IMPLICIT META-TALK AND COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY IN PERFORMANCE: TORAJAN POETICS AND POLITICS

Stanislaus SandarupaHasanuddin University

1 IntroductionLinguistic anthropologists have shown that ritual speeches are mainly

charaterized by the use of formulaic expressions, high formalization and rigidity. Bloch in discussing Merina circumcision ceremony in Madagascar argues that the ‘highly formalized language’ and the ‘rigidly prescribed behavior in dance movements’ order actions and relationship between participants. In this way there is no way for the structure of role relations and authority to be challenged except by a total refusal to use the accepted form or a total refusal of all political conventions (Bloch 1989 [1974], 24), since “you cannot argue with a song” (ibid. 37). Numerous works have been advanced against Bloch’s thesis (Werbner 1977, Parkin 1984; Schieffelin 1985 for examples).

This paper makes the argument that such rigid prescription becomes in part a resource of knowledgeable social actors who can contest authority in song while preserving the formal structure of the ritual. It will show how Torajan ancestral ritual speech parallelism is put into practice, and how this process is subject not only to regularities but also to happenstance, potentially of the most unpredictable sort. As a result, despite the fact that ritual is highly prescribed, the possible outcomes are unpredictable because its use may put the conventional senses of signs at multiple risks.

The value of a sign in ritual speech parallelism is fixed by its contrasts to other signs. Its use, however, is saturated with pragmatic value according to the subject’s interests. Thus to quote ancestral parallelism in a specific context for a certain purpose is to use it according to the acting subject’s pragmatic interest. The underlying assumption is that agents have the potential to resist and manipulate structural constraints and sometimes marshal enough creative power to transform their structural relations (Giddens 1984). Thus, its use has the characteristic of contingency and becomes a site of contestation (Sahlins 1985; Keane 1997).

The ritual embodies the construct used at various levels, pragmatically and strategically. Above all, just like ordinary speech, ritual speech parallelism also utilizes what Silverstein called a metapragmatic capacity in addition to having a pragmatic aspect (1993). He uses the term metapragmatics to refer to both implicit and explicit metatalk, that is, the talk about the talk. Bateson first used this term in 1950’s, calling it metacommunication and used the concept to explain how children jointly manage a play session. The importance of this concept will be shown at two levels of analysis. First, I will show how social actors utilized this metapragmatic capacity of the language

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discursively to strategically transform social relations. Metapragmatic capacity is basic to human ratiocination and allows for the evaluation and alteration of future action. Indeed, it allows agents to reflexively evaluate and explain their use of speech acts and those of others including the rationalizations behind them. A metapragmatic description thus provides us (social actors and analysts) with empirical evidence of what is exactly happening at the moment of speaking in performance. Secondly, I will show the importance of the strategic use of the implicit metatalk and collaboration in ritual as a verbal shorthand to keep the flow of chant without breaking the frame.

Using badong (chant for the deceased) as a case study, this paper examines how a ritual leader, speaking up formally and publicly to a rival leader, challenged and transformed the structure of social relations between the rival leader and himself and with their respective co-performers. Prior to taking over leadership, the challenger was a participant to the social event, recognizing his rival as the legitimate leader. By taking up the leadership position (tomantolo’ batiŋ) through implicit metatalk, he ursurped the previous leader’s power.

2. Bandong and its place within Torajan oral traditionThe badong chant belongs to the genre of death ritual speech parallelism (see

Appendix A). As song and dance badoŋ is an organized form of lamenting (umbatiŋ) performed by a collective at the high class death ritual. It is a complex semiotic phenomena consisting of kadoŋ badoŋ, ‘text lines’, badoŋ, ‘song cycles’, oninna, ‘unison’, and movement which comprises teŋkana, ‘movement of feet’ and soeanna, ‘movement of hands’. Like other dances and songs, badoŋ performance is one of the most rule-bounded ritual activities present in Torajan society. Within each level there are rules of combinations which produce meanings. Denotationally, all of these components are fused into a single purpose, i.e. to express the collective grief because a beloved one has passed away. The number of lines to be sung may be in the hundreds depending on the composition the ritual leader makes. These lines express more or less the same life cycles: mythical origin in heaven, life in this world, and the return to heaven (cf. Van der Veen 1966; Rappoport 1997). Within it we can also detect the differential distribution of various kinds of knowledge among performers such as knowledge of leadership, the ability to construct parallel lines, genealogy, voice quality and so forth.

In this performance, the ritual leader composes a line and offers it to co-performers to be repeated and chanted. The line is metapragmatically segmented into eight syllables, which are in turn sung interchangeably by performers. What is interesting is that the eight syllables are further segmented into a 3-3-2 pattern, which corresponds with the grouping of the performers. Semantically, each segment of three syllables is incomprehensible when judged alone, indicating the importance of syntagmatic relations among these segments to produce a totally meaningful line. Some syllables are sung longer than others. The prolonged syllables are then followed by filler syllables or mellisma (cf. Rappoport 1997). Filler syllables continue the last vowel of the syllable, which is preceded by phoneme /h/ (Sandarupa 2004). The repetition of the whole line by co-performers is a tendency to move toward a unified center while displaying and affirming the ordered relations between the (segmented) parts.

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During the performance, several forms of interaction appear. The exchange that takes place within this performance must also follow a certain pattern based on the adjacency pair structure that forms a tropic figuration as the performance unfolds. This figuration can be characterized as a call and response in which acts are ordered as first parts and second parts, and categorized as offers and acceptances respectively. However, in this particular ritual it is misleading to see the use of ritual speech as parasitic to its normal use (Austin 1962) because the properties of every element for each semiotic level are in dynamic relation with contextual factors and can be misused, repeated, decontextualized and recontextualized (Derrida 1982; Bauman and Briggs 1992).

In this approach, badoŋ chant is viewed as a process, a linear ongoing event, which moves from unit to unit with some insertion sequences. One of the most interesting facts about badoŋ performance is that its structure has some of the qualities of conversation. For this reason, I will use some concepts from discourse analysis such as exchange, turn taking, adjacency pair, insertions, and sequences (Levinson 1983) to analyze this ritual. In this ritual, the exchange that takes place between social actors is a fixed order of moves (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). The basic moves are Initiation [I] and Response [R], and the latter is further distributed among participants who take turn in singing the syllables. As a process, however, the acts performed by social actors are related and the occurring pattern is the use of pairs of lines known as adjacency pairs whose features are as follows: different speakers produce two utterances, and they are ordered. The first utterance belongs to the class of first pair parts, and the second to the second pair parts (Sacks 1967 quoted in Coulthard 1977). In badoŋ ritual, the first pair part is the ritual leader’s line, the second pair part is the repetition of that line by responsorial group.

Turn-taking is the management of cooperation in rituals in which one person speaks and another follows. The ritual leader has the right to speak first and then responded by the responsorial group. Sequences occur in times and moves from parallel unit to another unit. The tropic structure of this ritual acts can be shown as follows:

Figure 1: Tropic Structure of Badoŋ Ritual

The ritual leader, Initiation [I], composes a line and offers it to performers, Response [R] to chant the line. In real performance, a pair of lines becomes double, because each line is supposed to be repeated by respondents. This is a simple fact that previous ethnographers have neglected. The repeated line by R becomes a pair of the line uttered by the ritual leader. The next line, a pair of the first line, when repeated successfully by R, becomes the pair of that line. Thus two becomes four. Here we see how a speech ideology is related to idea of totality and social reproduction. It is also related to the ideology of the center as the source of fertility and social reproduction. For

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I R I R

successful performance, the preferred pair is, of course, command–conform, in which the ritual leader’s order to chant the line is followed by co-performers. It indicates the relation between ritual leader [I] who, by announcing the line, is in the position of implicitly commanding the plurality of co-performers [R]’s side, to conform to [I]’s command to repeat the line and sing it to a certain melody (badoŋ) in accordance with certain movements of hand and feet, and body (ondo). In short, within this chant performance, there is a hierarchical relation between [I] who is framing the total performance and [R] who must conform to what the ritual leader implicitly command (singing a line according to a certain melody and body movements).

Having looked at performance structure, I will now present how it is realized practice. As I have said above the exchange that takes place within this performance is predetermined but this does not guarantee what the outcome will be. The division of roles to be performed by co-performers is also set prior to performance. As an example let us look at badoŋ ditindok a’pa’. The word ditindok, a passive construction with the prefix /di-/ and with the root verb tindok meaning ‘to use a winnow to catch small fish or shrimps on rice field or river’. This is a beautiful image of fertility in which the evoked small fish or shrimps are likened to syllables sung by performers. The act of catching fish and shrimps thus serves to characterize the act of speaking and chanting. The division of lines into syllables that are distributed among speakers displays how the totality is divided into interdependent parts, which when they are properly and syntagmatically arranged, will ideologically serve to direct the flow riches and fertility into a village.

This most elaborate form of ritual is sung by four sub-groups and each consists of at least four chanters. This division into four (quadripartite) is understandable because the line to be sung is longer in that in addition to the eight syllables, the insertion line that marks the social status of the dead person will also be sung. The interactions that take place within this badoŋ is between tomantolo’ batiŋ (leader as giver) and paŋŋala badoŋ, ‘congregants as takers) between paŋŋala badoŋ (givers) and to ma’tammui (receivers) and so forth (Sandarupa 2004).

At one point in the on-going performance, the group is divided into four parts. Retaining the first two groups (paŋŋala and to ma’tammui), there are two additional groups, which consist of four performers respectively. The third group simban [R3] and the fourth group simboloŋ [R4]. In the performance they function to sing the insertion line not recited by the ritual leader. The word simboloŋ metonymically refers to the knot of long hair of the woman and therefore, it is female. The term simban refers to one song cycle and in relation to simboloŋ it then occupies the male role.

Let us look at the following example: [I] ritual leader tomai rapu rara’na [R]co-performers [R1]to-o-ho-ma-ha-i-hi-he- [ra-ha-pu-hu-ra-ha-ho]R2 [ha-ra’-ha-na-he-ho]R [R3] sim-ban o-ho-i-sim- [INSERTION] [R] co-performers i-mban-ho-ho [R3] passimban anna dikka’ le [INSERTION] ho-ho-ho

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[R4] simboloŋ simboloŋ renden indo’ [INSERTION] [R] co-performers oo-le-le-he-ho-ho indo’

Figure 2: Badoŋ Ritual Performed by Four Groups

2. The Ethnographic ContextThis ritual has attracted ethnographers, travelers, tourists, and missionaries alike.

Previous Torajan ethnographers who have written about Torajan rituals have given scattered comments on this ritual, which cannot be separated from elaborate funeral ceremony (cf. Wilcox 1989 [1949]; Nooy-Palm 1979, 1986; Koubi 1982). As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Kaudern (1929) recorded various games and dances in various places in his expedition in Celebes between 1912 and 1920. Discussing games and dances in central Celebes, which he defined as Paloe Toradja, Koro Toradja, Poso Toradja, and Saadang Toradja, he discussed a mabadoŋ dance performed by males and females, drawing on Nobele, a Dutch official, who had actually observed the performance. Holt (1938) in his travel to south Sulawesi observed ma’badoŋ and

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[R]

[R3]

[R1]

[R]

[R]

[R4]

[I] to mantolo’ batiŋ, the leader who commands co-performers to repeat his line[R] to ma’badoŋ, co-performers who responds and repeat [I]’s line by

chanting[R1] paŋŋala badoŋ: badoŋ takers[R2] to ma’tammui: badoŋ receivers[R3] passimban: male[R4] simboloŋ: female

[[I]

[R2

[R]

[R1

discussed some aspects of the ritual such as formation of a circle in the performance, dance movements and context. Van der Veen (1966) devoted a single volume to the collection of badoŋ ritual texts. Here, various texts performed in different ranking order of death rituals are presented together with their annotations. The term badoŋ is translated by Van der Veen as ‘the chant for the deceased’ (Van der Veen 1966), which becomes the title of the collection. This collection excludes many of the linguistic devices that relate texts to contextual factors. Thus, he appeared to be interested in textual content, characteristics of missionaries’ works during that period. This is not surprising because missionaries wanted to know the locals’ perspective about life after death. As Van der Veen said, there are two themes that can be discerned in the badoŋ: the expression of grief at the death of the deceased and the veneration of the dead person (Van der Veen 1966, 3). Recently, badoŋ ritual has been analyzed from perspective of ethnomusicology. The ethnomusicologist, Rappoport (1997), included samples of badoŋ performances from different regions in Toraja with different variations and analyzed them in terms of music.

The above ethnographic works have contributed in one way or another to our understanding of this ritual. Basically, badoŋ is portrayed as the narration of life cycles of the dead person from mythical origin in heaven, life in this world, and transformation into deified ancestor who continues to have power over the living. In general, this kind of analysis has placed too much emphasis on the semantic content of the text, resulting in a one-dimensional approach to badoŋ, which focuses on denotational text, in which the main statement is what the ritual text says. As a denotational approach, it simply leaves its dynamic aspect unexplained. Below I will present a balanced view of the two levels of textuality, denotational and interactional, and how the two are semiotically mediated (Silverstein 1976, 1984, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2003). As a ritual speech event (Hymes 1972), badoŋ ritual is not simply an enactment of predetermined values or structures. Rather, through enactment, performers are enabled to produce, challenge, and reproduce the structures of their society.

3. Speech Event of Ritual Challenge: The Case Study The event described below took place in June in 1996, when during the badoŋ

ritual performance that was conducted by the ritual leader Poŋ Jen (A), another person Poŋ Lua’ (B) suddenly challenged him. This is not something unique to Toraja. Keane reported that in one of the performances he recorded one well-known madman took up leadership and orated in couplets and the respondent followed him. As he said, “when a well-known madman stood up to orate in couplets the respondent chimed right in. The flow of cry and response went smoothly, unaffected by the fact that what the man said was, everyone agreed, incoherent. As long as the formal structure was successful, the respondent carried out his role without hesitating” (Keane 1997, 116). In the Torajan case, the rupture became serious because leadership politically moved to a different person through creative collaboration. It was a transformation of social relations that did not refuse the whole structure.

The badoŋ ritual was voluntarily performed by people who lived in the same village as the dead person known as badoŋ pa’tondokan, and was open to whoever wanted to participate. The performance took place on the second night of the seven-night

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ritual of the funeral ritual of an old lady in Meŋkendek village. The performance was supposed to carry on the chant of the mythical origin of the dead person, her being conceived and given birth in the sky, the heroic history of her ancestors, their roles in spreading the teaching of alukta religion, and her work activities and life in this world up to the time of her death and death-ritual performance. All these vectors were important both for the religious purpose of transforming the spirit of the dead person into a deified ancestor that would bring forth fertility on earth and for the construction of social identity, and social status marking both for the dead person and family members.

As the performance continued, the number of performers increased to between 50 and 60 persons. However, the trouble began when they arrived at chanting the lines that described her work activities (life in this world), which touched on her status.

1) [I] te mai bamba balo’- na ‘This spread area [of land] as the source of riches’ D D door magic POSS [R] te - ma - i bam – ba – ba – lo ’- na2) [I] pes - sulun - an k-um- uku’ - na ‘The entrance [of land] where she worked

hard’ PREF push into SUF whetstone POSS [R] pes-su-lun-an ku-mu-ku’-na

The new leader, B, who joined the performance from the beginning suddenly took up leadership and started to lead the performance, followed by the co-performers:

3) [I] ia 1 kami tu kami - nna ‘it is us, it is us’ 3SG 1PL EXC D 1PL EXC MDL/CF [R] ia – ka – mi – tu – ka – mi - nna

4) [I] unn - ula’ lindo - na boŋi ‘who are following the face of this night’

PREF snake face POSS night [R] unn - u - la’- lin- do - na bo - ŋi

While the chant was going on, another participant, seeing the awkward situation went to tell him not to continue and to respect the first leader. However, as the last line was chanted by co-performers, he continued with another line representing an even stronger challenge which was as followed:

5) [I] pada londoŋ te umbatiŋ equal rooster D lament ‘This [we] who are lamenting are of equal rooster’6) [R] pa - da - lon - doŋ - te – um – batiŋ

When all chanters sang line 6, someone went to stop him with the reason to respect the rivaled leader. However, he refused to stop leading the performance. And he literally meant it, because after announcing this line, he entered the center and made various fight movements of hands and feet (massila’-sila’), as an invitation to the rival leader to fight. However, before fighting took place the performance was stopped and all the performers crowded to the center to prevent the fight.

1 The pronoun ia is used as third person (he, she, it, they).

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4. Data AnalysisI will begin by analyzing the segment of text of lines 1 and 2 that according to the

challenging ritual leader (B) provide the specific conditions within which ritual challenge took place. It relates to cultural transformation that shaped the interaction. Then I continue the analysis of lines 3 and 4 to show how the ritual challenge was carried out from moment to moment showing it as collaborative emergence (Sawyer 2001) in the sense that many participants were involved, and how the emergent structure indexes the interactional happening and show the transformation of social positions of interlocutors. This method of analysis must account for two levels of textuality—denotational and interactional textuality (Silverstein 1976, 1984, 2003)—which are mediated by the emergent structure, a concept developed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1967; Schegloff and Sacks 1973; see Wortham 2001). As Wortham indicated citing the contribution of ethnomethodology and conversational analysis, this concept describes how the interaction between utterances has the effect on interactional positioning of the interlocutors (Wortham 2001, 40-44). Crucial here is the focus on indexicals that connect text to context, from where the cultural inference of interpretation can be made. To anticipate a bit, the interaction between the two is about leadership, the struggle to move to the center.

4.1. Conflict of InterpretationThe event that took place can be characterized as an act of signification, resting

on symbolic interpretation. When B’s side explained the reason behind his challenge he pointed to the specific conditions that provided rationalization behind his act. He referred explicitly to lines 1 and 2 that the previous leader had composed as ‘problematic’. The event was then partly shaped by the specific conditions arising from the performance itself. It touched on new values attached to the use of ritual speech parallelism. In other words moments in the performance became resources for social actors’ evaluation and explanation, which altered their future behavior. The lines that caused the ritual challenge are as follows:

1) te mai bamba balo’na ‘This spread area [of land] as the source of riches’ 2) pessulunan kumuku’na ‘The entrance [of land] where she worked hard’The metapragmatic talk that surrounded the dispute about these lines, as

expressed by informants, was not because their composition had violated the rule of the number of syllables that they should have. It was not also because the lines were not good parallel lines. Neither was it because their meanings were disputed. Rather, it was the conflict over the symbolic interpretation attached to the meaning of the parallel lines as a result of the discrepancy between the practical logics that shaped their composition as the result of value change introduced by modernity and Christianity with respect to traditional values.2

Thus both agreed about the values of the signs used in the two lines. So, note in line 1 the use of deictics te, ‘this’ and mai, ‘movement towards speaker’ (see Chapter 3). They indicate the spread area coming toward the speaker. The word bamba is door, balo’

2 For the discussion of change in Toraja Highland see Volkman (1985).

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is amulet.3 It was the gate of her riches. It also referred to the funeral ritual right where she lived, her domestic room, the compound where she lived, and the gateway to her riches, gifts that flowed into the area, of the reception day brought in by guests who came to participate in the funeral ritual.

Line 2 has the word pessulunan with the root sulun, ‘to put into’ with pe – an as circumfix. The word pessulunan is the pushing together, heaping up of her whetstone. We find the possessive /-na/ in both lines as subordinate clause: her working whetstone. The next expression is kumuku’na, a beautiful symbol and doubly derived form. The root is kuku’, which is the whetstone, and the use of the infix /-um-/ in kumuku’, means ‘to use the whetstone’. Toraja language uses denominalizing verbal form, in which denominal verb kumuku’, from which to make a subordinate clause that has a syntactic noun where the subject of the clause is expressed in the possessive /-na/. The subject of the clause is the underlying clause, that is, the dead woman. This expression showed her to be a person who worked hard by bending down similar to the person who sharpened her knife. So this expression means her working of the whetstone. So we find the parallel meaning between the two lines where bamba- door is pessulunan-entering into, and balo’ and kumuku’, where kumuku’ becomes the magical equivalent of an amulet in the hand of someone successful, so the whetstone becomes like amulet of riches. The same thing is true when someone has a helpful magic of amulet.

Thus, the difference of interpretation emerged when the pragmatic interests in the use of these signs was associated with social status. The challenged ritual leader asserted that his lines were perfectly good. He created the two parallel lines, which fitted the description of the dead person’s status as middle class. As a classificatory son in law he knew the cost of pigs and buffaloes that were sacrificed were the result of her children’s hard work. What he said was consistent with what he has done. He has worked hard to be able to run a small restaurant (waruŋ). As he said, every day for the whole week, he and his son go to the nearby town Ma’kale to buy palmwine and meat to cook and sell them. He has been able to reconstruct his toŋkonan from the money he obtained with his wife from this small business. In short, the value of hard work has in turn shaped his composition and symbolic interpretation of lines in the performance.

For A the two lines described the family’s successful life by highly valuing ‘work’, the values of actual life brought in by modernity and Christianity for almost a century. In contemporary Toraja, working hard has thus achieved relatively novel meanings that in some areas have shaped rituals and political world. As he said, realistically the only way to defend one’s social status was to work hard. Only by working hard can someone be able to stage an elaborate ritual.

However, B was of the opinion that those lines were insulting to the whole family group. He held a totally different view about the symbolic signification of the lines. He said that the lines were a description of work activities of the dead person, as a hard

3 There are many kinds of magic objects: balo’ pare, ‘the magic object for reproduction of rice’, balo’ peossoran, ‘the magic object that helps someone to be rich’, balo’ taŋ natama la’bo’, ‘the magic object against knife’ etc.

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worker, downgrading her social status to ordinary person (tana’ karuruŋ), which offended the whole kin group. As he claimed and others supported, the dead lady belonged to an important class. In the lines that followed he even used the expression ‘face of the night’ as an allusion to the ‘moon’ that used to refer to noble class status (see below). Thus for B, the value that he attached to the lines was still informed by the tradition in which in former time high class people controlled the use of land where they did not need to work because of the availability of the class of workers and slaves who worked for the high class people.4

4.2. Metapragmatics: Implicit Metatalk4.2.1. Cleft-construction and Pragmatic Aspect

In advancing his challenge, the speaker strategically selected a particular powerful parallel lines with peculiar characteristics, a cleft-construction. A cleft–utterance is a construction that has two parts, ‘it’ as its subject and what appears to be relative clause at the end (McCawley 1998 [1988], 64-67. Let us look at the segment of the texts that were used by the challenging leader to the challenged one:

3) [I] ia kami tu kami - nna ‘it is us, it is us’ 3SG 1PL EXC D 1PL EXC MDL/CF [R] ia – ka – mi – tu – ka – mi - nna

4) [I] unn - ula’ lindo - na boŋi ‘who are following the face of this night’ PREF snake face POSS night [R] unn - u - la’- lin- do - na bo - ŋi

Syntactically, lines 3 and 4 above constitute a single construction ia kami tu kaminna unnula’ lindona boŋi, ‘it is us, it is us who are following the face of night’. This cleft–utterance fulfills a function of ‘focusing’ a constituent of the corresponding simpler utterance kami unnula’ lindona boŋi, ‘we are following the face of night’ as an answer to an implicit question inda unnula’ lindona boŋi?, ‘who are following the face of the night? In this cleft–utterance, the focus of information is marked by the topic of the complex agentive subject repeated in the phrase [ia kami][tu kaminna], which is then followed by an actor focus construction with the restrictive relative clause as modifier and takes the whole proposition and makes it a modifier of the presupposed entity. The restrictive clause is unnula’ lindona boŋi, ‘who are following the face of this night’. Thus the whole meaning is ‘it is we–exclusive who are following the face of the night’. This is a peculiar way of constructing a cleft–construction where the subject of the simpler sentence is repeated twice.

4 As we know later on, this is only the ‘causa belli’ of the challenge. As we will see later, it is within a larger socio-political matters that he was after (see below).

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Line 3) ia kami tu kaminna consists of a repeated free morpheme of pronoun5 and other shifter such as deictic tu, and the communicative epistemic modality /-na/.6 The repetition of pronouns we – exclusive is for the purpose of emphasis.7

Line 4) uses an actor focus construction marked by the use of the prefix /uN-/ to the noun ula’, ‘snake’ and the creation of the transitive verb meaning ‘to follow’. The subject referent has been implied in the previous line kami, ‘we - exclusive’. The nomen patientis is lindona boŋi, which literally means ‘the face of the night’. The word lindo means ‘face’, and /-na/ is the suffix possessive that indicates the part – whole relation with reference to boŋi, ‘night’.

The presence of a number of linguistic markers such as deictics and constituent focus inform us that this is a pragmatically marked structure—pragmatic aspects include the use of shifters such as pronouns kami, ‘we – exclusive’, deictic tu, ‘that near the addressee’ or ‘far from speaker and addressee’. First of all, the focus is doubly emphasized. Unlike ordinary cleft-construction in which a subject is mentioned only once, the agentive subject in this particular construction is repeated twice with variation using deictic /tu/, and secondly, with the use of contrastive focus /-na/. This use of various pragmatic markers has contributed to ambiguity of the whole utterance, and it is precisely this that made it a very effective political speech.

4.2.2. Semiotic Power of Repetition

In general, the formal style of this oral tradition is the use of repetition. As Boas said a long time ago, “the investigation of primitive narrative as we as poetry proves that repetition, particularly rhythmic repetition is a fundamental trait” (Boas 1925, as quoted in Finnegan 1977, 128; see also Tannen 1999[1989]). One form of repetition is parallelism (Jakobson 1960), and it is this reason that Jakobson defined it as ‘the recurrent returns’ or ‘repetition with patterned variation’.

Semiotically, repetition is central to the establishment of a semiotic system because it leads us to judgments of identity and difference which are the basis of classification (Brown 2001). Repetition is manifested in various forms (Tannen 1999 [1989]) but what interests me here is the verbal repetition in performance spoken by two different categories of speaker as a semiotic device accomplishing something.

As the tropic structure shows above, we can distinguish two ways of fostering repetition. One way is to create verbal repetition by a single ritual leader, where he composes two lines that share the ‘same thing’ such as the structural pattern in adjacent phrases, clauses, sentences and sequences. It is this aspect of parallelism of badoŋ ritual

5 These pronouns are called free morphemes because in this language other pronouns are

grammaticalized as personal prefix and suffix to different linguistic categories (see above).6 Morphophonemically, when a free morpheme of noun class that ends with vowel gets suffix that

marks modality /-na/, the consonant /n/ is geminated and becomes /-nna/.7 It is also grammatical to create the line using the repeated second person (addressee) such as ia

kamu tu kamunna, ia iko tu ikonna, ia kita tu kitanna, ia aku tu akunna, but a bit clumsy to say ia ia tu ianna. The latter is usually said ia tu ianna.

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text that had attracted previous Torajan ethnographers. In real performance, however, there is another repetition that takes place, that is, an interactive repetition between the ritual leader and co-performers, in which the latter is supposed to repeat the line composed by the former. What I want to show in this performance is the semiotic function repetition performs in the accomplishment of a political goal, the usurpation of power in ritual performance.

Let us look at line 3 [I] ia kami tu kaminna, ‘it is us, it is us’. Note the repetition on nominal form in this phrase [ia kami] [tu kaminna]. In announcing this line, the ritual challenger started to take and held the position of a leader. This act has created a moment of uncertainty since the ritual’s prospective direction and outcome was no longer predictable, thus, a most critical phase of leadership transfer from old to new. In addition, the use of ‘we–exclusive’ by a single speaker in the middle of performance in front of the assembled public might pose a number of questions as for example, whether he represented a group distal from where the performance took place, excluding those standing there, or whether he spoke on behalf of those performers standing in the performance, excluding the old leader.

This moment of undecidability was repaired by the next ritual act of repetition. The co-performers [R] repeated the whole divided line into eight syllables together with the filler syllables. It was a repetition with difference because the leader’s mode of delivery was spoken with loud voice while co-performers chanted it according to a certain melody of the song cycle. The most important thing, however, in this repetition was that there was a movement from a denotationally incorrect use of the pronoun we – exclusive spoken by a single speaker to a denotationally correct form of use repeated by the plurality of performers. The co-performers sang the line the new ritual leader composed. This direct repetition was not merely a quotation verbatim of the leader’s words. The two used the same signifiers to redefine the situation into an emergent structure.

As a semiotic device, repetition thus has the power of transforming relation that can be seen on two levels of textuality. On denotational level it transforms the incorrect use of signifier into a correct one, making it felicitous in Austin’s term. On the interactional level, it transforms the social relations among performers. It has a political implication in that it conforms to the speaker’s indirect illocutionary force of commanding co-performers to chant (see below). Usurpation is in the process.

Once co-performers chanted line 3, the moment of undecidability is not fully fixed. The reason is that line 3 merely contains the agentive subject we – exclusive in cleft – construction that still waits to be qualified for the completion of its propositional content. This qualification is expressed in line 4, [I]’s unnula’ lindona boŋi that starts with the verb unnula’ with prefix /uN-/ as actor focus, which means ‘to follow’ from the root ula’, ‘snake’ and lindona boŋi, ‘face of night’. The repetition of it by co-performers further strengthens their recognition of the new leadership.

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Both the take over of leadership and the next moment of repeating and chanting by co-performers are political acts. In this situation, the repetition and chanting of his line determined whether his leadership was accepted or not and if in fact they obeyed his command this would be an index of support from them because these decisively different moments of ‘shifters’ performance dynamically changed the presupposed social groups and structural relations among them. Within this frame of interaction both of these ritual speech acts by the new leader’s take over of leadership and the co-performers’ repeating and chanting his line would be a sign for the previous ritual leader to willingly accept his exclusion from leadership in the next text performance sequence, and acknowledge the new leader’s leadership at the night of performance. In this perspective, the whole ritual performance contains an implicit message, an indirect type of metatalk that says they were following the new leader.

4.2.3 Speech Act, an Instance of AmbiguityIn carrying out his speech act, the challenging ritual leader had an intention to

accomplish being recognized as the leader. Let us now look at the data from the speech act analysis as proposed by Austin (Austin 1962). I will show how these uncertainties come up from the perspective of performative analysis, of whether anything further is required or not will arise, which would be fixed by context. Interactionally, the purpose of the utterance above functions to express social relations and personal attitudes, establish common ground and point of view, and negotiate role relationships. However, it raises the problem of cooperative illocutionary acts.

Following Hancher, I will assume that from the point of view of performative analysis the speaker’s utterance contained an amalgamation of illocutionary forces, a combination of commissive and directive (Hancher 1979). The speaker committed himself to some future course of action. Since the line did not contain an explicit performative verb, the illocutionary acts could be interpreted as containing the degrees of commitment that varied from undertaking, promising, to guaranteeing that if they support him things will be better. These illocutionary acts were not just unilateral but they required some response from the hearers i.e. the rival leader and the co-performers, which were also in the form of illocutionary contributions. With regards to co-performers the same creative line could subserve other illocutionary forces, directives, that is, of the speaker’s attempts of varying degrees to get the hearer to do something (Hancher 1979, Searle 1976). In this case since the line did not have an explicit performative verb we could assume that his offer of a line to be chanted might be taken variously from a weak attempt such as a suggesting to strong attempts such as persuading, requesting, order and commanding that the co-performers repeat and chant the line. What he did was to try to make the singing group represent his own category of people, not the category of people that the previous leader was presuming.

Even though he successfully achieved an illocutionary force, there was still a moment of uncertainty because of what Gould calls the illocutionary suspension or perlocutionary delay of the utterance (Gould 1995) on addressees, including the previous leader and the co-performers. The problem here was that by successfully performing the illocutionary acts of undertaking, challenging, and commanding in which Austin’s uptake

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has been secured (Austin 1962), it was not immediately obvious why the addressees reacted cooperatively. It was temporarily uncertain which perlocutionary effects would result, e.g. acceptance, conviction, or outrage.

By virtue of repeating and chanting it, the co-performers ratified and gave recognition to the challenger as the new leader. The propositional content of denotational textuality becomes ‘we follow you as the leader of the group standing here’. In other words, by getting an illocutionary of acceptance from co-performers, the new leader and co-performers were successful in creating a cooperative illocutionary act, of what Hancher called ‘collective speech act’ (Hancher 1979), and together they formally created the ritual challenge. The whole group using the first person pronoun we – exclusive repeated and chanted the line, which meant ratification and an acknowledgement of the leadership and further meant that he gained full support from co-present co-performers. What was happening was that the ‘we co-performers are following you as the leader’ further validated the transformation of social relationship from equal co-performers to hierarchical relations between the leader and co-performers.

For the successful ritual challenge the rival leader had to accept his exclusion from leadership as the performance went on. This meant recognition of the new leader and as the performance continued he had to accept the fact that his role was badoŋ taker and not the giver (leader). The speaker’s desired perlocutionary effect was the chanters’ acceptance and response by repeating and chanting the line of the new leader.

4.2.4. Implicit Metatalk: Deft Interactional StructureLet us now pursue further ambiguity that arose from the repetition of a single

continuous form of lines 3 and 4. When taken as a whole spoken by the new leader [I], which was then repeated by co-performers [R], the line becomes ia kami tu kaminna unnula’ lindona bongi, ‘it is we who are following the face of night’, the two become parallel lines. The structure of tropic relations is parallel since they both set up an ambiguity of exactly the same sort, of who the leader was.

What contributed to the ambiguity of the line was the metaphorical expression lindona boŋi, ‘face of night’. Note here how the literal meaning of temporality boŋi, ‘night’ is constructed to create the personification of the metaphor for the leader himself. As a metaphor it compares two things. The word boŋi is associated with death, darkness. Remember that badoŋ ritual is only performed at the death ritual at night hence, the expression badoŋ boŋi called ossoran. This use of the term is consistent with the names given to hierarchical order of death ritual performances. For examples, the one night ritual (saŋ boŋi), three night ritual (talluŋ boŋi), five-night ritual (limaŋ boŋi). In relation to this the other death ritual priest is called ta’duŋ kalillinan, ‘the umbrella of darkness’.

In many Austronesian cultures, face is a metonymic part of the body that represents the totality. In Toraja, this is also the case. The body part lindo (face) is a metonym for the whole body that represents the other part. When people meet with each other it is called sitiro lindo, ‘see each other’s face’, mellindomo sanda lindona, ‘all have shown faces’, dipolindo kalua’, ‘the one used as face’, that is, something presented that represent/re-present the giver, and finally ma’lindo batu, ‘to have a stone face’, ‘to

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present the self in humiliating way’. Combined together we can say that lindona boŋi refers to the leader of night badoŋ ritual taking face as the symbol of the leader or the totality.

In short, the expression lindona boŋi is a personification of the metaphor for the leader himself. The whole line, [I] and [R] then can be read as follows ‘we follow the face of night’ where the face of night is the ritual leader. They both present the double readings and the crucial question here is who the leader is.

Let me repeat the multiple layers of the typical parallelism that emerged from the performance and how they contributed to the uncertainty of ritual at this stage. The first parallel lines consist of line 3 uttered first by the new leader [I] and then repeated by co-performers [R], the kind of parallelism known as ‘repetition with variations’. The same occurred in line 4, thus taken together we have two parallel lines. Taken as a whole it is actually a single cleft-construction ia kami tu kaminna unnula’ lindona boŋi. But once this line was enacted in performance further complication arose. First, this single line has its implicit metatalk because of the ambiguous referent of ‘leader’, whereby in one line the expression ‘the face of the night’ refers to the previous leader and in the other line the ‘challenging ritual leader’. Secondly, once the whole line was finished being sung by co-performers, the single line ‘it is us, us who are following the face of the night’ (referring to the challenging leader) evoked its paradigmatic metatalk, ‘it is us, us, who are not following the face of the night’ (referring to the challenged ritual leader).8

4.2.5. IndexicalityThe above ambiguity is fixed through a metapragmatic act that connects text to

context. In mediated approach to ritual text, I will use the concept of indexicality. This concept was proposed by Peirce to show the relation between sign and object that is based on contiguity or existential relation (Peirce 1940 [1955]). Later Silverstein used it as the level of mediating denotational text and interactional text (for examples 1976, 1984, 2003). Thus the problem is how the speaker used pragmatic signs that connected the conceptual realm expressed through semantic role of agentivity with context, and how such use created a symbolic distanciation between the challenged ritual leader and the challenger, and their respective relations to the co-performers and took them as followers in ritual performance.

Shifter:As I have noted above, the utterance ia kami tu kaminna unnula’ lindona boŋi, ‘it

is us, it us, who are following the face of night’ contains signs such as the repeated kami and tu that Silverstein calls referential indexes or shifters, of what Jakobson called duplex signs (Jakobson 1957). Distinguishing them from non-referential indexes Silverstein says,

All languages incorporate these duplex signs, referential indexes. They are pervasive categories, which anchor, as it were, the semantico-referential mode of signs, those which represent pure propositional capabilities of language, in the

8 Cf. Chapter 3 of how a single line evoked its paradigmatic opposed line in Saussurean sense.

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actual speech event of reference, by making the propositional reference dependent on the suitable indexing of the speech situation. (Silverstein 1976, 24)

More specifically, Benveniste in his discussion on the reference of pronouns I and you says:

It is solely a “reality of discourse,” and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of “locution” not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies “the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I”. (Benveniste 1971 [1966])

Thus the referent of kami, ‘we exclusive’ means ‘person (s) who is (are) uttering the present instance of the discourse containing kami’. When this is uttered by the leader [I] it refers to him, in this instance of use, it may be used to refer to its aspect as the pronoun of authority if he wanted to save face if he failed to persuade co-performers to repeat his line. At this moment, the use of we – exclusive is also ambiguous. It might refer to the group of chanters literally and ritually standing there with the speaker where he spoke for them or to the larger and distal others of some category in social structure on whose behalf he speaks. But once this pronoun was uttered by co-performers [R], this use referred to “plurality of persons uttering it in the instance of discourse”.

The deictic tu is also a shifter, which is “the identification of the object by an indicator of ostentation concomitant with the instance of discourse containing the indicator of person” (Benveniste). Hence, its meaning relates to an instance of discourse by a person, and once co-performers repeated it the deictic tu is disambiguated. Its meaning becomes ‘the thing proximal to the addressee’ (see Chapter 3).

The repeated ‘we exclusive’ is followed by the epistemic marker /-nna/9 that tells us the modality of the proposition, of what Givón calls the communicative epistemic modality (Givón 1995). It is a surprising assertion, a contrastive assertion, whose meaning is that it is not what you expect. The speaker asserted the truth of the proposition he talked about.10

Face of Night - lindona boŋi What we have seen above is that as the performance was unfolding further

ambiguity arose especially when a metaphor for leader lindona boŋi was used. When the challenging ritual leader uttered line 3, the interpretation of ‘we’ may be ‘the pronoun of authority’ representing co-performers literally standing in the performance. The metaphor lindona boŋi, ‘face of the night’ refers ambiguously to its referent ‘leader’ but it

9 For this notion see Givón and Chafe (cf. Payne).

10 The utterance in the following example is uttered in a situation where the speaker strongly

believes the truth of the proposition he is talking about. For example, when the speaker says, bitti’ - na ? ki - daka’

small PSP 1EXC PL look for‘It is the small size that we are looking for’

he is asserting that the small size is referring to a presupposed entity. In this case, the speaker also presupposes that the addressee does not recognize the truth of that proposition.

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did not specify which one. As stated above, the whole line provides a double reading by evoking its paradigmatic opposed line. In the first reading, ‘we–exclusive are following the leader’, where the literal reading is that the old leader is the leader, that we are following this lindona boŋi. In the second reading, however, the fact that the new person has uttered it and the others are following, it means that leadership has changed. Thus when the new leader composes the line, the whole meaning of it is ‘we-exclusive are following the leader’. But he who was saying this was not following the old leader, because he was now taking the role of a leader and wanted the chanters to follow him. It is very subtle, a deft interactional structure or very accomplished halus structure.

Thus by [I]’s saying ‘we are following the leader’, he is not following the leader, and he does this by using implicit metatalk. In that case he has thereby created the ritual challenge and constructed himself as the ‘face’ while all co-performers [R] who repeated the line became the body, the corporate group and thus an image of society as the totality, in the symbolic face-body relation.

The whole utterance then, is a metapragmatic utterance. It is a description about what they are doing, that is, ‘following the leader’. It is a metapragmatic utterance about what is happening, which is, of course, by the performance itself, ‘follow the leader’.

4.2.6. Collaboration CreativityThe new leader’s taking over the leadership could also be called an usurpation of

power because in that event his ritual speech act, which was without right, accomplished his intention to challenge. In this culture the right to compose a line in performance is given to a single leader. Interruption into someone’s talk is considered negative (ma’barotokki). Ordinarily, a speaker whose talk is interrupted will usually be angry. He would say, da’mu ma’barotokki tu, ‘do not make an interruption’.

Interestingly, he carried it out by following the conventional way of performing the ritual. He does it by using the pronoun we exclusive, excluding the old leader. The use of deictic tu before we – exclusive after being ratified by [R] indexes ‘the thing [chanters] near the addressee’, and hence we-exclusive – NEAR YOU (the old leader) and further reinforces such claim of exclusion. Thus, there is a mutual recognition here since the right to challenge implies an equality (Bourdieu 1990), hence, if challenge then recognition.

The second line unnula’ lindona boŋi, ‘we follow the leader’ makes it much more explicit at two levels. If lindona boŋi is taken to be the metaphor for leader, by uttering the explicit line ‘we follow the leader’ in line 4 he and co-performers are not following the leader. By not following the leader through their collaborative speech act of ‘we follow the leader’ together they construed and transformed the challenger to be the leader, usurping the power of the previous leader. He has constructed his self as the center replacing the previous leader.

For the successful transfer of power, cooperation and improvisation are necessary (Sawyer 2001). By speaking up formally and publicly to the rival leader he challenged

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and transformed the structure of social relations between the rival leader and him, and their respective relations to co-performers. Prior to his taking over the leadership, he was a participant to the social event recognizing the previous leader as the legitimate leader. By taking up leadership position (tomantolo’ batiŋ), he was usurping the previous leader’s power.

What then happening was that someone went to stop him urging him to respect the rival leader. However, he continued announcing the next line [I], which was then repeated by chorus [R]:

5) [I] pada londoŋ te umbatiŋ equal rooster D lament ‘This [we] who are lamenting are of equal rooster’6) [R] pa - da - lon - doŋ - te – um – batiŋ

Line 5) and 6) were an even stronger challenge because he stated that they were on equal terms and both were equal leaders indicated by the use of the word pada, ‘equal’ and that both of them were londoŋ, ‘rooster’. This amounts to a change in the use of the metaphors of leadership. In the first metaphor the leader is lindona boŋi, ‘face of night’ in the normal sense of leadership in badoŋ ritual, whereby the whole body is the metaphor of corporate group in the performance. The use of the word londoŋ, ‘rooster’ has intensified and increased the force of the previous challenge. In this culture, this term is associated with the whole image of the category of fight, war called rari. Its use to challenge implied that they were equal and ready to fight when necessary the way roosters fight. It was one of the strongest challenges in ritual performance. And he literally meant it, because after announcing this line, he entered the center and made various fight movements of hands and feet (massila’-sila’) as an invitation to the rival leader to fight. The performance was stopped.

Up to this moment in the event of ritual challenge, there have been a number of transformations of social relations among social actors between the new leader and the previous leader, and between their respective constituents which culminated in the acceptance and the total support from co-performers for the new leader to lead the coming segment of performance with the exclusion of the former leader as leader. Through the use of the personal pronoun we exclusive and other shifters, the poetic repetition and tropic figuration in ritual, the speaker has successfully challenged and excluded his rival and occupied the ritual center. He became the ‘face’ while the whole body was the corporate group (co-performers). Meanwhile, the symbolism informs us that this successful ritual challenge was the work of collaborative creativity.

5. Socio-Political UncertaintyThis specific speech event, a ritual challenge in performance, did not emerge out

of nothing. As I will show below in addition to particular conditions emerging from the performance itself, this event was also shaped by outside contextual factors, and thus it is necessary to show the structure of conjuncture to see how happenings, and historical events are related to one another. I assume that there had been a series of events that in some ways contributed to this happening. As a preliminary, I will describe some of those prior events that provide the necessary background.

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A came from a small village in Saŋŋalla’ from a moderately well-off family. He married B’s first cousin on the fathers’ side who also claimed to have some relation to the noble chief of the area, so they were brothers-in-law. After marriage, they first moved into the remote village of Sillanan where his wife’s family members including B lived. It was here that he became a member of badoŋ group under the leadership of his wife’s family member, Ambe’ Beŋgo. In the 1980’s new shops at the market place of Mebali were built up, so A sought a renter’s permit and opened a small waruŋ (pub). In the long run, A’s waruŋ became known because of the special way he provided local food and palm wine. People from as far as the towns of Ma’kale and Rantepao went there to eat and drink. He and his wife then moved to this place. The location of this market place is close to the main road that connects Makassar and Toraja. Occasionally, they went back to his wife’s natal village of Sillanan located at the foot of the mountain some kilometers away from the new place, where B continued to live as a farmer. In addition to running a small waruŋ, A was also an active member in the church and because of a talent for of composing parallel lines he was often invited to be a master of ceremony (protokol) in many rituals. B on the other hand, continued to live in the village closer to the leader of their badoŋ organization. Both A and B became well known within this organization.

A series of events had produced tension among members of their organization, which was known all over Toraja land as Pa’badoŋ Sillanan, ‘Sillanan Badoŋ Organization’ (SBO). This uncertainty became even more visible when its authoritative leader Ambe’ Beŋgo died in 1993. Under his leadership, SBO was well developed and became well known, because as people noted, it stood for the preservation of the traditional badoŋs that other organizations have moved from because of the influence of Christianity and modernity. Before he died at the age of 75, his authority had been delegated to some potential leaders, to lead the performances at various places occasionally. While the leader was ailing, three persons were interchangeably assigned to lead the performances. The three persons were A, and B, plus another person Poŋ Ka’ka’ (C), who lived in two different places. The first two were involved in the event.

For several years after Ambe’ Beŋgo’s death, this organization had no formal leader. There had long been a discourse going on about who would be a leader. As I heard various versions of this uncertainty over leadership, the organization seemed not to be in a rush to find a single leader because they continued to be invited to do the performances in the death rituals of different villages. The sponsors of the death ritual usually contacted one of the three ritual leaders, and whoever was contacted became the ritual leader for that particular performance. Each claimed the same performers and used the same name under different leaders when they were invited to do the performance. Before long, this practice developed into an implicit competition. One told members about the weakness of each other though, apparently, performances went on smoothly.

After three years of uncertainty, a complication emerged. As I observed, membership in the organization had grown larger as had the dissatisfaction with its financial matters. During the time of my study there were no written documents maintained of the list of members, performances made, and the amount of money received from donations for various performances. Instead, much talk flew around about

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the misuse of money. As Poŋ Jen revealed to me, he was suspicious about the possibility of corruption extending back to when the authoritative leader was ailing. The other two leaders said the same thing but without a direct accusation. After each performance, the organization usually obtained some donation from the organizers of death ritual for whom they performed but as some members described they did not get what they expected from their leaders. As usual, criticism against one another was never direct, but was conveyed to third-party members and further relayed and of course the sender could immediately deny that he had spread the rumor when he was confronted. Of the three persons, A claimed that no one could compete with him. Another member told me that among the three A was the most expert person on this ritual. As he said, A knew very well the ondo, ‘movement’, quality of voice (oninna), which is good to hear (mammi’ diraŋŋi). Moreover, his verbal skill of kadoŋ badoŋ, ‘ritual text’ surpassed the other two. Unfortunately, said this man, he was not native to the village where the organization existed so his composition was not well founded sometimes. In another ritual event, when I met the well-known ritual singer Tato’ Dena’ and the young tomina Marten I asked them about him, and both agreed emphatically that he was sometimes rude in his composition, and that was why he was rarely invited to be a master of ceremony (protokol).

A admitted this but he said that the reason was that he was expert on retteŋ (poetic dueling). He was known as sharp in using the lines to criticize his adversaries in public, which people did not like. But he added, he wanted to be like a gora-gora toŋkon, ‘sitting throat’ (see Chapter 4). He acknowledged that the burden of the badoŋ ritual leader was a heavy responsibility (passanan magasa). One of the most difficult aspects was to compose lines that really fit the status of the dead person. As we have seen, the lines that the ritual leader composes for performance are not just related to an expression of grief for a dead person and his trip to the next world, but it touches on contextual factors in relation to his life phases, and social status markers. In other words, recognition of the structure of society is a crucial part of this performance. In addition to the use of explicit status markers in the insertion lines that are either added to each line or the insertion phrase that are sung by simban and simboloŋ groups, the whole lines may in one way or another be colored with words that sometimes do not fit the dead person’s social status. It is this aspect of composition that he finds the most difficult to accomplish. In part this is caused by mixed marriage and also people always want to be better than others.

Others have also criticized A when he made a big mistake in a performance at Leatuŋ, Patua’, his own village. The ritual leader composed the lines higher than the status of the dead person and his family members and he did it intentionally. Despite the fact that this family who organized the funeral ritual was of low class (commoners), he composed the lines to be sung that fit high middle class status. His evaluation was not based on social status, as B continued, but on the elaboration of the death ritual performance, where a number of pigs and buffaloes were sacrificed. This was possible in a new situation especially because the deceased’s children had made a wide network because of their jobs. The high-class representative thought that this was an incorrect performance because the words were not true words (taŋŋia kada toŋan). He was also criticized because in another ritual event he advised the children of the deceased to use

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symbols such as beadwork, red cloth and kris as decoration in front of the reception hall (lantaŋ karampoan) where they received guests. When someone protested such use of symbols, he advised the children to answer simply, ‘this comes from pens and papers’. This answer had a deep implication meaning the authority being built was not based on tradition hence it will not erode and corrupt the authority of the elders. Instead, it is a new construction of authority’.

B was a quiet person and apparently he was very knowledgeable about their tradition and the tradition of their badoŋ organization. He was not like A who was invited in Christian rituals to be a protokol, but he seemed to concentrate on the knowledge pertaining to the preservation of their distinctive badoŋ organization. Someone told me that he had magic that he used to protect the whole troop when others placed magic on them while they were performing. He was also sharp in his criticism and well known for his knowledge on poetic dueling.

In people’s view, C was the least expert among the three. In his speech he always talked with a high tone, a bit bombastic (tibura’-bura’). In a performance in Awa’, near Ma’kale said another member, people threw stones at them because they were offended by the lines C composed. In the leader’s view he made the comparison between the big waves on sea with a big wave of people attending the ritual. It was an elaborate death ritual (siampa’ re’dena tasik ‘find a boiling water on sea, kumaladanna bura-bura, ‘the coming up of foams’). However, the organizer thought that these lines depicted him as being able to organize this big ritual because of the money he obtained from outside. As he said, ‘I have been called puaŋ since long time ago, I am not a new rich’.

This was some aspect of situations that surrounded this organization. The three had equal chance to be chosen as the leader of this organization. As A expressed to me it would be good if they soon organized a meeting to elect a new leader. But the other two never accepted such suggestion. As I found out later on, B and C cooperated to prevent A from being a leader in this organization.

6. ConclusionIn this paper I have shown the importance of the strategic use of implicit metatalk

and collaborative creativity exercized in the performance by keeping the the flow of chant without breaking the frame. One of the central problems that anthropologists face in interpreting social action is the problem of attributions of agency to participants in public events. Such problem arises where members of different groups engage in social interaction when they participate in a mixed–group such as the badoŋ ritual troop. Rather than assuming ‘individual’ and ‘group’ as loci of agency prior to interaction, I have shown that the relevant attributions of agency are constructed and contested in the practice of badoŋ ritual performance. In this case I have shown how agency arises out of the collaborative interaction between individual and group to create challenge. As a result, through moments of interaction, and only through cooperation between the individual initiator and corporate group, the performance provides challenge to the existing type of ritual exchange structure. I thus offer a paradigmatic example of how

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agency is not just a property of individual but a group altogether (cf. Merlan and Rumsey 1991) in which without the latter the former is incapacitated to effect transformation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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