Remembering and Recreating Origins: The Transformation of a Tradition of Canonical Parallelism among the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia
- Remembering and Recreating Origins:The Transformation of a Tradition of Canonical Parallelism among the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia1
Personal Prefatory Remarks
I have been studying an oral tradition of strict canonical parallelism intermittently for nearly half a century. I began my research on this oral tradition based on the island of Rote in eastern Indonesia in 1965, and have continued these efforts, now with greater urgency, to the present. I have also been investigating issues in comparative parallelism for roughly the same period of time. In 2014 I published Explorations in Semantic Parallelism, which marked an important stage in this research. This volume is a collection of papers both new and old. For example, I reprinted my first survey of the field in 1977 published in honor of Roman Jakobson together with a longer paper on the "trajectory" of subsequent and continuing developments in the study of parallelism.
Explorations in Semantic Parallelism also reprints several of my papers on the study of the Rotenese tradition of canonical parallelism together with various papers that continue to extend my study of this tradition. My personal understanding of the Rotenese tradition of canonical composition has grown over several decades, while the tradition itself has been undergoing change. My perceptions of this change are intimately linked to my increasing comprehension of the tradition as a whole.
In this paper I take stock of the work on that tradition to date and to put it into perspective. I also describe the changes that have occurred in the tradition over the course of my research as I gradually gained new perceptions of its fundamental underpinnings. Much of my general research on Rote has been historically oriented. The island has its own extensive oral historical traditions as well as Dutch archival records that date to the mid-seventeenth century. Some of the changes in Rote's traditions of parallelism that I perceive as most significant were, on good historical evidence, begun a century earlier and have now taken over as ever more influential.
Introduction to the Study of Rotenese Ritual Language: The Context of Recitation
For a period of roughly four decades, all my recordings of the Rotenese "ritual language" were opportunistic. They were made during the course of ongoing fieldwork, primarily in one domain on the island, that of the central domain of Termanu (see Fig. 1). Recordings often occurred at ritual gatherings but just as often they happened when an individual poet or chanter chose to provide me with a particular recitation. One attraction for such recitations was that I always made certain to have a ready supply of native palm gin, which is regarded by the Rotenese as the "water of words," and is both a stimulus and requisite for recitation.2
Although these efforts at recording could hardly be considered systematic, they were neither fortuitous nor without plan. During my first fieldwork, I was fortunate in having as my language teacher, an elder master poet, known as Old Meno, who held the ritual office of Head of the Earth. His first male grandson was born shortly after I arrived, and he was taken with the possibility offered by my Uher tape recorder of transmitting his knowledge across generations. More than any other poet whom I have recorded, he had a concern for revealing and thus possibly preserving core traditions of origin.
Other poets were stirred to record by the rivalry that existed among them. The fact that I had recorded from a particular poet and let it be known that I valued that recitation would prompt other poets to want to record. Most recordings were of individuals and, if it was at all possible, I would work through the recording and transcription with that poet. Early in my fieldwork, on the advice of the elder brother of the ruler (Manek) of Termanu, I declared an interest in recording a particular text, Suti Solo do Bina Bane. This became a kind of key signature text that I recorded from many poets over the years. I also sponsored particular mortuary rituals at which recitation was required. Chanters would come to perform and, as was once the case throughout the island...
