Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples’ Lives PDF
Preview Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples’ Lives
BIOGRAPHICAL OBJECTS This page intentionally left blank BIOGRAPHICAL OBJECTS How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives JANET HOSKINS ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 1998 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue New York, NY 10017 Published in Great Britain in 1998 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 Copyright © 1998 by Roudedge Design and Typography: Jack Donner All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoskins, Janet. Biographical objects : how things tell the stories of people's lives / Janet Hoskins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 199) and index. ISBN 0-415-92011-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper). — ISBN 0-415-92012-4 (pbk.) 1. Ethnology—Indonesia—Kodi. 2. Ethnology—Biographical methods. 3. Material culture—Indonesia—Kodi. 4. Kodi (Indonesia)—Biography. 5. Kodi (Indonesia)—Social life and customs. I. Tide. GN635.I65H68 1998 306'.09598'6—dc21 97-40989 CIP Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. For Valerio, In Memoriam Ndara ole ura The horse companion of my spirit Bangga ole ndewa The dog companion of my soul A ando koti lighya nggu The post that my ginger vine creeps up A nggallu mbaku haghu nggu The enclosure of my tobacco patch Bu otungguka henene If you leave me now Ku kapepe nja pa todi I will be the basket left without a lid Ku halidi nja hamera I will be a container without its counterpart This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. THE BETEL BAG 25 A Sack for Souls and Stories 3. DOMESTICATING ANIMALS AND WIVES 59 Women's Fables of Protest 4. THE ROYAL SNAKE SHROUD 83 Local Weaving and Colonial Kingship 5. SPINDLES AND SPINSTERS 15 The Loss of Romantic Love 6. THE DRUM AND MASCULINITY 137 A Healer's Story 7. GREN BOTLES AND GREN DEATH 161 Modernity and the Ephemeral 8. CONCLUSIONS 183 Stories and Objects in Lived Dualities REFERENCES 19 INDEX 21 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book will appear almost twenty years after I first came to the Kodi district of Sumba. Doctoral dissertation research, from 1979 to 1981, was supported by the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Coun- cil, and the National Science Foundation, under the auspices of the Indone- sian Academy of Sciences (LIPI) and Universitas Nusa Cendana, Kupang. Six months of additional fieldwork in 1984 and a three-month trip in 1985 were funded by the anthropology department of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. In 1986 I returned to Kodi with filmmaker Laura Whitney, supported by the Faculty Research and Innovation Fund of the University of Southern California. In 1988 we continued our research project for six more months with funding from NSF grant no. BMS 8704498 and the Fulbright Consortium for Collaborative Research Abroad. In 1996 I received a University Teacher's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided relief from coursework and some additional travel funds. I am grateful to all of these agencies for having made this form of long-term fieldwork possible. My research began as a graduate student at Harvard University, under the guidance of Marie Jeanne Adams, David Maybury-Lewis, and Stanley Tambiah. In the period 1984—85,1 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Research School of Pacific Studies in the anthropology department, then headed by Roger Keesing and James J. Fox. Many of the ideas I have finally developed here germinated in lively discussions with members of a research group on gender, power, and production—Marilyn Strathern, Nicholas Thomas, Deborah Gewertz, Frederick Errington, James F. Weiner, Jill Nash, Chris- tine Jourdain, Michael Young, and Greg Acciaioli. I began work on women's narratives in 1990-91, when I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and part of an interdisciplinary group focusing on the historical turn in the social sciences, led byJ oan Scott and Clifford Geertz. I tried to work out early versions of these chapters in lectures given in 1992 at the Institute for Social Anthropology in Oslo, Norway, headed by Signe Howell. In 1995-96,1 was a scholar associate at the Getty Research Institute
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