Eastern Indonesia

Buku ini mengajak kita merenungkan kembali perlunya untuk mengikis batas pembeda antara yang kita anggap sebagai "Indonesia Barat" dan "Indonesia Timur" dalam upaya membangun kesejahteraan Indonesia. Meskipun upaya tersebut telah dilakukan jauh semenjak dahulu sampai era reformasi hadir, tampaknya kesenjangan antara barat dan timur masih cukup nampak. Di samping perlunya pembangunan ekonomi yang merata dan adil, buku ini mencoba mewacanakan kembali mengenai model pembangunan Indonesia Timur yang menekankan partisipasi masyarakat, pelibatan aspek sosial budaya serta peka terhadap isu lingkungan. Pendekatan sosial budaya dan antropologis tampaknya menjadi penting jika mengingat masyarakat Indonesia Timur penuh dengan kekayaan budaya dan karakter sosial spesifik yang dapat menjadi modal bagi pembangunan

Leiden Research MA Thesis (2018): The first part of this thesis consists of a synchronic phonological description of the Lio language (Austronesian: Flores, Eastern Indonesia) and the second part consists of a comparative reconstruction of the Central Flores Linkage to which it belongs.

This article examines Pramoedya Ananta Toer's book related to the comfort women on Timor from the perspective of a historian studying World War II and the comfort women--this may be our only source of information about comfort women in this region making it particularly important. This is not an easy task, as the book was put into published form sometime in the 1990s based on a manuscript assembled by Pramoedya in the 1970s on Buru based on interviews conducted by other political prisoners on Buru. Not surprisingly, the text itself shows signs of "split-personality," as if very different people with very different purposes were writing it.

Pantar is a forgotten island in at least two ways. Not only social scientists never did research on that island, but also the local population forgets its local knowledge due to its conversion to calvinist protestantism. Dutch missionaries were very strict in forbidding anything that might have been in connection with ancestor or spirit worship. The interest of the author made old men to start to remember their tradition and to speak again on important matters. By doing so a process of remembering was revived. The book thus is on the one hand a collection of local political-historical myths in the local language as well as its translation to German. On the other hand the book shows why and how mythical narratives, and its narrating and remembering are of never ending social relevance.

Pantar ist in doppeltem Sinn eine vergessene Insel. Nicht nur Sozialwissenschaftler haben sie übersehen, auch die überwiegend calvinistische Bevölkerung vergisst ihr tradiertes Wissen, seit die Mission jegliche Ahnenverehrung verbot. Das Interesse der Autorin regte die fast verstummten alten Männer dazu an, wieder inhaltsvoll zu sprechen ( tutu kadire) und dadurch Erinnern erneut in Gang zu bringen. Im vorliegenden Band werden aber nicht nur diese lokalgeschichtlichen Mythen wiedergegeben, sondern zudem Einblick in die gesellschaftliche Relevanz sowohl der mythischen Erzählungen als auch des Erzählens und Erinnerns vermittelt.

"Refleksi dari Ruteng: Daniel Dhakidae (1945-2021), Cendekiawan Rakyat Indonesia dan Berbicara Kebenaran kepada Kekuasaan" is my obituary essay for my friend, Daniel Dhakidae, who died on 6 April 2021. The essay was published in the memorial volume, Para Sahabat Mengenang Daniel Dhakidae, Cendekiawan Par Excellence edited by Ignatius Haryanto and Yohannes Krisnawan, published by Penerbit Buku Kompas in January  2022, hlm.287-94.

Like many other areas of history, our knowledge about the adoption of Christianity by Southeast Asians during the 16th and 17th centuries is still rather circumscribed, while the relatively small number of documents still extant results in construction of narratives on the basis of only a few sources. For the most part, the sources available have been scattered letters from Jesuit missionaries and a few (other) Portuguese texts, as well as a number of 17th and 18th century Dutch documents, primarily written by clergy and administrators serving the V.O.C.
On the other hand, some of the earliest known Malay language texts, dating from the 17th and 18th centuries and published by the Dutch V.O.C., have more recently become more widely known. It is generally understood that the Malay language was used as a trading language throughout the Indonesian archipelago, however, these early Malay language documents relate not to trade but rather to teaching Christianity, and their existence indicates a commitment to Christianization. This commitment directly contradicts the commonly accepted view of Spanish and Portuguese as Christianizers and the Dutch as money-lovers, rather than being seen as complex agents. In fact, involvement in both religious and economic pursuits is apparent from both the origins of the Portuguese and Spanish expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries and Dutch expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This study seeks to explore this early Christianization in an unusual case, Ambon, whose substantial Christian population converted to Calvinism and has remained Christian up to the present. This includes some consideration of the language of communication, in this case the Malay language, as an essential element which was involved in both Islamization and Christianization.

Eastern Indonesia is known for a great variety of textiles. One part of the region that has been largely overlooked in the literature is textiles of the Alor archipelago. However, the literature does recognise and speculate about the unusual silky character of some Alorese cloths that have entered Western museum collections. 
Based on fieldwork among weavers in the village Uma Pura, situated on a small island in the Pantar strait, this paper reveals the secret behind the characteristic shiny finish of the ‘silk’ sarongs from Alor. Ruled by necessity rather than choice weavers used to mix cotton with fibres from kolon susu, a common plant along arid coasts of Eastern Indonesia.
The same lack of raw materials for women depending on weaving for their livelihood also led to a triangle trade in the Solor-Alor archipelago where sarongs were traded for pots that were traded for cotton – which was brought back to Uma Pura to be mixed with kolon susu and spun into a kampung version of silk cloth.
In the paper these economical and practical aspects of the production of hand-spun yarns is set against the backdrop of a mythological past where Eko Sari, a hari woman from a village in the sea, taught Alorese women about spinning and the tangible present where hand-spun yarn plays a central role to pregnancy and childbirth in Uma Pura.

This article considers the millenarian disposition among the Buton of North Seram sub-district, Maluku. Particular focus is paid to how the Buton interpret their inclusion in indigenous cosmologies, given their current precarious and humiliating existence. In Maluku, the Buton have long been regarded as lower-class people, outsiders who are excluded from local cultural schematics and are both socially and legally vulnerable. Instead of simply seeing their aspiration for a new and perfect social order as something springing from their desire to end their predicament, and rather than viewing their belief as something invented for this end, I suggest that the incongruent communication of cosmological tropes is important in the formation of their millenarian framework. The Buton understand the presence of their mythical representations in the indigenous cosmologies as evidence of the original order, which inspires them to believe that the Seram people are concealing the truth and that its revelation will upturn the current oppressive order. For the often referred Seram communities, however, the inclusion of Buton mythical representations is a way of assimilating a powerful, dangerous stranger and perpetuating the wholeness of their cosmology. The emphasis on the productivity of the misunderstanding rather than the creative act of expanding symbolic frameworks helps explain the peculiar relationality which grounds Buton millenarianism.

"Reflections from Ruteng: Daniel Dhakidae (1945-2021), Indonesian Public Intellectuals and the Challenge of Speaking Truth to Power" is the English original of my obituary essay for my friend, Daniel Dhakidae, who died on 6 April 2021. The essay was published under the title 'Refleksi dari Ruteng: Daniel Dhakidae (1945-2021), Cendekiawan Rakyat Indonesia dan Berbicara Kebeneran Kepala Kekuasaan' in the memorial volume - Para Sahabat Mengenang Daniel Dhakidae: Cendekiawan Par Excellence - edited by ,Ignatius Haryanto and Yohanes Krisnawan, and published by Penerbit Buku Kompas in January 2022.

Published version: http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52501

This paper describes aspects of the phonology of Kodi, an Austronesian language of Sumba, Indonesia. Based on the analysis of recordings of an elicited word list, the description covers the segmental phonology, syllable structure and stress. A pervasive feature of Kodi is a number of morphophonological processes that result in most words alternating between a longer and shorter form. These include antepenultimate vowel reduction, paragoge, apocope and metathesis. Word forms can also be altered by the spreading of palatalization and labialization features

Eastern Indonesia is a region of great musical diversity. In contrast to the large choruses characteristic of this region, an unusual kind of two-part singing was discovered in the 1930s in eastern Flores and has received further attention since the 1990s. In this music, a first voice (hode’) is combined with a second (nuku), at very narrow intervals. The same kind of duet singing–with narrow intervals, movable drone, intermittent unison, and similarities in musical syntax–has recently been reported from eastern Timor. In the larger landscape of big choruses and gong music, these duets stand as an enigma. They are isolated not only from the surrounding musical practice but also from each other: the language in eastern Timor is Fataluku, a member of the Papuan language family, while in eastern Flores it is Lamaholot, an Austronesian language. Is there evidence for a link between them? This paper proposes an hypothesis of migration, using musical evidence and other cultural indications through a comparative approach.

Defined by Joel Robbins as the science of continuity, anthropology has long experienced diffi- culty explaining changes and transformations. The notions of cultures and traditions it maintains tend to simply assume their durability. This inclination has led to the problem of overlooking the dramatic heterogeneity in bodies of myths. Since myth is often treated as the ‘great component’ that promotes ‘the unity of a culture’, even among those who are critical of the timeless notion of culture, the theoretical tendency that pervades anthropology is to emphasise its coherence with the whole while disregarding its conflicting multiplicity. This paper attempts to propose a framework within which we can better address the multifariousness of a body of myths in actual social circumstances. This is accomplished by expand- ing Edmund Leach’s view of myth as an ‘argument’ and taking the view that the reproduction of myth requires its alteration and transformation for the sake of appropriating conceptualised qualities of social value. The subject of this study, in particular, is the myth about the Butonese lowlander in North Seram, Maluku, Eastern Indonesia.

The Tangguh area of Bintuni Bay, east of the Seram Trough, holds West Papua’s biggest gas reserves in its Paleocene and Jurassic sandstones. The effective source rocks for this area are Late Permian and Jurassic successions. Both Bintuni Bay and the Seram Trough were located on the same passive continental margin before Late Neogene deformation, which suggests that these source rocks should have equal potencies across the region. Nevertheless, one well located in the trough showed no significant quantities of gas, and the other three wells, including the Lengkuas-1 deep water well, were declared as dry holes. 

Basin modeling was used for the investigation of petroleum systems in the Seram Fold-Thrust Belt (SFTB) and Seram Trough foreland basin, by simplifying the SFTB thin skin deformation as an abrupt rock mass. This study is supplemented further by the source rock evaluation that showed the Jurassic interval is the primary source rock. 

The SFTB deformations not only acted as an abrupt rock mass that buried down the Jurassic source rock, but also supplied low thermal conductivity sediment into the trough. Nevertheless, the result showed that decreasing heat flow in the trough was unable to keep the oil prone Jurassic source rock below the trough within the oil window. The oil generation and expulsion phases which began in the Oligocene (33 Ma) ceased in the Early Pliocene (5 Ma) as a result of SFTB initiation in the west. This PliocenePleistocene event deformed most existing oil traps, replacing oil accumulations with gas.

In this paper, I present a preliminary analysis of the phonology of the Lewotobi dialect of Lamaholot (Central Malayo-Polynesian, eastern Indonesia), including phonemes, allophones, phonotactics, syllable structures, stress placement, and morphophonemic processes. I also argue that the Lewotobi dialect differs from the neighboring Lamaholot dialects with regard to at least three features. First, [ʋ] appears in the positions where [w], [v], or [f] occurs in other dialects. Second, this dialect only allows open syllables, with the exception that the glottal stop can occur as a word-final coda. Third, /a/ is raised to [ə] either when nasalized or before a nasalized vowel. The description and analysis presented here are entirely based on a database of approximately 1,000 words collected through my fieldwork.

Tourism has been theorized in a new ethnography of modernity, stressing the
museumization of the premodern and its production as spectacle. In this article,
I explore the voice and perspective of the “tribal culture” recently exposed
to a new type of gaze. Tourists are perceived as predatory voyeurs on
Sumba, a once remote area now receiving increasing numbers of foreign visitors.
An idiom of visual consumption encodes a critical awareness of global
inequities in access to and use of technology, and a history of changing selfperceptions.
The cameras that every tourist brings to capture images of headhunters
and primitive violence become the very emblems of the exotic violence
that they are designed to capture. [tourism, photography, cultural
identity, Eastern Indonesia, violence, headhunting.

This book provides an overview of the anthropological debate on house societies, pertaining particularly to Southeast Asian social formations. Its point of departure is a comparative model of social formations in Southeast Asia that was outlined by Shelly Errington. Although this model features prominently in anthropological discussions of the region, no detailed analysis of her comparative approach exists. This might be attributed to the fact that Errington's model is theoretically dense, alluding to the rather complicated anthropological field of kinship studies. The model combines premises of Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology with Clifford Geertz' symbolic or interpretative paradigm and situates the synthesis in the anthropology of insular Southeast Asia. This book traces the genealogy of Errington's model and provides detailed explications of its basic theoretical premises before it explores the concept of house societies and how it is applied by Errington to approach and compare Southeast Asian social formations. The book reveals the structuralism that speaks through Errington's comparative approach by discussing the concept of transformation and indicates the potentials and limitations a typlogy of different house societies has for the anthropology of Southeast Asia.

https://www.galda-verlag.de/product/centrism-and-dualism-house-societies-in-southeast-asia-reconsidered/

Reading this article is to embark on an adventure through certain ethnographic and archaeological texts about a specific form of boat construction. The voyage sets out from the village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia where whaling boats continue to be built according to traditions passed on by the ancestors. However, while researchers write about boats, they simultaneously board the boats in
order to construct the sequence of their narratives. Whether they journey back through the eastern archipelagos in search of the origin of a boat’s design; or follow the plank by plank construction sequence; or whether they find a leak in previous boat building discourse – all are involved in intricate relations of becoming through the materiality of the very boats they desire to observe and describe. Narratives are premised on unquestioned notions of linear time and travel. In this article, however, readers find themselves carried along on a different voyage, where time and travel are always in the here and now.

RESUMO
Essa tese trata sobre populações das regiões montanhosas de Timor-Leste, tendo por base uma experiência etnográfica situada em um agrupamento de aldeias na região de Oecussi (região administrativa em formato de enclave na Ilha de Timor, arquipélago da Indonésia Oriental, Sudeste Asiático). Procura-se explicar por que e como certas condições materiais desses ambientes têm contribuído para que ocorram processos de subjetivação em que as pessoas se concebam como “parentes” de uma Casa e “nacionais” de Timor-Leste. Procura-se também explicar os processos materiais pelos quais essas populações têm passado, a partir da reanálise de etnografias das populações, a partir de relatos orais dos meus conviventes e da literatura administrativa colonial. Têm-se como principal material para análise as convivências do pesquisador-autor com pessoas que se posicionam como mediadoras das estruturas políticas do Estado e com uma unidade doméstica que se encontra cada vez mais conectada às dinâmicas nacionais. A tese considera que essas populações não apenas vivem em grupos de parentesco e numa comunidade nacional: para viverem, elas continuamente produzem esses grupos de parentesco e a comunidade nacional. As vivências num ambiente onde se articulam modos de produção camponês e capitalista têm contribuído para a formação de um ambiente que dá condições para que ideias e valores de parentesco sejam subjetivados e valores e ideias nacionais sejam cada vez recorrentes e compulsórios. Assim, noções de tempo, espaço e pessoa relacionadas às instituições sociais do Estado-Nação e da Casa emergem não apenas mediante comunicações discursivas e rituais de ideologias nacionais ou de parentesco. Essas ideias e esses valores também emergem e adquirem relevância diante das vivências produtivas dessas pessoas no seu cotidiano, em suas experiências migratórias, nas memórias ativadas diariamente e nas diferentes unidades domésticas que moraram e nas suas rotinas de produção material.

Palavras-Chave: Nacionalismo – Parentesco – Timor-Leste – Camponeses
 
ABSTRACT
This doctoral dissertation deals with populations in the mountainous regions of East Timor. It is based on an ethnographic experience that took place in a group of villages in the region of Oecussi (an administrative region in the form of an enclave on the Island of Timor, in the archipelago of East Indonesia - Southeast Asia). It seeks to explain why and how certain material conditions (pertaining to these environments) have contributed to the occurrence of subjectification processes by means of which people can conceive themselves as “relatives” within a House and also as “nationals” of East Timor. It also seeks to explain the material processes these populations have undergone through a reanalysis of ethnographies of the populations as well as oral reports from my co-dwellers and also the colonial administrative literature. The main material for analysis is the relationship and co-living of the researcher-author with people who stand as mediators of the government's political structures and also with a domestic unit that is increasingly connected to national dynamics. This dissertation considers that these populations do not only live in kinship groups (and at the same time within a national community): in order for them to live, they continually produce or create these kinship groups and the national community itself. Their experiences (lived in an environment where peasant and capitalist modes of production are articulated) have contributed to the formation of a situation that enables kinship ideas and values to be subjectivized and also enables national values and ideas to be increasingly recurrent and compulsory. Thus, notions of time, space and personhood (related to the social institutions both of the nation-state and the House) can emerge – and not only by means of discursive communications and rituals of national ideologies or kinship. Such ideas and values also emerge and gain relevance in the face of the productive experiences these people live (in their daily lives, in their migratory experiences, in the memories that are activated daily, in the different domestic units they lived in and also in their material production routines).

Key-words: Nationalism – Kinship – East Timor – Peasants

After independence, a search for national heroes in the Indonesian struggle against
colonialism drew attention to Wona Kaka, a Sumbanese headhunter who raided
Dutch forces in 1911. Praised by some as the first figure in a common national
history, he is also used as a champion of local tradition who resists integration into
the "imagined community" of the Indonesian state. Controversy over efforts to
"call back his soul" from Java shows the ideological bases of the construction of
history and clashes between nationalism and opposition to outside control. [history,
headhunting, colonialism, nationalist ideology, mythology, Indonesia]

In the late 1980s, after decades of refusal, the Forest Tobelo foragers of northeastern Halmahera, Indonesia, converted to Christianity. The version of Christianity they accepted was not the one offered (or imposed) by coastal Tobelo-speaking communities with whom they share kinship and affinal ties, but was brought to the region by the American-based New Tribes Mission. This essay examines the factors and motivations behind this change, and offers an explanation that takes into account local histories, larger political and economic changes, such as deforestation and land encroachment, and the rarely examined topic of missionary methodologies. The Forest Tobelo decision to convert is best understood as an attempt to maintain their distinct identity from coastal communities with whom they have a long history of poor relations; the methods used by the New Tribes Mission made conversion an attractive option at that time.

Although the construction and amplification of touristically celebrated peoples’ Otherness on global mediascapes has been well documented, the genesis of touristic imagery in out of the way locales, where tourism is embryonic at best, has yet to be examined. This article explores the emergent construction of touristic imagery on the small, sporadically visited Eastern Indonesian island of Alor during the 1990s. In examining the ways in which competing images of Alorese people are sculpted by both insiders and outsiders, this article illustrates the politics and power dynamics embedded in the genesis of touristic imagery. Ultimately, I argue that even in remote locales where tourism is barely incipient, ideas and fantasies about tourism can color local politics, flavor discussions of identity and channel local actions.

A sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia, available for free via the Open Access digital option: https://haubooks.org/ethics-or-the-right-thing/?fbclid=IwAR2o5sR-0gjK_8DVjD9flMME-CxU9nEFLTkZkHB9irNnpU1vaUede25Alvg

Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it. Importing critical insights from the anthropology of ethics to the burgeoning anthropology of corruption, Tidey exposes enduring developmentalist fallacies that treat corruption as endemic to non-Western subjects. In practice, it is often indistinguishable from the ethics of care and exchange, as Indonesian civil servants make worthwhile lives for themselves and their families. This book will be a vital text for anthropologists and other social scientists, particularly scholars of global studies, development studies, and Southeast Asia.

This article makes a contribution to the documentation of the genre of oral literature known as zapal amongst the Bunaq, a Papuan-speaking group of central Timor. I present an annotated and translated version of the elaborate zapal entitled Hul Topol or Fall of the Moon. Hul Topol is a lengthy, multi-event narrative which gives etiologies spanning the realms of subsistence, cultural practice and natural order including animal behaviour and appearance.

This is a study about spatial arrangement and cosmological order of Huaulu society in Seram Island,Eastern Indonesia. Research and data collection had been conducted by ethnography. The problem is derived from Valerio Valeri's works on Huaulu spatial arrangement that is considered unfinished. In Huaulu, there are four basic directions recognizable to its people, namely rai, lau, roe, and ria-they can be translated respectively to South, North, East, and West. However, among several meanings associated to them, there is also association with the direction to the interior or mountain, the direction to the sea, the direction to the forest or 'outside world', and the direction to the village or 'inside world', respectively. By positing Huaulu village as point of reference, we can clearly see that the island interior is always situated in the South, whereas the sea is always situated in the North; hence, the translation for rai and lau is South and North. But, in respect of roe and ria, their translations are more problematic, since their connotations as 'outside' and 'inside' do not imply direct relation to East and West. Valeri left this problem unanswered by leaving us a question: why does in some context at Huaulu 'outside' stand to 'inside' as 'East' stand to 'West'? By answering this question, this article aims to complete the reconstruction of Huaulu spatial arrangement and cosmological order that had been started-and left unfinished-by Valeri more than three decades ago. The result is a basic geometrical order that underlies Huaulu cosmology.

Lamaholot is a Central Malayo-Polynesian language of eastern Indonesia and is spoken in the eastern part of Flores Island and neighboring islands. The Lewotobi dialect of this language has two kinds of verb alternations of theoretical interest: the ditransitive and the benefactive alternations. On the one hand, verbs of transferring ownership such as neĩ ‘give’ can appear in both prepositional recipient and ditransitive constructions. The alternation held between the two construction types is referred to here as the ditransitive alternation. On the other hand, certain verbs of transaction and service such as hope ‘buy’ can be involved in the benefactive alternation, which is observed between benefactive serial verb and benefactive constructions.The purpose of this paper is to provide the description and analysis of the ditransitive and the benefactive alternations in light of recent studies of ditransitive and benefactive constructions (Kittilä 2005; Malchukov, Haspelmath & Comrie 2010, to name a few).

This paper investigates "directionals" or geocentric spatial terms in Lamaholot, examining the interaction between directionals, topographic environment, and cultural construals of landscape. Lamaholot is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia spoken on the volcanic island of Flores. The Lewotobi dialect, with which this paper is concerned, is spoken on the coastal area between Mt. Lewotobi and the Solor Sea. Reflective of this topographic environment, this language has "directionals" or grammatical terms defined with respect to landmarks: rae 'mountainward', lau 'seaward', wəli 'parallel with the coast', teti 'upward', and lali 'downward'. After describing how the spatial orientation represented by directionals is embedded in linguistic and sociocultural practices in Lamaholot-speaking communities, this paper shows that directionals exhibit intriguing diversity in interpretation and morphosyntax: they constitute a coordinate system for geocentric frame of reference, refer to different directions depending on different construals of landscape, and can appear in various syntactic positions. It is argued that this diversity can be understood in terms of a complex interplay of topographic environment, sociocultural practices, language uses, and linguistic repertoire, as assumed in the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457-491). Thus, the directional system in Lamaholot makes a strong case for a sociotopographic approach to spatial language.

As a nation faced with great ethnic and religious diversity, Indonesia has conceived of museums as instruments for cementing national and provincial identities. Drawing on research in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta, the Nusa Tenggara Timur Provincial Museum in Kupang, and a small village-based museum on Alor, this article examines the often ironic role of Indonesian museums in the nation-building enterprise. I suggest that embodied in these museums and in Indonesian visitors’ responses to them, are distinctive renegotiations of the state conception of the museum as a loci for the construction of nationalist subjectivities.

KEY WORDS: Indonesia, nation-building, identity, Alor, museums

One of the outcomes of the radical decentralisation policies accompanying political reform and democratisation in Indonesia is a sustained administrative programme known by the term pemekaran, or a 'blossoming' of new administrative and budgetary units that extend to the farthest corners of the nation. This paper explores aspects and impacts of the pemekaran process as it unfolds in two remote corners of Indonesia, namely the sub-district of Routa in Konawe Regency of Southeast Sulawesi and the newly-established district of Bintuni in the swamp lands of Bintuni Gulf, West Papua. In both regions the strategic possibilities that accompany pemekaran have fostered a vibrant local politic based around appeals to established patterns of landed authority. But the logic of pemekaran can lead to fragmentation and confusion over jurisdictional authority. Critics argue that the process dilutes capacity and political authority. Supporters acknowledge the limits but applaud the extension of development funding into areas which otherwise would remain isolated and impoverished. The paper explores some of the dimensions of this debate and the role of pemekaran in shaping local experience on the margins of the state.

Язык гесер-гором – основной язык населения островов Серам-лаут и архипелага Гором, он также распространен на восточной оконечности острова Серам. И хотя гесер-гором является одним из крупнейших языков на всех Молукках и самым многочисленным в центральной их части, он практически никогда не был описан. Работа представляет полевые материалы (словник и образцы предложений) и даёт краткую характеристику грамматического устройства языка гесер-гором

In eastern Flores, on the Tanjung Bunga peninsula (among Western Lamaholot speakers), several times a year, ritual narratives (opak) are performed on a square dancing area, where all the clans of the same ceremonial land meet. Three types of narrative are sung, according to three kinds of rituals. The article explains the context, content and performance details of these stories, performed all night long. Why do the various clans continue to sing all these narrative? What values do these long poems have for people who sing them? Until now, studies on this subject have been remarkably few, and not even a partial transcription or translation of these narratives is available. This article offers a preliminary insight into these sung narratives, to show how vital they still are in eastern Flores.