpute and religion are indistinguishable" (p. 206).
• See chart on page 209 of different interpretations of the Lauje ideas and world-view.
• Why might it matter if people saw umpute as a metaphor versus seeing it as "real"? See page 206 on value.

Chapter 8/Theory a Decade Later

• What is Nourse’s point on "ethnographic authority"?
• Who’s voice is privileged more, the natives’ or the anthropologist’s?
• Why is this issue important, or is it?
• Why was it important that Nourse did not give all of the informants’ voices "equal weight"? (p. 215).
• Why did she give more time to Sumpitan?

Relationships to Spirits

• Umpute are ways of seeing the world through dualism or structurally opposed categories AND
• Ways of comparing the spirit world to the placenta as a concrete entity. People use "metaphors" to explain the spirit world (p. 219). The Lauje draw upon "birth" as a metaphor of the spirit world.
• How does this contrast to Descola’s notion of "animism"?
• Might we view Simae Balitangan’s view of the spirits as like animism, "umpute are not metaphor but real forces in the world"?