ACCESS RITUAL IN EASTERN SUMBA, INDONESIA

B. Retang Wohangara

Abstract


As a particular type of tradition, rituals have been of interest to folklorists and anthropologists. Understood as repeated, patterned, and contextualized performances, rituals could be in "low contexts" meaning that they are less formally, unplanned in advance, and. do not demand for complicated performances, or in "high contexts" that they are realized in a highly stylized and formalized occasions, and set as public events. This article attempts to describe an access ritual, called paariyangu (ritual of being a guest and a host), conducted by the people of (eastern) Sumba living in the east part of Indonesia. Visiting somebody's house is an act of entering somebody else's private domain. It is therefore necessary for the both parties (i.e. the guest and the host) to abide to certain manners so as to maintain a desirable social encounter. Key words: access ritual, Sumba, traditions, low contexts, high contexts

Full Text:

Download PDF

References


Ameka, Felix K. "Access Rituals in West African Communities: An Ethnographic Communities." In Ritual Communication. Edited by Gunter Senft and Ellen B. Basso, New York: Berger, 2009.

Forth, Gregory. Rindi: An Ethnographic Study of a Traditional Domain in Eastern Sumba. Leiden: The Hague-Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.

Gnerre, Maurizio. "Shuar and Achuar Ritual Communicatioon." In Ritual Communication. Edited by Gunter Senft and Ellen B. Basso, New York: Berger, 2009.

Hoskins, Janet. "The Heritage of Headhunting: History, Ideology, and Violence on Sumba, 1890-1990. In Headhunting and Social Imagination in the Southeast Asia. Edited by Janet Hoskins,

California: Stanford University Press, 1996.

McDowell, John H. 1983. ''The Semiotic Constitution of Kamsa Ritual Language." In Language in Society, Vol. 12, No.1, 1983: 23-46.

Senft, Gunter and Basso, Ellen B. "Introduction." In Ritual Communication. Edited by Gunter Senft and Ellen B. Basso, New York: Berger, 2009.

Sims, Martha C. and Stephens, Martine. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.24167/celt.v13i1.217



Copyright (c)



| pISSN (print): 1412-3320 | eISSN (online): 2502-4914 | web
analytics View My Stats