Author: Cawa

This author has written 20 articles

Ko’a

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  • Post category:Palu'e ikat

Ko’a is the name of a ’ceremonial domain’ on Palu’e, one of the seven domains that adhere to agricultural cycles beginning and ending with the sacrifice of water buffalo. Dr. Michael Vischer in the first significant text on Palu’e textiles (in Hamilton 1994), a fine anthropological account of the relationship between Palu’e ideas connected with textiles to the system of Palu’e socio-cosmic thought, mentions that interlocutors related the word koa (lit. ’boil’), which relates to the fermentation of the indigo vat, to Ko’a. While this could be a reflection of the ideology of ‘precedence’, because this exists in every domain, which Vischer notes, a more obvious connection would be ko’a ‘to warp’, to set up the ikated warp yarns before dyeing, and the final setup of all the warp yarns before weaving. The pronunciation is the same, the apostrophe marks the consonant glottal stop, which is frequent in sara Lu’a. Ko’a is indeed one of the most traditional domains today, or the one where the inhabitants all learn how to togo ‘chant-dance’ and more. In one of their origin stories the people spread from Ko’a to the rest of the island. Anyhow, linguistically, the meaning of ko’a does not speak against this belief, perhaps the name of the domain is taken from the word, and weaving is ingrained in the culture. Newly born girls are presented with weaving tools at the name giving ceremony bundo ngara, and woven textiles are the prime good given by wife-givers in response to the…

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Membuat rumbai / make fringes

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I had so many shawls without fringes or tassels at home, and I could not make them, I improvised and tried several ways but it took such a long time and the result was poor. I was lucky to meet Mr Gofur at the Rumah Rakuji stand at a modest exhibition, and he showed me the method which makes it so much easier and faster, and better, after an hour of practice or so. Video: Membuat rumbai / make fringes See also Sépa – Palu'e scarfs/shawls

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Nangge Liru, a myth about the origin of weaving

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Available as WAV-file with annotations, item SD1-037, at https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/38940Preliminary translation, still close to the transcription style. Story told by Lengu Nande. Notes: Areca fruit and piper betle, known together as sirih pinang in Indonesian, wua mutu in sara Lu'a, is a cultural pastime with ceremonial significance. Liru means 'the sky' or 'the heavens'. Raw rice grains, unhusked rice, siwe, is a ritual agent offered primarily to the deceased, the ancestors.That woman.. her parents lived up in the heavens. She had married a man from a village down by the edge of the world, so she lived in that village. There was no warping, and nobody to teach how to warp and weave. Then one moonlit night she talked to her husband. When the sun was about to rise, she stayed with their child, while her man, because the low tide was peaking, went searching for sea snails. He went searching for sea snails, while she and the child stayed at home. She cooked for the child, a small pot of rice. She cooked for her child, because she wanted to go up, up to her parents. When the rice was done, she told her child, “Hey, when your father comes tell him that if he is truly wealthy, go get me above Dheko pere réta wa Nangge Liru.”With a chicken and a coconut bowl of raw rice she went to the areca tree near the house. She asked the tree, “Areca, are you short, short until beneath the soil, or…

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Scania – Nordic Bathing Paradise

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Scania – the Nordic bathing paradise: This guidebook to the best beaches and lakes for swimming and bathing in Sweden's southernmost province "Skåne" is not outdated, the sea and the lakes are still there, and almost everything else mentioned. There a few changes in the landscape, especially in the cities, which will just add to the fun of exploring – the book is meant to inspire, have fun. Published in 2010. With Fredrik Pettersson. Still available in the bookshops, or from the authors, and you'll still be able to find the smoked fish.

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From Language to Ikat

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Stefan (Cawa) and Ratu, were exploring the semantic domain of weaving with senior weavers and learned names of sarong (dhama) types that they hitherto did not know of: Bhejo, Loka, Sa loi, Hura..  The three first mentioned cloths still existed on the island, but in other domains (or villages) and in their styles; the main pattern of this Loka was different. Where we lived, in the Kéli and Ndéo domains, Bhejo and Loka were not in use any more. We were very lucky to find two old, over a century, cloths stored away in the village Ndeo. Although in poor condition, such old cloths are extremely rare on Palu’e these days. Before this we had never seen a Palu’e cloth in natural dyes. It is said that people, ata turis, or collectors came during the 90s and bought naturally dyed cloths. Another reason why old cloths are gone is of course that they become worn out until they are in such a poor condition that the owner disposes of them. Most people have not understood the value of a ragged cloth, for heritage, to copy, even to sell to a cloth enthusiast. The fate of the discovered cloths were a little bit better. We had two copies made of the Loka and one of the Bhejo. Later I heard that the Loka had been forgotten outside in the rains, and fell into the mud. Half of the piece was saved (imaged). As for the Bhejo, it was borrowed by someone,…

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Article: Phonologic variation in Palu’e […]

Phonologic variation in Palu’e, a language from Eastern Indonesia, and the devising of an orthographic system. Abstract: This article presents a phonological description of the Palu’e language variants and reflects on the problems of representing the language in writing. Verifiable lexical and phono-logical data are made available and an orthography is introduced. Data and analysis is drawn from a comprehensive documentation, and specific recordings of three speakers/language variants reading the same wordlist, available in an online audio collection. The phonetically transcribed recording of one speaker is compared with the other two and the corpus-based phonological description, and provided in an annotated appendix. The annotated recordings support the estimate of >99% lexical congruence and mutual intelligibility between variants. From a multi-variant perspective several phonemes are in free variation with each other. /tʃ/ does not occur mid-word/second syllable in the interior variants that use the initial PMP *c instead of the coastal /s/, but is in complementary distribution with mid-word /dʒ/. /s/ is neither in complementary distribution with /tʃ/ nor /dʒ/ in the coastal variants. Several Palu’e variants exhibit sufficient specific features to be referred to as dialects, including two of the recorded samples, whereas the speech patterns of the phonetically transcribed speaker make sense from the perspective of the surrounding variants. Keywords: Austronesian, Palu’e, Flores, phonology, orthography, language variation, language documentation PDF: Ethnorema_Danerek DOI: 10.23814/ethn.15.19.dan

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Palu’e-Indonesian dictionary

  Palu’e (Sara Lu’a)-Indonesian dictionary with foreword, language description, and Palu’e-English-Indonesian core vocabulary wordllist. Published by UI Press, Depok. Order with the author if you cannot get it through UI press or elsewhere. 2019. 222 pp. See a review here: http://wacana.ui.ac.id/index.php/wjhi/article/view/983/pdf_141  

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Article: Documentation of Palu’e: Storytelling and folklore

Abstract This paper presents Palu’e storytelling on the basis of the on-going work with the Palu’e audio collection, created in the context of language/oral traditions documentation. The main aim is to show that the collection is a research resource for the humanities by discussing and comparing items which are referenced and accessible in the Kaipuleohone Ethnographic Archive. While the  contents of the collection are showcased for this specific presentation, the intention is directed towards the body of digital humanities collections. The problems of what genres should be included, definitions, method of analysis, are discussed and put to the test. Recordings initially focused on oral literature, but expanded to include personal narratives with content related to culture and tradition. The cross-referencing between genres and items demonstrates the benefits of a comparative methodology, and suggests ways of using the collection. Keywords: storytelling; language documentation; oral traditions; folklore; digital humanities; Palu’e. DOI: 10.17510/wacana.v18i3.634 PDF Documentation of Palu'e

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Article: Construction Sacrifice in eastern Indonesia

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The strange world of human sacrifice.. can it be true that in the 20th century foetuses, children, or their heads, were immured into buildings, like in the medieval legends? Most anthropological or sociological analyses tend to explain away this as a rumour, lacking eyewitnesses, and using theory rendering the local or subaltern voices insignificant, as if arising from external social forces and power relations. Why are sacrifices in connection with construction thought to be needed? And how does the type of building correlate with the nature of the sacrifice? Find out all about this in the article below which relies on relatively recent oral history and eyewitness accounts. Anyone immured? Abstract: 20th century. Europeans also featured in such rumours, especially in the eastern Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) and in the context of church construction, several decades after independence. This article discusses previous research on the construction sacrifice rumours and various construction sacrifice traditions which are viewed as local expressions of one ancient tradition. It harnesses oral history as its methodology with crucial eyewitness data from fieldwork in eastern Indonesia and recordings are available in a digital repository (Kaipuleohone). The data affirms that headhunting and kidnapping for construction sacrifice was practised on Flores during the mid to late 1900s. Strong evidence is presented of collaboration between one missionary and his local assistants, particularly a notorious witchdoctor-cum-‘kidnapper-headhunter’. The author concludes that the rumour is not merely folklore. PDF: Construction_sacrifice_Eastern_Indonesia To cite this article: Stefan Danerek (2017) Construction sacrifice in…

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The Short Story Genre in Indonesia

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The Short Story Genre in Indonesia. Book based on M.Phil. thesis. Available as PDF on request, or better, request the Ph.D. dissertation Tjerita and Novel [...], which encompasses this publication. See also here.

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