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Expressive Genres and Historical Change: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Taiwan (review)

2007; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cp.2007.0010

1527-9464

Ruth Finnegan,

Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

Reviewed by: Expressive Genres and Historical Change: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Taiwan Ruth Finnegan Expressive Genres and Historical Change: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Taiwan, edited by Pamela J Stewart and Andrew Strathern. Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific Series. Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2005. ISBN 0-7546-4418-9; xvi + 268 pages, tables, photographs, appendixes, notes, bibliographies, index. £50.00; US$89.95. This volume started out under the title "Worlds of Song." Though this was subsequently widened to embrace additional aesthetic genres and [End Page 334] empha­size interactions with changing historical processes, song in fact remains the main subject, especially (though not exclusively) in the New Guinea Highlands. The majority of chapters, predominantly by anthropologists based in the United States, United Kingdom, or Australia, present accounts of specific sung or chanted genres arising from the authors' own firsthand research—"song" in the broad sense of the term. Across a large region of the Papua New Guinea Western and Southern Highlands, stories are told with special intonational or rhythmic patterns, or both, which are different from those of ordinary speech. Alan Rumsey's impressive chapter discusses and illustrates this from three cognate forms of what he terms "chanted tales": Ku Waru tom yaya kange, Duna pikono, and Huli bi te. He ­provides a well-evidenced description of their similarities and differences in thematic content and stylistic form (lineation, rhythm, pitch, melody, prosody, use of repetition), with comments on the performers and excerpts from their texts. His particular focus is the relationship between the imagined world evoked in the stories and the contemporary lived world within which they are performed—a fascinating and sophisticated analysis of the interpenetration as well as the ­disjunction between the two. Two further chapters on Highlands sung genres are by the volume's editors, anthropologists from the University of Pittsburgh with a remarkable record of joint research across many of the areas covered in the volume. Returning to the Duna pikono—in their terminology, "ballads" rather than "chanted tales"—they draw on their own substantial collection to illustrate further the stylistic features and plots of these lengthy sung forms and clarify the context in which pikono tales of cannibalism and humanity (among other things) both keep alive and creatively rework themes of the Duna past. Their chapter on Melpa courting songs and ballads in Mount Hagen brings out the emotional tenor running through many of the region's song genres—the sense of being sorry, feeling regret, feeling sympathy—and explores how this complex of feelings is both rhetorically conveyed in song and can incorporate revitalized elements from the past. Lisette Josephides's discussion of myth and song among the Southern Highlands Kewa shows how such ­cultural texts can change according to context and narrative intent: myths get transformed into origin stories, laments into pig killing, and courtship songs into the expression of male ­politics. The German linguist Volker Heeschen takes a more comparative perspective in considering the dancing songs of the Eipo and Yalenang in the West Papua Eastern Mountains. He reflects perceptively on the relation between individuality and the personal expression of emotions and opinions, and provides illuminating ethnographic detail about the style, functions, and themes of the songs. Once again courting songs are prominent, as are images of sorrow and mourning. Anne Schiller's chapter on sacred songs and the revitalization of indigenous religion among the Indonesian Ngaju describes traditional song [End Page 335] ­genres (ritual chants, praise songs, sung myths, ballads), mostly performed in restricted language unintelligible to many Ngaju, and contrasts these with the vernacular songs and hymns of newer forms of religious worship being enthusiastically adopted by the youth. Janet Hoskins treats violence in Indonesia, showing how traditional rituals in Sumba were used in government propaganda—while the words of songs could express subtle resistance to state authority. These "worlds of song" offered new ways of mobilizing people in an arena characterized by both the potential for democracy and the continuing threat of violence. As in many similar analyses, these chapters include extensive quotation from the songs, basically reproduced as verbal text (only Heeschen attempts to chart tonal structures). Typographical reproduction...