Table of Contents
This collection of ethnographic essays on different peoples within the Austronesian-speaking world represents a step in a comparative effort that is encouraging and frustrating. The papers in this volume engage in this comparative effort in fascinating and diverse ways but their very diversity only highlights the variety of approaches adopted within a comparative Austronesian framework. The papers speak to each other and to previous papers in earlier volumes in the series on Comparative Austronesian Studies but they represent no single viewpoint, nor do they espouse a consistent methodology comparable with that of the ‘comparative method’ in linguistics. The cumulative effect of the papers produces a strong resonance, but tracing relations among them can give rise to a variety of readings.
The initial question to be asked of this volume is straightforward. What contribution do these separate essays offer towards a comparative understanding of the Austronesians? Each paper deals with a different group of people located across a wide sweep of islands from Sumatra through Bali and eastern Indonesia to Melanesia and the Pacific. This scattered ethnographic coverage can be seen to represent a considerable social diversity yet it would be hard to argue the particular populations included in the volume offer comprehensive coverage of the Austronesian-speaking world or even a strategic selection of comparative case studies. In fact, one of the papers in the volume deals pertinently with a non-Austronesian population that has taken on many of the seemingly defining features of Austronesian societies.
Each paper focuses on local conceptions of land, territory and settlement but the approach taken to examine these conceptions varies significantly. While some of the contributors may share a similar background and operate with some common understandings, other contributors bring their own distinctive perspectives to bear on the issues set out for discussion in the volume. In each instance, an available ethnography is assessed in terms of general issues of the categorisation of land and its social implications and the problem at hand is redefined in each of these ethnographic iterations.
There is an implicit cross-referencing among the papers. Each separate inquiry, although focused largely on internal explication, offers multiple references to Austronesian concepts and practices noted and discussed in other papers. The comparative effort is thus indirect, partial and incomplete but nevertheless insightful. In each ethnographic analysis, some issues take on new dimensions while others appear to recede. Thus each paper offers its own ethnographic contribution but contributes cumulatively to a wider comparative perspective.
To understand the wider comparative thrust of this volume, it is essential also to recognise that this is the fifth volume in a series that has grown out of the original Comparative Austronesian Studies Project that began in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the late 1980s. The project began what could best be described as a continuing dialogue. As a consequence, in virtually all of the papers in this volume, there are references to other papers in preceding volumes. Various comparative notions developed and fashioned in these other volumes—ideas about origin, ancestry and precedence—continue to be applied in this volume as well as notions of complementarity and recursivity. From this perspective, the present volume is an extension of a continuing investigation and needs to be read within the context of an entire series.
Given this wider context, it is only at the end of the volume that one is in a position to comment upon its cumulative contribution. This postscript offers one such reading of the volume as a whole. One can consider the papers in this volume in a variety of ways. I have chosen to consider various papers in groups that together pose specific comparative issues and raise questions of significance and of interpretation.