How to Break Rules in Ende
2025-07-19
This presentation is a follow-up to my previous talk, Following the Path of Ivory — How to Observe Rules That Are Not Followed. Once again, it concerns the rules that govern everyday life among the people of Ende, on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia—specifically, the rule of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. In that previous talk, I showed how the debt that arises from not practising matrilateral cross-cousin marriage can itself forge bonds.
In Ende, there is a particular kind of exchange that must take place when one fails to marry one’s matrilateral cross-cousin. This time, I would like to explore what that exchange means.
In my previous presentation, I argued that when people in Ende break the rule of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, they thereby incur a debt, and that debt in turn helps forge bonds between the parties involved. This way of thinking can be compared to the logic of Akikaeshi in ancient Japan, as described by Orikuchi Shinobu.1 According to this logic, as long as a debt remains, the bond between people endures.
This presentation, too, revolves around the topic of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. This time, I want to look at how people in Ende actually break the rule of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. As always, the key lies in gift exchange. And what I hope to show is that behind this strange form of exchange lies the same old logic of Akikaeshi.
In this section, I would like to introduce the question addressed in this paper— namely, how rules are broken— while linking it to the previous presentation, which focused on why people break rules.
The previous presentation began with this question: Among the people of Ende on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia, the most important rule is that of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. And yet, this rule is rarely observed. Such marriages almost never take place. Even so, the rule has not vanished—it continues to live on in society. Why? That was the question I posed.
The answer I found in the ethnography was this: By not carrying out matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, the people of Ende generate a kind of debt, and it is precisely this debt that binds people together. There is no exact equivalent of this “debt” in the Ende language, but in that presentation I suggested that the ancient Japanese concept of Akikaeshi comes close— a way of thinking in which relationships are sustained by deliberately refusing to settle accounts. The logic of Akikaeshi is a logic that says: debt is what makes bonds.
Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is, in a sense, a rule that exists in order for people not to follow it. In Japan, too, as a matter of fact, people do not practise matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, but that is not regarded as an act of non-action, because no such rule exists in the first place. If there are no traffic rules, you cannot violate them. Unless there is a rule about “matrilateral cross-cousin marriage,” there can be no violation of it.
This presentation explores the question of how such violations of the rule— namely, not practising matrilateral cross-cousin marriage— are actually marked or made visible in concrete terms. They are marked through gift exchange. Let us examine the logic that runs through this form of exchange. That is what this presentation is about.
Before moving into the main body of the presentation, I’d like to briefly revisit a few anthropological terms used here, as well as one key ethnographic fact from Ende society that forms the background of the discussion— the pair known as siblings joined by bridewealth (nara weta).
This paper also uses single-letter or combined-letter abbreviations to represent kinship relations, so I will briefly introduce them here. The basic set includes: M (mother), F (father), B (brother), Z (sister), S (son), and D (daughter). C stands for child (i.e. S and D), and P stands for parent (i.e. F and M). More complex relationships are expressed by combining letters. For example, MBD means “mother’s brother’s daughter,” and FZ means “father’s sister.”
The terms wife-giver and wife-taker are both anthropological concepts and translations of Ende terms (kat’eumbu and weta’ane). They refer to relationships between groups. — From the perspective of individuals, one might speak of mother-givers, wife-givers, etc. In my previous presentation, I used the Japanese expressions 「嫁を与える者」 and 「嫁を受け取る者」, but this time I’ll be using the terms wife-giver and wife-taker.
In my previous presentation, I pointed out an important ethnographic fact that is also relevant to the present discussion. That is, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage— or to put it in Ende terms, mbuzu ndu’u wesa sunda marriage— is explained not in terms of genealogy (matrilateral or patrilateral cross-cousins), but in terms of bridewealth. Suppose that bridewealth was paid for a woman (let’s call her b1), and that a man (let’s call him B1) used that same bridewealth for his own marriage. In Ende, this kind of situation is described as “wawu su’im // nai su’im”— one leaves the group, and one enters the group.
From here…
That concludes the review. What follows is not so much a review as an attempt to rephrase the conclusion from the previous presentation. The idea that debt creates bonds—this is what I’ve been calling the logic of Akikaeshi. Willing to risk overstepping the limits of the ethnographic facts, I would nonetheless like to put it this way: Nara weta bound by bridewealth —that is, siblings who stand in a cross-sex relation—are involved in a certain kind of debt. In other words, the brother owes a debt: he must send a woman (his daughter) to his sister’s group (into which she married). If a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage takes place, that debt—i.e., the bond—is extinguished. But if that marriage does not take place, the debt (the bond) remains in place.
In this presentation, there is another idea I’d like to spotlight alongside Akikaeshi: the idea of the flow of life. This is a notion found widely throughout eastern Indonesia, and it exists in Ende as well. In Ende, however, this idea comes with a particular twist. The Ende concept of the flow of life is always understood in tandem with the idea of the flow of wealth. These two concepts together form the foundation of how matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is understood in Ende.
A landmark in postwar research on eastern Indonesia was the edited volume The Flow of Life [@z.fox-flow], where the editor, James Fox, declared eastern Indonesia to be a “field of ethnological study” [@dejong.jpd-77] and listed several of its defining features. Alongside features like the parallelism seen in ritual language ([@fox-71b]; [@nakagawa-journey]), and botanical metaphors [@fox-71c], one particularly important idea — indeed, the one that gives the volume its title — is that of “the flow of life.” This refers to the movement of women through marriage, which is conceived as a flow of life itself [@fox-intro-flow: 12].
The source of the flow of life is the wife-giver. In particular, it is the mother’s brother who plays the most important role. In what follows, I would like to introduce a few examples of folklore concerning the mother’s brother in Ende.
The curious importance of the mother’s brother — and, relatedly, the strangeness of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage — has been discussed repeatedly throughout the history of anthropology. It has been interpreted as a vestige of matriarchy, or as a reflection of the “mother’s brother” functioning as the male mother within a patrilineal and patriarchal system, where the nephew feels a special affection toward him [@radcliffe-brown-mb]. Eventually, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage even came to be explained as the transfer of that affection for the mother’s brother onto his daughter [@homans_and_schneider-marriage]. Lévi-Strauss, in a programmatic essay often seen as a declaration of structuralism [@ls-kozobunseki], highlighted the relations B/Z, H/W, F/S, and MB/ZS as “elementary structures” of kinship. He proposed equations such as: MB/ZS : B/S :: F/S : H/W [@needham-62a].
Members of KAPAL will probably find this kind of grand theoretical sweep a bit off-putting. I felt the same—and in many ways, I still do. Thirty years ago, when I was stuck in my doctoral dissertation, my supervisor, Jim Fox, shared with me a remark attributed to Evans-Pritchard. 2 EP, he said, once offered this advice on how to write ethnography — “You need to find the grain of their culture.” At the time, I didn’t really understand what this rather Zen-sounding comment meant, but something about it stuck with me— enough that I made up my mind: “Let’s put aside the grand theory for now, and focus on how people in Ende speak and think.”
Even if we commit to seeing the grain of a particular culture, some form of comparison is still necessary. EP himself once said that comparison is the only method anthropology has. And yet, he added, “it is impossible” [@needham-polythetic]. Still, anthropology has long engaged in comparison. One paradigm for doing so was proposed by Josselin de Jong: the idea of an “ethnological field of study” [@dejong.jpd-77] (first proposed in 1935). His suggestion was to define the scope of comparison in terms of regions where diffusion could reasonably be assumed. One such field he identified was the Maleische archipel—the Malay Archipelago. In a sense, the members of KAPAL could be seen as apostles of Josselin de Jong. Fox later narrowed this field to “eastern Indonesia,” proposing it as a more specific ethnological field where similarities would stand out more clearly [@fox-intro-flow].
Here, let me introduce an ethnographic example from the region of eastern Indonesia: a case from Roti Island concerning the mother’s brother. In his essay “Sister’s Child as Plant” [@fox-71c], Fox describes the mother’s brother in Roti with the following expression: He is, in relation to his nephew, fuk. The word fuk is cognate with the Indonesian pokok, meaning “trunk” or “foundation.” In other words, the sister’s child would not exist in this world were it not for the mother’s brother.
In Ende, people say “Your mother’s brother is your pu’u.” Pu’u is cognate with the Indonesian pokok, meaning “tree trunk.” But in Ende, pu’u also means “origin” or “source of water.” The mother’s brother is the trunk, the cause, and the source of a person. Someone who has no pu’u — for instance, someone who has severed ties with their mother’s brother through ritual estrangement (lo’i) — is said to be “like a slave (ata xo’o),” or “like a sorcerer (ata porho).” To lack a pu’u is to not be truly human. What’s more, the mother’s brother is believed to have magical power over his sister’s children. If he performs a special gesture called pui siku (a motion like brushing one elbow with the opposite hand), it is said that the sister’s son will die. That’s how powerful the mother’s brother is.
The mother’s brother is the pu’u — the source of water — and life (as water) flows from him to the sister’s son. This flow of life is made visible as a flow of the head. In Ende society, every person receives their head from the mother’s brother (that is, from their mother’s natal group). And when that person dies, their head is returned to the mother’s brother– to the mother’s natal group. Concretely, the “head” is a type of wealth known as nggaw, akin to bridewealth.
One idiom used to describe matrilateral cross-cousin marriage in Ende — mburhu ndu’u // wesa senda — captures precisely this idea: the inseparable pairing of the flow of life and the flow of wealth. This section will explore how that idiom expresses this dual flow.
Ende people explains the meaning of this idiom, mburhu nduu // wesa senda like this.
Mburhu means “a path”; and wesa means a similar thing, “a small trail (by animals).” Nduu means “to trace” and senda means “to sew.” Thus, this idiom refers to the path of a woman’s aunt (FZ), her marriage and suggests that the woman will trace the same path as the aunt.
The “aunt’s path” refers to the aunt’s marriage. Let us focus here on b2 in the diagram. Her aunt (b1) created a path from Group B to Group C through her marriage. Now the woman I’m focusing on—b2—follows that same path and marries into Group C (specifically, to C2).
★ Following the Aunt’s Path
Thus, in Ende, the flow of life (the movement of women) is expressed metaphorically as a path.
★ In Conclusion
In the earlier sections on the mother’s brother and the circulation of the head, I explained that the flow of life is made visible through a counter-flow of wealth. In Ende, the flow of life is the flow of women— from the wife-giver to the wife-taker— and at the same time, it is accompanied by a counter-flow: a flow of wealth, from the wife-taker to the wife-giver. This flow of wealth (nggaw) governs the everyday life of the people of Ende. In what follows, I will illustrate this through a description of Bou.
Earlier, I introduced how people in Ende interpret the idiom mburhu ndu’u // wesa sunda. In fact, this idiom carries another layered meaning as well. Let me quote the words of an Ende speaker.
★ Another Interpretation
Mburhu ndu’u // wesa sunda has another meaning. Mburhu also means “ten”. In bridewealth payments, ivory is given in units of ten. Wesa refers to one unit of length for ivory. An ivory tusk longer than half the length of a person’s outstretched arms (rupa) is called a wesa.
Now, we finally turn to the question of inaction—that is, not entering into a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. There are two types of cases: one where a woman does not marry her expected partner (her FZS), and one where a man does not marry his expected partner (his MBD). As already discussed, such inaction is made visible through gift exchange. Let us now examine, case by case, what kind of gift exchange takes place in each situation.
Let us begin with the case in which a woman does not marry her FZS—in other words, she does not follow the “aunt’s/ivory path.” In such cases, the man who marries this woman gives wealth (nggawu) to the woman’s aunt and her husband. This gift is called jawa tosa (“maize pounded in a mortar”).
In practice, the jawa tosa payment is made by D3 (the groom) to B2 (the bride’s group). B2 then passes this bridewealth on to his sister b2/C2.
But the story doesn’t end there. Informants continued the explanation: The grey group—C2 (b2), who receives the jawa tosa— soon gives a gift in return to b2’s brothers (the blue group). It’s as if they were afraid of the debt vanishing entirely.
★ Fear of a Debt’s Dissolution
Another possible transgression is when a man does not marry the woman he is supposed to—his MBD. The violation occurs at the moment he marries another woman instead. In other words, he enacts the non-action of “not entering into a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage.”
★ Rhérho urhu
When the grey group (C) is faced with a demand to pay rhérho urhu, they in turn request a suitable counter-gift from their wife-givers, the blue group (B). In this section, I would like to describe this counter-gift.
When the grey group (C) is faced with a demand for rhérho urhu, they, in turn, request an appropriate counter-gift from their wife-givers, the blue group (B). This counter-gift is called to’u jopu (“to catch the head”). More precisely, it is called to’u jopu // dhéo ng’éro (“to catch the head // to seize the crown of the head”).
When group B receives rhérho urhu but refuses to offer to’u jopu in return, the relationship of siblings bound by bridewealth between B and C ceases to exist.
(Note: The following expressions are formulated by the anthropologist.) From the outset—when two groups are linked by bridewealth—the blue group and the grey group are seen as having a debt-based relationship. If a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage actually occurs, that debt—i.e., the bond of siblings linked by bridewealth—is extinguished. This is the significance of not marrying a matrilateral cross-cousin. When a sister’s son marries a woman other than his mother’s brother’s daughter and pays a rhérho urhu, the debt—that is, the bond—is erased. The to’u jopu payment is a way of recreating that debt—of reestablishing the bond.
[This is the concluding section…] In Ende society, whenever a debt is on the verge of being settled, they either avoid settling it altogether (as discussed in the previous presentation), or, as discussed in this one, they settle it only to create a new debt in its place— thereby continuously reinforcing the bonds among members. Here, too, what is at work is the logic of Akikaeshi.
Perhaps belatedly—more than forty years after I began fieldwork— I feel as though I’ve finally glimpsed one of the grains of Ende culture. That grain is called akikaeshi.