Narrating the gate and the path: place and precedence in South West Timor

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the historical and cultural dimensions of contemporary settlement patterns in the southern central highlands of West Timor. The Atoin meto people of this region are subsistent agriculturalists who live out their lives in the restricted world of household and hamlet. Social networks within and between hamlets are organised on the basis of dispersed clan group affiliations and marriage alliance. Knowledge of the past is recorded and expressed through an oral narrative tradition which provides a legitimating discourse for establishing claims in the present. In this thesis I draw on one exemplary oral narrative from the prominent clan group Nabuasa. This provides a basis for reconstructing the former political order in the study area of southern Amanuban. The analysis of the narrative reveals that the Nabuasa clan came to occupy the central position of an autonomous political system founded on an expansionary cult of warfare and headhunting. The history of twentieth century southern Amanuban has been one of diverse change. I argue, however, that Atoin meto communities maintain an orientation to the political order of the past and the central Nabuasa position within it. The legacy of this orientation may be observed in the patterns of land tenure, marriage alliance, and the system of localised political authority. These practical concerns are symbolised and represented through an inherited corpus of metaphorical idioms expressed in a pervasive dyadic form. These recurrent metaphors of life, such as gate and path, trunk and tip, female and male, and inside and outside, express cultural notions of relative precedence and social continuity. In these and other ways the present is constituted in terms of the past. Social reproduction is ordered by a system of asymmetrically structured social relations, articulated by a complex of gift exchange and legitimated and framed by recourse to historical precedent.