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Overview
Part One traces how the person, the house, and the polity are constituted symbolically in everyday practices as centered spaces. Part Two examines how centers can be de-centered, while Part Three explores the structure that tended to hold centers together in Luwu and other Indic States. The introduction and the three conclusions (each of the three being broader than the last in comparative scope) locate the author's views with respect to other current theoretical approaches to power and culture.
Originally published in 1989.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691605227 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #975 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 346 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm
By Shelly Errington
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09445-8
CHAPTER 1
The Person
In an illuminating and now classic explication of traditional Javanese political thought, Benedict Anderson has argued that the "idea of power in Javanese culture" contrasts at almost every point with the ideas about secular political power that have been prominent in Occidental political thought since the seventeenth century. In Java, he points out,
Power exists, independent of its possible users. It is not a theoretical postulate but an existential reality. Power is that intangible, mysterious, and divine energy which animates the universe. ... In Javanese traditional thinking there is no sharp division between organic and inorganic matter, for everything is sustained by the same invisible power. This conception of the entire cosmos being suffused by a formless, constantly creative energy provides the basic link between the "animism" of the Javanese villages and the high metaphysical pantheism of the urban centers. (1972: 7)
The idea that a cosmic energy suffuses and animates the world is an extremely common one in island Southeast Asia. Among the Bugis-Makassarese of South Sulawesi, the term given to this energy is sumange'.
My aim here is to begin to unravel the cultural logic informing everyday life, in which the existence of sumange' (named or not) has the status of "tacit knowledge" (in Polanyi's phrase) rather than, or more importantly than, explicitly stated "belief." That is, I am interested in the basic assumptions that structure people's perceptions and orient and underlie their actions. Such notions are relevant to what they think it is to be a person.
Some notable efforts have been made to socialize "the person," to claim that people are not only organic-biological entities or mental-psychological ones, but also public and socioculturally constituted artifacts. In an effort to rescue thought from the realm of the private and make it available to anthropological investigation, Clifford Geertz has written that "human thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its functions, social in its forms, social in its applications. At base, thinking is a public activity" whose forms are available for study in the "traffic of significant symbols" (1973c: 360). In a parallel rescue operation on the other half of the Cartesian person, Mary Douglas has insisted that social concerns are inscribed on the body (1966). We might then say, that, like thinking, embodying is a public activity, and that the body's constitution and meaning are publicly construed in locally particular ways.
The First Seven Days
Having brought forth progeny into the world, humans make efforts to turn their infants not into abstract humans exhibiting a universal "human nature," but into humans as they conceptualize humans to be. A revealing place to study the formation of the "person," then, is in the practices surrounding birth. The dangers to which an infant and its parents are subject, and the ways in which the child is protected and treated, can be unravelled to reveal how the person is thought to be formed.
People in Luwu occasionally call on the services of practitioners called sando' (Ind. dukun), who have different specialties: types of sicknesses, birth, building a new house, and others. I had thought of the sando' associated with birth as a sort of midwife, but after I attended several births and birth ceremonies and had a number of conversations, I discovered that the sando' is seldom called until after the birth has already taken place. During labor itself, I was told, the mother remains conscious and in a squatting position, assisted, if at all, by a female relative or neighbor. The greatest danger to a mother is thought to be not the act of giving birth but the possibility that the placenta will remain inside her, a rotting lump (as they put it), after the baby has emerged. The greatest danger to the baby is not being born but, rather, having its umbilical cord cut. So for the health of both, every effort is made to keep the baby and placenta together and attached, so that the two are born together. After giving birth the mother takes it easy for a while, sitting, standing, or walking around, but she remains in a torso-upright position rather than takes a nap, for, as in most parts of Indonesia, putting the body in a horizontal position except for sleeping is considered unconducive to health.
The placenta is said to be the baby's "older sibling"; the two newly born siblings, still joined by the umbilical cord, are placed in a prepared spot to await the arrival of the sando'. The sando' has the job of preparing the baby for the shock of having its umbilical cord cut. After the cord is cut, the placenta is buried. The baby remains in a state of great vulnerability for a minimum of seven days. During that period, the baby and mother must not leave the house, a place of protection. During that time, water for cooking and bathing is brought into the house by a relative or neighbor. The infant is considered especially vulnerable on its third night, the bongi sapa' (Tae; bongi means "night," Sapa' means "prohibited" or "tabu"). On that night (and, if the parents can afford it, on subsequent uneven nights, the fifth, seventh, etc., before the mother descends from the house), parents, neighbors and relatives maroja, which is to say, they stay awake all night inside the house, snacking and playing dominoes, in order to guard the infant with their alert consciousness. By the end of seven days, the baby's umbilical cord stump will have fallen off, and a ceremony is performed with the sando' in which the mother descends from the house to bathe outside. (Roughly, the higher the status of the parents, the longer the mother and the infant should remain inside the house for their protection. High noble women stay inside, I was told, forty days after giving birth.) The Buginese house is on stilts above the ground. Descending from it marks a transition from safe interior protected space to dangerous exterior open space. During this seven-day ceremony (or longer for higherstatus parents), the baby is introduced ritually to the dangerous world outside the house. Attended by a sando', the mother bathes outside for the first time since giving birth. High nobles, I was told, also ceremonialized the first time the baby's foot touched the ground — theirs was a very protected life, but the sensibilities evident in such a ceremony were similar to those I saw among commoners in Senga, simply taken to an extreme.
The following account of the first of the ceremonies sketched above is taken from fieldnotes. The fieldnotes appear as indented quotations; comments and elaboration appear in brackets in regular text. I have translated several words into English here, and have made the prose slightly more readable.
GIVING BIRTH
At 12:30 or so Sahari came to tell me that a baby was born at Padang. We arrived at the house at one o'clock. The baby had apparently been born about an hour earlier. The sando', Indo'Musu, had not yet arrived. The baby, its umbilical cord and placenta still attached, was on a tray in the bedroom, loosely wrapped in a sarong.
[The sando' said that a special place should be made for the newborn to rest as a sign that it is awaited and welcomed. She attributed one baby's constant fiissiness to the fact that minimal preparations had been made for its arrival. One family, for instance, laid the infant on a stack of seven new sarongs. Each day after birth they removed one sarong until the seventh-day ceremony, thus marking the infant's continued health and growth while dismantling and using the sign of its being awaited. Another family prepared a special area and surrounded it with a boco', the name for a cloth that surrounds a resting-place, whether it be a mosquito net enshrining a bed or a fabric curtain covering the contents of a shrine. Needless to say, such preparations would be much more elaborate for the arrival of a high noble infant.]
I went back to the front part of the house and chatted with the father until the sando' arrived. She immediately went back to the baby, but it was decided to bring it out on its tray to the front part of the house where there was more light so I could see the proceedings better and photograph it. The father said he has had a different sando' for each of his children. The sando' ordered hot water, and she squeezed green leaves [daung cuppa-cuppa] into it. She then touched the baby's head, hands, navel, and feet with the leaves, squeezing green juice out. Then she took the umbilical cord [lolo] and touched it to the placenta [erung] and to the baby's navel, then knotted the cord itself into a kind of loop. They sent a small child to get the bamboo knife [bila'] and some turmeric root. Yellow thread was brought on a plate. More hot water was added to the bowl, and the sando' put into it the bamboo knife, an old copper coin, and the turmeric roots (they were uncut, so it did not affect the waters color). Into this water she dipped a white cloth and then touched it to the baby's forehead, mouth, and chest, saying spells [baca-baca] while doing so; she did that twice. She then baca-baca some shallots and cut them up into a small jar of coconut oil. She sharpened the bamboo knife. She then pressed the umbilical cord against the baby's penis, and then tied the yellow thread around the umbilical cord. The baby's grandparent, its mother's father, came over to cut the umbilical cord. He took a root of turmeric and put it under the point on the cord that he wanted to cut, bracing the cord, and then cut it with the bamboo knife.
[A bamboo knife rather than a metal one is used, as ToLuwu feel that it will cause less of a shock. Usually the sando' cuts the umbilical cord, but she had delivered this baby's cousin the day before. For second cousins too, I was told, she could not have cut it; three days after the first birth, it would have been all right.]
Now he took the slightly bloody end of the cut cord which was attached to the placenta and touched it to the baby's mouth. They said it was to prevent the child from being matesse' [cheeky/insolent] to its parents. Now they prepared the placenta, the baby's "older sibling." They put it into an empty shell of the bila fruit, along with some rice, some fishbones, some daung cuppa-cuppa, a bit of the Koran [a scrap of paper with Arabic letters], and daung pallang.
[The placenta is being prepared for burial. It is put into a container, along with various other items, and later will be carried out of the house in a sling, just like a baby, by the father. Often the placenta is placed in a coconut shell; in this case, the container is the hard shell of a fruit whose skin is flexible until the pulp is removed, when it dries to a stiff, lightweight container. With the placenta were placed a number of items. Daung cuppacuppa, a type of green leaf, is generally said to prevent stomach sickness. Daung pallang is often used in ceremonies because jin pakkoni, a type of spirit that likes to lick up blood, are afraid of the leaf. The fishbones, several people said, are to prevent choking on fishbones. These and the rice and the Quran are standard items in such ceremonies, though things may be added or deleted. Some families insisted that a needle (for "konsentrasi," spiritual concentration) should be added, and others included turmeric in the package.]
Now that its umbilical cord was cut and the baby was separated from its afterbirth, the sando' proceeded to oil the baby with the coconut oil that had the shallot dropped into it with spells. She stroked the baby thoroughly on the back and chest, each palm, its feet, legs and forehead, occasionally leaning over and whispering into its ear, saying spells. The infant was really greased up, and it was stretched and its fingers and hands pulled back, so that, they said, it would be "flexible" rather than "stiff and awkward."
[The sando' was indeed making the baby flexible, but she was also protecting its most vulnerable spots, called its leso-leso, places where bad things might enter it. She protects the baby by baca-baca into its ears and oiling the leso-leso with oil into which she had whispered spells. Leso-leso areas include behind the ears, at the palms of the hands and feet, in the armpits, behind the knees, and at the backbone. The balls of the fingers and under the fingernails are also places to be protected. The fontanel is an especially dangerous spot, so it is seldom washed, and often leaves are placed on it as an added barrier. Leso-leso, it appears to me, are places where the smooth surface of the skin breaks, as in a joint, or where there are naturally soft spots.]
After being oiled, the baby was splashed with the water that had the turmeric, copper coin, and so forth in it, then dried off and given to the ToPattarima, the "person who receives it." In this case it was the baby's first cousin, a fourteen-year-old girl.
[So far as I can tell, the ToPattarima should be family, but not the parents or grandparents. It appears most often to be a parent's sibling or the baby's cousin, i.e., collaterals. Perhaps this indicates that the baby is welcomed by a supporting collection of relatives larger than its immediate family.]
The baby was dressed now by its mother's mother in white infant clothes, purchased at the market, and sprinkled with baby powder by its father, and put on a tray and on the bed. The attention of the sando' now turned to the mother, while the father stayed in the front part of the house. The sando' and the mother went to the back of the house, the kitchen, and I accompanied them to watch. The mother lay down and the sando' massaged her stomach and pulled and stretched her arms, rather the way she had done to the baby while oiling it, and she baca-baca all the while. The mother then got up into a squatting position [ma'cudengkeng, a comfortable and customary posture] and the sando' dipped some water on the mother's forehead while baca-baca, then on her hair. She massaged the mother's back a little bit. The mother washed herself off a little, and they lit a dapo-dapo and put dry leaves and some dried rice stalks in it so that it produced smoke.
[A dapo-dapo is a small clay container for burning coals, used in many ceremonies. Onto the burning coals people place palm sugar, rice stalks, or leaves with particular associations; the rising smoke is often fragrant.]
The mother stood over it, straddling it, so that the smoke rose between her legs. This they said was so that the blood wouldn't clot into a ball, but instead would flow out and her stomach wouldn't hurt. When this was almost over, I left the kitchen for the front room, where the father was preparing to announce the baby's presence to the world with the [Islamic] Call To Prayer. He put a big pair of scissors under his left arm, and, holding the baby and facing west, sang the call to prayer. [The point of the scissors was to have some iron; a knife would be good too, or a keris if they had had one.] After that, the baby was taken back and put onto the bed.
Now the placenta was to be buried. It had been put into the bila-fruit shell along with various items and was now wrapped in a banana leaf, then covered with an old cloth and tied into a bundle. The baby's maternal grandmother arranged a piece of cloth around its father's neck in the manner of a slendeng [a sling-arrangement in which women carry their babies]. The placenta package was placed into the slendeng and the father carried it that way down the stairs and out of the house, over to the nearby tree where a hole for it had already been dug by the baby's mother's father. The father returned to the house immediately. The grandfather finished burying it.
[In this area, burying the placenta under a tree near the house is the most common practice, but it can also be sent out to sea or hung from a tree. If you hang it from a tree, the father told me, you have to make sure it is very well-wrapped so it doesn't smell bad.]
I had been told that it was customary to bonk a coconut several times on the floor near the newborn's head in order to get it used to loud noises, sort of immunizing it to prevent aseddingeng [sudden loss of sumange']. I was disappointed that they hadn't done that, and asked the sando' about it. She said that these days babies hear a lot of loud noises, like radios, so you don't need to bother with making a special point to introduce them to it, the way you used to.
THE THIRD NIGHT
Before the mother descends from the house, the child is considered to be very vulnerable, especially on its third night, the bongi sapa'. It is protected on that dangerous night by being surrounded by adults who maroja (stay awake all night). Parents who can afford it make the night of maroja into a somewhat festive occasion, inviting neighbors in and serving lappa'-lappa' the men stay up all night playing a type of domino game. Lappa'-lappa' are long thin leaf-packages of sticky rice steamed in coconut milk, considered auspicious. For this occasion they must be cooked and eaten inside the house. The local imam (Islamic religious leader) may or may not be called in to say a prayer over the lappa'-lappa'. Even if the parents are too poor to do anything else, they stay awake all night, usually joined by a few close neighbors or kinspeople. The third night is the crucial one, but people maroja on all uneven nights before the mother leaves the house if they have the funds to provide snacks and the energy to stay awake. If the mother leaves the house on the seventh day, people maroja on the third and (if they can afford it) fifth days; if she leaves the house on the ninth day, people maroja on the third, fifth and seventh days; and if she leaves the house on the eleventh day, people maroja on the third, fifth, seventh, and ninth days.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm by Shelly Errington. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Notes on Orthography, Pronunciation, and Language, pg. xiii
- Introduction. The Problem of Meaning in the Study of Politics, pg. 3
- Chapter One. The Person, pg. 35
- Chapter Two. Microcosm/Macrocosm, pg. 64
- Chapter Three. The Polity, pg. 96
- Comment on Part I. Reading Movement, pg. 130
- Chapter Four. Vulnerable Places, pg. 142
- Chapter Five. The Contest for Place, pg. 169
- Chapter Six. The Potency of Names, pg. 191
- Chapter Seven. Forgetting Genealogies, pg. 203
- Chapter Eight. Centripetal Marriage, pg. 232
- Local Conclusion. Transcending Politics, pg. 275
- Comparative Conclusion. The Political Geographies of Potency, pg. 284
- General Conclusion. Empowered Signs, pg. 295
- Epilogue, pg. 303
- Glossary, pg. 307
- References, pg. 311
- Index, pg. 319
- Illustrations, pg. 323