The evidence of comparative linguistics and of archaeology for the historical origin and spread of Austronesian-speaking peoples is so overwhelming in its general conclusions that most research in other disciplines has shifted to ask more specific questions. These questions concern the transformations that occurred as a result of this spread of the Austronesians — both the internal developments within individual Austronesian cultures as well as those developments that resulted from contact among Austronesian groups and with other populations and cultures. Neither the biology, the language nor the culture of the Austronesians has remained static over the past 5000 years. It is these historical developments that the papers in the second section of this volume address.
Serjeantson and Gao, for example, in their paper argue for an evolutionary perspective that clearly recognizes the biological changes that have occurred. They focus on the evolutionary forces that have effected changes in the genetic make-up of the populations of Oceania. Whereas the Polynesians share many genetic features with Island Southeast Asians, they have also acquired genes from Melanesian populations and, importantly, have undergone further evolution, losing certain genes, in their migrations into the Pacific. The result is a genetic repertoire that is certainly different from that of the earliest Austronesians.
The Serjeantson and Gao paper also addresses a key question raised about the early Austronesians. Otto Dempwolff, who was one of the founding figures in the development of comparative Austronesian linguistics, served for a long period as a medical doctor in what was, at the time, German New Guinea. In 1904, following an earlier suggestion by another German doctor, Danneil, Dempwolff speculated that malaria may have exerted a significant selective pressure on early Austronesian populations whereas the non-Austronesian populations had, it appeared, developed a degree of immunity that gave them a selective advantage in highly malarial areas. By this argument, it was the islands with the least malaria that provided the safest pathway for the spread of the early Austronesians. Based on extensive research reported in Serjeantson et al. (1992), the Serjeantson and Gao paper lends support to Dempwolff’s idea suggesting that the early Austronesians may indeed have arrived in Melanesia to find a malarial region inhabited by peoples comparatively well adapted to the environment and therefore it would have been prudent for them to have kept to the small islands and to have continued eastward.
The paper by Bhatia, Easteal and Kirk makes similar observations in examining the different genetic make-up of Austronesian- and non-Austronesian-(or Papuan)-speaking populations within Melanesia. Based on earlier research, Kirk has identified three patterns of linguistic and genetic differentiation based on unique allele combinations: 1) an Australoid pattern that relates to the Aboriginal populations of Australia, 2) a proto-Papuan pattern whose highest frequencies occur in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and parts of Irian Jaya, with lower frequencies along the New Guinea coast and still lower frequencies in the Solomons, Banks Islands and Polynesian Outliers, and, 3) an Austronesian pattern that is not found in Australia and rarely occurs in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. The highest frequency of this pattern is to be found in some coastal areas of north and east New Guinea, the Solomons, Banks Islands, the western Carolines and Fiji. Bhatia, Easteal and Kirk show that while language may be an indicator of genetic difference in broad geographical terms, in Melanesia it is not an adequate discriminant in specific cases.
Dutton’s chapter points towards a similar conclusion. He examines the types of contact-induced change which have been observed in the Austronesian languages of Melanesia and discusses the problems posed by such change for the classification of the languages of the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian. The complex relationships between the Austronesian- and non-Austronesian-speakers, particularly in eastern Indonesia and Melanesia where contact has had such a long history, raises fundamental questions for the study of the cultures of the region.
The past poses questions as well as providing answers. Based on the linguistic and archaeological knowledge of Austronesian expansion, the anthropological contributions to this volume consider various questions regarding the structure and distribution of contemporary Austronesian communities.
Fox looks at the diversity of Austronesian societies and the proliferation of technical terms that have been used by observers to describe these societies. In the face of these diverse descriptive appellations, he focuses on a number of common features among virtually all Austronesian societies: the concern with the tracing of local origins and the reliance on a variety of narratives for the construction of a shared past. Thus the sharing of a journey may be used to define relatedness whereas claims to precedence, often based on the order of events in particular narratives, figure prominently as means of defining social differences.
The paper considers two formal models of social differentiation among Austronesian societies, the one involving a process of “lateral expansion”, the hiving-off of groups of relatively equal status to form new groups and the other involving a process of “apical demotion” among differentiated segments of society, often combined with a concomitant expulsion of high ranking segments to form new groups or opponent factions within society. Fox suggests that these two systems of differentiation rely on different structured narratives of the past to base their construction of origins and their determination of precedence. Thus, for example, in systems of lateral expansion, one encounters what Fox refers to as “spatialization of time” in origin narratives.
Sather in his paper addresses a number of questions that relate to Austronesian-speaking sea nomads and rainforest hunter-gatherers. If, as the linguistic and archaeological evidence indicates, the early Austronesians had developed, in addition to their sailing technology, the capacity to cultivate both rice and millet and, as they expanded, adopted a repertoire of other cultivated plants, such as banana and sugar cane, yams and taro, then certainly those contemporary Austronesian cultures without cultivation cannot be seen as exemplars of a prototypical Austronesian society.
Sather’s examination of the case of the Sama-Bajau, who are a widespread group of nomadic fishing people, is particularly instructive. Instead of looking at Sama-Bajau sea nomads as a single distinguishable population, he considers all the Sama-speaking populations, both settled and nomadic, as a group of related peoples whose languages can be traced to a proto-form that existed in the first millennium AD. Linguistic reconstructions for proto-Sama indicate a familiarity with farming, pottery-making, weaving and even iron-forging. Although predominantly oriented to the sea, present-day Sama-speakers show a range of adaptations to land and sea. These groups include farmers as well as fishermen and traders. In fact, within this larger group, nomadic boat populations are a small minority whose way of life represents a particular historical adaptation to expanding maritime trade. Thus Sather suggests that the early Austronesians, like the early Sama populations, had a diverse economy based on both foraging and farming, hunting and horticulture which over time led to different local adaptations.
Thomas also develops a set of contrasting models to consider patterns of exchange in Oceania. One form of exchange involves the giving of like-for-like, emphasizing the quantity of goods that are exchanged, particularly the competitive exchange of food among localized regionally undifferentiated groups; the other form of exchange involves the giving of dissimilar valuables among regionally extensive and differentiated groups organized on a hierarchical basis. Thomas then illustrates the working of such models both historically and regionally in Oceania.
Differing forms of exchange, the “directionality” of exchange, the “gendering” of exchange goods, and the differential value of women in exchange have been major foci of discussion in the Austronesian literature. This is particularly true of the anthropological literature on eastern Indonesia since the time of F.A.E. van Wouden, whose dissertation made the exchange systems of the region a critical focus of his analysis. Thomas’s paper is of direct comparative relevance to these continuing Austronesian research concerns.
The concluding papers in this volume examine the ways in which Austronesian societies have adapted to outside influences, particularly those of the world religions — first, Hinduism and Buddhism and then Islam and Christianity. Supomo looks at the earliest Indian contacts with Indonesian societies and the changes in religious and political organization that this brought about, particularly the dissemination of literacy that eventually led to an indigenous adaptation and transformation of Indian literary works, such as the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. Inscriptions in Sanskrit gave way to a number of inscriptions in Old Malay during the time of Śrīwijaya (late 7th century AD) and to a proliferation of inscriptions in Old Javanese that lasted for a period of six centuries beginning in AD 804. These early inscriptions provide some of the oldest examples of Austronesian languages preserved for examination. The Javanese inscriptions and later literary works, which Supomo refers to as “temples of language” as opposed to “temples of stone”, offer glimpses of social life defined by recognizable Austronesian categories.
Supomo notes that Old Javanese inscriptions refer to local indigenous communities as wanua [PMP *banua] and their inhabitants as anak wanua. The councils that governed these communities consisted of elders referred to as rama [PAn *ama meaning ‘father’]. Wanua were grouped in territorial units referred to as watak and these watak, in turn, were headed by rakai, a designation which Supomo argues is derived from the term for ‘elder’ or ‘grandfather’ [PAn *aki]. This early Javanese political system was presided over by a figure given the title ratu [PMP *datu, meaning ‘ancestor, chief, lord’].
The system utilizes a recognizable kinship idiom which can be related both to proto-Austronesian and to contemporary Javanese. Using the evidence from Old Javanese texts, Fox has shown that earlier Javanese kinship is entirely Austronesian in structure with little Sanskrit influence. Indeed the semantic structure of modern Javanese kinship gives evidence of a clear continuity and development from Old Javanese (Fox 1986). As Supomo points out, one must look to Bali even more than Java for many of the continuities with older Javanese traditions because the “temples of language” which he describes were transported and transplanted there after the coming of Islam. It is interesting therefore to note that local communities organized in terms of banua and presided over by village councils still continue to function in the upland areas of Bali today (Reuter, pers.comm. 1994).
Like Supomo, Reid also examines the continuities and changes that occurred in response to outside religious and political influences — the coming of Islam and then Christianity among the maritime populations of Southeast Asia from the fifteenth century onward. These sailing and trading populations included Malays, Javanese, Chams and Tagalogs (“Luzons”) who had long-standing historical relationships with one another and with the populations of the hinterlands for whom they provided an opening to the sea. The new religions brought about rapid changes in matters of identity — dress, speech, deportment and diet — as well as more gradual but profound changes in sexual morality, in the ritual role of women, and in relationships to the sacred, including attitudes toward the spirit world and the dead.
Yengoyan’s paper continues this theme in examining the diverse ways in which Christianity, promulgated through different colonial institutions and cultures, has transformed the cultures of the Philippines and the Pacific. In this transformation of local Austronesian societies, instead of fostering any one particular form of society, the combination of western colonialism and Christianity has proffered a concept of individuality, stressing the roles, rights and responsibilities of individuals in all social relationships. It is this concept that continues to exert a profound effect on Austronesian societies throughout the region.
The papers published here were all presented initially during a three-day conference entitled “The Austronesians in History: Common Origins and Diverse Transformations”, held in the Coombs Lecture Theatre in the Australian National University in November 1990. The conference was organized under the auspices of the Comparative Austronesian Project in the Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU. In accord with the aims of this project the papers were requested to be on a broad scale — comparative, interdisciplinary and historical in orientation. The results provide a survey of some of the most significant facets of the Austronesian trajectory through time and space, although as with all books of this kind there are obviously some gaps.
It is worthy of note that this volume falls into a tradition of multi-disciplinary works on the histories of the various major language families of the world. Previously, such volumes have tended to stress archaeological and linguistic information at the expense of other sources, often because they have explicitly researched the interfaces between these two disciplines (e.g. Ehret and Posnansky 1982 for Africa; Renfrew 1987, Mallory 1989, Markey and Greppin 1990 for Indo-European). It is apparent that such volumes have the potential to generate broad comparative debate. Hopefully, this volume on the Austronesians will do the same, particularly with its broadening of the disciplinary input to include anthropology, biology and documentary history. Austronesia today includes many highly significant developing nations; an understanding of its historical raison d’être must be seen as an important goal, both for research and for education, by and for Austronesians and non-Austronesians alike.