Alune incantations: Continuity or discontinuity in verbal art?

Abstract

Throughout this century some Alune‐speaking villages in the eastern Indonesian province of Central Maluku have experienced rapid sociopolitical and ecological change. Concomitant with these changes, language shift from Alune to the regional Malay variety, Ambonese Malay, is also occurring. This paper draws on a corpus of 45 incantations collected in two Alune villages which have been dissimilarly affected by the processes of change. The utilisation of a limited corpus of modern incantations in one village indicates a substratum of specialised indigenous sociocultural knowledge which has persisted in that site despite language shift and sociopolitical change. Comparison between traditional and contemporary forms of this genre of verbal art reveals structural differences and the extensive use of lexical items from languages other than Alune. Despite linguistic discontinuity, the endurance of incantations in this contemporary Christian society provides some continuity with pre‐Christian Alune practices and may be viewed as a response to external events which are driving social, cultural and linguistic change.