When fena is compounded to fen-lale (inside a fena) this refers unambiguously to a settlement rather than the clan or the total fena territory. The link between clan and land is not contingent on custodians living on their fena land. In fact, many Buru people live on land belonging to another clan. If men ‘request with respect’ (laha tu hormat) to hunt, make gardens, or even to build villages on the land of others, particularly the land of their mother’s brothers or brothers-in-law, their request should be granted. Since the land belonging to a clan is also constructed as the clan members’ place of origin, there may be a difference between place of origin and place of residence. In any given fen-lale, there will be people from the clan considered to be ‘custodian of the territory’ residing in their place of origin. In addition, people from other clans will also be residing there, usually by agreement with the custodial clan.

The following table shows the number of households found in six south Buru villages and the clan affiliation of those households:

* Indicates the founding clan of each village.

In spite of the permanence associated with English terms such as ‘village’, Buru villages or settlements are not fixed centres of population concentration; they are continually impacted by a semi-nomadic lifestyle, which needs to be understood in light of several different factors. First, various seasonal activities tend to either disperse people or gather them together. Activities associated with hunting and gathering alternate with more intensive periods of agricultural activity. Buru men seek to gain a reputation as good hunters and considerable food comes from their hunting activities, particularly during the peak of east monsoon (June and July) when men ‘enter the jungle’ (rogo mua) to hunt the small marsupial cuscus and wild pig as an exclusively male activity. Women also gather wild vegetables and tubers from the jungle whenever possible. During the west monsoon (November to April), the activities of men and women focus on agriculture and they prefer to be in or near their gardens most of the time.

Swidden agriculture also contributes to mobility on Buru. Typical of non-volcanic islands in equatorial regions, Buru soil is relatively infertile (Bellwood 1985: 12), and shifting agriculture is needed to allow for soil replenishment. The need to make new gardens on a fairly regular basis means that village-to-garden distance increases as people remain in the same settlement over time and new gardens must be made further and further away. The further gardens are from settlements, the more days or weeks people tend to spend in their gardens without returning to the village, particularly in labour-intensive periods of clearing, planting and harvesting. After 20 years or so, it is not uncommon for entire Buru villages to move to a new location, where primary forest is available for new gardens, typical of how settlements are sometimes ‘forced to move to keep up with swiddens’ (Dumond 1969: 337).

This means that people might alternate between a ‘village house’ (hum-fena), a ‘garden house’ (hum-hawa; usually just a hut) and sometimes a ‘hunting house’ (hum-tapa; a forest hut usually associated only with men). The best way of viewing Buru residence is in terms of these several options which people have available to them. At certain times they might live for extended periods in their garden or in the jungle, and at other times they might return to a house in a village. These options are then multiplied, because it is possible to have several hunting huts or garden houses in different gardens several days’ walk apart. In addition to the possibility of living with relatives in other villages, all this provides people with numerous options for residence and with socially significant ways to avoid conflict and asymmetric relations. A common pattern in Christian villages is for people to return to the village from their gardens on Saturday afternoon and leave again on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning after the Sunday church service.

Studies of swidden agriculture have pointed out how this type of agriculture usually requires that relatively large amounts of land per capita be available for agricultural use, and that settlements cannot remain permanently in place (Meggers 1957: 82; Dumond 1969: 337). Both these factors occur on Buru where population density is about 11 people/km². In addition to having limited permanence, the composition of Buru settlements varies significantly with none being very large. ^[2] The smallest type of settlement is a single isolated garden or jungle hut for a single family or hunting party. The term ‘circle of houses’ (hum-lolin) can refer to a small settlement of three to 10 houses (20 to 50 people). This term refers to the settlement and the social group that lives there, as households in this type of settlement usually belong to a single lineage or sub-clan, which is also called hum-lolin. Larger settlements may have 30 to 50 households (150 to 300 people) belonging to several clans (noro). The term fen-lale (inside a fena) can be used to refer to these multi-family settlements. On the coast there are a few multi-ethnic settlements such as the subdistrict centres with more than 200 househoulds.

Several colonial accounts (Willer 1858; Wilken 1875; van der Miesen 1908, 1909a, 1909b) reveal how terminology to describe Buru settlements posed a dilemma to European administrators. Many settlements in the 19th century were recorded as having about 20 or 30 inhabitants although some had as many as 174 inhabitants (Willer 1858: 194). In these reports, settlements were often referred to with the Buru term hum-lolin, and one official (Willer 1858: 100) made it a point to translate hum-lolin as ‘hamlet’ (Dutch: gehucht) rather than ‘village’ (dorp) because of the small size. Others referred to them inconsistently as gehucht or dorp.

In many places in Maluku it is commonly said that people did not live in villages until they were forcibly resettled, usually on or near the coast, by the Dutch or Indonesian Governments. It is not obvious that this occurred on Buru. In colonial accounts there is no discussion of resettling people into larger villages nor is there any oral history from that time suggesting villages were formed by forced resettlement. In fact, small villages (hum-lolin) on Buru Island today are very similar to those described in the last century. And the larger villages (50 houses) of today are not limited to areas of government intervention. Several large villages in the interior of the island remain outside the scope of government contact and service.

A more significant change in regard to Buru settlement in the past century than village size is the fact that a more sedentary lifestyle has been promoted by the Government as a prerequisite for ‘national development’. Cement and tin roofing create more permanent structures than those built from traditional jungle materials and in some villages these items have been carried up the mountains with great difficulty to build schools, churches and a few individual houses. Government officials as well as imported pastors and schoolteachers encourage sedentary living and more permanent houses as a sign of modernity.

But even cement, tin roofing, churches and schools have limited impact on mobility. Explanations of why villages continue to move often have to do with sickness and multiple deaths. If too many deaths occur in a short time, it is often deemed time to abandon the village. ^[3] New villages form as a founder, called a ‘village custodian’ (negri duan), gathers people together. The number of people living in a village is thus partly a reflection of an individual village custodian’s charismatic ability to gather people together and to maintain a sense of solidarity. Some of the mountain villages in which churches were established by Dutch missionaries in the early 20th century still exist at the same location, although not without having endured various problems that would usually be resolved in Buru society through migration. In certain cases the pressure has become too much and even villages with Dutch churches have migrated. During my fieldwork in 1990, a large village near the lake with a prestigious reputation for having several cement houses, was abandoned and dispersed after internal disputes, with one clan returning four days’ walk, halfway across the island, to their land of origin.