Named speech registers and the inscription of locality in the Dutch East Indies
(paper delivered at the Meetings of the American Anthropological Association 2005, and at the Asian
Research Institute, National University of Singapore, February 2006)
Joel Kuipers
George Washington University
Kuipers@gwu.edu
Thanks for inviting me, it’s a pleasure to be here. This paper that I’m presenting today is
part of a larger project that I’ve been engaged in for 20 some years, namely trying to
understand the relation between language culture and authority. Not all forms of
representation are equal, and some of them are granted more weight, more significance,
more authority than others. I’ve been trying to study this stratification of linguistic
resources ethnographically, historically and linguistically. Ethnographically and
linguistically, for my dissertation fieldwork, I studied a form of ritual speech in the
eastern Indonesian island of Sumba. I examined how they used in a series of
performances following calamities, and the specific poetic forms they used contributed to
the sense of coherence and authority for the event. I began to noticed in the mid 1990’s
though, signs of a precipitous decline, and a lot of people seemed to be converting to
Christianity. I found that the roots of this lay much deeper in changing beliefs about the
function of language. So I wrote another book in 1998 that explained these changes in
relation to changes in beliefs and attitudes towards the language itself, not just in relation
to government coercion or some psychological change. More recently I’ve been
interested in the way ideas about language and authority are reproduced and negotiated in
science classrooms, and I’ve been watching middle school children in diverse classrooms
in the USA use language to negotiate scientific facts. I hope to continue to a similar,
comparative project in Indonesia.
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In this paper today, I’d like to go back and look at how certain kinds of language
got selected as appropriate, indeed privileged objects of study. I want to explore what this
has to do with beliefs about writing and authority of the word, and how the Dutch and
Indonesian ideas came together in a unique way.
I’d like to begin with an example from Sumba, Indonesia (Anakalang). Webb
Keane (Keane 1997) reports that one of his assistants, D. H. Wohangara told him that he
has often wondered why Sumbanese, unlike Javanese and Balinese, never had their own
script. Keane goes on to suggest that for Sumbanese in the 1990’s, the absence of writing
is something that needed to be explained, and it arose in reference to cultures that do have
it. To ask "why Bali and not us?" and to see the lack of indigenous writing as a mark of
cultural incompleteness relative to others is to treat all "localities" as commensurable.”
That is, in this view, Bali, Java and Sumba are all localities, within a single framework,
rather than one of them being viewed as an encompassing or totalizing model for
evaluating the others.
While Keane perceptively notes that the speaker’s question implies that
Sumbanese culture is coordinate with that of Java and Bali, I would suggest that there is
an additional way to explain Wohangara’s expectations about writing. In Sumbanese,
and indeed in many communities across Indonesia, there are named speech registers that
are viewed as ‘words of the ancestors’ – authoritative ways of inscribing privileged,
traditional knowledge. So, for men like Wohangara, in a sense they already do possess a
system of “inscription;” what they lack is a graphic means of putting it down onto
durable materials. Since the government doesn’t recognize the authority of any forms of
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inscription other than graphic ones (and sometimes not even those), this has had serious
consequences for the Sumbanese and their efforts at obtaining recognition for their
religious practices (Kuipers 1990).
“Writing” has a long history of associations for the Dutch East Indies, and a very
specific set of associations for the Dutch and for the Indonesians themselves. These
associations, beliefs and attitudes, make up not merely a set of folkways, but an
ideologically interested set of practices that stratify language resources in particular ways.
This stratification of resources had implications for how ritual speech was studied, and
how the field of Indonesian language studies was viewed more generally. After 1815,
when the Congress of Vienna attempted to carve up much of Europe on linguistic
grounds (including Holland), Dutch ideas about what counted as the “local” and indeed
what counted as “language” were richly bound up with writing, and other privileged ways
of representing knowledge (Noordegraaf 1990). These debates found their way out to the
Dutch East Indies, indeed to some of its remoter precincts.
In trying to understand the development of Indonesia as a linguistic area, there are
at least two key concerns: what gets to count as “language?” what gets to count as an
“area?” In this paper, I want to argue that in the Dutch East Indies and then post
independence Indonesia, the definition of the area analytically for linguistic and
ethnological analysis was bound up with ideas about writing and translation. To study
attitudes about writing I want to take a somewhat unusual perspective. I want to look at
the evolution of studies of named speech registers (Grimes 1994), especially so-called
‘ritual speech,’ in the Dutch East Indies after the restoration of Dutch rule to the
archipelago in 1815. I then examine how the focus on these languages came to fit into
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Dutch ideologies about how writing. These ideologies inflected their studies of how their
own society was organized, and the role that languages played in them as a reflection of
local cosmologies.
Although the upsurge in recognition of and interest in linguistic diversity in the
Dutch East Indies had much to do with geopolitical events in Europe, there was also
increasing recognition of stylistic variation locally within Indonesia. Among these styles
were named speech registers, widely found across Indonesia, associated with formal
situations, positional identities, and highly structured forms of dyadic speech, often
consisting of couplets, in which the first line parallels the second in both rhythm and
meaning. The extent to which these registers exhibited parallelism similar to that found in
the Hebrew Psalms, or even displayed universal dualistic tendencies in particularly
pristine form, called into question the internal coherence and distinctiveness of Indonesia
as a Field of Study (Josselin de Jong 1977 [1935]).
At the same time, native understandings of ritual speech, its place and scope of
authority, underwent profound shifts (Kuipers 1998). While missionary efforts to inscribe
and “fix” the textual knowledge of ritual speech were often welcomed initially as a way
of preserving its distinctiveness and authority, the act of translating these speech styles
into Dutch, and then later, Indonesian, came to be seen as a de-contextualizing act, in
which the “local” knowledge was ancestral speech, and the language of broader
interpretation was Dutch and then, Bahasa Indonesia.
Earliest translations
4
Among the first to notice, record and describe distinctive forms of religious language in
Indonesia were missionaries. As van der Putten explains in his article on early language
research in the Indies (Van Der Putten 1995), there were basically three types of
linguistic investigations going on in the Dutch East Indies after 1815: missionary work,
government linguists, and administrators. Embarrassed that the British interregnum in
Indonesia had exposed the relatively poor level of linguistic competence of previous
Dutch administrations, the post 1825 administrations launched an ambitious training
program for administrators sent to the Indies. Of the three types of people engaged in
publishing linguistic analyses, it was only the evangelists who made an effort to explore
and document these special genres and named speech registers. Missionaries were a
relatively marginal presence in the Dutch East Indies, which for much of its history was a
largely secular enterprise.
The missionaries’ task – in some ways - was the narrowest and most focused of
all the language researchers working at the time. They focused on the formal registers of
the language that could be used to translate the Holy Bible, because they wished to
bestow their translations with a formal character. They did not want the Indonesians to
treat the Holy Bible as ordinary text. Many of these missionaries carried out long term
fieldwork and knew the languages they studied very well.
August Hardeland and Ngaju Dayak Basa Sangiang ‘Spirit Language’
Among the earliest of these missionary scholars to describe the characteristics of
ritual speech in the Dutch East Indies was a German by the name of August Hardeland.
He was sent by the Rhenish Mission Society to Central Borneo to translate the Old and
New Testament into the Ngaju Dayak language. In 1841 he set up a mission station on
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the Murong River, staffed it largely with former slaves whose freedom he had purchased
with mission support (Swellengrebel 1974; Baier 2002). Although he was a German, he
worked closely with Dutch scholars in the Netherlands, received support for some of his
scholarly and publishing efforts from the Netherlands Bible Society, and even married a
woman of Dutch descent.
A solemn and pious man, he had little sympathy for Dayak culture, but took his
task very seriously. He was very concerned that his translations be accurate and reflect
the “pure” and “uncorrupted” Dayak perspective, uninfluenced by Malay or other outside
“dispositions.” Here Hardeland’s writings reflect the debates about linguistic “purism”
that were very much part of the zeitgeist ‘spirit of the times’ in the 1840s. For intellectual
support, he looked to the work of the Romantic Dutch Orientalist Taco Roorda (Roorda
1874), who wrote an influential grammar of Javanese (Hardeland 1858), a grammar he
wrote without ever setting foot on Java. Since he lacked the authoritative written texts
and manuscripts on which Roorda based his grammar, Hardeland recruited a dozen
Dayak elites who began to teach him ritual speech (or basa Sangiang). He declared that it
“can be called the dayak Kawi or Sanskrit,” (1858:4), he implicitly compared it to literary
systemi. He described it as “poetic and full of metaphors. The form of it resembles the
Hebrew poetic language with respect to the rhythm and the short parallel elements”
(Hardeland 1858). Rather than include couplets in the actual translation, however, he
chose to publish them separately, on the grounds that they might evoke heathen imagery
in the minds of his readers.
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Benjamin Matthes and Bugis lontara’
Benjamin Matthes was another scholar during this same period who was trained
by Roorda, and who collected a large corpus of parallelistic ritual speech(Matthes 1883).
Like Hardeland, he was supported by a Mission society, and sent to translate the Bible
into a local language, this time, the Makassarese and Bugis languages of Southwest
Sulawesi. Arriving in this strongly Islamic region of Indonesia in 1848, he immediately
set to work assembling a team of elites. Unlike Hardeland, Matthes had large corpora of
manuscripts written in a local Indic derived script called lontara’. He used these texts
exclusively as the basis for his grammar, dictionary and translations, a practice that his
teacher Roorda had used with some success. While some critics at the time raised the
question of the relevance of these richly parallelistic, poetic texts to everyday speech,
Matthes felt that among the hyper status conscious Buginese, only such revered textual
language could possess the dignity worthy of the Holy Bible. He admitted that all of his
translations contained words that ‘were not in the ordinary language.” These works drew
heavily on the basa Bissu or the ritual language of the transvestite Bissu priests used in
pre-Islamic rituals and recitations associated with the epic poem La Galigo.
H. Neubronner van der Tuuk and aksara Batak
At the same time that Hardeland and Matthes were working in Borneo and
Sulawesi respectively, a now-legendary figure named Hermanus Neubronner Van der
Tuuk had begun work in Sumatra. Born in the Indies to a Malay mother, but educated in
Holland under Roorda, he began to study the Indic script bark manuscripts (aksara
Batak) of the Batak language from north Sumatra. As he transliterated them he
discovered that they were mostly magical spells and divination chants, and were written
7
in a “peculiar style” of language, a couplet style which he named “liturgical language.”
Despite his own rather explicit and grave misgivings about Christianity and its doctrines,
he accepted a position with the Netherlands Bible Society to translate the Bible into
Batak in Northern Sumatra.
While most Dutch intellectual historians dwell on his outsized charismatic and
irreverent personality, in many ways linguistically he was very much a man of his time.
Like his colleague Hardeland, he sought ‘pure’ languages. He did this, like Hardeland,
and Matthes, by studying the speech of elites, and indeed the privileged genres among the
elites, such as ritual speech. Consistent with his Orientalist training under Roorda, van
der Tuuk treated written texts as privileged objects of study. However, his take on the
writing was typically irreverent (at least to Dutch ears): “The Bataks do not have the folly
of most nations, who speak differently than they write.”. When they write things down,
they don’t create the nonsense that we do. Unlike us, who are confused by letters, […]
every Batak who knows the script, writes his thoughts down clearly, for he writes down
things according to his language. Thus his script is a masterpiece of systematicity, as it
represents all the sounds of his language.” (Tuuk 1962)
What Van Der Tuuk was arguing was that because the Batak script reflected the
spoken language in a “pure” (zuiver) form, it was not “dead” and “irrational” like the
Dutch orthographic conventions of the time, which among other things, still preserved
distinctions in the case endings that had long since been abandoned by the speakers. He
was agreeing here with the opinions of his teacher, Taco Roorda, who drew on Von
Humboldt to argue – with some passion - that Dutch orthography was a holdover from a
8
moribund past, was “dead” and needed reform.ii (Noordegraaf 1990). Roorda’s opinions
figured in passionate debates about Belgian separatism.
Van der Tuuk’s entry into this already raucous debate underway in the Low
Countries conveniently overlooked the radically different functions of writing for the
definition of linguistic areas: One of the goals of writing among Europeans was the
elimination of variation – creation of a monoglot standard as embodiment of the
“imagined community” as Benedict Anderson (1991) has so often reminded us. By
contrast, one of the goals of writing among Indonesian ritual speakers was the
preservation of variation – i.e. distinctiveness between ritual and non-ritual speech forms
(Kuipers 1996). The whole point of writing in Java and Bali and in the outer islands
where it occurred was to inscribe and fix the higher authority of the words of the
ancestors and spirits. The idea that Indic scripts would be used for everyday, pedestrian
matters among non-elites as a way of building a territorial national community was not
part of their thinking. The whole European project of language standardization and
graphic reform was radically at odds with the goals of ceremonial inscription in its
various forms in the Indonesian archipelago. The question about what gets to count as
language and that language’s relation to an area was launched, in important ways,
through debates about inscription.
Establishment of Anthropology as a scientific academic discipline
Up until 1877, anthropology had been a geographically oriented training course for civil
servants in the Dutch East Indies. In that year, it became a liberal academic discipline at
9
Leiden University. By 1885, the chair of anthropology was G. A. Wilken, who departed
from the Orientalist tradition by declaring anthropology to be a science, guided by
theories of evolution, which he used to interpret variations in Indonesian societies. For
Wilken, such curious features of language, such as the existence of a distinctive speech
register, naturally raised questions about its origin, and how it came to arise. He assumed
that ritual speech was part of an animistic world view, and was particularly impressed by
the way in which it was associated with a distinct office of priesthood. Later, van Gennep
in Brussels, drawing on Wilken’s data, came to see ritual speech as a key marker of the
emergence of a social structural differentiation of roles, of which priesthood was one
example.
Pillarization and the rise of Dutch structuralism
By the late 19th century, the Dutch were increasingly divided along religious and
ideological lines, or pillars (zuil). Each group developed its own social institutions:
churches, political parties, unions, schools, hospitals and sports clubs, even their own
businesses; but also tellingly, their own modes of public inscription: newspapers and
broadcasting companies. The idea was that they would create institutional structures that
would reflect, or be somehow isomorphic with, their religious or ideological beliefs. In
this way, systems of economic exchange, religious belief, family structure, even language
use would all be organized according to a common ideological framework. It is
interesting to note that a key feature of this pillarization (verzuiling) was the separate
facilities for publishing and broadcasting authoritative words. Catholics, Protestants,
10
secularists, all laid claim to different sources of authoritative words, whether it was in the
form of the Bible, school texts, or newspapers. While this pillarization has mostly
disappeared in post war Holland, the one aspect of it that remains is the separate
newspapers.
Given that this was how Dutch society in the late 19th and early 20th century
responded organizationally to their own problems of diversity, it is perhaps not surprising
that they would map it onto the far more diverse Dutch East Indies. Since one of the
things the people of the Netherlands had in common was a shared language, it also makes
sense that these scholars also looked for unity in a common language. Writing could be a
way of eliding those differences, depending on how it was done.
Structural approaches to ritual speech as a reflection of sociocosmic dualism and
“Indonesia as a field of study.”
It is tempting to see structuralism – with its strong focus on sociocosmic dualisms
expressed in ritual speech - as in some ways a reflection of this pillarization. Just as
Dutch society dealt with its internal diversity in which religious beliefs, social structures,
and linguistic practice all nested together in homologous layerings. The person whose
name is most closely associated with the rise of structuralism in Indonesia is J. P. B. de
Josselin de Jong.
De Josselin de Jong studied structural linguistics as an undergraduate, focusing on
how grammatical categories of Algonkian languages expressed a local “ethnopsychology.” Later he turned his attention to Indonesian languages, particularly in eastern
11
Indonesia, where he worked on the island of Leti, where he collected myths in ritual
speech. By 1935, de Josselin de Jong had declared the Indonesian archipelago an
ethnological field of study (Josselin de Jong 1977 [1935]). Drawing on the evidence of
rituals, myths and poetic forms, he argued that all these societies shared a tendency
towards sociocosmic dualism. This tendency toward dualistic representations was found
in social structure, village layout, and crucially, the poetic structures of ritual speech.
An important characteristic of this form of structuralism was the attribution of
these features to the “thought” of the people whose cultures bore these characteristics.
The reason all these people in the archipelago shared social structural features of
asymmetrical marriage alliance, sociocosmic dualism and the like was because of their
similar ways of thinking. In 1973, after a visit to Holland, Claude Levi-Strauss gave a
speech in which he declared that he finally discovered the reason why structuralism had
flourished in the Netherlands as well as Paris. In a farewell speech at the KITLV, he told
them, “It is not the Leiden academics who are the great structuralists – it is the
Indonesians (Josselin de Jong 1989).iii
A few years later, James Fox observed in his introduction to the book, The Flow
of Life, in eastern Indonesia, “it is a linguistic convention that social wisdom and indeed
significant knowledge of a ritual sort must be expressed in dual terms – in binary or
dyadic form”(Fox 1980). Drawing on the work of people such as Matthes, Hardeland,
and van der Tuuk, Fox argued “this linguistic view holds the key, in my opinion, to an
understanding of the pervasive dualism” (Fox 1980). He later published an essay which
has recently appeared in which he argues that this patterning of ritual speech “reflects a
tendency of speakers to attune speech acts to particular contexts and to discriminate
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among categories of addressees. Thus speech among the Austronesians becomes a
multileveled event.” (Fox 2005). He argues that the widespread use of ritual speech is a
reflection of the pervasiveness of synonymy as a metaphorical and paradigmatic way of
dealing with diversity in the archipelago.
Indigenous Philologies
Hildred Geertz, in what is still viewed as a stinging rebuke to Dutch anthropology
(Josselin de Jong 1989), expressed skepticism about the evidentiary basis for structural
theories about dualism, asymmetric marriage alliance and circulating connubium (Geertz
1965). What Geertz was looking for was an account of how these dualisms were used in
the activities of social life. The power of these inscriptions derives not only from an
imagined, distant ancestral source, or an abstract penseé, but also from observable,
practical appropriateness in the immediate, here-and-now applications of ritual speech in
the context of use. While, as Keane (1997:42) notes, “the possibility of viewing language
as an object of "philology" is already latent in the decontextualizing authority of ritual
speech” it gets much of its practical power in its various circumstances of application.
Descriptions of how ritual speech is used in action reveal important shifts in ideas
about both “locality” and “language.” Where once it was an act of inscription, - a
decontextualized, authoritative act encompassing all other forms of communication
including everyday speech – increasingly ritual speech is viewed as a token of a type of
local culture. As the Indonesian language increasingly becomes the language of political,
religious and cultural authority, ritual speech becomes an example of “local culture,”
something that the Indonesian language can be used to explain, and place in a broader
context. It is not itself viewed as a source of the general, fixed, totalizing and categorical,
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but rather an example of a specific local culture, and its particular manifestations
(Kuipers 1998).
Among the Ngaju Dayak, basa Sangiang has become a form of sastra lisan ‘oral
literature;’ its recitation has become, as Anne Schiller has pointed out, a kind of cultural
performance. “Many Christians and Muslims espouse a feeling that tiwah (a death ritual
in which the journey of the souls of the dead is narrated in ritual speech) should be
perpetuated as a kind of acara kebudayaan or “cultural performance.” (Schiller 1997:
143). These rituals are seen as embodying the essence of their culture and rather than
being viewed now as something similar to Christian Bible or Muslim Quran, it is viewed
as an aestheticized display of cultural identity.
Among the Batak, their ritual speech manuscripts are rarified forms of ‘cultural
heritage’ (pustaka) and ritual language performances are folkloric ‘art’ (Rodgers 1976).
The parallelistic forms of speech are displayed in folktales (turi-turin), marriage oratory
(horja) and some traditional sayings, but are rarely inscribed using the Batak script.
Kozok (Kozok 1999) shows that the script is used now on some street signs, some public
monuments as a secular sign of civic identity, and by rare antiquarians, but seldom taught
in school since not only is the script difficult for children, textbooks are inadequate and
inaccurate, and the language is unfamiliar to the students. According to Kipp (1993:242246), the indigenous religious practices with which these forms of speaking are
associated is known as perbegu (literally, ‘one who has or uses ghosts’). In the aftermath
of the alleged communist coup attempt September 30, 1965, when all Indonesians were
required to affiliate with a major world religion, the ranks of its affiliates swelled and
sought identity as Hindu. While the matter is far from settled, Kipp observed signs of
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secularization of perbegu as it became a matter of cultural identity, not religion.
Participants included Muslims and Christians, as it came to be seen among many as a
“cultural” phenomenon.
Kipp argues that what one is witnessing in Karo society anyway, among the
Batak, is a kind of secularization. Since this term means so many things to so many
different people, she wisely chooses to define it not in terms of disenchantment or the
decline of religiosity, but in terms of compartmentalization. This applies well to the fate
of ritual speech. As the sheer density of forms of signification increases in Indonesian
life, and more forms of authoritative knowledge (science, official religions, government,
military) clamor for attention, the role of ritual speech forms has become increasingly
specialized to narrow domains of experience, organized around voluntary participation,
personal choices and even individual expression. Kipp suggests this
compartmentalization arises naturally from the fragmentation that occurs in increasingly
heterogeneous complex societies.
In some ways that compartmentalization of ritual speech has come furthest among
the Bugis and Makassarese, for whom the performance of their basa Bissu or basa dewata
(language of the Bissu priest, or language of the gods) is rarely heard locally but recently
played to three nights of sold-out audiences on July 13-16 2005 in the Lincoln Center in
New York City and here in Singapore in 2004, where the director ?? staged an elaborate
version of the I Galigo epic as an opera. For the Bugis, ritual speech has been
aestheticized to the point where it is on display for foreigners but rarely seen at all at
home in southwest Sulawesi. The language of basa Bissu is quite different from everyday
speech, and understood only by those with advanced training, and experience in reading
15
the indic lontaraq script. There are no teachers trained in this script, much less the
language it inscribes, and thus it is unlikely to escape from the compartmentalization
process as a vital force in local Bugis life.
While Kipp sees Batak religious practice as increasingly compartmentalized, I
think that compartmentalization is accomplished through the various kinds of translation
and writing practices used to represent and depict the language. Ritual speech is not just
an internal system, but it is one of many resources available to speakers, and thus part of
its meaning derives from its relationship to other resources in the overall communicative
repertoire with which it is in contact.
One of the key forms of interaction is that of translation. Over the course of my
fieldwork in the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba over two decades, I was impressed
with the increasing role of the Indonesian national language in everyday settings and its
declining role as a language of translation. While the Dutch Bible translators attempted to
place a special importance on the local languages as vehicles for subjective appreciation
of, and authentic belief in, the Holy Scripture, very few people used those texts as of the
2000. They devoted much effort to translating the Bible directly from the Hebrew into the
local language and there was much concern for a time (in church circles anyway) with
fidelity to both the original Hebrew and correct usage in the Sumbanese languages.
Currently, however, as more and more Sumbanese speak Indonesian fluently, and
it pervades everyday life to a greater and greater degree, there is, very little discussion
about fidelity to the local language in contexts of translation between Sumbanese and
Indonesian. One never sees Sumbanese officials carefully parsing local statements to find
16
equivalents in Indonesian; instead, once something is translated in Indonesian, that
quickly comes to stand for what was said in Sumbanese.
The only exception to this erasure of linguistic locality is in specific, defined
moments of ritual speech. In such cases, there is an assumption that the local text has a
meaning that is worth being faithful to. For example, I have heard Regency level officials
seriously conduct exegeses of the inner meaning of a couplet Pada elu, Manda Eweta,
that emblazons the archways over the state roads into the Regency. The once
transcendent meaning of the couplets, considered an authoritative because of its source in
the words of the ancestors, now is secularized and compartmentalized as its stands for a
bureaucratic, and political kind of encompassment, not a moral or religious one. As a sign
of the local, the everyday regional languages are offstage, as it were, and seldom
translated self-consciously into Indonesian. As a sign of what might be called the
“transcendent local” language, ritual speech comes to provide a sense of linguistic
identity for export, a production of linguistic locality from outside. So it is now that
couplets are written on T-shirts, public archways, and government insignia in Sumba,
Batak script adorns some street signs, police buildings, and some tourist artifacts, and
Makassarese couplets are the basis of an opera playing to sold out audience in New
York’s Lincoln Center.
Increasingly, ritual speech is viewed as a subspecies of a local language, one that
is somehow privileged to provide a sense of identity. It is also privileged in the sense that
it is the only one that is translated into Indonesian so that others can appreciate this
linguistic identity outside from outside. It is substitutable for the whole of local language
in the sense that displaying one’s ability to speak a little bit of ritual speech is often
17
enough t make others feel that one is “fluent” in local customs. Sumbanese who live for
many years on Java when they come back to the island will often try to speak a little bit
of ritual speech to show others their familiarity in the local language even though their
everyday speaking ability has disappeared.
Conclusions
Ritual speech does not just mark language as different, it stratifies linguistic
resources in relation to an audience. The local indigenous project sought to stratify
linguistic resources for a ceremonial community of practice of subsistence agriculturalists
to represent the privileged ancestral claim on precedence, order, and truth. It inscribed
locality by fixing it verbally as the originary framework against which current
expressions are mere offspring, tendrils, rhizomes, and traces. The colonial project
brought strong beliefs and controversies – hardened by centuries of religious struggle
during the Reformation – about the role of ritual languages (such as Latin) as exemplars
truth. Dutch linguists sought a triple conversion: from paganism to Christianity, speech to
writing, and alien to comprehensible (Errington 2003). Methodologically privileged by
Orientalists as self-conscious “text,” and formally privileged by structuralists as
isomorphic with patterns of society and myth, and even cognition, ritual speech held a
supreme position for defining Indonesian life for a time. But for post-independence
Indonesians, ritual speech was at once an embarrassing reminder of a recently backward
and tribal past, but also, in a rapidly changing society, a privileged resource for
18
expressions of identity tied to locality. It literally adorns public spaces as a way of fixing
local identity as part of a territorial and bureaucratic hierarchy of the nation-state.
This focus on linguistic representations as part of peoples’ positions is part of an
ongoing project in American linguistic anthropology devoted to the exploration and
investigation of lingustic ideologies. Linguistic ideologies are beliefs and attitudes about
language and how it is used that are linked to the interests of the actors who use them.
For decades, historical linguistics has been locked in a struggle to explain language
change in terms of inheritance on the one hand versus borrowing or diffusion on the
other.
There are clearly elements of both inheritance and diffusion at work in ritual
speech. On the one hand, there are such striking similarities among ritual speech
traditions throughout the archipelago, that it is hard to imagine that these could have
arisen – to paraphrase Sir William Jones “through chance alone.” On the other hand,
there are not only ritual speech traditions among neighboring communities who speak
languages from different language families – e.g. Mambai and makassae both have ritual
speech traditions, are neighbors, but one is Austronesian and the other Papuan. Further,
individual ritual speech traditions make extensive use of local dialect borrowing to form
the couplets on which the parallelism is based. (Fox 1974).
But the role of ritual speech and its fortunes in the nation state are hard to explain
in relation to relation to anything other than ideological interests (Kuipers 1998), in the
case of sumba, linked with local ideas about the state. This is particularly true for
linguistic resources so heavily freighted ideologically as ritual speech. Cannot be
explained as a result of some cognitive efficiency or the workings of a sound rule; nor is
19
it the result of a borrowing of new forms – it is an ideological transformation and a
narrowing of contexts of use.
The case of ritual speech in Indonesia has lessons it can provide for historians
more generally and students of how how forms of ideologically charged representations
undergo change. The importance of focusing on context and activity.
Linguistic area has been recently defined as a geographical region in which
neighboring languages belonging to different language groups show a significant set of
structural properties in common (Enfield 2005). Most of the speech communities in
Indonesia consider the parallelism of ritual speech a “significant structural property” and
the readily recognize it in other regions where it is used, even though they may not
understand it. Can groups sharing this form of ritual speech be considered part of a larger
speech community? For many of the Austronesian speaking groups this is not
implausible, but it gets tricky in parts of eastern Indonesia where ritual speech exists but
the grammar and vocabulary of the language is Papuan such as the Makassae and the
Bunaq.
20
Much of the answer to this turns on where one stands on a much older debate
about ethnological classification: the role of borrowing versus inheritance. But what we
see in this case is that whether Indonesian ritual speech patterns were inherited or
diffused is of less importance for explaining the changes than the meaning of the relations
among the parts of the activity systems in which these forms are used. Only by looking at
these forms in the context of how they are produced, inscribed and reproduced among
ideologically interested actors will we begin to get a handle on how they change over
time and space.
Explain to historians why language ideologies are important; explain that writing
is an area where ideologies are most strongly evident. This examination might be
considered under the rubric of what Errington calls “Colonial linguistics” a field
grounded in common presuppositions about languages’ writability and so also about
patterned relations between meanings of talk, on one hand, and speech sounds or their
orthographic counterparts on the other. Colonial linguistics needs to be framed here, then,
as a nexus of technology (literacy), reason, and faith and as a project of multiple
conversion: of pagan to Christian, of speech to writing, and of the alien to the
comprehensible. (From Errington
He foregrounds the assumptions about the hierarchy of languages that Europeans brought
with them to the project of understanding and writing native languages, and the “politics
of translation” that grounded Latin’s double significance as sanctioner and enabler of
21
Catholic missionary descriptive work. As a Truth-language, metonymically bound up
with the transcendent message it conveyed (Anderson 1991), Latin legitimized these
descriptive projects both as means and ends for propagating faith. As the paradigm of
written language, Latin was a descriptive resource: an ideal icon, template, and source of
analytic categories for written (mis)representations….” For the Protestant missions who
were paying the wages of most of the earliest Dutch evangelists, the Latin model figured
only indirectly, but
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change in Austronesian languages. T. D. a. D. T. Tryon. New York, Mouton de Gruyter.
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Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
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speech on the Island of Sumba. Cambridge ; New York, Cambridge University Press.
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Academy (1855-1858). HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF LINGUISTICS, VOL. II:
PAPERS FROM THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORY OF
THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES (ICHoLS IV), TRIER, 24-28 AUGUST 1987. H.-J. Niederehe, &
22
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715-727.
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Enfield, N. J. (2005). "Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia." Annual Review of Anthropology
34: 181-206.
Fox, J. J. (1980). The Flow of life : essays on eastern Indonesia. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press.
Fox, J. J. (2005). Ritual languages, special registers, and speech decorum in Austronesian languages. The
Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar. e. Sander Adelaar and Nikolaus Himmelman. New Yorkl,
Routledge: 87-109.
Geertz, H. (1965). "Comment on P.E. Josselin de Jong, An Interpretation of Agricultural Rites in Southeast
Asia." Journal of Asian Studies 24(2): 294-297.
Grimes, C. E. a. K. M. (1994). Named Speech Registers in Austronesian languages. Language contact and
change in Austronesian languages. T. D. a. D. T. Tryon. New York, Mouton de Gruyter.
Hardeland, A. (1858). Versuch einer grammatik der dajackschen sprache. Bearbeitet und herausgegeben im
auftrage und auf kosten der Niederlaendischen bibelgesellschaft. Amsterdam,, F. Muller.
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Anthropology in the Netherlands: A Reader. I. P. d. J. d. J. (ed.). The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff.
Josselin de Jong, P. E. a. H. F. V. (1989). Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University. Leiden Oriental
Connections 1850-1940. W. Otterspeer. Leiden, E. J. Brill.
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speech on the Island of Sumba. Cambridge ; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Matthes, B. F. (1883). Eenige proeven van Boegineesche en Makassaarsche poèezie. 's Gravenhage,, M.
Nijhoff.
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Academy (1855-1858). HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF LINGUISTICS, VOL. II: PAPERS
FROM THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE
23
SCIENCES (ICHoLS IV), TRIER, 24-28 AUGUST 1987. H.-J. Niederehe, & Koerner, Konrad [Eds].
Amsterdam, The Netherlands:, John Benjamins Publishing Company,: 715-727.
Roorda, T. (1874). Beknopte Javaansche grammatica, benevens een leesboek tot oefening in de Javaansche
taal. Amsterdam,, J. Mèuller.
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Indonesische talen. 's-Gravenhage,, Martinus Nijhoff.
Tuuk, H. N. v. d. (1962). De pen in gal gedoopt. Amsterdam, G. A. van Oorschot.
Van Der Putten, J. (1995). "Taalvorsers en hun Informanten in Indie in de 19e Eeuw: Von de Wall als
Politiek Agent in Riau?" Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 151(1): 44-75.
“Dayaks have neither writing nor literature. They have nevertheless a devotional liturgy, complete with
basa Sangiang…. (1858:4).
ii
Van der Tuuk did not always agree with Roorda. He attacked the hoogleerar Taco Roorda in a
i
published diatribe some years later. He argued that Roorda never really learned Javanese,
but instead studied with Dutchmen named Winter, Wilken and Gericke; he had learned
“winterese.” They were his main informants, all of whom had worked in Central Java,
and did not know the speech of the vast number of Javanese who speak an eastern
Javanese dialect. Roorda himself had never set foot in Java, yet he wrote grammars on it,
based on his logical ahistorical model of the language. Fasseur quotes an Utrecht
professor as saying that Roorda was such a bad teacher, that he had very few students,
and students would immediately forget their lessons and sell their textbooks right after
the tests were over. (Fasseur 1993: 148).
iii
“
24