Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia Catherine Allerton Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013, xi+221p.Potent Landscapes, by Catherine Allerton, is engagingly written anthropological study of place and culture in Southeast Asia. Its ethnographic focus is a two-placed, partly resettled village (p. 5) in Manggarai region of eastern Indonesia, with settlement Wae-Rebo in highlands, and its lowland offshoot Kombo developed in 1960s as part of a wider governmental resettle- ment drive. To differentiate itself from structuralist Leiden School that identifies eastern Indonesia as a field of study and pursues a cosmological coherence within field, this book takes a phenomenological (p. 4) approach that puts bodily experience at center of analysis, including those messy and contradictory aspects of people's life. Allerton presents a multisensory (p. 15) picture of how landscapes gain potency through place- and path-making out of entanglement between people and place. Meanwhile, by examining influence of Catholic conversion, state development, resettlement, and migration on this eastern Indonesian village, Allerton also ties work to contemporary issues.Three recurring themes are key to master core of book. First, equal prominence is given both to taken-for-granted, often unspoken aspects of everyday life and the extraordinary, ritual or ancestral (p. 9) aspects of life. Allerton argues that place- and path-making happens both through explicit creation of presence in ritual performances and through everyday practices that do not consciously aim to create values. Readers can easily see close entwinement of mundane and ritual life is repeatedly brought out throughout chapters.Second, landscapes, a rather encompassing concept in book, include not only mountains or fields, but also-rooms, houses, and paths-and combine both material and immaterial aspects. Human activities take place in concrete materiality of landscapes whose characteristics also shape people's social life. Beyond this, Allerton places more emphases on immateriality of landscapes, which refers that landscapes have agency, evoke human memories and emotions, and have their own concerns and desires.Last but not least, Manggarai landscape is defined by mobility along several dimensions. As chapters expand outwards in ever-widening concentric circles (p. 15), different kinds of places, from smallest and most intimate household rooms to larger scales of landscapes, are connected through daily movements between houses, to fields, up and down mountains, and more poignant journeys along marriage paths or to outside realms. Closely related to Allerton's strategy of personifying landscapes, is her attempt to illustrate temporal dimension of mobile landscapes. Rooms, houses, and villages have their own course of social lives and need to undergo rites of passage as humans do so through life to realize identity transformation and reproduction.The main contents of book are organized in six chapters. Chapter one examines household rooms, which have not featured prominently in many writings on Southeast Asian houses. Allerton asserts rooms can be agents to connect with ancestors, gather up souls, and transmit mysterious blood spirits. By showing entanglement of rooms with their occupants' bodies and souls during key phrases in human life cycle, Allerton argues that rooms emerge as different kinds of entities in context of different practices and how particular rituals create presence of room as agents. In this way, important social relationship among Manggarai people can be learnt from narrative of social life of a Manggarai room. However, when doing so, Allerton emphasizes that we should not objectify rooms but understand it as an ongoing dynamics in a room-household's developmental cycle (p. …