Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples’ Lives

224 Pages·1998·5.56 MB·English

by  Janet Hoskins

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