Ways of Knowledge Transmission among the Ende of Central Flores
| I went down to the crossroads, | |
| fell down on my knees | |
| — | |
| Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues” (1936) |
This paper aims to present two contrasting types of knowledge and their respective modes of transmission among the Ende people of central Flores, eastern Indonesia, and to analyse their social significance.
Let me begin with a few reminiscences. Many years ago, when I was struggling with my Ph.D. thesis, my supervisor, Professor James J. Fox (Pak Jim), shared with me a remark attributed to E. E. Evans-Pritchard (EP). EP, Pak Jim said, once offered this advice to his students on how to write ethnography — ‘Before everything else, one must find the grain of a culture.’ 1 At the time, I did not fully grasp what this rather cryptic remark meant. Only now, after so many years, do I think I understand it.
Pak Jim himself has shown us many such ‘grains’ found in Austronesian societies, especially in eastern Indonesia: such as ‘botanical metaphors’ (Fox 1971), the ‘flow of life’ (Fox (ed) 1980), ‘origin’ (Fox and Sather (eds) 1996) (Fox 1996), ‘place and landscape’ (Fox (ed) 1997) (Fox 1997), ‘precedence’ (Fox 2009) and many others.
A few recurrent strands can be discerned within these motifs; ‘knowledge’ is one of them. Knowledge of genealogy is central to kinship-related matters such as precedence and ancestry; knowledge of topogeny is essential to location, landscape and place. And I think knowledge is one of the strands that weave together the elements of Endenese culture. Yet there is one respect in which what the Endenese talk about is distinctive: it is not knowledge of the ‘authentic’ or ‘orthodox’ kind, the kind that recounts, for instance, the origin of human beings, or the migrations of particular clans. What the Ende people are anxious to talk about, rather, is a kind of ‘inauthentic’ knowledge — heretical, or anti-social, in character. It is the knowledge which witches (ata porho), the anti-social beings in Ende cosmology, are believed to possess. Throughout the paper, I want to call this type of knowledge ‘esoteric knowledge’, as opposed to ‘orthodox’ knowledge.
In this paper, I would like to present the Endenese conceptualisation of these two types of knowledge. Esoteric knowledge differs from orthodox knowledge, not only in its content, but also in the way it is acquired. While orthodox knowledge is handed down from one generation to the next, esoteric knowledge is handed from one person to another like in a weekly market (nerhu).
The Endenese live in the central part of the island of Flores, eastern Indonesia. They number around 50,000 to 70,000. The Regency population was 273,553 in 2023.
They subsist on slash-and-burn agriculture. Even though the influence of the market economy is significant, the economy of the Ende people can be said to be fundamentally a subsistence economy.
I began fieldwork among the Endenese people in 1979 and since then I have visited Ende, on and off, up to the present. I have lived in a village called Rhepadori (a pseudonym), in a ritual domain called Tana Rhorho (to be discussed fully later). Much has changed since then. In this paper, I focus on the period around the 1990s; that is, the ethnographical present in this paper refers to the 1990s.
In this chapter, I will deal with the orthodox type of knowledge, which occupies the central place in the social life of any Endenese person. This is the knowledge of kinship and matters directly related to kinship, such as social organisation.
An Endenese person’s life revolves around his kinship network. The organising kinship principle in Ende is patrilineality in the sense that properties, especially land, are owned by patrilineally related people.
In Ende, there are only two possible relationships between any two kin: one is a relationship between members of one’s own group (OG/OG) and the other is one between wife-giver and wife-taker (WG/WT). Accordingly, there are two kinds of exchanges between kin: sharing (bagi) between OG/OG and giving and receiving (pati and simo) between WG/WT.
The table shows the being aspect of kinship — it shows that those being in such and such relation do such and such exchange. Kinship ordains that people who are in the relation of OG/OG should share and that those of WG/WT should give and receive. In Ende, sometimes doing, that is sharing, or giving and receiving, makes being, relation of OG/OG or WG/WT. Marshall Sahlins succintly recapitulates the situation, by saying: “If friends make gifts, gifts make friends” (Sahlins 1972: 186).
Land, on which they depend for subsistence, is inherited patrilineally such that a parcel of land is ‘shared’ among the members of one patrilineal group.
About land, people say:
| Kami kema tau kaa | We work only in order to eat, |
| kéwi tau minu | we tap palm wine only to drink. |
| kema mbo’o | we eat so as to be full, |
| kéwi aé | we tap wine so as |
| to quench our thirst. |
Land is inherited from patrilineal ancestors. And it is to be used only for subsistence. Thus, it is strictly forbidden to sell a parcel of land. In this way, you can see that ‘selling’ (téka) and ‘buying’ (mbeta) are excluded from the orthodoxy of Ende society.
Land is owned by a patrilineal group. It can therefore be safely said that kinship, or more particularly, the patrilineal descent system, is the basis of agriculture — the subsistence economy of Ende.
This does not mean that a parcel of land is inhabited only by members of the owning clan. In fact, a considerable number of outsiders (non-agnates) live in the region. These outsiders are permitted to work the land provided that (1) they pay a small tribute to the land-owning group and (2) they follow the ritual practices of the land-owning group. The first of these, that is, tribute, is purely nominal — one chicken, one bamboo container-full of palm wine, and a small container-full of rice (manu se éko, moké se taso and aré se wati). The more important condition is the second one, that is, a tenant should follow the rituals of the land-owning group.
Generally speaking, in slash-and-burn agriculture, the ritual activities are as important as practical ones, and the same is true of Ende. Every practical activity is accompanied by a certain ritual activity. From August to September, they clear the forest (ghagha). In September, they burn the forest and turn it into a field (jengi). In December, they plant the field (tendo). From April to May, they harvest (keti) maize, rice, and other crops.
All these practical activities are accompanied by various ‘rituals of land and rocks’ (nggua tana watu). From August to September, before opening the forest, they perform a ritual called kaki to tell the resident spirits (nitu) that they are about to open the forest. And numerous smaller rituals are performed in the fields. A night before any of these rituals, they perform an offering (dhéra) to ancestors. These are the rituals performed separately in each field by one household or one lineage. They are followed by two important communal rituals at the end of the agricultural cycle. From April to May, they hold rituals of maize and rice (pesa uta and neté piso) respectively, which are performed by each clan. And finally, in July, they hold rituals of tubers (kaa uwi) marking the closing of the year. This is the greatest ritual and marks the extent of their ritual domain called Tana Rhorho.
Kaki, dhéra and other rituals are held by each household, while pesa uta (for maize) and neté piso (for rice) are held by each clan. And finally, to mark the end of the agricultural cycle, the ritual of tuber crops (kaa uwi) is held by members of the whole ritual domain of Tana Rhorho. These rituals are performed to enhance the solidarity of patrilineal groups (at various levels). See the table below.
| Rituals | Kin groups |
|---|---|
| kaki/dhéra etc | Household |
| pesa uta/neté piso | Clan |
| kaa uwi | Ritual domain |
Kaa uwi (‘eating yam’) rituals are held to show the unity of the ritual domain. The village where I stay during my fieldwork is called Rhepadori, and it belongs to a ritual domain called Tana Rhorho (Rhorho’s land). All the people of Tana Rhorho participate in this ritual (kaa uwi). Tana Rhorho was created, people claim, as the original land of Kepi was dissolved into two parts. Now let me recite the history of Tana Rhorho.
The origin story is known by the title ‘Ngemi Nggenda // Jera Kepi’, ‘Stupid is Nggenda // dumb is Kepi’. It is set in the period when the Portuguese lived in Flores. 2 They lived in a coastal village called Numba. And the indigenous people lived in a village called Kepi, up in the mountain. The chief of Kepi (named Tegu Demu) made friends with the Portuguese. One day, the Portuguese complained that the water (coming from the mountain) smelled bad (aé wau raé). implying that the people living upstream (people of Kepi) were dirty. People of Kepi were offended and decided to wage war against the Portuguese people. The chief of Kepi, being friendly with the Portuguese people, would not join the warring party. The party was led by the Kepi chief’s two nephews (his sisters’ sons), Rhorho and Rhéa.
People of Kepi defeated the Portuguese and drove them away from
Numba. The people gathered in a place called Raka Tupa and celebrated
their victory over the Portuguese. They sent for Kepi, asking him to
come down from the mountain and join the feast. The chief of Kepi (Tegu
Demu) would not reply.
They had sent messengers for seven days and seven nights.
And then, finally he said:
| Ja’o ndia | As for me here, |
| Huu ngéré kuru pumbu | My hair is like overgrown weeds, |
| Rhonggo ngéré wawi koi | my back is like a baked pig. |
| Wiwi dhiki | My lips are small, |
| Rhema rho’o | my tongue is little. |
| Mepu ngéré manu | Crouching like a fowl, |
| Rhéngga ngéré rhako | lying like a dog. |
| Mepu iwa mbépa | Crouching still, and not moving, |
| Rhéngga iwa ménggo | lying quietly, and not stirring. |
| Méré-si weta | May the sisters be big, |
| Rhéwa-si ané | may the sister’s sons be long. |
On hearing this reply, Rhorho and Rhéa said:
| Kita weri pe-deri | We will divide the jaw into two, |
| Rhema pe-kera | cut the tongue into two. |
They arranged the division of the former land of Kepi between the two of them. They went so far as to arrange the system of land tenure in each domain. Rhorho said:
| Tana ja’o iwa kowé | My domain is not of kowé, |
| Sia murhu | Where the rain falls first, |
| tendo murhu | they plant first. |
| Ata mbo’o | When others are satisfied, |
| ja’o mbo’o | I will be satisfied also. |
Rhéa said:
| Tana ja’o tana kowé | My domain is of kowé. |
| Ja’o tendo murhu | I will plant first, |
| Ata pésa dhéko | then others may follow me. |
Thus the original land of Kepi was divided by his sisters’ sons, Rhéa and Rhorho. The land of Rhéa lies to the west, where the social structure is more feudal (kowé3); and the land of Rhorho lies to the east, where the social structure is more egalitarian (not kowé). The boundary of both lands is marked, as with all meaningful parcels of land, by the head (urhu) (the northern tip) and the tail (éko) (the southern tip) and other boundary markers. The head of Tana Rhorho lies in the female sea (mesi hai) (the Flores Sea) and the tail in the male sea (mesi xaki) (the Savu Sea); the north-east boundary (réta) in Raba Masa and the west boundary (rarhé) in Nanga Panda.
Those rituals and ‘histories’ are central to Ende society and serve to enhance the solidarity of patrilineal groups (from household to clan, and then to the ritual domain).
These rituals and ‘histories’ are kept alive because the knowledge of them is maintained from generation to generation. The knowledge concerned includes, for example, the wording of ritual chants (soasorha) recited on occasions for dhéra (offerings to ancestors). Let me quote the almost formulaic opening of any Ende ritual chant.
| asa usu | [Rituals] originated in the primordial times, |
| wa’u na’u | we have been passing [these rituals] on |
| since ancient times. | |
| téké dhii | We have grasped the layers, |
| pama pii | protected the piles. |
| kajo embu | Great-grandparents, |
| ema iné | grandparents and parents. |
| ata ndu’a | Mountain people, |
| ata Ende | coastal people. |
| bou si tembo | Gather your bodies, |
| xinggi si rhoo mu | put together your trunks. |
| kami susu nggua | [Since] we’ll perform rituals, |
| nama mbapu | we’ll administer the ceremonies. |
‘Histories’ are full of meaningful names, as in the topogeny defined by Fox (Fox 1997). These places are what Auge (Augé 1995) calls ‘anthropological places’. Rituals are transmitted from father to son, accompanied by legitimate knowledge of rituals. Let us call this genealogical inheritance of knowledge ‘vertical transmission’. Vertical transmission is the transmission of legitimacy within the kinship system. The sole purpose of the rituals and histories is to enhance the solidarity of patrilineal groups.
This chapter deals with the other kind of knowledge: esoteric knowledge. It is quite different from the orthodox kind of knowledge we dealt with in the previous chapter. While the orthodox kind of knowledge has to do with socially approved values such as kinship and histories, the esoteric kind of knowledge has to do with socially unapproved values.
The previous chapter describes how the idea of legitimacy (socially approved values) in Ende revolves around kinship ideology (patrilineality). In contrast to that, the idea of illegitimacy (socially unapproved values) revolves around the idea of witchcraft. This section deals with the Endenese idea of witches (ata porho)4 and the related idea of ‘brave ones’ (teké ruku).
A witch (ata porho) is the prototype of evil, the anti-social being in Ende. A witch is imagined to have a human appearance but to possess a substance called wera (in lieu of an ordinary soul, maé). The wera leaves the witch’s body, visits a victim, and does harm to him. A witch in this way ‘attacks’ (tau) someone, because of jealousy (rhené), greed, and other such personal anti-social feelings. The victim then suffers misfortunes, diseases, and, sometimes, death.
A witch (ata porho), described above, is defined in physical terms (wera and others). In many cases, people become witches of this type involuntarily, for example, by accidentally swallowing a wandering wera. In Ende, there is a category of human beings (or quasi-human beings) similar to witches. They are, however, defined not in physical terms but in terms of knowledge. A teké ruku is one such category, described in similar terms to those used for witches. A teké ruku has the power (orho negi) to attack people so as to cause misfortune to a victim.
An ordinary person becomes a teké ruku, a powerful being, because of esoteric knowledge. Some witches are said to have power because of esoteric knowledge as well. In this section, I deal with the kind of knowledge which is supposed to give power to both witches and ‘brave ones’ (teké ruku). Here, I take up one such type of knowledge called ‘the mothers’ (iné) and discuss it in some detail.
In Ende cosmology, everything, or every phenomenon, is believed to have a ‘mother’. If one knows the name of the mother of a certain thing, then one can have full control over that thing, they say. For example, each kind of disease has its own ‘mother’. If one comes to know the name of the mother of a disease, then one can cure the disease. Of course, that also means that he can cause the disease too. If one knows the name of the mother of maize (iné jawa), then one can easily have a good harvest in one’s own field. It also means that one can cause a bad harvest in someone else’s field as easily.
There is only one way of acquiring this kind of esoteric knowledge in Ende, that is, by buying (mbeta) it. There is a cultural scenario for acquiring this kind of knowledge. First, he who wants to have a certain piece of secret knowledge (let us call him ‘the buyer’) visits a person (‘the seller’) who is believed to have the knowledge. At night, the story continues, the buyer of the knowledge sits in a specially deferential way (called jou) in front of the seller and hands him money. The seller then whispers the content of the knowledge to the buyer.
Sometimes a narrator of the story adds a rather intriguing piece of information. He would continue: suppose there happens to be someone (let us call him ‘the thief’) under the floor (rhewu) eavesdropping on the conversation between the seller and the buyer. Then, the narrator would continue, the power (orho negi) will reside, not in the buyer, but in the thief.
To understand this process (the thief, and not the buyer, getting the knowledge and its accompanying power), one should know the special feature of esoteric knowledge: that is, it behaves like a thing; — if one gives knowledge of the name of a mother of maize to someone else, one cannot command the power over the maize any longer and the buyer has this power (orho negi). And if a thief interrupts this transaction, now the power (orho negi) resides in the hands of the thief and not the buyer. It should be noted that only esoteric knowledge has this thing-like characteristic, and not orthodox knowledge.
This thing-like nature makes more sense when one takes into consideration the transactions concerned, that is, ‘buying’ and ‘selling’.
It is ‘sharing’, ‘giving’, and ‘receiving’ that play important roles in the legitimate spheres of Ende culture.
As I mentioned in the case of land transactions, ‘selling and buying’ are explicitly excluded from these spheres. Now it is ‘selling and buying’ that come to the fore in the illegitimate spheres.
Now let me summarise, in this section, the Endenese conceptualisation of ‘selling and buying’ as contrasted with ‘sharing’, ‘giving’, and ‘receiving’.
The Ende culture dictates that people who are kin to each other should engage in appropriate kinds of transaction. So, for example, WT should give an elephant tusk to his WG. And Sahlins’s law in Ende dictates that if one gives an elephant tusk to someone, then those two are regarded as WT/WG.
‘Buying’ and ‘selling’ are performed between non-kin (between strangers). And Sahlins’s law works here such that those who buy and sell with one another become strangers to each other.
In Gift (Mauss 1990 (1950)), Mauss says: ‘… the thing received is not inactive. … it still possesses something of him [the giver].’ (pp. 11–12). It is the ‘persona’ of the giver we find left in the gift. This itself is a remarkable discovery. But I think the lack of the persona in certain kinds of transactions is as important. In a capitalist system, Taussig says, ‘it is essential that this embodiment be “exorcised”’ (Taussig 1980: 28). In plain words, in giving and receiving transactions, the ‘persona’ of the giver is still in the thing given; while in selling transactions, there is no ‘persona’ of the giver (what Taussig calls ‘embodiment’) in the thing sold. In this connection, the word mbeta in the Endenese language is significant; it means both ‘to buy’ and ‘to cut’. If you buy something, you cut the bond between the original possessor and the thing. In legitimate transactions (sharing, giving, and receiving), what the participant seeks is the bond with the partner; while in illegitimate transactions (selling and buying), what the buyer seeks is the thing (knowledge (orho mbé’o) and the resultant power (orho negi)), and not the bond with the partner. Actually, the bond should be cut for the knowledge to be transferred completely to the buyer.
In this concluding chapter, (1) I would like to summarise my arguments and compare the result with one of Fox’s papers (Fox 1997a). And (2) I would like to place my arguments in a wider context, sociological as well as philosophical, in search of an answer, or at least an insight, into some long-standing debates.
At the end of the paper on topogeny (listing place names sequentially), Fox says that there are only two ways of establishing succession, that is, in time or in space (Fox 1997a: 101). The former (succession in time) is genealogy, relying on personal names, while the latter (succession in space) is topogeny, relying on place names (Fox 1997a: 101).
| succession | knowledge | via |
|---|---|---|
| in time | genealogy | personal names |
| in space | topogeny | place names |
Here in this paper, I suggest there is another pair of ways of succession. This pair is distinguished, however, not by axis (in time/in space), but by the nature of what is transmitted (orthodox/esoteric).
| succession | knowledge | via |
|---|---|---|
| legitimate | orthodox | kinship |
| illegitimate | esoteric | market |
We can summarise the arguments of this paper in the table below.
| Vertical | Horizontal | |
|---|---|---|
| knowledge | orthodox knowledge | esoteric knowledge |
| Direction | Father → Son | Seller → Buyer |
| Mode | Sharing | Buying/selling |
| Orientation | Group | Individual |
| Nature | Legitimate | Illegitimate |
Legitimate knowledge is transmitted from father to son (vertically), while illegitimate knowledge is transmitted horizontally, from seller to buyer. Whereas vertical inheritance is group-oriented, horizontal transmission is individual-oriented.
This table, together with the summary above, may look familiar to some readers; that is because the opposition set out here is exactly that between the moral economy camp led by Scott (Scott 1976), versus the rational peasant camp led by Popkin (Popkin 1979).
Scott (1976) declares that the Southeast Asian peasant behaviour is ‘risk-averse’ (p. 4) because a peasant’s position is like ‘that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water’ (vii). And when his living standard goes down, he can hope for help only from neighbours; and to secure that help, he is willing to help his neighbour. 5 Scott calls this kind of economy the ‘moral economy’ of the peasant. To this, Popkin (1979) argues that the only motive the peasant has is individual profit. In other words, every human being behaves like a rational economic man, trying to obtain the maximum profit from the available resources. In short, there is, according to Popkin, no such thing as ‘moral economy’.
An Ende person is standing, as it were, at a crossroads between legitimacy and illegitimacy, between society-oriented values and individual-oriented values. One of my informants once said to me: ‘to have a good harvest, sometimes one has to behave like a witch (ata porho)’.
As I declared at the beginning of the paper, the ethnographical present is set in the 1990s. Now after almost 30 years, we may be able to tell which way the Ende people have chosen.
They are still standing at the same crossroad. So many things have changed since the 1990s, but they are not totally ‘society-oriented’ nor ‘individual-oriented’. For them, it seems, it is not a question of A or B. Actually, it is not even a question; it is a matter of balance. What they endeavour to do is not to choose one of the two ways, but to balance the two ways as long as possible.