Nage Birds

Classification and symbolism among an eastern Indonesian people

Gregory Forth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415318273
• eBook ISBN: 9781134368099
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This unusual and richly-illustrated book is the story of the relationship between the Nage people of eastern Indonesia and the birds alongside which they co-exist. Based on fieldwork carried out over a period of some fifteen years, it aims for a total view of how a human community interacts with another zoological class, giving birds a chosen place in human ideas and social practice. As well as a fascinating ornithological study of Indonesian bird life, Nage Birds offers a much-needed critique of current theoretical argument on how non-Western societies categorize and evaluate different species and modes of being.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

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This book concerns the Nage, a people inhabiting the central part of the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia, and their knowledge of birds. Although ‘Nage’ has more restricted applications, in its widest sense the name refers to a population of roughly 50,000 residing in villages to the north and west of the Ebu Lobo volcano (see Forth 1998a, Map 2). Nage dialects are closely related to those spoken in the Ngadha region, to the west, and in the Ende and Lio regions, to the east. All central Flores languages are provisionally classified as members of a Bima-Sumba group (Esser 1938), which forms part of the Central-MalayoPolynesian branch of the Austronesian family (Blust 1979). In this volume, I refer mostly to the dialect spoken in and around the western Nage village of Bo’a Wae. The immediate vicinity of Bo’a Wae — the residence of the ‘rajas’ or native rulers of Nage during the period of Dutch colonial administration — has been the main location of my field researches in Nage, and it is to this region that the present work primarily refers (see further 24–26).

Objectives: content and context

A general relevance of this study is the continuing debate about the nature of ethnobiological, or more specifically ethnozoological, classification. For a long time, a crucial question has been whether such classifications fundamentally reflect universal factors of perception and cognition operating directly on discontinuity in the natural world, or whether they are radically shaped by culturally specific values bound up, for example, with economic and religious life. Sometimes identified as ‘intellectualists’, proponents of the former position (see e.g., Berlin 1992; Atran 1990; Hunn 1976; Bulmer 1974) tend to advance a view of ethnobiological classification as fundamentally similar to modern scientific taxonomy. By contrast, opponents (e.g., Ellen 1993a; Hunn 1982; Randall and Hunn 1984), dubbed as ‘functionalists’ or ‘utilitarianists’, adopt a position of cultural relativism, interpreting folk classification as reflecting patterns and principles specific to particular societies.

In recent years, and partly in response to an accumulation of detailed ethnobiological studies of single cultural communities, both sides have refined their positions in ways that accommodate significant findings of their opposites.¹ Indeed, for some time intellectualists have allowed for the existence of ‘special purpose’ classifications in which folk biological taxa are organized according to criteria that are culturally particular (e.g., Berlin 1992; Hunn 1977: 47). Some have also acknowledged that ‘folk generic’ categories (typically the smallest named categories, see pp. 5–6) may be linked as members of more inclusive categories (particularly ‘intermediate’ taxa) on the basis of cultural significance rather than on perceptual grounds (Berlin 1992: 149, 152); and the same allowance has been made for labelled distinctions within folk generic categories (or ‘folk specifics’; see Berlin 1992: 120–22). Yet intellectualists still consider special-purpose classifications as constructs quite separate from, and secondary to, ‘general purpose’ classifications; that is, taxonomic schemes grounded in the perception of natural discontinuities of morphology and behaviour. Most prominent among the factors of perception (or ‘percepts’) which intellectualists discern in the construction of folk biological taxa are visible features. At the same time, and especially with regard to birds, auditory features — which is to say, characteristic vocalizations — may assume a comparable importance (see Berlin and O’Neill 1981).

As the foregoing may suggest, ethnobiologists of both persuasions have usually spoken in terms of a binary opposition of universal percepts versus cultural particulars, or a contrast of ‘perceptual salience’ and ‘cultural salience’. Recently, however, several scholars have demonstrated how perceptual salience is analysable into several distinct factors. Berlin (1992) thus speaks of ‘phenotypic salience’ (or ‘taxonomic distinctiveness’), ‘the size of an organism in relation to human beings’, and ‘the prevalence of individual species in the local habitat as well as their relative ease of observation’ as factors ‘determining the likelihood that a particular plant or animal will be named’ (1992: 263; emphasis is Berlin’s). ‘Phenotypic salience’ (which has sometimes been used synonymously with perceptual salience) refers to perceptually salient discontinuity, or ‘decided gaps’ (Hunn 1999: 47), in the natural world, which in principle correspond to taxonomic distance in scientific biology. Even more recently, Hunn has proposed further refinements in the analysis of what he similarly refers to as the ‘size factor’ and ‘ecological salience’, as perceptual components that, in addition to phenotypic salience, can affect the likelihood of a natural kind being recognized by folk classifiers (1999: 48). Hunn then contrasts these three factors to a fourth factor, which he calls ‘cultural salience’ and equates with what others (including Turner 1988: 274; see also Hunn 1982) have termed ‘cultural significance’.²

If nothing else, these refinements underscore the extent to which pan-human perception and cognition interact in complex ways with patterns of behaviour, interests, and values specific to a particular culture. Yet while analytically separating the factors of size, ecological salience and phenotypic salience advance our understanding of a more general perceptual salience, the concept of ‘cultural salience’ — a ‘variable “interest in” or “attention to” a set of organisms’ that differs from one society to another (Hunn 1999: 49) — remains conspicuously undeveloped.³

Quite apart from the question of whether ‘cultural salience’ is properly treated as comparable in this way to the several factors of perceptual salience, it should later become apparent that cultural significance (as I would prefer to call it) has in fact very little influence on either the form of Nage ethnotaxonomy or the definition of its component categories. Nevertheless, if cultural significance is to have any use as a reference to something distinct from pan-human percepts, then, at the very least, one needs to distinguish between utilitarian value (for example, whether an animal or plant is exploited as food or as a source of raw materials) and symbolic significance (for example, whether it is believed to manifest a spiritual being or serves as a metaphor for human qualities or a social status). Noteworthy in this respect is one finding of the present work, that while the majority of Nage bird categories figure in symbolic representations (Chapter 8), very few possess distinctive utilitarian value (see pp. 8–14). The majority of birds can indeed be consumed as food, but this of course does not distinguish one category from another, nor in Nage ethnotaxonomy does it equivocally associate a number of kinds as members of a more inclusive class, the existence of a utilitarian (and non-taxonomic) category of game birds labelled piko kolo notwithstanding (see Chapter 3)⁴ .

As I further demonstrate, both utilitarian and symbolic values of birds are as much grounded in perceptual, and then mostly visual, attributes as is Nage ethno-ornithological taxonomy. Indeed, the basic components of both utilitarian and symbolic associations of individual bird categories can themselves be shown to be, in the first instance, perceptually based units of ethnotaxonomy. The point may be briefly illustrated with reference to diurnal birds of prey, a group that figures prominently in all aspects of Nage ethno-ornithology. With regard to their negative economic significance as predators of domestic fowls, these birds can be conceived as composing a utilitarian class. Yet what defines them as a threat to fowls (and thus lends them a specific utilitarian value) is precisely their physical form and behaviour; and as I show in Chapter 4, the same perceptual features crucially inform their (equally negative) symbolic significance.

In this general connection, in Chapter 2 I introduce a concept of ‘simple distinctive features’, which comprise locally recognized empirical attributes defining bird categories (or, more particularly, ‘folk generics’) as the smallest, most exclusive units of a general purpose ethno-ornithological classification. In many instances, these attributes, abstracted from Nage mundane discourse about birds, further provide the focal elements of the symbolic representation of a category (including similative usage). As this may suggest, in regard to their common origin in empirical observation, the difference between ethnotaxonomic and symbolic discourse lies mainly in how percepts are cognitively processed. As I demonstrate in the next two chapters, Nage ethnotaxonomy straightforwardly reflects observation of palpable discontinuity, identifying individual specimens on physical grounds as members of exclusive categories and, in a number of cases, simultaneously classifying two or more such categories together, as members of more inclusive classes — thus giving rise to a taxonomic hierarchy.

By contrast, symbolic representations of birds — including what may be called their ‘symbolic classification’ — are constructed more selectively, by focusing (Sperber 1975) on particular perceptual features, which may be largely or partly affected by a factor of cultural interest (see, for example, Chapter 4 for the linking of owls, diurnal raptors, and other birds as a function of a pronounced Nage concern with murderous, nocturnally active, and cannibalistic witches). These features further facilitate conceptual linkage with non-ornithological things, so as to create representations of a completely different (that is, non-zoological) sort. In fact, so extensive is the transformation that the resulting classification is arguably one constituted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Studies in environmental anthropology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ethno-ornithological classification: generic categories and ethnotaxonomy
• 3 Intermediate categories, binary associations, and nomenclature
• 4 Things that go po in the night: ethnotaxonomy and symbolic classification
• 5 Spiritual birds
• 6 Birds as omens and taboo
• 7 Hibernating swallows, kite stones, and the legless nightjar: some curiosities of Nage bird knowledge
• 8 Birds in myth and metaphor
• 9 The story of Tupa Lélu, or how birds of prey became chicken thieves
• 10 Comparisons and conclusions
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index