The Tyranny of the Text: Oral Tradition and the Power of Writing in Sikka and Tana ?Ai, Flores

The Tyranny of the Text: Oral Tradition and the Power of Writing in Sikka and Tana ?Ai,FloresAuthor(s): E.D. LEWISSource: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 154, No. 3 (1998), pp. 457-477Published by: KITLV, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27865442 .

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E.D. LEWIS

The Tyranny of the Text Oral Tradition and the Power of Writing in

Sikka and Tana ?Ai, Flores1

1. Introduction

The transition of a community from a tradition in which mythic narratives are communicated orally to one in which myth is written down and recon

structed as literature is poorly understood in those societies of eastern

Indonesia which have recently made such a transition or are now in the

process of doing so. For anthropologists, there are many interesting ques tions about the ways in which oral literature comes to be committed to a

written form and what happens to oral traditions when tales and myths, in

the past narrated orally, are written down. Such questions are, for example: What are the processes by which an oral tradition comes to be written down?

Once written, are the texts of once orally transmitted myths different in iden

tifiable ways from the texts of tales composed in the literary medium? If so, how does the written material in the 'oral style' compare with other material

and, indeed, what changes in the form and content of such material occur in the transition from the oral medium to the written medium? What purposes do myths in the form of written literature serve that are not fulfilled by oral

ly narrated myths, and vice versa? Thus we might profitably consider how written material in the oral style is used and compare those uses with the functions of oral literature in communities in which myths are only commu

1 The original draft of this paper was presented as a contribution to the session on Long Literary Works in the Oral Style at the Bicentennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in Canberra in 1988. It was revised and completed in draft in 1993 while I was a

Fellow in Residence of The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar, The Netherlands. I cannot imagine an atmosphere more

amenable to undisturbed scholarly reflection than that provided by NIAS and I should like to

express with gratitude my appreciation of the Institute and its staff. This essay is the first of a

series of papers on Sikkanese myth and history.

E.D. LEWIS is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Melbourne who obtained his Ph.D. at the Australian National University. Specializing in Eastern Indonesian ethnology, he is the author of People of the Source (see list of references) and numerous papers. Dr. Lewis' address is: Anthropology Programme, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia.

BKI154-III (1998)



458 E. . Lewis

nicated orally and in communities in which the two forms co-exist. This is a

problem that can be taken up in at least two senses: firstly, what there is to be learned from records of the practical details of performance or reading and,

secondly, the cultural, social, and political significance or contextual mean

ings of written and oral literatures. I would like to take up some of these questions with respect to the myth

ic traditions of the peoples of Sikka and Tana ?Ai, who live in different parts of the eastern region of the island of Flores, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, in eastern Indonesia. In particular, I will describe the social and political con

sequences of the recording of Sikkanese myths in writing by the Ata Sikka

themselves and compare the effects of this commitment of an oral tradition to writing, which has been going on in Sikka since at least the 1920s, with the

possible effects of a similar process which has just begun in the ceremonial domain of Wai Brama in Tana ?Ai, where, until my arrival there to begin

anthropological field work in 1978, mythic histories were still communicated in performance and transmitted from one generation to the next exclusively in an oral medium.2

2. Sikka and Tana ?Ai

Both the Ata Sikka and the people of Tana Wai Brama have possessed well

developed ritual languages in which ritual specialists told the mythic histo

ries of the two societies. Whereas in Tana Wai Brama the tradition of narra

tion of the mythic histories of the domain still flourishes, in Sikka there are

today only a few old men who can remember fragments of the myths and

what must once have been a magnificent store of oral literature. By 1977, when I began ethnographic fieldwork in Sikka, narration in ritual language and the use of this language in the ceremonial life of the community had all

but disappeared and there were no longer any practising ritual specialists who could narrate complete and coherent segments of the oral histories even

for the benefit of an anthropologist, let alone on the occasion of a ceremony. The reasons for the withering of Sikka's oral literature are not hard to find:

the people of Sikka became Catholic more than four centuries ago, a devel

opment in the community which seems to have coincided roughly with the

emergence of a Sikkanese royal house whose members became, in time, the

2 In the early 1970s some recordings and transcripts of narrations of myths in rituals and in

interviews with chanters were made by students from the Catholic Seminari Tinggi at Ledalero

in central Sikka. A notable Florenese priest, Pater Piet Petu, also travelled to Tana ?Ai and tran

scribed narrations of myths, but the Ata Tana ?Ai themselves have not had access to those writ

ten texts, which were taken away from the valley.



The Tyranny of the Text 459

rulers of all of the district of Sikka, excluding Tana ?Ai in the eastern moun

tains of the region (see Lewis in press). The ideology and institutions of

Catholicism eventually displaced most of the native Sikkanese religion and

cosmology, and Catholic liturgy replaced the rituals of the traditional cere

monial system, the fundamental precepts of which were encoded in ritual

language. Ritual language and the histories and myths for which it served as

transmitting medium declined in use and this special, poetic form of Sara

Sikka3 ceased being used in ceremonial performances in the community. While Sikka's indigenous religion and mythology had all but vanished by

the 1970s, the system of ceremonial exchanges of ritual goods which articu lates the alliance system of Sikkanese houses has continued to define the rela

tionships of groups in Sikkanese society and has become perhaps even more

complexly involuted than in the past. The people of Sikka Natar, the village of Sikka on the south coast of Flores, are distributed over a number of named

groups, called Twisung, houses whose members are related through paternal descent. These groups regularly contract marriages through the exchange of bridewealth from the husband's house and counter-prestations by his wife's

house. There are frequent marriages between men and women of Sikka and

people from outside the village but, in the social landscape of the region, the web of affinal alliance becomes denser the closer one approaches the thirteen 'noble' houses of Sikka Natar itself. The prestations accompanying the mar

riage of a member of one of these central houses eventually involve practi

cally every Twisung in the village itself in the giving of gifts and counter-gifts, and many from other villages in the region as well. Until 1954, when the rule of Sikka's raja was brought to an end by the extension of the new govern mental order of the modern Indonesian state to Flores, the Ata Sikka con

sciously and determinedly manipulated their system of affinal alliance and

exchange for political ends, in order to extend their political and economic

hegemony beyond the borders of their own village to the whole of their dis trict and into Larantuka to the east and Lio to the west. Perhaps because of

its functions in the political and economic life of the community, the alliance and ceremonial exchange system of Sikka did not decline with the old reli

gion and ritual system, but instead grew in complexity with the increase of

wealth in Sikka Natar and the growing influence of the people of the village in the rest of the district.

In contrast to the Sikkanese, the people of Tana Wai Brama, one of seven

ceremonial domains into which the Tana ?Ai region is divided, maintain their

indigenous religion and ceremonial system. The narration in ritual language of the mythic histories of the domain remains a crucial and vibrant element

3 Sara ('way, language') Sikka is the language of Sikka.



460 E. . Lewis

in the rich ceremonial and ritual life of the community. In Tana Wai Brama, affinal alliance is not marked by the exchange of ceremonial goods and there are neither bridewealth payments nor the counter-prestations that occur in

Sikka. Rudimentary exchanges are made after the death of a husband, but

these are counter-prestations for the return of his 'forelock' (a metaphor for

'blood') to his natal group in the person of one of his daughters. In Tana Wai

Brama, affinity and affinal alliance relations are a matter of the pathways that

blood, which comes from a person's mother, follows in generating new life

and new social groups. Permissible and impermissible pathways are defined

partly in terms of the 'histories' of the clans and houses of the domain and of

their past relations, each new social branching recapitulating an event of gen eration or creation in the mythic past of ancestral times.4 While in Sikka the arena for political discourse is the negotiation of exchanges which define

marriages, in Tana Wai Brama the political life of the community revolves around the ritual specialists who plan, organize, and conduct the complex rituals that integrate the clans and houses into a single community, polity, and society, that is, a domain. In Sikka, power, prestige, and politics are part and parcel of affinal alliance; in Tana Wai Brama, power and prestige are the rewards of successful participation in the ritual and religious life of the com

munity. In Sikka, marriage is politics; in Tana Wai Brama, the celebrations of

religion are politics. Comparing the roles of myth in the lives of the Ata Sikka and the Ata Tana Wai Brama, we can say that the Ata Sikka would never have become the prosperous and influential people they are today had they kept their myths and rituals, whereas the society of the domain of Wai Brama

would wholly disintegrate without them. With these brief notes on the differences between the Ata Tana Wai Brama

and the Ata Sikka, we are in a position to investigate why the commitment of

Sikkanese oral literature to writing serves the Sikkanese social system, where as the same transition from the oral to the literate would serve to degrade and,

ultimately, radically transform the Tana Wai Brama social system.

3. The Textualization of History and the Management of the Past in Sikka

societies where writing is unknown, or where it is limited to a professional scribe whose duty is that of writing letters and keeping accounts, or where it is the

possession of a small minority, such as clerics or a wealthy ruling class ..., the art

of narration flourishes, provided that the culture is in other respects of a sort to foster the singing of tales. If the way of life of a people furnishes subjects for

4 See Lewis forthcoming, 1988a, and 1996b for expositions of the alliance system of Tana Wai

Brama and its relation to the mythic histories of the domain.




stories and affords the occasion for the telling, this art will be fostered. On the other hand, when writing is introduced and begins to be used for the same pur poses as the oral narrative song, when it is employed for telling stories and is

widespread enough to find an audience capable of reading, this audience seeks its entertainment and instruction in books rather than in the living songs of men, and the older art gradually disappears. The songs have died out in the cities not because life in a large community is an unfitting environment for them but because schools were first founded there and writing has been firmly rooted in the

way of life of the city dwellers.' (Alfred Lord 1960:20.)

While Sikkanese oral histories point to more than four centuries of Catholic

tradition in the community, contact between the Sikkanese and European (that is, Portuguese) Catholic clergy was most likely infrequent until the peri od of Dutch rule in Flores after 1859. Catholic missionaries began arriving in

the rajadom of Sikka in large numbers in the early 1880s, and by the turn of

the century schools were established in Sikka Natar and in other parts of the

rajadom. The principal language of instruction in the lower schools was

Malay, while both Malay and some Dutch were taught in the middle schools.

As a result of the educational programmes of the Church, a class of literate

people, many of whom went into the Church or became teachers or lower

level government employees, emerged throughout the district during the

first two decades of this century. The rajas and people of Sikka Natar were

especially quick to exploit the opportunities and benefits afforded by educa

tion. Today, the whole of the population of the village is literate and has been

so for at least two generations. Indeed, since Indonesian independence, when the government of the rajadom was dismantled, the Ata Sikka have

shifted their means of wielding influence in the district from the exercise of

direct rule to dominance of the government bureaux in Maumere (the Kabu

paten, or Regency, centre), the schools, and the Church hierarchy. During the

period in which the Church, the raja, and the Dutch (through their policy of

zelfbestuur, 'self-government', or indirect rule) worked closely together in the

region, the Ata Sikka came to see the Catholic Church and the government as

intimately interrelated and both as exploitable for their own purposes. This

was the period between the two world wars, in which the traditional religion and ritual system of Sikka Natar suffered its final decline.

During the interregnum following the departure of the Japanese from the

island after the Second World War and before rule by the Republic of Indo

nesia, there was a brief period of chaos in Flores while the western Indone

sians fought for the nation's independence from The Netherlands. In those

few years the Sikkanese rajadom achieved its greatest power under the most

progressive, the most influential, and the last of the rajas of Sikka. It was then

that Ratu Thomas Ximenes da Silva directed three of his ministers, who were

drawn from the noble houses of Sikka Natar, to write down the history and



462 E. . Lewis

laws of his people. One, Mo?ang Boer Pareira of Bola, on the south coast, recorded the hadat (Malay adat 'custom', 'law'). Another, D.D.P. Kondi, a ka

pitan (district officer) in Ratu Thomas's government, wrote the history of the district. And a third was to commit to writing the precepts of the indigenous Sikkanese religion, including a compilation of ritual-language texts. In the

end, judging from the descriptions of the works they produced that I have obtained from contemporary people in Sikka and Maumere, the subjects of the individual writers turned out to overlap considerably. This was perhaps to be expected, because to the Sikkanese mind, myth, history, hadat, and lan

guage are wholly and inextricably interwoven as a single cloth. Of the manuscripts which the ministers are said to have produced, and

which the Ata Sikka often mention when they discuss their history and hadat, I have seen only a history of the Sikkanese raj adorn in typescript and a few

fragmentary typescripts on religion (one on Tana ?Ai) and hadat law by Kondi. There is very good evidence that the raja's men produced a rather re

markable corpus of written material on these subjects, but a peculiarity of the Sikkanese view of 'ancestral' artefacts has ensured that they quickly became inaccessible. Indeed, a large portion of the Kondi history exists only because an American anthropologist happened in 1961 to pass through Maumere, where he was shown the manuscript work and arranged to take it away for

typing.5 The original manuscript has since vanished without a trace, but the

typescript has survived (Kondi 1995).6 To understand why these valuable chronicles of a recently vanished tra

dition have disappeared rather than been carefully preserved, we need to

5 Lewis in press provides an account of how a copy of Kondi's work came into my posses sion. The manuscript has now been corrected and translated (Kondi 1995). 6 In November 1994 I returned to Flores for a season of field work in Tana ?Ai and to work

with Guru M. Mandalangi Pareira, with whom I was finalizing plans for the publication of a

Sikkanese-Indonesian dictionary. Guru Mandalangi lives next door to one of his sons, Oskar

Mandalangi, who is married to a granddaughter of Kapit?n Mo?ang Boer.

Oskar Mandalangi speaks some English and reads and writes the language rather well. On account of this, the day before I left Maumere to return to Melbourne in December 1994,1 gave Oskar copies of a number of papers I had written on Tana ?Ai and Sikka. Among them was a

paper on the Kondi manuscript (Lewis in press), in which I had written a remark in a footnote

about the loss of Mo?ang Boer's writings and manuscripts by Sikkanese writers.

Late in the evening before I was to leave Maumere, Pak Oskar summoned me to his house. When I arrived, he appeared to be in a state of considerable excitement. He had enjoyed my paper on Don Al?su, he said, which he found accurate and interesting. But in one crucial respect, he said, I was quite wrong. The other manuscripts to which I referred in my footnote were not lost. At that, Oskar crossed the room, flung open the double doors of a large Dutch-style cabinet and began pulling out papers and notebooks from its shelves. Here, he exclaimed, were the 'lost'

manuscripts and notebooks of the redoubtable Mo?ang Boer Pareira, Oskar's wife's mother's

father.




know something about how the Ata Sikka treat ceremonial goods generally and ancestral heirlooms in particular.

The tokens of ceremonial wealth in Sikka Natar are of two kinds. First there are the goods classified both as non-consumable and masculine. These include elephant tusks which entered Flores as trade goods during the early period of Portuguese and Dutch influence in the island, gold coins of nine

teenth-century Dutch mintage, horses, and Indonesian currency. Second are

the Tutang labu wawi pare, 'cloths, blouses, pigs, and rice', goods which the Ata Sikka classify as feminine and consumable in the sense that they are used and must constantly be replaced. Feminine goods include the ikat textiles of com

plex motifs and manufacture which are dyed, woven, and worn by women

(see Lewis 1994), pigs, rice, and household furnishings and utensils. The masculine and durable ceremonial goods are given as bridewealth in the sys tem of ceremonial exchange which links groups in the community in an in

clusive network of affinal relations. The feminine and consumable goods are

given as counter-prestations to bridewealth in the same system, bridewealth

passing from wife-taking groups to wife-giving groups and the feminine

counter-prestations passing from wife-giving groups to wife-taking groups in the community. An important feature of the classificatory distinction between masculine (durable) goods and feminine (consumable) goods is that

the former are conceived of as ancestral goods, heirlooms which have

devolved through many generations of Ata Sikka from the ancestors to con

temporary members of the community. Because they are Of the ancestors', masculine ceremonial goods belong to no particular person or group, and

ownership, which individuals and groups claim over other resources and commodities that are of use in the secular life of the community, does not

extend to these items of ceremonial wealth. The value of ceremonial goods is

determined by their constant exchange between ?wisung and circulation in

With only a few hours remaining before my departure from Maumere, I had no time to exam

ine the documents which Pak Oskar had revealed and could not determine whether they includ

ed any of the manuscripts which the Sikkanese had consistently for more than fifteen years

reported to me as having been lost. A cursory examination of a few of the papers enabled me to

identify manuscript notebooks of Mo?ang Boer Pareira dating from the early 1920s. One of these

books contained transcriptions of ritual-language texts from Tana ?Ai which appeared to be

identical, word for word, with contemporary ritual-language narrations which I have recorded

in Tana ?Ai since 1978.

With the peculiar serendipity by which ethnographic research progresses -

perhaps I should say, stumbles along

- a unique and quite remarkable opportunity for further research on the subjects of this essay thus presented itself. I am convinced that these manuscripts must be preserved and

studied in detail. This work, which will be undertaken with the collaboration of Pak Oskar

Mandalangi, will begin soon.



464 E. . Lewis

the marriage exchange network. Feminine goods, in contrast, must be con

stantly renewed because the items which constitute this class of goods dete riorate with use. These goods are produced as gifts for exchange by the

women of the wife-givers' house on the occasion of a marriage, and principal among them are the cloths (?utang, a word cognate with the Malay word

hutang, meaning 'debt', 'obligation' or 'credit'). Considerable labour goes into the manufacture of these fine cloths, an investment of time, effort, and skill

which is not required for masculine goods. Because textiles are consumed, women work constantly to resupply the ceremonial exchange system with these necessary concomitants of bridewealth.

In Sikka, masculine ceremonial goods, unlike feminine goods, are valu able not in themselves but because they are material links to the ancestors and the community's ancestral past. In Sikkanese myth, the origin of the

rajadom, the coming of the Church, and the acquisition of ivory and gold coins (the passage of which marks ties of alliance) are all bound up together and are frequently represented in tales as having occurred simultaneously in the distant past. So, too, the manuscripts produced by the scribes of the noble houses under Ratu Thomas, the last raja, but with a difference. These manu

scripts, which the Ata Sikka describe with the same words as are used with reference to the masculine goods exchanged as bridewealth (Sara Sikka

ngawung ?na hung: 'ancient goods', Bahasa Indonesia harang pusaka: 'heir

looms'), are ambiguous with respect to the classification of ceremonial goods. They are items directly linked to the ancestors, not only because ancestors of the noble houses produced them, but also because these written works rec ord ancestral knowledge. They are, in these terms, masculine goods and so are non-consumable and non-renewable, but, while they were classed as 'masculine' and ancestral goods, they were not exchanged in bridewealth transactions. At the same time they were produced by identifiable persons, and in these terms are like feminine goods, which are also 'produced' by identifiable persons.7 They were, in short, a new kind of heirloom, a pro duced manifestation of the ancestors which the possessor was not obliged to

give away in the ceremonial exchange system. Indeed, the manuscripts were ownable knowledge, which would change hands not ceremonially in ex

change between groups who, having received them, were obliged to pass them on again to another group, but by inheritance within the social groups of their authors. Hearsay evidence -

principally in the form of interviews I conducted with descendants of the authors of the manuscripts

- indicates that the manuscripts were taken apart in the 1950s and 1960s, with some bits

7 The women who make the textiles exchanged for bridewealth weave into their cloths clues to their individual identities (see Lewis 1994).




going to kin of the authors and other bits being inherited by firstborn chil dren. Ata Sikka told me that the eldest son of Mo?ang Boer Pareira became a

judge in Java and took the portion of his father's manuscripts which he had inherited with him when he left Sikka for that island; it has not been seen

since. In this way, particular groups within the community and specific indi viduals within these groups came to 'own' the recorded and objectified past of the community. And, as elsewhere, with knowledge came power, or so the Ata Sikka thought.

Since the raja's ministers produced the first native written texts on Sikka's

history and culture, other authors have taken up pens and portable Brother

typewriters to follow suit. The writings by Ata Sikka on their own history and culture are now sufficiently voluminous for common and distinctive

characteristics of the various works to be distinguished and a rough typolo gy of the available material to be devised.

In all cases, except for citations of ritual language, the language of writing is Bahasa Indonesia. I have yet to encounter a work produced by a Sikkanese author which is written in Sara Sikka, the Sikkanese language, although texts in that language were committed to writing early in the twentieth century by

missionaries of the Catholic Church, who wrote prayer books, hymnals, and material for religious education in Sara Sikka and even, for a few years, pro duced a weekly magazine in the language. Bahasa Indonesia or, in the early days of schools on Flores, Malay, was the medium of instruction in Sikkanese

schools, and a knowledge of Malay was crucial for anyone aspiring to a

career in government, the Church, or education. Perhaps for this reason, and

notwithstanding the fact that the Ata Sikka take considerable pride in their own language, the Sikkanese viewed Bahasa Indonesia as the principal medium of commerce in the larger world and as the language of literature.

Furthermore, since many Sikkanese authors and compilers of local hadat were schoolteachers, it was perhaps inevitable that the works considered here all came to be written in Bahasa Indonesia.

The works by local Sikkanese authors that I have collected are mainly of two kinds. The first are kenang-kenangan (Bahasa Indonesia: 'memoirs') and histories. These include Kenang-kenangan 80 th. Gereja Sikka (Reminiscences of

Eighty Years of the Church in Sikka), a work of sixty-seven pages in mimeo

graph celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the construction of the Church in Sikka Natar, and Wake Pu?ang (Nukilan Kembali Sejarah Kabupaten Sikka)

(Reconstructing the Source (Excerpts from the History of Kabupaten Sikka)), a forty-seven-page work in mimeograph, both by Edmundus Pareira, a

retired school teacher of Sikka Natar, as well as the untitled history of the Sikkanese rajadom by D.D. Kondi cited above. Second are the compilations of traditional Sikkanese laws and oral literary texts. Examples of this genre are: Kleteng Tatar; Himpunan Seni Sastra Bahasa Sikka (Kleteng Latar; A Collec



466 E. . Lewis

tion of Literary Art in the Language of Sikka), thirty-two pages in mimeo

graph, and Peleng Patang; Himpunan Peribahasa dan Ungkapan-ungkapan Adat Bahasa Sikka (Peleng Patang; A Collection of Traditional Proverbs and Sayings in the Language of Sikka), seventy pages in mimeograph. These works are by Edmundus Pareira and his elder brother, M. Mandalangi Pareira, also a

retired school teacher. Kleteng latar and peleng patang are names for genres of texts in Sikkanese ritual language, the compilation of which has been a pre

occupation of many Sikkanese writers. In addition to the published compila tions by the Pareiras, there are works still in manuscript form by Teti Sola

pung, a retired school teacher from Lela, a village near Sikka Natar on the south coast. Teti Solapung calls his compilation simply Naruk Sora8 mole

Kleteng Latar (Matters of Sora and Kleteng Latar). The manuscript consists of

fragments of differing length of the mythic histories of Sikka written in ritu al language, which are presented without any translation or commentary.

Among the many published and manuscript works by Sikkanese authors I have seen a few which deal with Sara Sikka itself. Among these are

Edmundus Pareira's brief Tata Bahasa Sikka, a grammar of Sara Sikka in man

uscript form, and a very useful Sara Sikka - Bahasa Indonesia Dictionary by Mandalangi Pareira. This work bears the title Ronang; Lumbung Perbenda haraan Kata-Kata Bahasa Sikka - Indonesia (Ronang9; A Treasury's Rice Granary of Words in Sikkanese - Bahasa Indonesia).10

A detailed analysis of the styles and content of the emerging native

8 Sora (Sara Sikka) means both pantun (Bahasa Indonesia: a short poem in quatrain form) and

syair (Bahasa Indonesia: 'verse, poetry'). 9

Ronang (Sara Sikka) is the word for the traditional Sikkanese rice granary which was also

used for the storage of items of ceremonial wealth. 10 I began compiling an extensive glossary of Sara Sikka in 1980. In 1986-19871 worked close

ly with Guru Mandalangi Pareira in the correction and editing of my work. My intention was to

publish a comprehensive Sara Sikka - Bahasa Indonesia - English dictionary, but the project has

required far more time than originally envisaged. In the meantime, Guru Mandalangi complet ed his Ronang. In 1993 and 1994, I again worked with Guru Mandalangi on the preparation of

his Sara Sikka - Bahasa Indonesia dictionary for publication (Lewis and Pareira 1998). The larg er dictionary, Kamus Dialek Dialek Tengah dan Tana 7Ai dari Sara Sikka, Jilid 1, Sara Sikka - Bahasa

Indonesia - Bahasa Inggeris (A Dictionary of the Central and Tana ?Ai Dialects of Sara Sikka, Vol.

1, Sara Sikka - Bahasa Indonesia - English), is now complete but awaits editing and final prepa

ration for the press. It is perhaps worth pointing out the existence of a few works on Sara Sikka by European priests of the Catholic Church who have worked in the district. These include an unpublished diction

ary (Sara Sikka - Dutch) by Meyer, which was compiled probably in the 1920s, and two mimeo

graph volumes by Father H. Bolscher SVD of Hi Parish in central Sikka. The first volume of

Bolscher's work, Tati Lalang Sara Sikka (Showing (or 'pointing to, first steps on') the Path to the

Sikkanese Language), 150 pages in mimeograph, 1978, is a dictionary in thesaurus form of

Indonesian words and their equivalents in Sara Sikka. The second volume is Tati Lalang Sara




Sikkanese literature on history, language, and culture would be beyond the

scope of the present paper. However, some additional comments on the ways in which these works came into existence will illuminate the effect of such

works in contemporary Sikkanese society In particular, I wish to consider works of the second genre: the compilations and transcriptions of texts in

Sikkanese ritual language. The authors of those compilations of ritual-language texts which I have

studied have written down what they recalled of Sikka's oral literary tradi tion. In this endeavour, they have tapped the memories of other members of the community, but in no case do their compilations include texts or tran

scriptions of ritual language in performance. This means that the fragments recorded in writing are largely taken out of the specific social and ceremoni al contexts in which ritual language was once employed. They are, in other

words, texts without contexts other than their authors' minds and intentions. As a result, they present special difficulties in interpretation and understand

ing. Even translation into Bahasa Indonesia or English becomes a difficult

matter, the more so because of the complex metaphors which Sikkanese ritu al language employs. They are, nevertheless, important and extremely inter

esting cultural products. The essential question about them, which a fuller textual analysis might illuminate, is to what extent they can be read as reli able indices of an oral tradition of myth and history which has now disap peared from social currency. In other words, to what extent and in what way are they elements of a vanished ceremonial and ritual system and to what extent and in what way are they the creative products of individual authors?

In addition to the distinctions drawn above, another can be made. Of the Sikkanese texts under consideration, there are those that have been publish ed (albeit usually in very limited numbers in mimeograph) and those that remain in single-copy manuscript form. After speaking about these written

works with both Sikkanese authors and other members of the community, I am left with the impression that the value placed on a particular work is an inverse function of the number of copies in existence, that is, the accessibili

ty of the work. Thus, although the mimeograph publications that have ap peared in Maumere and Sikka Natar in the past twenty years are valued, the Sikkanese constantly make reference to the manuscript works held by the writers or members of their families which are not generally accessible, for

example, Kondi's 'Hikayat'. Reference is made to these works in such a way as to have led me to conclude that these works, which few have ever seen, are especially valued and even imbued with special authority if not power.

Sikka: (474 pages in mimeograph, 1982), a straightforward Sara Sikka - Indonesian dictionary, which is of special interest because it records the central dialect of Sikkanese rather than the dialect of Sikka Natar.



468 E. . Lewis

This is particularly the case with references by Sikkanese speakers to the van ished manuscripts on history and culture by Raja Thomas's ministers. In this feature of the emerging Sikkanese concern with literary records of their past

we find a revealing paradox: the most highly valued and respected writings are precisely those that are locked away and thus not available to the wider

community and those that are thought to be 'lost'. In Sikka, knowledge is power, and objective knowledge, that is, knowl

edge enshrined in the written word in manuscripts, is a talismanic token of the power of the owner of the manuscript, whether or not this owner is the author. As a result, those who actually possess manuscripts

- or, more pre cisely, those who are generally thought to own them, a point on which those credited with possession never disagree

- are accorded special status and

prestige in the community: they are the exclusive possessors of what are gen

erally viewed as the only authoritative and most legitimate records of what in the past was the common property of all Ata Sikka, hence nothing less than the cultural heritage of the Sikkanese people. The prestige accruing to

the possessor from such possession is not readily translatable into terms of

political or financial gain in contemporary Sikkanese society; it is rather a rit

ual prestige which is in full accord with the traditional division of secular and sacred power and authority in Sikkanese society.11

In this way, the texts are not so much used or intended as vehicles of com

munication about Sikka's past, but are instead - as objects and as objectifica tions of that past

- tokens of wealth and power entering the contemporary

political life of the community. Just as objects exchanged in bridewealth transactions move along paths which articulate the essential patterns of

social relations in the community, the written ancestral words as object stand

for the system of relations between humans, society, and the cosmos which once existed and which, though it is of little account in secular affairs today, is still of importance in political, social, and religious events in which refer ence is made to the past. According to this view, those writers who have gone so far as to publish compilations of hadat texts have actually violated the tra

ditional system by weakening the identity between a corpus of knowledge and the person who holds that body of knowledge. In this kind of society, lit

11 As elsewhere in eastern Indonesia, the power of a community's secular leader (in many cases a raja) and that of the ritual leader are held to be different in nature and to be effective in

distinctive (but complementary) realms of human life. Thus, Sikka Natar had, until 1954, a sec

ular ruler in the person of the ratu ('raja') and a ritual leader in the person of the tana pu?ang ('source of the earth', a phrase often rendered in Malay as tuan tanah, 'lord of the earth'), whose

responsibilities extended in the religious sphere to the fertility of the earth, human beings, and

animals. While the ratu was the centre of the Sikkanese petty state, the source of the earth was

the centre of the indigenous religion and ritual system.




eracy itself takes on both a secular and a sacred facet. Furthermore, by con

fining hadat to an object (a book, a manuscript) instead of allowing it to run

loose in the community, the community can, as the Sikkanese take pride in

doing, both maju (Bahasa Indonesia: progress' and 'improve') economically and respect the past, which, were it allowed a life of its own, would conflict

with the ideology of progress, development, and modernity which the Ata

Sikka have, since the Second World War, embraced enthusiastically. Only by

locking the traditions of their society up in books, by objectifying, 'freezing' them in written words, can the Sikkanese be the people they are becoming;

especially in the case of Sikka Natar, modern society exists at the expense of

the past.

4. Ritual Language and the Individual Creative Moment in Tana ?Ai

'... when a nation of men starts making literature it invariably starts on the diffi

cult emprise of verse, and goes on to prose as by an afterthought. Why should men start upon the more difficult form and proceed to the easier?' (Arthur Quiller Couch 1916:57-8.)

While they speak a dialect of Sara Sikka, the Ata Tana ?Ai of the mountains

of the eastern region of the Regency of Sikka maintain a culture and society

substantially different in organization from those of Sikka Natar.12 The ritual

language which the Ata Tana ?Ai employ in the performance of ritual is latu

lawan, 'bold speech', and bleka hura, 'patterned speech, ordered speech' (see Lewis 1988b), in contrast to ordinary speech. The language of daily commu

nication is marin plaun, 'to speak in halves', that is, simply and straightfor

wardly, without the semantically paired words, and thus complex elements, of ritual language. Ritual language was the language of the ancestors. It is

'complete' and 'whole' because of the dualistic parallelism of words which

marks its structure. Ritual language thus stands apart from the speech of

everyday discourse, which is non-dualistic in form and, in the view of the

Ata Tana ?Ai, highly elliptical. According to them, not only is ritual language 'whole', but bleka hura, because it is the language of the ancestors, was the

original language of Tana ?Ai and thus predates the prosaic language of the

contemporary Ata Tana ?Ai.

Bleka hura or latu lawan is used only on ritual occasions to address ances

tral spirits who are the intermediaries between human beings and the deity of Tana ?Ai. Once every generation, the deity is invoked directly in the com

12 The social and ceremonial organization of Tana Wai Brama, the largest of the domains of

Tana ?Ai, are the subject of Lewis 1988a.



470 E. . Lewis

plex and large-scale rites of the gren moh?, the performance of which marks

the culmination of the Tana ?Ai ritual cycle (see Lewis 1988a, 1996a, and

Lewis, Asch and Asch 1993). While everyone in the community understands at least fragments of ritual language, only a few ritual specialists, two or

three men from each clan of the domain, know the mythic histories of the clans and the domain fully and are fluent in the use of ritual language, the

vehicle for narrating these histories on the occasion of ritual performances. Because bleka hura is a language (it is distinctive syntactically and lexically from Sara Tana ?Ai, the dialect of daily discourse), Tana ?Ai ritual specialists use ritual language in the same way as any language can be used, to say the same thing in constantly new and changing ways and to say novel things for

the first time. It is not always easy to distinguish formulaic couplets and episodes in a

chant from new elements introduced by an individual chanter. But in per formance, narrations of mythic histories are never merely recitations of mem

orized and unchanging, set 'texts'. The nature of ritual language as a language, in which, as in ordinary language, a skilled chanter can say anything he wish

es, is crucial. Many incidents over the years have convinced me of this, but two in particular stand out. The first occurred in 1978, when I arranged to

meet chanters from three clans of Tana Wai Brama at the house of a fourth. I

provided palm gin and they, in return, agreed to chant for me some of the his tories of the domain, which I would record. The session resulted in five hours of high-quality recordings of chants.13 When I transcribed my tapes, I dis covered that the chants did not comprise clan histories but long and master ful apologies to the ancestors for invoking them outside a ritual performance and for chanting at the request of an outsider. The texts of the chants were in

fully formed ritual language, but their content could only have been entirely novel, created especially for the occasion by the ritual specialists. The second occurred in 1984, when Mo?ang Pius Ipir Wai Brama, who became the Source of the Domain of Wai Brama after the 1980 gren make, came to Canberra to assist Tim Asch, Patsy Asch and myself in the postproduction of the film, A Celebration of Origins (Lewis, Asch and Asch 1993). Pius had never been away from Flores before, let alone to Australia. To my questions the first few days of his visit about what he thought of this or that in Canberra, he replied in rit ual language, describing his flight from Bali to Sydney, his long journey by car to Canberra, the lorries and trains we passed, the great plate-glass win dow of the house in which he was staying, and the mysteriously noisy box from which dishes emerged spotlessly clean. His fluent replies were perfect

13 The photographs of four ritual leaders of Tana Wai Brama that appear on page 100 of Lewis

1988a were taken on this occasion.




ly formed with respect to the semantic parallelism and the formulae of ritu al language, but referred to things, events, and concepts wholly new to his

experience. Thus ritual language allows myths and ritual incantations to be recreated

to a specific formula with each telling and, in time, to change and evolve to reflect the changing social, political, and economic circumstances of society itself. I would argue, however, that the living tradition of oral literature in Tana ?Ai does not merely reflect change in society in a reactive way, but is itself a principal instrument for effecting change in the community. The per formance of ritual, of which the narration of myth is a major component, is, in other words, a means employed by knowledgeable and influential men -

the corps of ritual specialists in the community - to bring about alterations

and adjustments in the relations of social groups to one another and of the whole society to its larger political and ecological environment. In a society in which the status quo is defined and justified in terms of the past, the vari

ability of the past as represented in variable myths produces variation in the

present and the future.14 One implication of this for the analyst of Tana ?Ai society is that any given

single text of a ritual performance, that is, the reduction through writing of a narration of mythic history in the course of the performance of a ritual, can be taken neither as an artefact nor an index of Tana ? Ai culture in general, but

only as a partial index, one requiring detailed contextual analysis, of the event it records and, thereby, of the state of relations in the community at that moment. Unlike Sikka, whose people view their myths as part of an unchan

ging past, in Tana ?Ai many views of the past are revealed in the analysis of texts in ritual language derived from performances by different ritual spe cialists on different occasions. Whereas written transcriptions of actual per formances of myth and ritual from Tana ?Ai made not by performers them selves but by an outside agent such as an anthropologist present themselves as long literary works in the oral style, texts produced by Sikkanese authors must be judged as long literary works in the written style. The exegesis of textual material from Tana ?Ai is thus quite a different endeavour from the

analysis of the Sikkanese material. The analyst should not be deceived by manifest and superficial similari

ties between Sikkanese texts and transcriptions of Tana ?Ai performances. The formal patterns of arrangement of words in such texts, for example, are

similar between the two, and texts from both communities reveal the same semantic parallelism that is characteristic of all ritual languages of eastern

14 For a description of how one ritual specialist employed ritual language and his knowledge of the mythic histories of his domain to manipulate the outcome of the gren make in 1980, see Lewis 1988b.



472 E. . Lewis

Indonesia. However, semantic parallelism and constant and recurrent fea tures of form, which are themselves functions of the syntax and structure of

the communicating medium, cannot lead us directly to a definitive interpre tation and understanding of the meaning of the texts. We must, in other

words, learn to read the parallelisms in order to be able to read the text, but we cannot read the culture fully from the text; having mastered the language, we must read the text within the culture. There is a significant difference between texts in Tana ?Ai ritual language and texts of the written literary' tradition of Sikka: the former are texts of events, namely ritual performances in which ritual specialists employ ritual language in the narration of mythic histories, whereas in Sikka texts that include passages in ritual language (as in the Kondi 'Hikayat') are not anchored in a particular performance or event.

The latter thus serve their authors' more general purpose of defining or cod

ifying hadat. Thus a further difference between the written literary 'tradition' of Sikka and the oral ritual tradition of Tana ?Ai is that in the former case

texts are authored, while in the latter case they are not. Whereas a written work is intended by its author to stand to a degree on its own as an object, the unauthored transcription cannot be understood without direct reference to the intentions of its performer and the circumstances of the performance, of which it is but an incomplete and reduced record.

5. The Tyranny of the Text and the Liberation of the Intellect Through Writing

'... the printed book - the written word - presupposes a speaking voice, and must

ever have at its back some sense in us of the speaking voice.' (Arthur Quiller Couch 1916:45.)

With respect to texts of ritual performances in Tana ?Ai, a problem which, I

admit, can only be formulated here, is how to treat written versions of myths: can they be treated analytically as if they were texts of performances, for

example, or must they be thought of purely as literary creations? Or does it matter? Which is to ask what is the difference between the transcription of a

myth narrated and recorded 'live' and a literary rendition of a tale of the same genre in the same kind of language (that is, ritual language) which has flowed directly from the mind of the author, through pen to paper, without a

'performance'? A comparison of the formal characteristics and features of texts from the

pens of Sikkanese authors and transcriptions of oral performances in ritual

language in Tana ?Ai reveals that the classifications of the Sikkanese cosmol

ogy are encoded in both. Indeed, the structured character of ritual language, which is essentially identical in the two traditions, serves among other things




to encode those culturally constituted systems of classification which lend a

comprehensible order to society and its material environment. Thus we

might conclude that the symbolisms of the texts are of equal force, whether their source was a ritual performance or an act of literary creation. However, the indexicality of the two kinds of text, to use a term employed by Roy

Rappaport (1979), differs substantially In Rappaport's terms, the Sikkanese texts communicate symbolically information about culture and history gen

erally (or their authors' conceptions of culture and history), whereas each

instance of ritual speech in Tana ?Ai communicates both information about

Tana ?Ai culture and, what is perhaps more important for the Ata Tana ?Ai

themselves, information about the state of the performer, relations between

him and his audience, and the state of the community at that particular moment. Clearly, Sikkanese texts, being frozen in print, do not fulfil the lat ter communicative function. The lost dimension of Sikkanese texts thus lim its what can be learned about the community through their analysis.

Myths in Tana ?Ai, and perhaps in all societies in which mythological tra

ditions survive as a force in daily life, reflect the storytelling capacity of

human beings. George Steiner, in his After Babel (1975), has noted that lan

guage provides human beings with a powerful tool for manipulating the

physical and social world. But it also provides humans with a means for

lying to one another, for representing and communicating what Steiner calls

'alternities', that is, creative conceptions of things not as they are but imagin

ings of what they might be (unicorns, for example, or an as yet unbuilt new

house). Steiner argues that the ability to imagine alternity is a gift but is one

capable of doing us harm as well as enabling us to respond to changing cir

cumstances creatively and flexibly. While people may make judgements about a ritual specialist's rendition

of a chant or about his style of chanting, in the Tana ?Ai tradition there is no

'standard text' of any myth by which the narrations of a tale or its contents are judged. Each telling of a myth involves the performer's alternity, which

through the telling enters the political discourse of the community, to be

altered, accepted, or rejected through negotiation. The authority of the per formance is determined by the authority accorded to the performer by the

community generally, and is a matter decided in social and political realms

external to the myth itself. Each telling of a myth is thus textually unique in

that it yields, if recorded and contextualized by reference to persons, events, and social relations beyond itself, a unique text discernibly different from

other texts. The content and form of a tale or myth thus depend upon the

individual teller of the story at a particular time and place. In Tana ?Ai,

despite the formulaic character of many of the couplets and phrases of texts in ritual language (which may vary little between chanters, and not at all from one performance to the next), the episodes included and the order in



474 E. . Lewis

which these episodes are presented vary radically between performances. What is said in each individual performance must be set against what is not

said. The unsaid is always the complete' history of the domain, an encom

passing myth that is never articulated fully but is nevertheless thought to

exist, at least potentially, in the minds of the community's chanters. The stan

dards by which the community at large judges a telling of a tale to be right are the prerogative of the community as a whole. Recitations are creative en

deavours which allow both the narrator and the community to reorganize

conceptions of the present and future in accordance with perceived needs for

change or for maintaining the status quo ante.15 What happens when a piece of oral literature, such as a myth, whose nar

ration is an element of a ritual event, comes to be written down? First of all, what was originally an ephemeral telling of a tale, to which the teller can con

tribute original, creative ideas, is changed into a static text - the tale is

'frozen'. Minimally, the existence of the frozen text influences subsequent

tellings. In the extreme case, however, the tale becomes such that it cannot be

told any other way. Thus, what is becomes a guide to what ought to be and the text generates norms for future behaviour and standards for future thought. It becomes part of an ideology, in other words. Whereas a single telling with in an oral tradition represents a theory of what is at the moment, the text comes to be seen as encoding what ought to be for all time. To the extent that

this is true, the freedom of a community to use language to respond to chang ing circumstances is diminished, and the individual creativity of the myth teller, by which he moulds his community's responses to changing circum

stances, is circumscribed by the text.

Whereas the myth presented in the form of an oral narrative once com

municated possibilities, the written text encodes imperatives; the author of

this text thus is in a position to control the interpretation of the myth, that is, its meaning. Once the text is committed to writing, as the Ata Sikka have

committed their myths to writing, individuals are no longer free to recast -

to retell - the story of the creation of the world or the origins of the moral

order, for example. As a result, under changing circumstances the rationality of the tale is reduced as it comes inevitably to conflict logically with these

changing circumstances. This has happened in Sikka. As the Ata Sikka were

increasingly drawn into the modern world of Catholicism and national ide

ology, the Tale and its entailed moral and cosmological order came to be

increasingly out of step with reality and, indeed, to conflict with it. For the

Sikkanese, ever greater suspensions of disbelief were required to maintain

15 See Lewis 1989 for an exploration of the ways in which innovation in ritual enters com

munity discourse.




the illusion of veracity created by the text. The truths of the text, which now

require interpreters not generally available, can become a threat to the new

status quo. In Sikka, texts and the myths they objectify have become the prop

erty of a select few owners, who lock them away as valuable heirlooms and

prevent them from being freely circulated. In modern Sikka it is sufficient, in

order to maintain links with the past, to know that such objects exist, while too close a scrutiny of their content might be dangerous. Even when fragments of the tradition are published by authors such as those cited above, they are

presented as mere history and not as documents which might have force in the

present. We see what is, in effect, the heirloomization of history and the past. When a tale is in the process of becoming a written text, its implicitly

understood metaphoricalness - the sense that it stands for something else

that is decided individually and freely by its hearers - is reduced to absolute truth. Where previously it could reasonably be altered to reflect the realities of changes in the community's life and the multifarious opinions of the mem

bers of the community, it now becomes something quite different. By hold

ing up THE BOOK and declaiming 'This is the true word of the ancestors (or God, or whatever)', the myth as object becomes a tool of social and political control rather than a medium for negotiation and change. In this way, the text

becomes tyrannical. I first became interested in (and a bit concerned about) the effects of writ

ing on a tradition of oral performance in 1980, when I embarked on a project to document on film and audiotape the telling of myths in the gren make rit uals of the Ata Tana ?Ai. When I returned to Tana ?Ai with videotape copies of films of ritual performances and transcriptions of recorded conversations and verbal performances in 1982 and subsequent years, I was struck by the

unexpectedly intense interest the Ata Tana ?Ai showed in my transcriptions of ritual-language texts as compared with the merely polite interest they showed in my film records of the same events. It was only after I began to

wonder about the possible influence which my own recording and tran

scription of ritual events, and the ritual language included in these events,

might have on hadat in Tana Wai Brama16 that I read the second of Jack

Goody's trilogy on literacy, family, culture, and the state (Goody 1986).17 In

the Introduction to that work, Goody asks a number of questions which are

very similar in intent to those I am asking about the oral and the written

presentation of religious ideas and politics with respect to the Ata Sikka and

Ata Tana ?Ai. Goody's questions are:

16 It is perhaps significant that, whereas I saw my work as the recording of events, some of

my informants were quick to interpret it (though not with disapproval) as the recording of hadat. 17 The other two volumes in this series are The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge 1977, and The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge 1987.



476 E. . Lewis

'What difference does it make when the word (of God), as in Judaism, Islam and

Christianity, is written in a book (or an array of books) rather than being just the word of mouth, the product of the spoken tongue? Are there any general ways in which oral and literate cultures tend to differ in their religious beliefs and prac tices? How do systems of worship depend upon specific modes of communica tion? And, over time, how far do traditions of intellectual activity depend upon the earlier presence of a religion of the Book?' (Goody 1986:1.)

While I have not dealt either with Goody's questions or with his essay here, I should point out that I consider his questions to be extremely pertinent to our efforts to understand the movement of societies from 'traditional' to 'modern' organizational forms. Though beginning with similar questions, I

would move in a different direction from Goody's in seeking answers. To put it somewhat baldly, my analysis of material from Tana ?Ai and Sikka leads

me to the conclusion that whereas in Flores literacy, and in particular writing (as a form of auctorial composition), is liberating for the individual intellect, the resulting text is tyrannical for society at large. I should emphasize that

perhaps my conclusion only holds true for Sikka, where a minority of al

ready advantaged people wield pens and typewriters to produce compendia of their traditions. When, as will inevitably be the case, the majority of the

population becomes functionally literate and fully used to communicating in the written as well as the spoken word, the imbalance of power between the

spoken word and the written WORD and the concomitant imbalance of power between the literate and the non-literate classes of society will be corrected.

Only then will the sacred aura of the written WORD wane and the tyranny of the text end. But at this point in Sikka's history, and especially in the case of the Ata Tana ?Ai, the WORD, when written, remains a double-edged sword, at once the means of liberation and of tyranny.

REFERENCES

Goody, Jack, 1986, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kondi, D.D.P., 1995, 'Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka' (History of the Rajadom of Sikka), edit ed and translated by E.D. Lewis. [Unpublished manuscript.]

Lewis, E.D., 1988a, People of the Source; The Social and Ceremonial Order of Tana Wat Brama on Flores. Dordrecht/Providence: Foris. [KITLV, Verhandelingen 135.]

-, 1988b, Quest for the Source; The Ontogenesis of a Creation Myth of the Ata Tana Ai', in: James J. Fox (ed.), To Speak in Pairs; Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-, 1989, 'Why Did Sina Dance? Stochasm, Choice and Intentionality in the Ritual Life of the Ata Tana 'Ai of Eastern Flores', in: Paul Alexander (ed.), Creating Indonesian Culture, pp. 175-98. Sydney: Oceania Publications.




-, 1994, 'Sikka Regency', in: Roy W. Hamilton (ed.), Gift of the Cotton Maiden; Textiles

of Flores and the Solor Islands, pp. 148-69. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural

History, University of California at Los Angeles. -, 1996a, 'Invocation, Sacrifice, and Precedence in the Gr en Make Rites in Tana Wai

Brama, Flores', in: Signe Howell (ed.), For the Sake of Our Future; Sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia, pp. 111-31. Leiden: Monographs of the Center for Non-Western

Studies, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. -, 1996b, 'Precedence and Hierarchy in the Social Orders of Tana 'Ai and Sikka', in:

James J. Fox and Clifford Sather (eds), Origins, Ancestry, and Alliance; Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography, pp. 154-74. Canberra: Monographs of the Department of Anthropology, The Australian National University.

-, in press, 'Don Al?su's Quest; The Mythohistorical Foundation of the Rajadom of Sikka', History and Anthropology 11-1 (1998).

-, forthcoming, 'Precedence and Hierarchy in the Formation of Tana Wai Brama and

the Rajadom of Sikka', in: Michael P. Vischer (ed.), Hierarchy, Precedence, and Social

Differentiation in the Austronesian World. Lewis, E.D., T. Asch, and P. Asch, 1993, A Celebration of Origins; The Gren Make Rituals

of Tana 'Ai. Watertown, Massachusetts: Documentary Educational Resources. [16 mm film, 47 minutes, sound synch, colour.]

Lewis, E.D., and Mandalangi Pareira, 1998, Kamus Sara Sikka - Bahasa Indonesia [A Sara

Sikka - Bahasa Indonesia Dictionary]. Ende, Flores, Indonesia: Nusa Indah.

Lord, Alfred B., 1960, The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 1916, 'On the Difference between Verse and Prose', in: On the Art of Writing; Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913-1914. Cam

bridge: University Press.

Rappaport, Roy, 1979, 'The Obvious Aspects of Ritual', in: Ecology, Meaning, and Reli

gion. Richmond, California: North Atlantic Books. Steiner, George, 1975, After Babel; Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford

University Press.



The Tyranny of the Text: Oral Tradition and the Power of Writing in Sikka and Tana ?Ai, Flores

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