Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society

Abstract

Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. WEBB KEANE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; 297 pp. (paper). Anakalang is a dry, out of the way place in West Sumba, Eastern Indonesia. Here, where subsistence agriculture is the norm, neither trade nor wages play much part in people's lives. Local affairs take place in a realm largely untouched by the reach of the Indonesian state. Although most people have converted to Christianity within the last thirty years, and warfare and the headhunting that went with it have been in abeyance since the colonial era, violence and bravado still command men's image of themselves, and ancestor spirits remain important. This is where Webb Keane carried out fieldwork in the 1980s and '90s, trying to understand exchanges, formal speech, and feasting. In his remarkable and ambitious ethnography, he makes these esoteric subjects speak to general theories of representation. The result is a critique both of those approaches that treat culture as a text or as disembodied discourse and of those that lean toward economic or material reductionism. Further, Keane shows that agency is not only something individuals exercise, but also a property of groups. The main actors in formal transactions are the corporate patrilineal descent groups called kabisu and their segments known as houses. High status kabisu, some of which constitute a nobility, assert claims as village founders, and possess ancestral heirlooms and villages with stone tombs and dancing platforms where they sponsor great feasts. Asymmetrical alliance characterizes the pattern of marriage among kabisu, with, ideally, at least one marriage each generation renewing the affinal bond. Nonetheless, long-standing affines construe each other as antagonists and constantly scrutinize the objects and words they exchange in ceremonial contexts as either a recognition of honor or grounds for offence. The ethnography sticks mostly to formal settings such as marriage negotiations, where the predominant speakers are generally not themselves party to the exchanges or decisions that occur, but merely the delegated voices of the principals. Adepts of ritual speaking lace their talk with the couplets that are a hallmark of this region and that Anakalangese regard as a legacy from an ancestral golden era. The stylized expressions bracket an event as efficacious or definitive, for this was the manner in which ancestors spoke. Much speaking in ritual events also consists of highly redundant messages relayed by go-betweens, reports and repetitions of what others have said. This agency-blurring practice, and the replicability of utterances among different speakers, Keane argues, displace utterances from persons and bespeak the transcendent authority of ancestors. Keane explores at length the implicit logic of speaking in pairs. A couplet says the same thing in two different ways, and also points to an unstated, third possibility: a gloss in colloquial speech. Couplets as a poetic device thus evince a general process of displacement where signs point to something not actually there, a semantic center that is only presupposed. Displacement is also evident in behaviors relating to slavery. …