Tetum Ghosts and Kin: Fertility and Gender in East Timor

154 Pages·1988·6.278 MB·English

by  David Hicks

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Tefum Sfiosís Rin
David Hicks
State University ofNew York, Stony Brook
WAVELAKD
PRESS, IN<
Prospect Heights, Illinois
í
For information about this book, write or cali:
Waveland Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 400
Prospect Heights, Illinois 60070
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To my wife,
Maxine
Copyright © 1976 by David Hicks
1988 reissued by Waveland Press, Inc.
ISBN 0-88133-320-4
All ríghts reservM. N$gart of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
System, or transmiite'a in any form or by any means without permission in
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Printéd in the United States of America
7 6 5 4
Confettis
Acknowledgements v
Editors’ preface vii
1 Fieldwork 1
2 Birth: The cycle opens 19
3 Ecology 3 8
4 The house 56
5 Kin and affines 67
6 Marriage 85
7 Death: The cycle closes 107
Glossary ot Tetum words 127
List of anthropological terms 131
Recommended readings 133
Bibliography 135
Index 137

Achnoroledgemenfs
Besides those Caraubalo villagers mentioned in the following chapters, I
wish to thank those villagers whose ñames do not appear but without
whose help my field research would have been impossible, and the
following individuáis and institutions for their assistance: the late
Professor Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Professor Christoph von
Fürer-Haimendorf, Dr. Ravi Jain, Professor H. G. Schulte Nordholt, Dr.
Barbara Ward, Mr. Ruy Cinatti, Dr. José Teles, Mr. John Burton, the
Junta de Investigares do Ultramar, and the Frederick Soddy Trust. My
fieldwork was made possible by a grant from the London Committee of
the London-Cornell Project for East and Southeast Asian Studies which
was supported jointly by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the
Nuffield Foundation. Before leaving for Indonesia I had the advantage of
studying social anthropology at Oxford University in the scholarly havens
provided by St. Edmund Hall in my first year and Exeter College in sub-
sequent years. To the Principal and Fellows of St. Edmund Hall, and to
the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College go my profound thanks. I am
especially grateful for the honor the Rector and Exeter Fellows bestowed
on me by my election to the Alan Coltart Scholarship in Anthropology in
1963-1964 and again in 1964-1965. Much of the material examined in
this book was analyzed while I was a doctórate student at Oxford work-
ing under the supervisión of Dr. Rodney Needham. My personal and
scholarly debí to him is incalculable. Dr. Melody Trott, of California
State College, commented on an earlier versión of the present text, as did
Drs. Robert Edgerton and Lew Langness of the University of California,
and my colleague at the State University of New York at Stony Brook,
Dr. W. Arens. With extraordinarily painstaking care Mr. Gene Tanke
went over my entire manuscript and helped improve ít in many ways.
Mrs. Mari Walker typed and retyped various drafts in her usual patient
manner, and I thank her yet again. Many of my descriptions ofTetum life
were first presented to my own freshmen and gradúate students at Stony
Brook, and their reactions helped shape the account given here. I com-
pleted this book while a Fellow of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
(University of Paris) in 1976, and I wish to thank the SSRC Fellowship
Panel in the U.K. and the EPHE in Paris for providing me with the op-
portunity to exchange ethnographic information and discuss the inter-
pretation of data with those of my French colleagues who have also
carried out fieldwork on Timor—Drs. Brigitte Clamagirand, Claudine
Berthe, and Gérard Francillon. Their contributions to the seminar series I
gave from February to May helped me to regard my Tetum data from
alternative points of view, and it was an agreeable experience work-
ing with them. Drs. Pierre Smith and Dan Sperber provided me with
sounding boards for certain of my ideas, and they, too, merit my thanks.
It gives me special pleasure to remark on the encouragement Gabor
Nadasty, Marietta Nadasty, Phyllis Newman, Jack and Nancy Garraway,
and my mother, Anastasia Dorothy Hicks, have given me at different
times while I was writing this book; and as an affectionate token of ap-
preciation for the help she has selflessly given—and continúes to give—I
dedícate it to my wife, Maxine.
École Pratique des Hautes Etudes,
University of Paris
gtfifors preface
Anthropology, like all scientific and artistic disciplines, is constantly
changing so that research approaches once generally favored inevitably
give way to new approaches over time. One of the most important
developments in contemporary cultural anthropology is the attempt to
analyze cultural phenomena in terms of their symbolic significance in-
stead of, or in addition to, their structural, functional, and ecological
significance. This approach has given rise to a new sub-discipline that is
often referred to as symbolic anthropology. Because symbolic
anthropology is such a new development its practitioners vary con-
siderably in the ways they structure their studies; and because the sym­
bolic is abstract in its nature, its impact is often difficult to measure,
analyze, and describe in concrete terms. For these reasons, there has so far
been little published in the way of useful text materials for students who
might wish to pursue their own studies in the field. We believe this ac-
count by David Hicks will help to rectify that situation.
Religión, of course, is the primary arena for symbolic meanings and
acts. Therefore it is not at all surprising that the advent of symbolic
anthropology has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in the
study of non-Western, non-literate religions. This revival has been par-
ticularly marked in British social anthropology, of which Professor Hicks
is a representative. By concentrating on ghosts and kin in this analysis of
the symbols employed in the ritual and myth of the Tetum society,
vii
Professor Hicks enables us to understand much of how the world view of
the society relates to its religión. As he himself observes: “When we ex­
amine Tetum culture, taking the ritual relationship between ancestral
ghosts and their human kin as our starting point, such different spheres as
rituals, religious beliefs, kinship practices, oral literature, ecology, and
architecture together blend into a single, expansive field of study.” Thus
the book is not only a useful example of symbolic analysis, but it also
demonstrates the functional integration of culture which has fascinated
anthropologists for at least the past half century.
David Hicks was trained in social anthropology at the University of
Oxford under the late Professor E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Professor
Rodney Needham. After winning a scholarship in anthropology at Ox­
ford he went to Indonesia to carry out fieldwork. With the material he
collected there, he wrote one thesis that gained him his Doctor of
Philosophy degree from Oxford and another that earned him a Doctor of
Philosophy degree from the University of London. The author of two
dozen or so essays in anthropology, Dr. Hicks here presents his first book.
Robert B. Edgerton
L. L. Langness