Four other papers in this volume engage in implied comparisons on the theme of land as ritual location but without reference to either *banua or *tana. Although reference categories are different, the discussion in each of these papers relates to one or another of the themes broached in the earlier discussions.
Minako Sakai’s paper deals with the Gumai, a Malay-speaking population in the highlands of South Sumatra among whom the word tanah, meaning ‘land’, occurs. Her concern is with kute, the term Gumai ritual specialists use, in preference to modern terms for village or hamlet (desa or dusun), to denote a ‘residential territory’ to which genealogically defined Gumai populations link their origins and celebrate their continuity with past generations. The term kute, which once implied a fortified centre, is derived from Sanskrit but has a long history of use in Old Malay. As in the case of the papers that discuss the ritual polities of Bali, understanding the Gumai requires some comprehension of the variety of political influences their region has been subject to since well before the time of the Sriwijayan Empire.
As a Muslim population, the Gumai retain non-Islamic ritual specialists (jurai tue) whose task is to link the present populations with the founding ancestors of the Gumai population. Sakai’s paper is a brilliant exposition of just how these ritual specialists are selected in a society whose origin groups (jungkuk) rely on bilateral genealogical reckoning. As in other societies with similar forms of cognatic kin structures, residence—and the de facto inheritance of specific houses—provides the basis for a continuity of succession.
Although not central to her discussion, an interesting feature of her paper is the discussion of how Gumai incorporate ‘stranger groups’—populations without genealogical links to the founder population of the kute. The Gumai case bears directly on the case of the Keo of Flores, but stands in contrast with that of Sikka.
My own paper, ‘Contending for Ritual Control over Land and Polity: Comparisons from the Timor Area of Eastern Indonesia’, is concerned with some of the same issues as the paper on the Gumai, particularly the idea of rule and the ritual custodianship of the land. It is in fact one in a succession of papers in which I have attempted to examine comparable aspects of various societies of Timor. The first of these compared houses and their significance (Fox 1993); the second, ideas of origin and the way in which ‘progenitor lines’ are defined and traced within Timorese societies (Fox 1996).
The paper is a comparison of three domains: Termanu on the island of Roti, Amanuban in south-west Timor and Wehali in south-central Timor. Termanu and Amanuban provide two cases where the contest for control of the land has resulted in the installation of an outsider—a ‘stranger king’. As in Sikka in central Flores, this installation subordinated the local ceremonial custodianship over the land to a new political centre.
Wehali provides a contrasting case where such spiritual power has not been subordinated but in fact continues to emanate a vital authority to neighbouring domains. Thus Termanu and Amanuban have developed into polities—states with rulers—whereas Wehali has remained a ritual centre. The further interesting contrast among these cases is the valency given these different centres: Termanu is explicitly a ‘male’-centred polity, Wehali is equally explicitly a ‘female’ centre, while Amanuban evidences elements of both valencies.
The two final papers in this reading—that by Mark Mosko on ‘Self-Scaling the Earth’ among the North Mekeo of PNG and that by Andrew McWilliam on forest tenures among the Fatuluku of East Timor—are the most challenging and provocative in the volume. Mosko’s paper is an attempt to provide a bridge between the discourse currently being conducted in relation to the societies of eastern Indonesia and the distinct discourse on ‘personal partibility’ in Melanesia. His paper is an elaborate analysis of Mekeo land and society conceived on the model of a body, involving the two-way flow of substances from inside and out.
Andrew McWilliam’s paper is particularly challenging in a volume on Austronesian comparison precisely because it deals with a non-Austronesian population who speak a Trans-New Guinea phylum language. As McWilliam makes clear, the Fatuluku have had ‘a long-term engagement with Austronesian social and cultural ideas and practices’ through contact with other Austronesian-speaking populations on Timor and, as a consequence, ‘they have borrowed extensively from Austronesian registers and concepts over many generations’. (In fact, in another paper, McWilliam has referred to the Fatuluku as ‘Austronesians in linguistic disguise’.) In his paper, he enumerates a range of conceptual features that the Fatuluku share with their Austronesian neighbours: similarly oriented spatial coordinates, an extensive use of common dyadic categories such as trunk/tip, male/female and elder/younger; landholding origin groups identified by the Austronesian term ratu; a clear recognition of progenitor lines among these ratu groups; myths of precedence based on a succession of boat arrivals from overseas; and the regular use of ritual language couplets.
Yet in considering Fatuluku society, there are also apparent differences coupled with an oblique untranslatability of concepts. Thus, for example, McWilliam refers intriguingly to ‘the Fatuluku idea of a conceptual distinction between the “body” of the earth and its “skin”’—a distinction that is not known to be a salient feature of neighbouring Austronesian groups. It is perhaps interesting in this context that Mosko devotes attention to the notion of ‘skin’ as a critical feature of the ‘body’ of the earth among the Mekeo, some of whose cultural ideas might have derived historically from contact with neighbouring non-Austronesians.
Critical comparative issues raised by MacRae in relation to the Indic models that have contributed historically to the transformation of Bali are equally relevant but more elusive in the examination of the Austronesian/Non-Austronesian societies of eastern Indonesia, PNG and Melanesia that have, for millennia, been in regular contact. Fatuluku offers enormous potential for comparative Austronesian studies. The finer and the deeper McWilliam is able to develop his ethnographic understanding of the Fatuluku, the better we might be able to gauge what we mean by ‘Austronesian’.