In 1935, drawing on ethnological information from reports by officials of the Dutch East Indies government and missionaries, F.A.E. van Wouden published a thesis entitled Sociale Structuurtypen in de Groote P o s t . W i t h out the benefit of detailed ethnographic accounts of the societies of eastern Indonesia he postulated for the region what his thesis supervisor, J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong
(1935, 1977; and P.E. de Josselin de Jong 1980) came to call a "field of ethnological study" in which van Wouden perceived a cultural core common to all societies of the southeastern Indonesian archipelago. This core consists of clan systems organized by principles of "circulating connubium" ("cross-cousin marriage in its restricted
form" [van Wouden 1963:1]) which articulate corresponding systems of social classification. Here society serves as a model for "all-embracing classification" by which "cosmos and human society are organized in the same way" (ibid.:2). Van Wouden then analyzed the information available to him
to argue that throughout the region, and in contradistinc tion to the societies of the western archipelago which lack clan systems and are ordered by cognatic or bilateral systems of kinship classification, its people all share asymmetric connubium, bipartite divisions of authority into realms of the sacred and the secular, and systems of myth and ritual which bind society and cosmos into a "totality of culture".
In the past twenty-five years the societies of what the Dutch called the Groote Oost and to which van Wouden devoted his thesis, the Lesser Sunda Islands and the Timor archipelago which together make up the modern administra tive province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, have been the subjects of at least two dozen ethnographic studies. All of them have taken into account van Wouden's thesis and have had as a principal aim the description of particular systems of affinal alliance, social classification, mythology and
ritual (see Fox [ed.] 1980, especially the author's "Introduction" and concluding essay). While the modern
research has provided a large corpus of mutually interpretive ethnography (see P.E. de Josselin de Jong 1980:319), it has also revealed considerable and essential variation in the structures and cultures of eastern Indonesian societies.
As a result we find that clanship and alliance systems are not uniformly developed in the region and that social
systems founded on a general principle of marital exchange vary widely in their structure, form and function. Thus van Wouden's thesis that every society in eastern Indonesia is structured by relationships of alliance among exogamous social groups has been confirmed, but we now know that these groups themselves can be of fundamentally different types — in some cases they are households, in others they are lineages, clans or territorial units — and that the
significance and functions of alliance vary from one society to another. Formal structural similarities remain, but
they are manifested more in the realm of cultural expres sion, in myth, metaphors, cosmology and systems of thought, than at the level of social structure.
This is certainly true of the societies of Flores, which are centrally located within the field of ethnological
study first delineated by van Wouden. The one million
inhabitants of the island comprise six major ethnolinguistic regions: (from west to east) Manggarai, Ngada, Ende, Lio, Sikka and Larantuka. While showing many cultural similar ities, the rugged and mountainous topography of the island and the effects of different historical influences have perpetuated and in some areas further divided an already differentiated population. In each of the six regions can be distinguished coastal populations and mountain groups. Coastal populations came under the rule of different local rajadorns which have had varying and independent relations with the outside world. Thus Manggarai and Ngada in pre- Dutch times came under the influence, if not the rule, of the Islamic sultanates of Bima (Sumbawa) and Goa (south Sulawesi). Ende was the site of an independent Muslim raja allied with Bima, while the mountain Lionese were divided among many local political domains. By the sixteenth
century Larantuka and the peoples of the Solor archipelago to the east were ruled by a number of local rajas, with the raja of Larantuka gaining importance through contact and trade with the Portuguese. From Larantuka Catholicism and trade extended westward along the south coast as far
as the region of Lio, while interior groups of eastern Florenese were neither converted to Christianity nor
fully incorporated into larger polities until the twentieth century. Today almost the whole of the island is nominally Catholic, and local kingdoms were dissolved within a few years after the formation of the independent Republic of Indonesia. Nevertheless the peoples of the island retain their individual languages and cultures.
1.3 Sikka and Tana Ai
The Ata Tana Ai are a branch of the Sikkanese peoples of eastern Flores. Tana Ai is the region of mountains and high valleys in the eastern part of the administrative regency of Sikka and lies at the border between Sikka and the regency of Flores Timur (East Flores) to the east.
The modern regency (Kabupaten) of Sikka includes the tradi tional territories of peoples of three Florenese cultures, but the majority of the population is Sikkanese and is distinguishable culturally and linguistically from both the people of Larantuka to the east and the Lionese popula tion to the west. A small enclave of speakers of the
Lamaholot (Solorese) language of Larantuka and East Flores, who are called Muhang by the Sikkanese, is found along the northern coast of the Tana Ai region of Sikka. The western part of the regency is inhabited by Lionese who constitute the largest ethnic group in the neighboring Regency of
The national census of 1980 put the total population of the regency at 219,650 (Biro Pusat Statistik 1981).
This number includes approximately 160,000 Sikkanese. The Sikkanese inhabit the whole of the region, including both north and south coasts, the central hills and eastern mountains, from the river Nanga Bloh in the western part of the regency to the H i Wukoh range of mountains which forms the eastern boundary of Sikka and Flores Timur.
The Sikkanese people speak a common language, Sara Sikka, which Esser (1938), drawing on Jonker (1915:XI-XII), classified as one among the Ambon-Timor group of Malayo- Polynesian languages and which Dyen (1965) includes within his Moluccan Linkage of the Austronesian languages.
Three principal regions of Sikka may be distinguished on cultural, linguistic and historical grounds. The central Sikkanese who inhabit the central hills of the region
include the largest portion of the population and are some times referred to by other people of the district as the Ata Krowe, or by the people of the village of Sikka as Ata
Iwang ("hill people"). Sikkanese settlement on the north coast is relatively recent, and many communities there are of mixed population. Of the long established communities of the south coast (Lela, Sikka and Bola), the people of the village of Sikka, from which the name of the regency is taken and to which I will refer as Sikka Natar, should be distinguished. Sikka Natar was the home of the rajas and noble families who ruled the district until 1954. They
were the first of the district to convert to Catholicism and consider themselves (and are recognized by others) to be a separate community in the district. The language of Sikka Natar is sufficiently distinctive to merit
recognition as a dialect of Sara Sikka, the Sikkanese language.
The Ata Tana Ai are the third group of Sikkanese and the subject of this thesis. They are called the Ata Tana Ai ("People of the Forest Land") by the central and coastal Sikkanese, to whom the Ata Tana Ai refer inclusively as Ata Krowe, because the mountain slopes and valleys which they inhabit are more heavily forested than the lands of central Sikka which have suffered extensive deforestation.
The central and coastal Sikkanese are organized into localized descent groups of various sizes and complexity. Both men and women belong to the descent groups of their fathers and the groups are generally exogamous and exchange bridewealth on the occasions of marriages of their members. The people of Sikka Natar maintain a complex system of
exchanges of ceremonial goods both among themselves and with people of other villages in the district with whom they have contracted marriages. The central Sikkanese are farmers and planters of coconut, by which they partici pate in the monetary economy of the island. Many central Sikkanese are traders and people of coastal villages engage in fishing. They are generally supporters of the ideology of development which has been since the beginning of this
century purveyed by the Dutch colonial government, the Catholic missionaries and more recently and effectively by the Indonesian government. The peoples of central Sikka, as well as the Muhang and Lionese populations of the regency, are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Indeed the traditions of the people of Sikka Natar recount the conversion of the first raja of Sikka to Catholicism by the Portuguese in
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1552. Catholic teachers from Sikka Natar, and later European missionaires, then spread the new religion along with the Sikkanese political hegemony to the remainder of the district.
In contrast the Ata Tana Ai are organized into many small descent groups which are ordered by principles of precedence into larger, non-localized clans. Clans are ordered by relations determined by their "histories", the oral tradition in which the h a d a t (customs, law, traditions)
are encoded and expressed in rituals which make up, along with the mutual obligations of the various clans in their
performance, the ceremonial system of the Ata Tana A i .
Participation in this system and being placed in it by h a d a t
determines the boundaries of Tana Ai society, boundaries which serve to exclude people who are not members of Tana Ai clans. Along with the exclusive organization of the
Tana Ai clans, and the ceremonial system which it articulates, the Ata Tana Ai have maintained their traditional and
and the Church in the past half century to convert them to Christianity and modernization.
Also in contrast to the central Sikkanese, the Ata Tana Ai are subsistence agriculturalists, hunters and
gatherers who exploit what, when compared to much of central Sikka, is a richly forested and well watered montane
environment. The Tana Ai economy is based on the shifting cultivation of rice and maize with small-scale and occasional trading of copra and coffee in the weekly market at Talibura on the north coast providing some cash income.
The central Sikkanese are village dwellers who identify themselves by village residence and whose dense settlements are constructed along the sharp ridges which cut across the region of the central hills of the regency. By contrast, the Ata Tana Ai live in their gardens in single family households dispersed throughout their territory. The difference in
settlement patterns between the two regions results in strikingly different senses of community.
The entire region of Tana Ai lies today within the
administrative district (kecamatan) of Talibura. At Talibura are located the office of the district officer (camat) and branches of various government departments. Near Talibura at Watubaing is the church of the parish of Watubaing which includes most of the region encompassed by this study. The Ata Tana Ai, who have never settled on either the north or
south coasts of their territory, have only infrequent and formal contacts with officers of the district government.
Direct contact with Europeans came much later to the Ata Tana Ai than elsewhere in Sikka. By 1879 the Dutch had established a controleur or posthouder at Maumere,5 with a small garrison of police, in order to govern the port there. The dagboek of the controleur6 for the years 1879-1907 rarely mentions the Tana Ai region and it appears that the Dutch only in the 1930s began making irregular patrols in the mountains. In 1920 the first school in the present day district of Talibura was established by
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the Church at Boganatar on the road which links Maumere and Larantuka. This development did not much affect life in Tana V7ai Brama, however. In 19 23 a teacher from Sikka Natar established a school at Pruda on the south coast, primarily intended for the children of a few Sikkanese planters who began planting coconut there early in the 1900s. The coastal region around Pruda was not at that
time inhabited by Ata Tana Ai. Then in 1925 a mission station and coconut plantation was established by the Church at
g
Nangahale. The plantation required labor and some Ata Tana Ai from lower parts of the valley settled on the coast to work the plantations, along with people from other parts of the regency. Following independence, the Indonesian government established a district office at Talibura around which has grown a village of Ata Tana Ai and migrants from other parts of Sikka.
A Catholic primary school, operated jointly by the department of education in Maumere and the Catholic mission,
was established at Hila Natar, near the border of Tana Werang and Tana Wai Brama in 1953. Staffed by teachers from central Sikka, this school and its teachers provided the people of Watuwolon with their first continuous and most direct contacts with the outside world.
Finally, in the late 1960s, a Swiss missionary of the S.V.D. established a new parish at Watubaing, between Talibura and Nangahale, to serve the Talibura community. By 1974 this priest had established kapela (chapels) at Uru, Natarmage, Pruda, Wolometan and Hila Natar and was making regular "patrols" of the mountains and Tana Wai Brama three or four times each year.
The Ata Tana Ai are not so isolated that their only contacts with outsiders have been with missionaries and
government officials. Many young Tana Ai men travel through out the eastern end of Flores before returning to Tana Ai to marry. These journeys produce friendships with people in other parts of the island which, later, grow into regular trading relationships. Goods traded include rice, pigs, coffee, copra and timber from Tana Ai, for which Tana Ai men obtain tuak (gin made from the juice of the Borassus
palm), ikat textiles, horses and machetes. The relationships between trading partners are long-standing, personal and
are spoken of as deun imun, relations of friendship. These relationships provide the Ata Tana Ai with important alliances all over Sikka and western Larantuka, and some older Tana
Ende and the island of Lembata. The relationships may be inherited by the sons or sisters' sons of the men who initiate them. They are often invoked for the pleasure which travel affords, but occasionally have a more serious consequence as, for example, in 1979 when the rice crop failed in Watuwolon, many families
were able to obtain seed rice for the next year's planting from trading partners in Larantuka.
Central Sikkanese informants and acquaintances, upon learning that research was being carried out in
Tana A i , often pointed out that the people of the mountains were the "most traditional" of Kabupaten Sikka and
that, because of its physical isolation and inaccessibility, Tana Ai has benefited little from "progress", "development" and "religion" (i.e., Catholicism).
While it is true that the Tana Ai region is relatively inaccessible, it should be noted that the Ata Tana Ai
regularly walk from the south coast to Talibura on the north coast in less than a day. People from Watuwolon are able to walk to market and return the same day. Although travel in Tana Ai is difficult, distances are not great and the remarkable integrity and exclusiveness of Tana Ai society cannot wholly be explained by its physical isolation.
Common to the societies of Nusa Tenggara Timur are systems of social and political organization,
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sometimes referred to as "diarchy” or "dual sovereignty", in which secular authority is separate from but complemented by sacred or ritual authority. This was certainly true of central Sikka where the r a t u (raja) and noble families of
Sikka Natar comprised a semi-autonomous government under the Dutch, while local tana p u a n g, "sources of the earth"
or "sources of the domain"10 in whom were vested ritual responsibilities for the land within local ritual domains, retained ceremonial and traditional rights. In Sikka Natar itself the t a n a p u a n g , who, it is said, originally sanctioned the first r a t u Sikka, is still today considered to be the
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ultimate authority, on matters of h a d a t .
The Sikkanese of Sikka Natar, under their rajas, came to rule over all of what is today Kabupaten Sikka and large areas of Lio to the west, an arrangement which was sanctioned by the Dutch under the policy of zelfbestuur, "self rule". Nonetheless the Dutch also found it an advantage to dilute somewhat the power of the rajas of Sikka by recognizing in the late nineteenth century two subaltern rajadoms, and later a third. These were the rajadoms of Nita (which was headed by a branch of the royal da Silva family of Sikka Natar), the Lionese rajadom of Paga, and Kangae in the north central region of Sikka. Relations between these local rajas and the rajas of Sikka Natar were not always amicable, nor were
those between r a t u Sikka and the neighboring major rajadoms of Larantuka and Ende. Despite frequent hostilities and disputes (or perhaps because of them) the royal genealogy
of Sikka, of which there are several versions extant, documents regularly renewed and long-standing affinal alliances between the Sikkanese royal house and noble
lineages and the subaltern rajas of Paga and Nita, as well as between the rajas of Sikka and Larantuka and between children of the rajas of Sikka and the Lionese rajadom of Wolowaru.
One point of continual dispute between Larantuka and Sikka until the Dutch confirmed the present boundary in 1904, was sovereignty over Tana Ai. Before settlement of the boundary issue by the Dutch, Tana Ai was nominally part of the rajadom of Larantuka and there are myths and stories in Tana Ai that recount events during that period by reference to "ratu Lewotobi", the "raja of Lewotobi, as the raja of Larantuka is still called today. The
mountains, differences in language and custom and distance from the town of Larantuka meant, however, that the affilia tion of Tana Ai with Larantuka was unsubstantial and