The Potent Dead

Ancestors, saints and heroes in contemporary Indonesia

Anthony Reid, Henri Chambert-Loir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000247107
• Subtopic: Kunst & Geisteswissenschaften unterrichten

The dead are potent and omnipresent in modern Indonesia. Presidents and peasants alike meditate before sacred graves to exploit the power they confer, and mediums do good business curing the sick by interpreting the wishes of deceased forebears. Among non-Muslims there are ritual burials of the bones of the dead in monuments both magnificent and modest. By promoting dead heroes to a nationalist pantheon, regions and ethnic groups establish their place within the national story.

Although much has been written about the local forms of the scriptural religions to which modern Indonesians are required by law to adhere - Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism - this is the first book to assess the indigenous systems of belief in the spirits of ancestors. Sometimes these systems are condemned in the name of the formal religions, but more often the potent dead coexist as a private dimension of everyday religious practice.

A unique team of anthropologists, historians and literary scholars from Europe, Australia and North America demonstrate the continuing importance of the potent dead for understanding contemporary Indonesia. At the same time, they help us understand historic processes of conversion to Islam and Christianity by examining the continuing interactions of the spirit world with formal religion.

1
Castrated dead: the making of un-ancestors among the Aoheng, and some considerations on death and ancestors in Borneo

Bernard Sellato

‘She doesn’t know what an unbirthday is!’ [said the Mad Hatter of Alice].

—Walt Disney’s, Alice in Wonderland

In the course of the past 15 years, the misuse of the term ‘ancestors’ in the context of Borneo’s ethnic arts has plagued a number of otherwise interesting books.¹ Everywhere one finds photograph captions reading ‘ancestral figure’, ‘ancestor effigies’ or ‘representation of an ancestor’, as if Borneo were another Nias or another Leti, two islands famous both to anthropologists for their somewhat ubiquitous ancestors and to dealers and collectors for their very dear art. Strikingly, older works on Indonesian art were much less inclined to see ancestors everywhere.²

While some Bornean ethnic groups do honour their ancestors in certain circumstances and some even seem to have a cult of the ancestors, it has become exasperating to see again and again the same misinformed captions under a photograph of anything as remote to an ancestor’s figure as a Bahau carving of a spirit to ward off evil, a Ngaju hampatung statue, the painted dragon face on a Kayan shield, a Busang hudo' mask—or even a Kenyah row of smoked skulls of enemies (the caption reads ‘Ancestral skulls’).

What is an ancestor? In a quick survey of the literature I found only hazy and often contradictory definitions of such terms and expressions as ancestor, ancestrality, cult of the dead, and cult of the ancestors. A first point should be made here. Obviously there is some confusion due to an indiscriminate use of the ancestor of our common vocabulary, which carries no more subtle an idea than that of ‘forebear’, and the anthropologists’ ancestor, which is a more complex concept. I return to the subtleties of anthropological concepts later. Meanwhile, I use the term forebear in place of the common language ancestor, and do not use the anthropological ancestor.

As a starting point I deal with a straightforward phenomenon—death— and move on to the concepts of the soul of the living being, and of the spirit of the dead, investigating in the process the concept of passage and the rites associated with the passage of death. The Aoheng, who may or may not constitute a special case in Borneo, offer an opportunity to look into the concept of death and the funerary rites in a historical, cross-cultural perspective, and to review, in their relationship to systems of social organisation, the main views held by the peoples of Borneo on funerals and the afterlife.

Death, at first sight, transforms a deceased person into something else. The phenomenon of death turns a living being into a corpse. This is a natural passage. At the same time, for most of the world’s societies, the soul of the living person either turns into a spirit of the dead, or simply vanishes while a new spiritual being comes into existence. The concepts, vague or elaborate, of the soul of the living being and of the spirit of a dead person seem universally acknowledged.

Someone’s death is generally viewed as both a sad event for the deceased’s family and an inauspicious one with potentially deleterious consequences for the whole of the community of the living. The spirits of the dead are considered dangerous. Immediately after death they are believed to go to some transitional place (limbo), or to remain in this world in the vicinity of the corpse.

As these spirits are dangerous, most societies stage a ritualised passage, consisting in transferring them from their temporary dwelling place to a final abode (heaven), where they can no longer threaten the living. This passage is the obsequies or funerals. In Borneo, most societies did (and some still do) perform ritualised passages in the form of various types of simple or multi-staged funerary rituals.

THE AOHENG

The Aoheng are a 3000-person-strong Dayak group living in the centre of Borneo. Their historical territory is the Long-Apari district on the uppermost reaches of the Mahakam River, where they are distributed in five settlements. One community split off long ago to settle in the upper Kapuas region of West Kalimantan, and two more have migrated recently to the middle Mahakam area (see Map 1). Ultimately derived from nomadic hunting-gathering bands, the Aoheng first underwent the influence of the Ot Danum (Uut Danum), a group of non-stratified agriculturalists now in Central Kalimantan. After 1800 the Long-Gelat, a stratified Kayanic group

Map 1 Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan)

of the upper Mahakam area, forced them to settle, and the Aoheng ever since have been rice swiddeners and longhouse dwellers (Sellato 1986, 1992).

The descriptions below are in the ethnographic present tense, unless an explicit reference is made to past or present time. A major feature of Aoheng social organisation is stratification, showing three categories (strata): aristocrats (süpï), commoners (kovi) and slaves (dïpon). The ideology of stratification stresses that aristocrats and commoners are human beings of different essences. Social ascription to one stratum is very rigid, and vertical social mobility very limited within one’s lifetime. Social status has little to do with wealth: a poor aristocrat always remains an aristocrat, while a rich commoner can never become one. While their wealth may become an important factor when it comes to inter-village aristocratic marriages and alliances, the aristocrats do not rely on it to legitimise their social position within their home community.

Kinship is cognatic and genealogies are reckoned bilaterally, sometimes over some 10 generations. Genealogic lines (koturun or puhu') are resorted to in order to establish kinship ties with individuals from other villages. If a knowledge of genealogies may be needed in dynastic claims and disputes, a recourse to the spiritual intervention of dead forebears has no relevance to the legitimising of power and status in Aoheng society.

Kinship terms include aké' (PP), düo keaké' (PPP), and toü ko aké' (PPPP).³ The expression aké' hau' refers to any forebear, beyond or including PPP. Another expression, do (aké') né moni maé, ‘they (forebears) of long ago before’, refers collectively to the Aoheng of a remote past.

No patronymic appellations exist, whereas in other regions of Indonesia such appellations are more or less tightly linked to lineage founders and to cults of particular forebears. A personal name (aran) is given to a child at the name-giving ceremony, but an individual or his/her parents may change it once or more according to circumstances (e.g. sickness), often following a dream. The use of teknonyms is the norm, but a teknonym is often combined with one or several other types of names—kin and affinal terms, necronyms, nicknames, reciprocal appellations, honorific titles—each of which may also be used alone or in combination with another, according to the relationship between the speaker and the person addressed or referred to. The fact that some personal names are those of animals may hint at an ancient system of appellations including some forms of totemism, but is of no relevance to today’s situation.

In aristocratic as well as commoner families, the personal name of a dead grandparent or a more remote forebear is commonly picked up again (ngokat aran, ‘to raise a name’), insofar as it is considered a ‘good’ name. This corresponds to a vague belief that a forebear’s qualities may pass on to any offspring bearing the same name, although no particular ritual is attached to this. Certain names, especially of dead aristocrats, may not be used by families of the lower strata, as these ‘noble’ names are for the aristocratic stratum’s exclusive use.

AOHENG GODS, SPIRITS AND SOULS

Nature is host to scores of local guardian spirits (otü nya'an), residing at mountain tops or passes, and in certain trees and big boulders. Generally rather impartial to humans, they may become aggressive if neglected, and travellers are always careful to make offerings when passing a place hosting a spirit. These guardian spirits fall into vague categories, such as the otun danum (river spirits), rather well disposed, or the otun duno (fig-tree spirits), easily irritated. The Aoheng, therefore, may be viewed grossly as animists (in the sense of Tylor and Durkheim; see Durkheim 1960: 67ff). Although, as elsewhere in Borneo, there seem to be some hints of naturism (see below), this is not the place for a discussion of its past or present importance in traditional Aoheng religion.

The Aoheng also believe in a pantheon comprising eight or ten deities coming in pairs—Tingai and Tipang, Kito and Bangka’an, Halung and Ha’an, Oü and Büan—and in a number of heavenly spiritual entities of lesser importance, generally not named. The gods are listed in one breath in invocations. Pairing stresses either their association (Oü mo Büan, Sun and Moon) or the fact that a god has two names. The Aoheng are not too clear about the different gods’ quality, specificity or function. They stress that Tingai, also called Amun Tingai, is the highest god, which conforms to the ideas held by the neighbouring Kayanic groups whose Taméi Tingéi was borrowed by the Aoheng. Amun Tingai was later confirmed in its status by the Catholic missionaries, who identified it with God. The names Tipang and Bangka’an seem also to have been borrowed from Kayanic groups. As for Kito, it is the high god of many nomadic groups and is also found among some Kenyah groups (Sellato 1994: 161–2).

On this earth, a relevant distinction is made between a safe human (cultural) sphere—the village and fields—and a threatening outer (natural) world—the forest. Negotiations with the spirits are carried out on a daily basis by the individual and the nuclear family, primarily entailing propitiation (repelling spiritual danger). They do not involve or concern the gods.

Conversely, contact is established between men and the heavenly gods only in extraordinary situations (the consecration of a new village, epidemics, a succession of crop failures). Such contact involves the community as a whole, and acts to attract blessings from the gods to restore the old alliance of men and gods, a harmonious relationship that is perceived to have weakened, entailing misfortune. These half-forgotten gods, viewed as distant or in semi-retirement from human affairs, are called for assistance, generally through a mediator (e.g. a sacrificed pig), to ensure health and prosperity for the village, its population and its crops. The major occasion for communicating with the gods occurs in the course of the pengosang (or mengosang) religious festival, the highest and most sacred manifestation of the Aoheng’s ritual life (see Sellato 1986, 1992).

Other categories of spiritual entities reside in heaven, which have no connection with the spirits of the dead, nor perhaps with the gods. They include healing spirits (otü penyangon, otü habai), who help the shaman in curing a patient in exchange for an animal sacrifice; and singing spirits (otü kelisum), who either inspire a singer of kelisum (spirit songs) or sing through his/her mouth. Finally, spirits residing in the severed heads of enemies (otun tekohong; see below), formerly wrapped in leaves and kept hanging from rafters in the longhouse gallery, were ritually fed, then dismissed, in the final stages of the pengosang festival.

The soul of a living person is called berüon—a term derived from düo, ‘two’, as in many Bornean languages, hence a spiritual alter ego. The term kesongan, more physiological, refers to the breath, while songan, more abstract, is akin to the Western concept of ‘conscience’. At death, the berüon disappears, while a spirit of the dead comes into existence, otü or otun kovo, which is of a different nature. The otun kovo remains in the deceased’s house, until it is ritually accompanied to heaven (havun), where the spirits of the dead finally dwell.

There it belongs to an undifferentiated category of unnamed entities, the otun kovo. The Aoheng have only a vague concept of what life after death might be like, and their cosmological and cosmogonic ideas, particularly concerning the topography of havun and the spirit’s route to get there, were heavily borrowed from the Kayanic groups (on Kayan religion, see Rousseau, 1998). The Aoheng may mention the deceased—as Kovo Nyangun, ‘the late Nyangun’—when recalling or referring to episodes of his life, but they would never allude to the spirit Nyangun has become. The otun kovo no longer have an individual existence in havun, and never intervene in the affairs of the living.

The Aoheng’s major cultural hero, Sengiru (Tiger), should be mentioned. Tiger introduced various rituals, at a stage of their history when the Aoheng were still ‘savage’ nomads—he even introduced the night. He has been identified as a true historical character, a Long-Gelat aristocrat whom the Long-Gelat chief (named Liju, ‘Tiger’) married to an Aoheng band leader’s daughter in order to pacify and ‘civilise’ them. A tiger spirit can heal the sick, although it is mainly known to punish transgressors of taboos. Clearly Tiger, a remote forebear not quite connected to remembered genealogies, has been identified with an ancient, now obsolete meteorological deity (the tiger-thunder), but he is neither a divinised cultural hero nor an ancestor, and he is never given offerings or invoked, let alone given a cult.⁴

AOHENG FUNERARY PRACTICES

As stated briefly above, the Aoheng, a set of nomadic hunting–gathering bands, underwent first the influence of the Ot Danum, an ethnic group belonging to the Barito Group (see Sellato 1986, 1989, 1992, 1994; also below), then that of the Long-Gelat, a stratified Kayanic group (see Rousseau 1990). The Ot Danum, to this day, perform double funerals, whereas the Kayanic groups as a rule practise simple funerals. Before their massive conversion to Christianity (Roman Catholicism) in the 1930s, the Aoheng practised both types (see Sellato 1986: 407–9), encompassed in the expression ‘custom for the dead’ (adet do né kovo).

In simple funerals, by far the most common, the corpse is kept within the house for a prescribed number of days, and the spirit of the dead remains around the body. The living keep the spirit company and entertain it. During the last night, an elder ritually accompanies (nemotang icu') the spirit of the dead along its journey to its last heavenly abode (havun), and a rite of separation is held. The next morning the body in its log coffin is carried to its grave, in the past a cave or rock shelter, now a burial in the ground. Mourning taboos remain in effect until the next new moon, when the living are reintegrated into society, life is regenerated and returns to normalcy, and sociocosmic harmony, upset by death, is restored.

Rare occurrences of double funerals (norang) were in the past reserved for certain aristocrats. After primary transition rites the body was kept to weather on a platform near the village, normally until the following new year (i.e. the new rice harvest). Meanwhile, a headhunting expedition was organised. The severed heads procured were meant to provide the receptacles for spirits which would serve as slaves to the spirit of the dead in its final residence. The secondary funerals consisted in retrieving the dried-up bones and placing them in a valuable ceramic jar. The ritual to accompany the spirit of the dead to havun was held during the night preceding the transfer of the jar to the caves.

FUNERARY RITES AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION: THE BROADER PICTURE

The Aoheng case shows a combination of two main methods of handling the dead in Borneo, corresponding to two distinct cultural spheres that in the past have influenced the Aoheng.⁵

A set of groups belonging to what is called here the Barito Group are found mainly in Central Kalimantan, with some in southern West and East Kalimantan. The name Barito Group really stems from a linguistic group (in the sense originally used by Hudson 1967), the members of which all display significant cultural similarities, particularly the double funerals. However, I have called the Barito Complex (see Sellato 1994: 187–90) an ancient set of societies forming a single cultural sphere, which probably covered the whole of the island’s interior in the first millennium, before the spread of the Kayanic groups and their culture. These agricultural (or, rather, horticultural) societies were very competitive (see Sellato 1987), focusing prestige-seeking on great feasts of redistribution at secondary funerals and the erection of extravagant monuments. Today such societies, having all to a certain extent converted to rice farming, are still found in various, often far apart regions of the island. Some still practise double funerals, which offer to the families organising these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps and illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Castrated dead: the making of un-ancestors among the Aoheng, and some considerations on death and ancestors in Borneo
• 2 How to hold a tiwah: the potency of the dead and deathways among Ngaju Dayaks
• 3 Witnessing the creation of ancestors in Laboya (West Sumba, Eastern Indonesia)
• 4 Reciprocity, death and the regeneration of life and plants in Nusa Penida (Bali)
• 5 Remembering our dead: the care of the ancestors in Tana Toraja
• 6 Island of the Dead. Why do Bataks erect tugu?
• 7 Modernising sacred sites in South Sumatra: Islamisation of Gumai ancestral places
• 8 Ancestors' blood: genealogical memory, genealogical amnesia and hierarchy among the Bugis
• 9 Saints and ancestors: the cult of Muslim saints in Java
• 10 The Tembayat hill: clergy and royal power in Central Java from the 15th to the 17th century
• 11 Interpreting the historical significance of tombs and chronicles in contemporary Java
• 12 The role of a Javanese burial ground in local government
• 13 'National ancestors': the ritual construction of nationhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index