Gregory Forth

Headhunting and the social imagination in Southeast Asia

Contributors 1. Introduction: headhunting as practice and trope Janet Hoskins 2. Lyric, history, and allegory, or the end of headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi Kenneth M. George 3. Headtaking and the consolidation of political power in the early Brunei state Allen R. Maxwell 4. Severed heads that germinate the state: history, politics, and headhunting in Southwest Timor Andrew McWilliam 5. Buaya headhunting and its ritual: notes from a headhunting feast in Northern Luzon Jules De Raedt 6. Telling violence in the Meratus mountains Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 7. The heritage of headhunting: history, ideology and violence on Sumba, 1890-1990 Janet Hoskins 8. Images of headhunting Peter Metcalf Index.

Public affairs Institutionalized nonmarital sex in an eastern Indonesian society

A recent revival of anthropological interest in kinship has evidently extended even as f ar as such long-standing questions as the universality of marriage. More particularly, Cai Hua (2001) has argued that marriage is encountered in all societies except one: the matrilineal Na or Moso of southern China, who ensure biological and social reproduction by way of impermanent sexual liaisons called visits. Continuing in a universalist vein, Cai (2001:426) further claims that marriage and the Na arrangements, whereby a man and a woman meet solely for the purposes of sex, are mutually exclusive; in other words, that an institution of marriage precludes all other forms of institutionalized sexuality. The present essay controverts Cais thesis in an especially telling way: it explores an eastern Indonesian society in which an approved and institutionalized form of temporary sexual relationship exists (or until recently existed) not only in tandem with marriage, but also with affinal alliance, a system in which marriage and marital sexuality form an essential part of connections between structural groups, and which has usually been conceived as entailing a marriage prescription (Forth 1993:96-7). Insofar as it provides an alternative means of social as well as biological reproduction, the Indonesian institution also bears significantly on continuing theoretical debate in anthropology regarding such analytical categories as descent, filiation, and social kinship. Drawing on accounts of numerous informants I have known during a series of visits to Indonesia over a period of twenty years, in what follows I describe a form of premarital or extramarital sexual relationship among the Nage and Keo of the island of Flores. The relationship involves young unmarried women regularly and openly becoming temporarily attached to men - either married or unmarried - for the purposes of sex. Nage and Keo

Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba

Introduction 1. Place, identity, and the shifting forms of cultivated speech: a geography of marginality 2. Towering in rage and cowering in fear: emotion, self, and verbal expression in Sumba 3. Changing forms of political expression: the role of ideologies of audience completeness 4. Ideologies of personal naming and language shift 5. From miracles to classrooms: changing forms of erasure in the learning of ritual speech 6. Conclusions.

The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange.

Janet Hoskins provides both an ethnographic study of the organization of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of field work with the Kodi people of the island of Sumba, her book focuses on Kodi calendrical rituals, exchange transactions, and confrontations with the historical forces of the colonial and postcolonial world. Hoskins explores the contingent, contested, and often contradictory precedent of the past to show how local systems of knowledge are in dialogue with wider historical forces. Arguing that traditional temporality is more complex than many theorists have realized, Hoskins highlights the flexibility and relativity of local time concepts, whose sophistication belies the cliche of simple societies living in a world outside of time.