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Indonesia Tanimbarese
In the southeastern part of Maluku Province lived more
than
60,000 residents of the Tanimbar archipelago in the early
1990s.
They resided in villages ranging in size from 150 to 2,500
inhabitants, but most villages numbered from 300 to 1,000.
Nearly
all residents spoke one of four related, but mutually
unintelligible, languages. Because of an extended dry
season, the
forests were much less luxuriant than in some of the more
northerly
Maluku Islands, and the effects of over-intensive swidden
cultivation of rice, cassava, and other root crops were
visible in
the interior. Many Tanimbarese also engaged in reef and
deep-sea
fishing and wild boar hunting.
Unlike the Weyewa, Toraja, or Dayak, the Tanimbarese do
not
maintain an opposition between their native culture and an
officially recognized Christian culture. Following a Dutch
military
expedition in 1912, Catholic and Protestant missionaries
converted
all residents of their archipelago by the 1920s. However,
the
Tanimbarese tradition is preserved through intervillage
and
interhousehold marriage alliances. Tanimbarese orient
themselves
socially toward their villages and their houses. The unity
of the
village is represented as a stone boat. In ceremonial
settings,
such as indigenous dance, the rankings and statuses within
the
village are spoken of as a seating arrangement within this
symbolic
boat. Intervillage and interhouse rivalry, no longer
expressed
through headhunting and warfare, continue to be
represented through
complex ritual exchanges of valuables, marriage alliances,
and
competitive relations between the Catholic and Protestant
churches
(one or the other of which counts each Tanimbarese as a
member).
Tanimbarese are affiliated with rahan (houses)
that are
important corporate units, responsible for making
offerings to the
ancestors, whose skulls were traditionally placed inside.
Rahan are also responsible for the maintenance and
distribution of heirloom property consisting of valuables
and
forest estates. Since Tanimbarese recognize a system of
patrilineal
descent, when a child is born they customarily ask:
"Stranger or
house master"? Since a male is destined to "sit" or "stay"
in the
house of his father, he is a "master of his house." If the
baby is
a girl, the child is destined to move between houses, and
thus is
a "stranger." The question of which house the girl moves
to, and
what obligations and rights will go along with the move,
is one of
the most important questions in Tanimbarese society. There
are
certain "pathways" of marriage that young women from
certain houses
are expected to follow, particularly if these interclan
alliances
have lasted more than three generations. Only if certain
valuables
are properly received by her natal family, however, is a
young
woman fully incorporated into her husband's home.
Otherwise, her
children are regarded as a branch of her brother's
lineage.
The Tanimbarese traditionally engaged in both a local
system of
ceremonial exchange and, for centuries, in a broader
Indonesian
commerce in which they traded copra, trepang, tortoise
shell, and
shark fins for gold, elephant tusks, textiles, and other
valuables.
In the twentieth century, however, Tanimbarese began to
exchange
their local products for more prosaic items such as
tobacco,
coffee, sugar, metal cooking pots, needles, clothing, and
other
domestic-use items. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese
merchants
thoroughly dominated this trade and consequently gained
great
influence in the local village economy.
Data as of November 1992
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