Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory) by Allerton Catherine

Author:Allerton, Catherine [Allerton, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780824837990
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2013-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.3 Collecting on the stone sompang platform at penti

However, like “history objects” in Kodi, Sumba, the Wae Rebo stone platform is not simply a “sign of history” but can “even help to make history” (Hoskins 1993, 119). During the new year ritual performance, the sompang platform is addressed as an agent with the power to protect the village from conflict and bad luck. I was told that the purpose of the ritual speech and the offerings left on an elaborately decorated, woven platform is to “persuade” (reku) the stone sompang itself. Indeed, a number of people told me that at the end of the site-specific rituals at penti, the whole community of Wae Rebo-Kombo—including platforms and other sites—is invited into the drum house. The sompang, like other spirit-places, is thus at times spoken of as a material place, a sign of history, and at other times is personified as a kind of place-agent that may join in lively events in the drum house.

In a discussion of the significance of megalithic stone monuments to the Zafimaniry of Madagascar, Bloch argues that these monuments construct a permanence that, in contrast to the “growing” permanence of human life in villages, is absolute (1995b, 73). He portrays the Zafimaniry as having a rather ambiguous view of megaliths that is based on what he considers to be a common Austronesian contrast between stone, which is eternal but has never been alive, and wood, which originates in a living thing (ibid., 73). However, it is not clear that all Austronesian societies follow the Zafimaniry in denying vitality or agency to stones. Bonnemaison, for example, has described how the first inhabitants of Tanna, Vanuatu, were thought to be magical stones who travelled noisily about the island, waging war with each other and, in so doing, creating the land and its roads (1994, 115–116). In Manggarai, stone platforms have a kind of animate energy that connects with the wider fertility and potency of the agricultural landscape. Moreover, as we have seen, the steadily accumulated ritual paraphernalia of the center of a new field—including a flat stone—aim to “thrust in” and “root” crops into that field. As with stones in Gawan fields, these mini-monuments produce a certain (ritual and physical) “heaviness” (Munn 1986, 80; cf. Kahn 1996, 180) in Manggarai fields that are forever shifting, changing, or slipping down the mountainside.

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