Table of Contents
This paper examines the common Austronesian reliance on similar idioms and metaphors to define ideas of origins and on the use of narratives for the construction of a shared past. Thus common origin — not just “descent” —becomes a prime marker of identity. Among Austronesians, the sharing of a journey may be part of this reckoning of social ancestry. Within this cultural framework, the paper considers two formal systems of differentiation: the one, a system of lateral expansion; the other, a system of apical demotion with concomitant predatory expulsion. Each system relies on a differently structured narrative of the past on which to base its construction of origins.
Austronesian societies offer a spectacle of diversity. There are at least eight hundred contemporary Austronesian societies, each of which can be considered to possess a distinct, if not distinctive, social organization; and, if one were to add to this number those Austronesian societies on whose early social formations we possess reasonable historical information, this diversity is further increased.
Such social diversity ranges from that of simple hunter-horticulturalists such as the Buid of Mindoro, the Ilongot of Luzon, the Penan of Borneo, the Sakkudei of the Mentawai islands, or the Huaulu of Ceram to the elaborate command states of the Merina of Madagascar, the Javanese of the Majapahit and Mataram periods, or the complex island kingdoms of Tonga, Tahiti, and Hawaii; from migratory sea populations such as the Sama-Bajau, or the trading societies of the Moluccas and of the Massim with their inter-island networks of ritualized exchange valuables to the predatory seafaring societies of the Malays, Bugis, Makassarese and Tausug.
A diversity of island environments has called forth adaptations that have also spawned great social variety: coastal sago palm exploiters such as the Waropen; elusive jungle nomads like the Kubu of Sumatra; tiny fishing populations on atolls in the Pacific; riverine peoples such as the Dayak, Kenyah or Kayan of Borneo; the maize-cultivating mountain populations like the Atoni Meto of Timor, for whom a view of the sea was once considered distressing; dryland palm tappers such as the Rotinese and Savunese in eastern Indonesia; cattle herding peoples such as the Bara of south central Madagascar; yam, taro, and sweet-potato gardeners of the Melanesian islands, some of whom, like those on Goodenough Island or the Trobriands, flaunt their harvests in feasting for recognition; expansive swidden-rice cultivators like the Iban of Borneo; or settled rice farmers like the Ifugao of Luzon with centuries of collective investment in elaborate terraces.
Religion has also contributed to this diversity. Islam has influenced the societies of western Austronesia as has Hinduism and Buddhism; and Christianity has had its influence through the whole of the Austronesian world from Madagascar to Hawaii and from the Philippines to Timor. There are also scattered Austronesian populations who have taken on no world religion — or, have even formally rejected such possibilities. Such populations are often identified, by the nineteenth century categorical designation, as “animists”. These Austronesians share with most other Austronesian peoples, though perhaps in more explicit fashion, a general belief in life and in the interrelationship of different forms of life. In the Austronesian world, the mosque, the temple, the church, or simply a tree set among a pile of rocks is part of the diversity of social life.
Confronted with this spectacle of diversity, the question is whether there exists among these many societies social features that may be identifiable as characteristically Austronesian. Certainly in answer to this question, anthropologists investigating societies in different regions of the Austronesian world have fashioned a formidable array of technical designations. We have cognatic and non-cognatic societies; lineal and nonlineal, patrilineal, matrilineal, bilineal, quasi-unilineal, ambilineal, and double unilineal societies; societies with kindreds, with ramages, with bilateral descent groups, with optative descent groups, with status lineages, with circulating connubium, generalized exchange, symmetric and asymmetric marriage. Sorting one’s way through the formal technicalities of all of this apparatus is almost as daunting as investigating the original diversity of societies which this apparatus was intended to illuminate.
A singular difficulty with the current sociological apparatus available for the study of Austronesian societies is that it has been shaped within specific regions. Reflecting the particularities of these regions, the terminology of one area does not travel well — and certainly not as well as the Austronesians themselves — from one region to another. Instead of encompassing the full sweep of Austronesian diversity, our present terminology is partisan to particular variants of the whole. Another less apparent difficulty is that this sociological apparatus makes implicit assumptions about the nature of social life which the Austronesians themselves do not seem to share. Austronesian ideas about persons, about the union of persons, about social derivation and identity, about sociability itself, such ideas are not — or, were not — those of nineteenth century Europe from which our sociological traditions derive.
In the study of Austronesian societies and their transformations, it is best to reexamine our own premises and to focus on a few basic features of a general nature. At the same time, it is essential to attend closely to the concepts of the Austronesians themselves expressed in idioms and metaphors of a common linguistic and cultural heritage. In the process, it is inevitable that we abandon some of our previous preoccupations[1] and with them jettison the conceptual encumbrances that have limited a comparative understanding of the Austronesians.
This effort may give us a fresh start on a new voyage of investigation. My purpose in this paper therefore will be to examine a few key ideas that recur throughout the Austronesian-speaking world and to consider their implications in the transformation of Austronesian societies. In this paper, I will look first at the concept of “origin” among the Austronesians and then, from this vantage point, at specific formal structures of social differentiation. I will illustrate my discussion by selective citations of particular well-known Austronesian ethnographies. My intention is not to create a composite picture of Austronesian society but just the opposite — to identify differences that derive from shared similarities.