Parallelism and the Composition of Oral Narratives in Banda Eli

While parallelism is easily recognizable as the source for various literary tropes, it is also important as a resource for the speakers' dialogic engagement with the patterns of interaction and experience: they embody part of their linguistic habitus. This article explores the forms of parallelism found in a variety of speech and narrative genres in Bandanese, an Eastern Indonesian minority language with about 5,000 speakers. Bandanese abounds with parallel expressions in which speakers use part-whole relations based on social and cultural classifications to construct totalizing cognitive and value statements. At the same time, Bandanese poetics is more than just evidence of an integrated cultural world. The article analyzes interactions between tropes based on repetition and parallelism to suggest that speakers and narrators use them to create a resonance between immediate rhetorical effects and larger recognized aesthetic positions in their folk categories. A prominent example of such resonance is the use of parallelism in eloquent, public speech. When speakers use the lexical contrast between Bandanese and the regional or national majority language as a source of parallel expressions, they draw from an aesthetic in which powerful speech resonates with past and future dialogue with outsiders. Recent scholarship on parallelism and repetition encourages us to recognize that they produce potential dialogic relations on a larger scale than that of single utterances. This approach can produce valuable insights into possibilities for innovation in and revitalization of Bandanese and other minority languages threatened by demographic change and loss of use in their former domains.Abstract from website.Timo Kaartinen received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2001. He is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki and has a done ethnographic research at several Indonesian sites since 1992. His ongoing fieldwork focuses on the revitalization of minority languages in the Eastern Indonesian province of Maluku

Islamic Transformations in the Periphery of Maluku, Indonesia

The article explores Islam as an element of the social and symbolic formations created in the context of long-distance trade relations in the Aru and the Kei islands of southeast Maluku. The Muslim migrants and traders who settled in the area in the early colonial period created places that served as entry points to the local, autochthonous society. Even as these sites allowed Muslims to control access to local cultural domains, they allured local people with possible access to trade wealth and mobility. By creating conceptual and tangible boundaries around the indigenous domain, early Islam anticipated the contrast between universally valid religious convictions and materially embedded cultural forms. This contrast became significant after the large-scale conversions to Christianity and Islam in the late colonial period. Islam was also transformed by its interaction with various cosmopolitan discourses, but it has remained more accommodating than Christianity towards socially embedded ritual practices and material symbols. This raises the question whether 'cultural Islam' should be defined by its neutral, apolitical attitude towards the secular state which is complicated by the fact that the culturally embedded Islam in Maluku took form in the absence of centralised state power.Peer reviewe

Polveutuminen, avioliitot ja sukulaisuuden kieli

Aineisto on Keskustakampuksen kirjaston digitoimaa ja kirjasto vastaa aineiston käyttöluvista

The Promise of Equality : Forum section 'Anthropologists Debate (In)equality'

Non peer reviewe

Urban Diaspora and the Question of Community

The Bandanese are a community with a distinct language and tradition which point to their origin in Banda, an early base of Dutch colonization in Indonesia. Presently focused in two villages in the Kei Islands, the community has been transforming into a regional, urban diaspora since the 1960s. Field research from March until August 2009 focused on the question of how this community distributes itself regionally and to what extent its ethnic relations are informed  by its previous history of travel, migration and displacement. The study reveals that urbanized Bandanese occupy political and economic niches  marked by a privileged access to fishing and trade, the backbones of the provincial economy. At the same time, their shared ancestry with local land-owning  groups legitimizes their presence in new locations. Differential access to maritime wealth and land give new meaning to the classification of immigrant and  autochthonous people, ubiquitous in each island society of Maluku, in which the Bandanese are placed in a mediating position. Keywords: diaspora, migrations, Indonesia, Maluku Island

Mosques and Imams : Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia

Book review. Reviewed work: Mosques and Imams : Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia / Kathryn M. Robinson (Ed.). - Singapore : NUS Press, 2021.Non peer reviewe

Parallelism and the Composition of Oral Narratives in Banda Eli

While parallelism is easily recognizable as the source for various literary tropes, it is also important as a resource for the speakers’ dialogic engagement with the patterns of interaction and experience they embody as part of their linguistic habitus. This article explores the forms of parallelism found in a variety of speech and narrative genres in Bandanese, an Eastern Indonesian minority language with about 5,000 speakers. Bandanese abounds with parallel expressions in which speakers use part-whole relations based on social and cultural classifications to construct totalizing cognitive and value statements. At the same time, Bandanese poetics is more than just evidence of an integrated cultural world. The article analyzes interactions between tropes based on repetition and parallelism to suggest that speakers and narrators use them to create a resonance between immediate rhetorical effects and larger aesthetic positions recognized in their folk categories. A prominent example of such resonance is the use of parallelism in eloquent, public speech. When speakers use the lexical contrast between Bandanese and the regional or national majority language as a source of parallel expressions, they draw from an aesthetic in which powerful speech resonates with past and future dialogue with outsiders. Recent scholarship of parallelism and repetition encourages us to recognize that they produce potential dialogic relations on a larger scale than that of single utterances. This approach can produce valuable insights into the possibilities for innovation in and revitalization of Bandanese and other minority languages threatened by demographic change and by losing their former domains of use.Peer reviewe

Interview with Tim Ingold

Non peer reviewe

Handing Down and Writing Down : Metadiscourses of Tradition among the Bandanese of Eastern Indonesia

The topic of this article is the reproduction of tradition among the Bandanese, an Eastern Indonesian people. I analyze the style and rhetoric of songs that tell about ancestral sea voyages. The question I address is what happens to the value of the songs as tradition when they turn from oral performances into circulating texts. I explore several contexts of performance and transmission and argue that the songs can be embedded in lived realities in different ways. By writing the songs down, the Bandanese reorganize their tradition into new genres of text and performance. Their metadiscourse of tradition affirms that these genres represent the exemplary, complete language of the ancestors. Although singers and writers affirm the artistic, textual, and cultural completeness of their arts, they are reluctant to pass on their knowledge in an already integrated form.Peer reviewe