Ritual Voices of Revelation
The Origin Narratives of the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia
- 358 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
This is a study of a collection of oral compositions of the Rotenese of eastern Indonesia. Recited in semantic parallelism, these compositions require a strict pairing of all words to produce correspondingly ordered verses. These narrative verses create an elevated discourseāa 'scriptural voice'āintended to reveal the origins of Rotenese cultural life. The translations and exegeses of these origin narratives offer a work of world-class poetic imagination that recounts a dynastic contest between the Sun and Moon and Lords of the Ocean Sea and its epic consequences.
As background to the presentation of these narratives, this study provides a description of Rotenese life expressed in the complementary pairs that the Rotenese themselves use to categorise their world. A concluding chapter examines the Rotenese acquisition of Christianity and the subsequent retelling of the Biblical Genesis in Rotenese parallel verse, thus continuing the general examination of the use of parallelism as elevated ritual discourse. Gathered from poets from two domains on the island, most of these compositions date from fieldwork in 1965ā66 and in 1973. The publication of these materials represents the summation of more than fifty years of research.
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Table of contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The metaphoric creation of a complementary world
- 3. Background and exegesis of the origin narratives of Termanu
- 4. The origin narratives of Termanu
- 5. Background and exegesis on the origin narratives of Thie
- 6. The origin narratives of Thie
- 7. Christian narratives of origin
- Appendix I: A portrait gallery of poets
- Appendix II: The idea ofĀ topogeny and its use in the origin narratives ofĀ theĀ Rotenese
- Bibliography
- Index