Construction Sacrifice,Kidnapping and Head-hunting Rumors on Flores and Elsewhere in Indonesia

Three recent articles have examined head-hunting and kidnapping rumors in connection with construction sacrifice on Borneo and Flores. This paper presents further information on such rumors on Flores and elsewhere in Indonesia which largely confirms their interpretations. However, the argument is made that rather than being a new phenomenon and a product of the colonial era, these rumors may well have been characteristic of Indonesia from ancient times and have typically been associated with offices of political and military potency. Policies and activities of the Dutch near the Solor islands since the seventeenth century may have strongly reinforced suspicions that they were capable of taking heads through local agents.     

Preliminary U-series and Thermoluminescence dating of excavated deposits in Liang Bua sub-chamber,Flores, Indonesia

We report the results of a test excavation of deposits in a limestone cave sub-chamber located beneath the main chamber of Liang Bua, Flores, Indonesia; the discovery site of the small hominin species, Homo floresiensis. Well-preserved remains of extinct Pleistocene fauna and stone artefacts have previously been identified on the surface of a sediment cone within the sub-chamber. Our excavation of the deposits, at the base of the sediment cone in the sub-chamber (to 130 cm depth) yielded only a few fragmentary bones of extant fauna. Uranium/Thorium (U-series or U/Th) dating of soda straw stalactites excavated from 20 to 130 cm in depth demonstrates that the excavated sediments were deposited during the Holocene. Red Thermoluminescence (TL) dating of the sediments at the base of the excavation (130 cm depth) indicates these sediments were last exposed to sunlight at 84 ± 15 ka (thousand years), similar to red TL ages of cave sediments from the main chamber. Together, these results indicate that the surface faunal remains, which are morphologically analogous to Pleistocene finds from the main chamber excavations, were transported to the sub-chamber relatively recently from the main chamber of Liang Bua and probably originated from conglomerate deposits at the rear of the cave and from deposits around the front entrance. There is no evidence for hominin occupation of the sub-chamber, instead it seems to have acted as a sink for cultural materials and fossil remains transported from the surface via sinkholes. Despite the small number of finds from the test excavation, it is possible that more extensive excavations may yield additional transported cultural and faunal evidence at greater depths.     

Bat cave and Hobbit hole,microbats of Liang Bua (Flores,Indonesia)

Liang Bua is a limestone cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. Palaeontological and archaeological excavations at this site have unearthed one of the best insular records of fossil bats to date. The assemblage is numerically dominated by the horseshoe bat species Rhinolophus euryotis, followed by the leafnosed bat Hipposideros diadema. In addition to these species, remains of Rhinolophus simplex, Hipposideros sp. cf. H. sumbae, Murina sp. aff. M. florium, Taphozous sp., Kerivoula sp. and Miniopterus sp. have also been recovered. Two taxa found in Liang Bua, Rhinolophus euryotis and Miniopterus sp., are not apparent in the modern bat fauna of Flores. Some specimens, found during the more recent excavations, are known from specific depths. Two age-groups are represented. The stratigraphically oldest is 74–61 ka and includes Murina sp. aff. M. florium and Rhinolophus euryotis. Conversely, the younger, Holocene, assemblage is much more diverse. Despite the relatively small amount of microbat material collected thus far, it displays a higher diversity than the rodents from the site. This is presumably related to the better dispersal ability of bats relative to other, non-volant mammals.     

Functions of sovereign violence: Contesting and establishing order in Darjeeling,India

This paper explores the relationship between de facto sovereign violence and order in spaces of contested authority. Here, so-called “informal sovereigns” imbued with the power to kill and punish with impunity can act either as rebels against, or as chosen mediators for, a weak government. This paper takes this ambivalent relationship between informal sovereigns and the state as a starting point to explore the different functions of sovereign violence drawing on a case study from Darjeeling, India. Here, informal sovereigns appear in the form of regional leaders of an autonomy movement that has, at times, violently challenged the government's authority over the region. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence, the paper argues that sovereign violence performed by such informal sovereigns has different functions. It can either stabilize or challenge existing power relations and legal orders. To differentiate these functions and to account for the ambivalent relations between informal sovereigns and the state, the category of informal sovereigns needs to be disentangled. To do so, this paper establishes a distinction between ‘petty sovereigns‘, whose sovereignty is outsourced from the state, and ‘autonomous sovereigns’, whose authority is mainly grounded in actors' capacity to perform excessive violent acts. While petty sovereigns' violence is law-preserving and strengthens existing power relations, autonomous sovereigns engage in law-making activities and aspire to affect changed orders and to benefit from that change. The case study concludes that a sovereign's efficacy in effecting order is not only grounded in violence. Rather, its authority emerges from the grey zone of the negotiated boundaries between itself and the state, and its recognition by its respective constituents.     

Language diversity,language policy and the sovereign state

An analysis of Mark Bevir's account of the role of language and tradition on the one hand, and the individual on the other in the generation of ideas, and proposal of an alternative account It endorses Bevir's project of finding a middle way between individualism and collectivism, but finds that Bevir exaggerates the role of the individual. It argues that human selves always remains dependent on language even to articulate their own intentions to themselves. Whilst they have a capacity to create new linguistic expressions, this is always limited to the exploration of possibilities already latent in the language. However, no one is a mere recipient and conduit of a given language: everyone hands it on transformed by their unique appropriation of it. The antifoundationalist analyses of Wittgenstein, Newman Collingwood, and Neurath are invoked to argue that this state of affairs also applies to the individual's relation to the beliefs and values inherited traditionally: there is no possibility of a wholesale rejection of what is received; no individual can reject all received traditions, and erect an entire belief structure from scratch, but can only modify it on a piecemeal basis, so that received tradition always remains constitutive of the individual mind. It is also argued that human self-consciousness is always socially formed, and no person ever completely integrated, and stabilized. No one is ever therefore in a state of complete self-possession. One therefore must reject Bevir's claim that the historian of ideas must initially presume that individuals are sincere, conscious and rational in their expressed beliefs: ‘sincere’ self-consciousness is an ideal never fully achieved, and beliefs as to what constitutes ‘rationality’ are so varied that specific presumptions cannot be made.     

宗族村落中姻亲关系的建立、维护与重组——以鲁东小姚格庄为个案

一、前言 非洲的世系理论（lineage theory）甫一出现,立即被汉学人类学家应用在中国亲属制度的研究上。弗里德曼（Maurice Freedman）首先把对中国宗族制度的研究发展成了宗族范式,并构造出从宗族组织认识中国社会的理论模式。弗氏的这一范式为后来的学者们提供了基本模式和出发点,后来学者不断追随他的研究,     

Hyperstructure,hierarchy and humanitas in Olympic ritual

The Olympic victory ceremony is a globally familiar and highly stable ritual form of the world system of nation states. In this article, the medal ceremony is placed within the overarching Olympic ritual process, and its evocative power is attributed to its symbolic treatment of the relationship between Individual, National and Human identities in modern worlds. The ritual asserts and performs the compatibility of these identities in the face of all the horrific counter-evidence of the 20th century and today; it presents a very specific strategy for symbolically handling exclusionary nationalism.     

Styling the revolution: masculinities, youth, and street politics in Jakarta, Indonesia

This article explores the changes to urban political culture in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1998 to the present. By tracing the contributions of youth activists, and middle-class university students in particular, to the production of the street as a political and public space, the author demonstrates to what extent the democratized post-Suharto era naturalizes the place of youth in nationalist politics. Central to this inquiry of youth identity formation is the elision of class and gender as analytical categories. Student movements in 1998 and after have relied on a specific masculine style that draws on both the authenticity of nationalist historical narratives and the street as the domain of the People, and in the process masks potentially contentious class and gender differences among progressive activists.     

Tree Totems and the Tamarind People: Implications of Clan Plant Taboos in Central Flores

ABSTRACT Among the Nage of eastern Indonesia, a sizeable minority of clans maintain totemic attitudes towards trees and other plants whose names they share. Tree totemism is mostly expressed in taboos on burning the wood and using the timber in construction. In addition, there is the idea that all Nage people should not burn wood of the Tamarind (Nage) tree. Comparative evidence and local historical narrative locate the source of phytonymic clan names in an earlier use of such names as toponyms and settlement names. Insofar as this is their origin, Nage plant totemism can thus be understood as a residue of a naming practice relating to places rather than to people, either human ancestors or groups. As the use of ‘Nage’ as the formal name of an inclusive ethnic, socio‐political, and territorial entity is relatively recent, and indeed largely a function of a colonial administration introduced barely a century ago, this case further demonstrates how taboos and totemic relations can develop rapidly in contexts of major social change.