The expression ‘if you do not give you are not human’ (to anu lafu, M)100 summarises Makasae
social relationships which are endorsed by obligatory gift exchanges. The act of giving objects can be construed as giving a part of oneself, thus imposing a debt upon the recipient that must be reciprocated in order to balance-out or repay the debt.
At the heart of the Makasae alliance system is a deeply felt sense of obligations one has toward both individuals and groups in one’s community. The rituals by which these obligations are both discharged and recreated are not performed mechanically, but with full consciousness of moral dimensions. Moreover these obligations not only unite families, lineages and clans, but enable the circulation of wealth and the negotiation of political authority.101
To default on gift exchange results in a serious loss of status in Makasae society whereby the individual, and by implication their family, becomes valueless. Such emphasis on gift exchanges remains as valid in 2014 as when Bühler visited Baguia in 1935. Exchange has been noted as the ‘idiom of Makasae life’.102 The continuity of alliance is punctuated by a
series of highly elaborated and obligatory mortuary exchanges, which outweigh bridewealth negotiations in both their scale and significance.103
Makasae life is permeated by duality and oppositions through which social behaviour is structured.104 Through complementary and analogical associations between wife-giver and
100 To anu lafu, M, literally means ‘a living person’; Shepard Forman, “Descent, Alliance, and Exchange
Ideology among the Makassae of East Timor,” in The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia, edited by James J Fox (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 157.
101 Guterres, Justino Maria Aparicio. The Makasae of East Timor: The Structure of an Affinal Alliance
System. Masters Thesis, University of Melbourne, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Anthropology Programme, 1998, 97.
102 Forman, “Descent, Alliance, and Exchange Ideology among the Makassae of East Timor,” 152. 103 Forman, “Descent, Alliance, and Exchange Ideology among the Makassae of East Timor,” 152. 104 T F Lazarowitz, The Makassai: Complementary Dualism in Timor, PhD Thesis, State University, Nova
71 wife-taker, masculine–feminine, control over fertility or lack thereof, and the exchange of masculine goods (buffalo, horse, swords) for the feminine gifts (pigs, handwoven cloth, rice and necklaces), these binary opposites are balanced in order that the sacred world of spirits is in accord with the secular world of the living. The maintenance of alliances between groups as part of a ‘wider system of social action tying together and integrating the worlds of the living and the spirits in stable equilibrium’ remains constantly in practice.105 The entire
Makasae social system can be envisaged as turning on a profound desire for union and balance across the spectrum of social relations, whether marriage, bridewealth transactions, agricultural ritual, or political and legal organisation. These desires support the exchange ideology, and their symbolic expression in ritual.106
The exchange of food between wife-givers and wife-takers is central to sustaining and continuing life in Makasae culture, and remains as relevant in 2014 as it was in 1935. Elaborate exchanges accompany the maintenance of alliance between lineages, such as the transition of the woman from her lineage into her husband’s lineage upon marriage. Marriage is both a partnership between a woman and a man as well as an alliance between their respective families. Reflecting a fundamental cultural emphasis on dualism, the wife-givers (omarahe, M) are considered feminine whilst the wife-takers (tufumata, M) are considered masculine. Makasae anthropologist Justino Aparcio Guterres states that the omarahe are the superior group as their responsibility is ‘providing blood for the perpetuation of the lineage of the tufumata’.107
The exchange of bridewealth gifts (tufurae gi ira, M108; barlake, fetosan umane, T) ensures the
continuity of life via the exchange of food and the means of its production. The role of food, termed ‘child of mother earth’, cooked from sacrificial livestock and local produce is transformed in the bodies of wife and husband to create blood and sperm – the elements for successful reproduction. ‘In the end, it is people who propagate both the earth and the lineage through exchange and alliance’.109 The children of a married woman become the
105 Lazarowitz, The Makassai, iii.
106 Forman, “Descent, Alliance, and Exchange Ideology among the Makassae of East Timor,” 150. 107 Guterres, The Makasae of East Timor, 6.
108 This Makasae phrase literally translates to ‘the value of the women’.
72
progeny of the husband’s family and hence the wife’s role is the regeneration of her husband’s clan. Thus, payment of buffalo, horses and swords from the male’s family to the woman’s parents is required. In return, the woman’s family gifts domestic textiles, pigs, goats, rice, and an orange-coloured coral necklace (gaba, M; morten, T). These gifts are the basis of wealth in Makasae society.
The quantity of gift exchange is based on the amount requested for the bride’s mother at the time of her marriage. These bridewealth negotiations occur following the request for the woman, known as ‘to open the door’ (tufu seti, M) or in cases of arranged marriages as ‘the threading together of cloth’ (bura kesi, M). Customarily gifts of a fixed number of buffalo, horses and ‘old Makassar swords’ are gifted as part of this request.110 Today, cash is
increasingly given for bridewealth exchanges. The ceremonial and domestic realms, and related gifts, counter-balance each other.111
Figure 1.12: Women bearing tufumata bridewealth exchange gifts of handwoven cloth and rice at Bubuha, Larisula, Baguia Sub-district, 16 August 2014.
110 Forman, “Descent, Alliance, and Exchange Ideology among the Makassae of East Timor,” 159.
111 Once substantial bridewealth payments have been exchanged, the ‘call to come out’ (rai wara, M) ceremony
occurs with the bride leaving her family wearing or shouldering handwoven women’s cloth (rabi, M) and man’s cloth wrap (kola, M). Signifying the agreement, it is also customary for the bride to wear prestigious
gaba, attributed as a form of wealth amongst the Makasae. She follows her husband and his mother to their oma falu, representing the transition of the bride from her clan into that of her husband. The gaba is referred
to as ‘spindle and cotton basket’ (kida ate, toka, M), which is gifted together with the handwoven cloths to her mother-in-law, symbolic of her arrival in the new family and lineage house.
73 The ideology of exchange is similar for bridewealth and mortuary exchanges, but the form and rate of exchange varies. The goods exchanged are the same as for marriage. Whilst bridewealth exchanges are transferred in portions, sometimes over an extended period of years, mortuary exchanges, once determined, are transferred immediately. Mortuary exchanges are mediated between wife-giver and wife-taker descent groups who co-ordinate their exchanges and death payments to the matrilineal kin of the deceased.112 At funerals,
gifts are received by descendants of the deceased from wife-taker and wife-giver groups. An obligatory exchange known as ‘bridewealth of the dead’ (mana toe mana gauru, M)113 is a
payment to the earth made by the deceased’s wife-takers to the nearest kin of the deceased, prior to burying the corpse. As one informant jested in 2014, he paid for his wife twice – once upon their marriage and once upon her death.114
These cultural practices, frequently referred to as ‘cultural law’ (adat, I), remain current and co-exist alongside Catholicism, which is widely practised in Baguia today. Informants describe ‘religion’ as separate to but accommodating of adat. One informant explained that God is a benevolent spirit who extends clemency and forgiveness when people sin; however, if adat is contravened, the ancestors are inconsolable and may inflict death as a punishment.115
Others, however, tended to dismiss animist practices, such as the erection of sculpted ancestral figurines (atewaa, M; ai toos, T), in preference for Christianity. Distinctions were drawn between funerary practices for animists (jentiu, T) and Catholic grieving practices such as wearing black (kore metan, T), a derivative of European mortuary practices.116 Catholic
mortuary practices, which are widespread, appear to have grafted themselves onto, or in some instances replaced, older indigenous customary practices.