On Deer and Dolphins: Nage Ideas Regarding Animal Transformation

According to the Nage of eastern Indonesia, certain animals regularly transform into animals of another kind. Similar beliefs—specified here as notions of ‘contemporary zoological transformation’—have been documented for Malays and at least one other Indonesian society, as well as for the Kalam and Rofaifo of New Guinea. Referring to interpretations by ethnographers of these other societies, the paper analyses the Nage beliefs in regard to their connection with observation of zoological kinds. Attention is also given to their possible utilitarian value, connection with ethnozoological classification, and relation to similar yet distinct transformations encountered in myth and spiritual representations. Drawing on Atran's thesis (1990), it is concluded that Nage beliefs in contemporary animal transformation posit changes of essence and are in this sense counter-intuitive. At the same time, certain ontological features demonstrate that the beliefs cannot be accommodated to a category of mythological or religious representations, and that in several respects they share more in common with modern scientific thought.     

Considerations of ‘Keo’ as an ethnographic category

‘Oddly enough, in backward, antiquated Flores there was a district — keo by name — where even now it is allowed for girls to engage in intercourse any man, and the most outstanding among them — outstanding in satisfying men — are in great demand for marriage.’ (Sukarno, in C. Adams 1965: 130)     

CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE AND HEAD-HUNTING RUMOURS IN CENTRAL FLORES (EASTERN INDONESIA): A COMPARATIVE NOTE

In a recent contribution to Oceania (59:269–79, 1989), R.A. Drake analyses a kidnapping rumour that has regularly appeared in Borneo during the last 90 or more years. According to the rumour, agents of the state require a human sacrifice, and especially a human head, to place beneath the foundation of a bridge or other modern structure that is being erected, in order to lend it durability. This rumour, Drake argues, draws crucially upon the widespread notion or practice of construction sacrifice, in combination with a tradition of head-hunting as an aspect of inter-ethnic relations which was prevalent in Borneo before the colonial era. The present paper questions aspects of Drake's thesis by discussing the occurrence of precisely the same rumour among the Nage of central Flores, a people who do not know head-hunting of the Bornean variety and who have no tradition of human sacrifice in connection with indigenous construction.     

Labour's True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877

This essay examines the language of manliness that both marked and shaped nineteenth‐century mainstream labour activism during a formative period of craft bastardisation, class formation, and movement building. It sketches the logic and meanings of manliness embedded in labour newspapers, journals, addresses, and trade‐union proceedings from the period. The analysis recovers a persistent, complex, and problematic racialised and gendered/classed language central to skilled white workingmen's collective self‐identification. Assimilationist in thrust, it beckoned workingmen to an ambivalent double identity defined as much by manly character as by class characteristics. Thus it both facilitated and limited labour activism and class consciousness.     

A Secular Australia? Ideas,Politics and the Search for Moral Order in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Australia

This article argues that the relationship between the religious and the secular in Australia is complex and that there has been no simple transition from a religious society to a secular one. It argues that the emergence of apparently secular moral orders in the second half of the nineteenth century involved what Steven D. Smith has termed the “smuggling in” of ideas and beliefs which are religious in nature. This can be seen clearly in the economic debates of the second half of the nineteenth century in Australia in which a Free Trade based on an optimistic natural theology battled with a faith in Protection which had powerful roots in a secular form of Calvinism espoused by David Syme. The article concludes with an analysis of twentieth‐century historian W. K. Hancock's comparison of the medieval commonwealth and Machiavelli, concluding that Hancock found both the Free Trade and the Protectionist visions of moral order to be inadequate.     

REVIEW

Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolonial Microcosm: Identity and Development in Vanuatu By William F S Miles. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1998. pp. xxiv + 271. Price: US22.95 pb