Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Webb Keane is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

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Signs of Recognition

University of California Press

But then how ridiculous would be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them! For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and which were the realities.
Plato, Cratylus, 432

Late one night in September 1986, I was in the high hilltop village of Prai Maleru. It was several days into a ritual sponsored by Sulung, an important and elderly ritual specialist (ratu ), to inter his parents' bones in a new tomb. This was an occasion for him not only to fulfill his own long outstanding obligations to his parents but also to call in the debts others owed him, to put forth an autobiographical justification in a long series of orations, and, incidentally, to lay claim to a bit of disputed land just below the village. Each night, old women sat in the front room by the bundles of bones, talking quietly, occasionally bursting into stylized but wrenching keening songs. Several neighboring houses were crammed with scores of visitors, drawn by obligations, the opportunity to make their own demands of the host, the pleasure of the dances, the appeal of the oratory, the company, and the feasting. Outside, in the plaza in front of the house, gongs played, a weary singer grew hoarse, and men danced while young women watched and encouraged them with periodic ululations. On the veranda, ratu Sulung rested between orations. Inside, I huddled with several other men around the hearth against the chill of the dry-season night. Ubu Kaledi, a local government official, was doing most of the talking. His clan (kabisu ), an important exchange partner of ratu Sulung's, had also been involved in a long series of disputes with ratu Sulung's kabisu. Tensions were exacerbated by personal differences. Ratu Sulung was a vehement, foul-mouthed, and often obstreperous opponent of the rising forces of Christianity. Ubu Kaledi, in

contrast, was involved in an uncomfortable effort to lay claim simultaneously to the prestige of modernity, government office, and church membership and to the status of the ritual title to which he believed himself heir.

I was being lulled to sleep by the familiar course of the talk as the men rehashed old disputes about cattle promised and received, differences of opinion about ritual procedures, insults alleged, reputations impugned, the baroque twists of matrimonial politics. In the midst of this, I perked up, realizing that Ubu Kaledi had turned to a rare topic in these circles, national politics. His interest in the national scene was unusual in Anakalang, where, in the words of the American politician Tip O'Neill, "all politics is local" and where for many people "Indonesia" is a distant abstraction. Even more unusual were his heterodox opinions. He began holding forth on the alleged Communist coup attempt of 1965, which led to a convulsion of killings in many parts of the country, the downfall of Sukarno, and the birth of the present New Order regime of President Soeharto. In contrast to the official line, he maintained that the coup was really a matter of rivalries within the military. Musing on the nasty goings-on in Jakarta, he commented 'That's the way it always is, it's all politik ,' using an Indonesian word that usually connotes the disorder that arises out of self-interested intrigue and factionalism. He then drew an analogy from close to home: 'It's like here in Anakalang: when we kajiC la , that's politik.'

The analogy was startling, and is emblematic of a problem that lies at the heart of this book. Ubu Kaledi here used kajiC la (negotiation speech) to refer to the full range of ritual speech. This is a highly formal register that stands in marked contrast to everyday ways of talking. It is defined in particular by indirection, density of metaphor, and strict poetic form. Said to have been handed down unchanged from the ancestors, ritual speech is required for all significant interactions, both among the living and between the living and the dead. Its performance style, poetic structure, and ancestral origins all give it the aura of eternal, harmonious order. Even Anakalangese who identify themselves with modernity, Christianity, and the state usually place enormous value in ritual speech, which they describe as central to local identity, ancient wisdom, collective values and social solidarity, and the sense of order that enables them to resist the chaos threatened by contemporary life. In other words, ritual speech should stand for everything that opposes the national scene, modernity, factionalism, and disorder of politik. Likewise, ritual speech exemplifies the ethnographic image that places like

Anakalang often present to the outside world as vestigial reserves of ritualized, traditional order (see Keane 1995a). And yet here was Ubu Kaledi, whose most vigorous efforts and ambitions hinged on masterful use of ritual speech, identifying it with the discreditable activities of politik. Notice that he was nor suggesting that ritual speech disguises or overcomes politik. In this, and other casual comments, he was suggesting a stronger, even an inherent, relationship between that which is most highly valued and orderly and that which is most devalued and disorderly.

At one level, this conjunction of ritual, politics, and disorder should not be surprising. As Clifford Geertz ([1959] 1973a) pointed out long ago in his account of a troubled Javanese funeral (and as the violence of the European Reformation might remind us), rituals are well suited to express or catalyze political tensions. To the extent that rituals are public and consequential, their forms, materials, personnel, and timing can all serve as tools of strategy and themselves become bones of contention. But analyses of ritual and politics often approach the two as involving distinct principles. Thus, for Geertz, the problems in the Javanese funeral arise from a lag between cultural persistence and rapid social change, a peasant ritual clashing with an urban context ([1959] 1973a: 169). Other approaches treat ritual as a medium for conflicts that are "really" about something else, be it, for example, factional strife, control over resources, structures of domination, or resistance to hegemonic discourses. But this book begins with a somewhat different concern, with the way in which the potentials for slippage and conflict might be immanent in ritual form itself. Moreover, these potentials are not necessarily confined to ritual. The formality, consequentiality, and reflexivity of ritual bring to the fore certain dilemmas implicit in the very nature of representationb dilemmas that, I suggest, are thoroughly implicated with general problems of power, authority, and agency.

I was intrigued by Ubu Kaledi's view of things, because over time my own experience of the high and often tense formality of social relations in Anakalang seemed to bear it out. It seems I was not alone in the sense that ritual events bear disturbing undercurrents. When I returned to Anakalang in 1993, there was much talk about government restrictions (as yet not entirely successful) on certain kinds of ceremonial events. Responding to the state's ever-growing pressure for economic rationalization, the regent considered feasting to be...