The drum is the shaman, the spear guides his voice

Sot. Sci. Med. Vol. 27, No. 8. pp. 819-828, 1988 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

0277-9536/88 $3.00 + 0.00 Copyright 0 1988 Pcrgamon Press plc

THE DRUM IS THE GUIDES

SHAMAN, THE SPEAR HIS VOICE

JANET HOSKINS

Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, CA 90089, U.S.A.

Abstract-Kodi rituals of curing use anthropomorphized objects-the drum and the spear-as intermediaries to communicate with the spirits causing the affliction. The spear ‘cuts through’ to the cause of the illness at the divination, by guiding the arm and voice of the human diviner. The drum beaten during an all night ceremony has a more important role: a myth at the opening of the ceremony tells the drum’s personal story or biography, which is identified with the suffering patient. In the course of the ceremony it travels on a shamanistic journey to the upperworld to seek the blessings of health and well-being.

The myth of the drum’s origin provides a narrative structure for the whole ritual, and defines the basis for its efficacy. The percussive sounds of the drum and gongs are said to make the patient feel better. A case study shows how ‘ordered sound’ is used to dissolve social tensions into a culturally structured pattern, so that consensus can be achieved in implicit accommodations in which neither party loses face. An older man’s illness awakens guilty feelings among his younger relatives, whose thieving is believed to be responsible. The healing ritual creates the context for them to express contrition without confessing. Thus, although the rite re-establishes communication between persons and between the human and spirit worlds, it involves deception and silences as well as revelations. Through an analytic comment on social tensions, artistic illusions are used to overcome the airing of social differences. The healing rite is intended to restore a social consensus, produced by a combination of music, speech and actions, which allow signs to triumph over substance.

Key words-shamanism, mythology, curing rituals, Eastern Indonesia

When Mbora Wonda, an important elder among the Kodi people of Sumba, eastern Indonesia, began to cough and spit blood, ritual assistance was immediately sought from both human and nonhuman intermediaries. A diviner was summoned from a distant hamlet, and came bringing a special magical spear which he would use to ‘cut through’ the illness to its cause. His partner and ritual counterpart was a singer who followed him to this consultation, carrying a sacred drum.

As members of the family gathered to watch, the diviner first held the spear outstretched in his right arm and lunged toward the main house pillar of the lineage cult house, calling out the names of various spirits and asking them if they were angry. The spear guided his voice to the right answers, striking the pillar only when the response was positive, and failing to reach it when the response was negative. The answers that he received confirmed the seriousness of the illness, and he told members of the household that a singing ceremony Quigho) would have to be held to effect a cure.

“The sounds of drum and gong beats must echo throughout the village,” he said. “The spirits must be called down and fed.” His partner, the singer, nodded and began to consult with other family members about when such a ceremony could be held. The steps were complicated: first, a chicken would be offered to the spirit of the drum (marupu bendu), and its entrails examined to ascertain the willingness of the spirit to serve as an intermediary. Then, three human ritual specialists, the diviner, the singer, and a ritual orator would stage a full night of alternating prayers and music, sending their words up to the deities with

the percussive rhythms of the musical instruments. Finally, a pig sacrifice would be held the following morning, with contributions from all the members of the sponsor’s lineage house, and those who had taken wives from there.

Members of the sponsor’s party agreed to these conditions, thus opening the way for consecrated objects such as the drum and spear to begin the process of treatment. The objects themselves are considered ‘bitter’ @z&-taboo, set aside) and they can only be used in a ritual context. Before they become effective, the story of each object’s origins must be recited, as a kind of ‘biography’ which details its personal history, and establishes parallels with the personal history of the patient.

About 50,000 Kodinese live at the western tip of the rather dry island of Sumba, subsisting on gardens of corn and rice, and raising pigs, chickens, horses and water buffalo. Three-fourths of the population adhere to the ancestral system of spirit worship (uguma marapu), while about 25% have converted to Christianity. In the more isolated hamlets, rituals are the main occasion for social gatherings of a dispersed population, and the focus of a prestige economy built around feasting, brideprice payments, and the construction of large stone tombs in ancestral villages.

Ceremonies are led by diviners, singers and orators who address deities in formal ritual couplets, and could best be described as ‘priests’ because of their control of specialized religious knowledge. Shamans (persons claiming a direct experience of supernatural power, usually through past illness) are not important in Kodi healing, but I will argue that the mythic narrative recited at the beginning of each

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820 JANET HOSKINS

ceremony attributes ‘shamanic’ powers to the drum. The paper explores the significance of the drum and spear in Kodi healing techniques, and describes their anthropomorphization into ritual actors, almost equivalent to persons. Through the recitation of a personal history or ‘biography’ [ 11, the drum acquires the power to heal, and becomes a symbolic double of the patient.

Healing in Kodi is accomplished through a combination of words and music, which are ordered in a semiotic process which moves from the most concrete details of symptoms to the most abstract expressions of collective rhythms. Herbal preparations or physical manipulations are little used in treating serious illnesses. There is no separate domain of medical practice. Instead, illness is treated as one of several serious misfortunes (including fire, flooding, acci- dents, adultery or incest) which necessitate the performance of a singing ceremony (yaigho). The ceremony is perhaps better described as a response to illness rather than a cure. While it is expected to improve the patient’s condition, in many cases a full recovery is not anticipated. Instead, the ceremony provides a temporary respite from discomfort so that the patient can put his social affairs in order, trying to remove the cause of ancestral displeasure which brought on his symptoms.

The myth of the drum is used only in ceremonies held to dispel1 afflictions which involve illness. The drum’s biography models a response to pain through images of drifting and disorientation which are not considered appropriate to other misfortunes. I inter- pret its use in the first part of the ceremony as an analytic device, separating the illness from the patient, which permits a more abstract understanding of the cause of ancestral anger, opening the way for a resolution which will allow the patient to find relief in the sentiments of collective unity expressed in music. Thus, the semiotic process moves from the narrative of the drum’s origins to a dialogue between the singer and orators about the causes of ancestral anger, and finally to the dissolution of these conflicts in the rhythms of the drums and gongs.

Understanding the effectiveness of this ceremony requires a re-examination of the relation of myth to ritual, and of the discursive symbolism of narrative and the nondiscursive impact of music. The story of the drum, presented as a prelude, must be analytically opposed to the ‘action’ (oratory, offerings, drumming, singing, dancing and sacrifices) which follows it. The performance receives its mythic justification through elaborate verbal expression, but it does not accomplish its goal of healing until other nonverbal elements are added.

I argue that the myth of the drum is a ‘paradigm’ which is applied to the illness event, providing a cultural structuring of expectations presented indirectly, and also a model for the emotional experience of illness and its resolution. My argument is influenced by Levi-Strauss’ famous essay on a Cuna birth incantation [2] and his later discussion of the relation of myth and ritual [3], but it also takes into account more recent criticisms of its ethnographic basis [4]. The important role given to objects rather than persons in Kodi curing challenges the psychoanalytic model of ‘abreaction’ and ‘transfer’, and

suggests that more attention should be directed to the symbolic processes of identification and displace- ment. Myth is treated in this context as a part of ritual, rather than an abstract speculation on the insoluble condition of man in nature. My interpretation supports Maurice Bloch’s claim that rituals may “smooth over and ignore problems by obscuring them in the very nature of the drama that they involve” [5]. But they also finally result in the clarification of the issue at hand, through a re- evaluation of the bonds which bring people together.

THE ORIGIN OF THE DRUM AND SPEAR

The myth of the drum’s origins establishes its legitimacy as the agent of the treatment, and provides a narrative structure for the ceremony as a whole. Coming from an unspecified place of health and plenty, the drum experiences hardship, then a re- formation as it is carved from driftwood into its present hollow shape. Filled with a certain number of magical objects (bits of candlenut, chicken feathers, and a ‘bow’ which resonates), the drum is mythically reconstituted and given a new life as another kind of traveler. After traveling across the seas in the surf, it is sent to travel through the seven layers of heaven and six layers of earth to the spirits of the upperworld, who can give the blessings of health, coolness and well-being.

The origin myth of the drum is generalized for all drums which have been properly carved and consecrated with sacrifices for use in curing and singing ceremonies. When a human singer or orator serves as an intermediary, he must first ask the permission of his ancestors, who speak on his behalf to the deities of the upperworld. He must also make an offering of sirih leaves and betel nut to the spirit of the drum. The drum is addressed in the first words of the song- magho belu, meaning the “shaded (cavity) beneath the spotted hide”. It is described as descending from a “corral on a steep hill, a dark place in the distant heavens” from which it has freed itself to travel on its journey. Washed ashore at the westernmost tip of the islands of Sumba, at Cape Karosso, it is found by two men-“Nggudi who knew how to carve, and Lando who knew how to sculpt”, the ancestors who first gave it a form. They took the piece of driftwood into their hamlet and made it a Kodinese object. But since the clans of Nggudi and Lando are not identified, the drum is not placed within a specific descent line. This is important for its transcendance of partisan divisions between clans, as its history binds it to cosmic forces but not to existing social relations.

Nggudi and Lando take the driftwood to the back entrance of their house, where it is stripped of its bark and trimmed. Then they carry it to a secret place, an abandoned ancestral village (“the land stepped on by many feet, the stones sat on by many buttocks”) where it is carved and filled with magical objects. A brace formed in the shape of the sun and a bow formed in the shape of the moon (wunda mata wulfu, punu mutu lodo) are inserted into the cavity to help it resonate. These objects recall events which first separated the heavens from the earth: a man from the village of Toda shot the moon with his bow and

The drum is the shaman, the spear guides his voice 821

arrow, and caught it inside a net brace which he took back to his village. Intermediaries were sent to negotiate for its release, and promised him the powers to call down rains and lightning if he would give back the moon. This exchange marked the beginning of transactions between the human world and the upperworld of the deities, which previously had been continuous. Thus, initial unity followed by separation created the possibility of ritual exchange and communication.

It is appropriate that the drum as an intermediary between the human community and the deities bear the emblem of these primordial acts, and that the moon bow and the sun brace create musical sounds which carry messages back and forth. The other objects contained in the cavity of the drum are emblems of sacrifices made to cement these exchanges: three bundles of tail feathers represent the roosters killed to ascertain the willingness of the ancestral spirits to listen to the drum, and the 7 x 4 pieces of candlenut are a more durable surrogate for the offerings of sirih leaves and ‘hunting silver’ (chips of silver wrapped in each leaf) placed on the cover of the drum before each ceremony.

Nggudi and Lando then search for a cover for the drum. First, they wrap it in “keladi leaves from the cave tops, and wide green leaves from the forest”, a weak layer of vegetation immediately broken by the drum sticks. Then, they try the hide of a mature buffalo from the sawah fields, and a spotted python from the undergrowth. These prove too tough and resistant. Finally, they settle on the hide of a young calf with white markings on the head for the upright drum, and a young bay colt for the diliro or horizon- tal drum which is its counterpart. The youth of these animals signals a rule for sacrifices to the highest deities: they must be yearlings with ‘black eyes’, not the more expensive and impressive long homed animals which are used for prestige feasting. In two or three ancestral villages which have special cult houses for their drums, the drums were supposed to be originally covered with the skin of a young girl, a war captive sacrificed to acquire the most powerful musical intermediary, the marapu bendu or ‘spirit of the drum’. It was the sacrifice which empowered the drum, just as on the last day of the ceremonies it is the sacrifice of pigs and chickens which will confirm the ceremony’s success.

Pierced by the cockatoo of the Pa toghi kyaka long beak marou ngandu

Bored by the parrot of the Ha bola pero large mouth manumba ghoba

You are the bird we set singing Yo dikya a kahilye paha puningo

You are the butterfly we send Yo dikya a kapudu flying papa lerango

The drum assumes a feminine form, externally seductive and curvaceous, internally hollow and re- ceptive to the voice of the male orators, who pierce it with their words. With this name, its lightness and agility is emphasized, like the bird or butterfly, and these qualities are stressed in order to liberate the patient initially from the troubling ties which bind him to his illness. The biography of the drum is the story of its release from constrictions and its formation into an instrument of communication. This symbolic linking of the drum to an escape from constricting forces explains why the first identification established in Kodi curing links the patient to the drum. Its story loosens the tangle of social relations which trap the patient inside the mystery of his illness, and allows him a certain conceptual distance from these relations. A metaphor which describes the driftwood’s descent from the heavenly kingdom specifically described this process:

You are the one who came down Yo na mburu la kandula from darkening skies above kondoko mayako

Sailing in a golden boat from Na mburu la karamba the celestial realm . rara tena .

Leaping out quickly from Bu kodi kendu pala A forest of high ginger vines La kandaghu daiyaro

kota lighya Slipping like a stone Bu watu lande lolu From underneath tomato bushes La kalembu lekero

wini core

At the second stage, the patient is urged to identify with the singer on his journey to the upperworld, and the metaphor of a ‘tangle’ is reversed, to encourage the patient to bind himself to the human intermediary as a companion on his journey. The singer tells him that

The history of sacrifices performed to find an appropriate cover for the drum recalls family efforts of family members to find the cause of the illness. It legitimates the role of the drum as healer by showing that lives have been given to acquire that healing power, and it recapitulates the pattern of feasts held to placate angry spirits which is followed in the singing ceremony (yuigho) itself. Once the drum is covered, it can be “summoned with names of fishes, called with names of pigs”-addressed in the formal couplets of ritual language:

We are bound together like Enga pa ongge lola wunato the roots of the banyan tree nda

Wound together like the coils Enga pa diri la cokalo of a giant python kaboko nda

The singer and the patient travel together “along one path, riding the same horse”, as they head for the upper kingdom where they will confront the angry spirits who have caused the illness. The metaphor of binding is also used again on the return trip, when the promise of blessing that they bring from the deities is “tied to the head, bound to the horns”, or slipped “inside the folds of loincloth, carried at the base of the horse’s back”.

You of the sharply resonant voice Yo na katiku liyo You of the wide open mouth Yo na malenggaroka

ghoba

After the singer’s invocation, he calls on the orator to join him in the task of unravelling the mystery of the illness:

The small bundles at the knees Rising up to the waist Your rounded full chest Your delicate slender waist

Ghilyo tadu kuha Let him come meet us on Maipa pa toboko la lara Babaro likye bengge the path donggandi Yo na tamboro kuru To plait a row of mats for Pa maghana nopo luna Yo na taranda kenda the head

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Let him sit on the deep Maipa londo la taloro wu dancing ground mandattu

To make a mark in the Pa or0 manerio mango garden’s growth dalo

The “counterpart with upright knees//pair with parted hair” is summoned to “carve a mark in kandelu wood//cut a path by the barkcloth tree”, to cooperate in a joint endeavor. The heaviest burden is laid on the singer, who hands it to the drum and says “not to let it slip from the armpit’s grip, not to let it slide from the knotted bundle”, as he carries these words to the upperworld.

The journey proceeds with a description of the wonders of the heavenly home of the deities-a land of abundance where the hearthstones are made of pig fat, the kitchen racks are made of pig’s jaws, the kitchen ashes are made of rice, and the roof is thatched with chicken feathers. The singer travels as the companion of the drum, compared in ritual couplets to the “horse that is his companion, the dog who sleeps at his feet”. The offerings of betel nut and ‘hunting silver’ (a sliver of metal placed inside the sirih leaves) will pay their way into the heavenly level, whose entrance is marked by a metal gate and ringed with a golden rainbow.

When they have arrived in the early hours of the dawn the singer and drum present their wishes in musical form: “the beating of the drums and the sounding of the gongs, the voices of flutes and fiddles”. They are received by the Great Mother and Great Father, who can bestow the blessing of abundance, thick sheaves of paddy and heavy ears of corn.

Once they have presented their pleas, speaking “with sweetness in the mouth and grease on the tongue”, they prepare to leave this magical realm. They bear blessings of coolness and health in a bundle which is “carried at the top of the forehead, shifted onto the shoulders”, and brought back to the human community.

The return is made concrete through the sacrifice. Chickens or pigs are dedicated to the angry spirits and killed so that the diviner can show the physical evidence of augury to the sponsor of the feast and the patient. He makes the diagnosis and prognosis tan- gible by encouraging the patient to trace with his fingers the line of the sides of the liver, which should rise straight, and the vertical ropes of the entrails, which should be untangled and clear of blemishes. A positive augury presents a perceptible model for the patient’s proposed return to health. By touching the liver and smearing his hands with blood, the patient experiences the fact that a soul has been sacrificed in return for his own.

The mythic origins of the spear are also important. While the drum is symbolically female, the spear is male. Formed by the masculine art of metal-working, it is a gift of a Savunese man who first taught the Sumbanese to smelt iron. Women arc forbidden to witness metal smelting, just as men cannot look on the indigo bath for dyeing thread. Metal working and indigo dyeing are paired a couplet referring to crafts imported from Savu, ‘dipping cloth, pouring iron’, and in the couplet naming the double gendered creator, in which the female deity binds and dyes the hair at the forehead, while the male deity smelts the

harder skull at the crown. Like the drum, the spear has a mysterious foreign origin, and is not associated with a local clan.

The spear has its effects by guiding the voice of the diviner, providing yes or no answers which clarify the social cause of illness. The spear directs the diviner’s arm as it lunges towards a pillar in the right front corner of the house, referred to as the mata marapu or ‘source of the spirits’. Psychological tension in the diviner’s body may unconsciously push him toward certain answers about the reasons for ancestral displeasure, but Kodi exegesis insists that the spirits themselves make their will known through the objects, as it comes into contact with the pillar and metaphorically ‘scars’ it with the point of the spear. Divination is called “seeking the truth in scratches on the pillar, throwing lots on the wooden headrest”. One must “wound the divination post, open up the walls of the room, carry the torch to the sacred altar, lift the flames to the holy corner”. The spear must cut through illusion and deceit to arrive at the truth, using its sharpness to dispel1 dangers. The violent probings of the spear are here again balanced by the hollow receptiveness of the drum. The spear is a tool of enlightenment, but the drum is the journeyer, the true companion of the sick man and the one who travels with him on a metaphorical voyage from illness back to health.

INTERPRETATION OF THE EFFECIIVENESS OF THE MYTH IN HEALING

There are two processes which we can trace in the ceremony-a mythic one and a ritual one: the myth charts the creation of the drum from a formless piece of driftwood, the ritual charts the re-creation of the patient’s health from the disorientation of disease. Parallels between these processes describe the experience of a loss of direction and control in similar couplets. The driftwood used in the drum is invoked as the one

who was turned over and over ba walo di koghi ela in the waves of the sea worm mbanu nale month (February)

who was tossed here and there in ba konggolo di koghu the flooding waters of the ocean ela wangu for0

Its dangerous journey across the sea occurs in the season of heaviest rainfall, a season for planting in which the re-birth of the rice crop is foretold by the swarming of sea worms. The trials of the drum are situated in the season of hardship which precedes abundance.

The sick patient is similarly tossed and turned:

turned over by the waves of the walo di koghi ela marere glazed eyes and shaking body mata, kalawaro ihi

tossed here and there by the konggolo di kongu ela heat of fevers and the mbanoho, maringi ihi trembling of disease

Formlessness is overcome when the driftwood is found and incorporated into the human world by being is carved into the drum’s sacred shape. The orator and singer are also said to carve their mark on trees and undergrowth in the course of the ceremony. The carved form of the drum re-establishes its links to the ancestors, and sacrifices enact exchanges between the human and spirit worlds. The healing


power of the drum stems from its archetype’s experience of drifting and the disorder-a parallel of the classic ‘shamanic illness’ which qualifies human intermediaries as ritual practitioners.

Because of its mythic ‘biography’, I argue that the drum is the shaman in Kodi healing. The priests only serve as human help-mates in the ritual process. The mythic process of transforming a piece of driftwood into a healing drum recapitulates the ritual processes of transforming the patient into a re-ordered, re-formed and healthy person.

Two important differences emerge between the role of drum in Kodi healing and the role of the Cuna shaman discussed in Levi-Strauss essay on ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’ 121: (1) The Cuna myth is used at the moment of final breakthrough, when a woman is experiencing a difficult labor and the myth provides a meaningful structure to her pain and a way out of it. The Kodi myth, in contrast, is presented much earlier in the ceremony, and it is used to ‘set the stage’ for the rite, as an initial preparation for a process which must later proceed by anchoring the events in the personal history of the patient. (2) The Cuna cure is mediated by a shaman, a human being with a previous history of illness and suffering who is now able to use this experience to cure others. He is the one, in Levi-Strauss’ terms, who ‘abreacts’ the illness and takes its pain into himself. In Kodi, the role of the shaman is taken by the drum. The identification does not occur at the level of the healer’s own experience of illness, but instead in an identification with a collective imagining of the causes of suffering.

Kodi healing presents a model of symbolic effectiveness which differs in many important respects from Levi-Strauss’ psychoanalytic model. A greater distance separates the patient and the healer because of the mediation of objects, and the causes of illness are diagnosed at a social rather than individual level. In the diagnostic interview before divination, the patient’s symptoms and the aetiology of his affliction are given less importance than the history of the social problems within the group.

Recent discussions of the efficacy of ritual per- formances [6, 71 have argued that a meaning-centered approach, such as Levi-Strauss’, is limited by the inability of the patient to understand these meanings in full. The force of the transformative cure is said to come across not as an apprehension of meaning, but through nondiscursive dramaturgical and rhetorical levels of performance. In Kodi, it is clear that the patient is able to follow the narrative of the drum’s journey, and to a certain extent understands how this symbolic representation lays the groundwork for some relief of his symptoms. However, after an initial consensus is established which separates the illness from its causes, social conflicts must be discussed and resolved. Night-long oratorical confrontations are followed by the rhythmic beats of the drum and gongs, in which some of these conflicts may be dissolved into an agreement expressed in the nondiscursive power of music. Since the shamanic role is taken by an inanimate object, neither abreaction nor transference is possible, but identification through common experience remains the basis for ritual efficacy.

The diviner, singer and finally the drum are succes- sively identified with the patient and then separated from him, moving from particular details of his illness to ritual transcendance. As more abstract, less contextualized agents, the drum and gongs convey their message to the spirits in the highly abstract language of music, rather than the discursive and socially anchored language of speech (even speech organized into somewhat ‘abstract’ formal couplets). The importance given to objects and their histories de-emphasizes both the details of the patient’s symptoms and illness and the individual importance of the ritual performers. The paradigm of illness in the myth of the drum’s origin depersonalizes the experience of disease and misfortune by elevating it to a cosmic plane. Translating these themes into musical beats, the repetitive and punctuational use of drums and gongs, reduces the journey itself to a transition marked with percussive force-the standard intervals and durations of cultural tradition.

The role of percussion in rites of transition has already been noted by Needham [8], but he did not explain this linkage in terms of any individual or social function. Kapferer [9] attempts a phenom- enological explanation which asserts “that the musical time of exorcism is manipulable and reversible”. Rouget [lo] has studied the relation of music and trance extensively, noting that it is cultural ex- pectation, and not some universal undifferentiated response to rhythm, which gives music this power to dissociate and generalize. In Kodi curing, musical rhythms are used with the conscious intention of re-ordering experiential instability within the patient: the myth of the drum’s origins first vividly recalls that instability, then re-establishes an order conveyed in the pattern of sounds which accompanies the prayers and oratory directed to the listening spirits. The patient both recognizes his own confusion and, through an identification with the journey of the drum and the sacrifice of various animals, overcomes it.

Music immerses the patient and audience in collective rhythms, expressed in the common couplet used to assure the deities that all is well again: “We strike to the same beat, we row to the same rhythm” (na met&a a bohe, nu humuku a tuku). The diffusion of attention away from the individual creates a way of speaking in ‘ritual euphemisms’ which obscure certain social tensions and create a new context where they can be remedied.

The spear, a valuable imported object, is not mythically transformed, but its Savunese origins add an outside spiritual power. The Savunese, most of whom are now Christian, are believed to be the guardians of a secret occult tradition, and are often suspected of witchcraft. The powers of the divination spear are in many ways more mysterious than those of the drum, and less clearly explicated in mythic format. But the spear is only the tool which “guides the voice of the diviner”-it is a way of acquiring knowledge, but does not share the drum’s transformative powers to effect a cure. The ‘biography’ of the spear, or rather the hints that we have of its history, suggest an exotic origin but do not explain its efficacy beyond that suggestion. The biography of the drum provides a journey which is the paradigm of the patient’s own journey from illness back to health.

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CASE MATERIAL ON THE SOCIAL RESOLUTION OF ILLNESS

The case of Mbora Wonda demonstrates how the drum and spear move from the category of anthropomorphized objects to healers, through their ability to ‘translate’ specific ailments into a more general and abstract ‘language’ (music) which allows a re-ordering and cure by spiritual agents.

Mbora Wonda suffered from ‘deep coughs’ (tengge mandarru), a Kodi description of tuberculosis, which is believed to be a hereditary disease. It is said to travel down the patrihne (ha& pa mburu) and may afflict all of the members of a single ancestral village. A different category of ailments-including fond- nesses for particular foods, allergies, and the hunger for human flesh expressed in witchcraft-are believed to travel down the matriline. However, the actual occurrence of an illness, even a hereditary one, is believed to be related to spiritual discontent with social relations within the village. Its onset is never accepted fatalistically, but must be investigated.

Mbora Wonda’s father died 15 years earlier, after coughing up blood for months. The divination after his funeral determined that the disease attacked him because he had not confessed to boyhood thefts of livestock and gold. Once he was dead the curse seemed to have passed outside the house. None of his descendants showed any symptoms of the disease until Mbora Wonda’s cough began in 1979. Kodi illness theory holds that guilt and sin are shared collectively by the whole lineage, so Mbora Wonda felt the reason for his resumption of the tubercular pattern was not his own actions but those of his patrilateral nephews-who had been repeatedly accused by neighbors of stealing pigs and horses.

Socially, Mbora Wonda was in a difficult position. Since the family had denied responsibility for these thefts, they could not be accepted as an official explanation for his illness. But to remedy the situation it would be necessary to discuss the matter publicly. Among the neighbors, hostile and resentful of the loss of their animals, tongues were already wagging with the story that these thieving nephews were causing the premature death of their uncle. However, demands for payment in recompense could not be made without proof of the boys’ guilt.

Ritual specialists were called in, among them a diviner related to the people most vehement in their claims that the boys were stealing. In a diagnostic consultation with the diviner, Mbora Wanda admit- ted that the incidence of the disease had previously been linked to stealing, but asked the diviner to interrogate the ancestral spirits about other taboo violations which must be involved this time. He suggested more harmless explanations-that harvest offerings had been performed late, a lineage house should have been re-built, possible disapproval of a recent marriage with someone from an outlying area. These scenarios were proposed to the offended spirits in the interrogatory form of divination, but to the human public they were red herrings, masking a more obvious explanation. Any suggestion that ancestral laws had not been fully followed could be met with assurances that “no one would continue to step out of line, no one would go on infringing the old

taboos”. The theft could be discussed indirectly in this manner, eliminating the need for a public confession.

Mbora Wonda’s illness was treated with a singing ceremony which opened with the recitation of the myth of the origins of the drum. I transcribed and translated it with the aid of the singer, who uses it in more or less standardized form to open all rituals concerned with healing illness. The dialogue between the singer and orators began with a genealogy of those who had suffered from tuberculosis in the hamlet, tracing the pattern of suffering to “soften the throats and oil the livers” of the listening spirits. A possible relation between stealing and the disease was suggested in a narration of the words spoken by the diviner to Mbora Wonda’s father:

So the old horse will know

So the ancient dog can see

If you go back to the forest filled with tempters

And pastures filled with disease

Then let the areca nut and betel quid you chew be transformed

Into the cough of white stones And the mucus of northern

waters!

Maka tana peghe a ndara malupu

Tana tanda a bangga kaweda

Ba otu ngguka wali ela kandaghu danga yora

Mono la marada danga pungo

Tana na habalingoka a kapa hamama mu ela

Tengge watu kaka Mono a wiria wei

kalogho!

The couplet designating tuberculosis (tengge watu k&a) was paired with a more general, abstract reference to forests filled with wild spirits which could tempt men to steal and pastures where the spirits of epidemics roam.

A Sumbanese singing ceremony (ynigho) follows the classic structure of transition rites described by Van Gennep [l l] and elaborated by Victor Turner [12-141 with an initial separation, a liminal period, and then a re-aggregation. The separation is established in the first song, which narrates the origins of the drum and invites the ancestors and deities to attend, promising them “water to drink and rice to eat” (i.e. sacrifices) in return for their attention. The liminal period corresponds to the drum’s journey to the upperworld, with the singer’s voice as an imaginary companion, in order to untangle the patient from his disease. While the patient does not move, he participates in his messengers’ journey, as they meet the angry spirits and promise to appease their rage

.with sacrifice. Normal time is suspended during this stage, replaced with the measured beat of the drums and gongs, establishing a rhythm for singing and oratory which also communicates with the spirits. In the early hours of dawn, when the morning star first appears, the orators declare that “the day is breaking over Gaura, the dawn is rising on the land”. At these words, lost spirits may descend violently from the heavens, accompanied by a great crashing noise, flashes of light, and footprints traced in the ashes at the base of a bamboo spirit ladder erected at the front house corner. It is the time of greatest excitement, the last hours of darkness before the next day. The patient’s strongest identification with the ritual intermediaries comes when he must trust in their power to explain and affect his fate.


At this moment the orators spoke most directly about the suspected cause of Mbora Wonda’s cough. In an extended plea to the spirits to renew the fertility of the fields, one old orator recited these words, a kind of parable on the dangers of thievery:

All the young red calves Ngara a kamboko ghobo kura

Who shake their horns in scorn Na kalilyokongo kaduna All the proud white piglets Ngara ha wawi byara

lengge Who wag their tails in defiance Na weighyongo kikuna I will cut off your tails Ku katupu waingo a

kikumi I will trim off your mane Ku halodi waingo a

wonggomi Unless you let the knife cut Unless you thresh the paddy

anew

Kioto donu nguti byaka Para nduka ndali byaka

Repeating in the dead of night A helu waingo hudo ndoko

Repeating in the dawn’s obscurity

Eating like parasites in the belly of Kambero Lero

Resting like ticks in a rich man’s hair at Peda Manu

A helu waingo lodo ndango

A loti kyambu haghu ela Kambero Lero

A wulu hegho rato ela kamburu Peda Manu

Peda Manu and Kambero Lero were the names of the pastures and hamlets from which thefts had been reported, so the meaning of his words was evident to the listening audience.

Re-aggregation began with the dedication of pigs and chickens for sacrifice, each dedicated to a specific spirit, so that the spirit’s acceptance of the offering could be ‘read’ in the augury. A share of cooked rice and meat was given to each of the deities which guard the house, the village gates, and the altars for clan deities and harvest offerings. A communal meal must be shared with the spirits before they return to their separate world. One large pig is identified with the patient who sponsors the feast. His prospects for recovering are determined from an examination of its liver. For Mbora Wonda’s feast, other pigs were also dedicated to the spirit of his father, the spirit of the clan deity which protects his descent line, and spirits of the village gates (to guard against disease enter- ing), the local region (inhabited by members of other clans who might harbor ill feelings) and the fertility of the land (endangered by boundary violations). Irregularities found in the livers of sacrified animals could bind the sponsor to carry out new feasts.

At this ceremony, the auguries were positive, but a special invocation was spoken in dedicating the pigs for the spirits of the local region (lo& pa&) and the deity who brings fertility to the land (marupu bokolo). In effect, the priests defied those suspected of thievery to partake of the slaughter if they intended to resume their earlier behavior:

All of you who secretly roast Ngarana na tunu hodikongo

Mice at the edge of the gardens Malagho la kamoto All of those who sneak away Ngarana na palo

pipicongo With a pike fish in the pouch Who snatch the malere fruit From the top of the tree

Kamboko la kaleku Ngarana na ngokongo Wu malere tokongo

Who climb along the trunk to get Ngarana na lawengo The last bulb along the bough Wu hadidi pyolana If you eat this rice with us Tana ba mu a ngagha

ma It’ll turn into rice to inflame the Ngagha bombo witti

feet wemu If you drink this water with us Tana ba inu a weiyo ma It’ll turn into water to swell the Weiyo pogho kanitu

stomach wemu You will eat rice full of disease Mu baka ngagha

mangu ndombona And drink water full of spiders! Inu baka wei mangu

nggengge!

By bringing pigs to the feast and accepting the raw meat dedicated to the deities, the suspected nephews made a covert declaration of their good faith, and promised not to steal again. Without openly confessing, they were given a forum to express contrition and atone for their misdeeds.

Mbora Wonda accepted their contributions with the additional knowledge that Sumbanese deities will reject stolen animals sacrificed to them, marking their livers with dark traces and turning their flesh into poison. The augury itself is therefore a diagnostic which measures compliance with all the procedural rules surrounding feasting, especially the cooperation among members of the sponsoring house (uma) or patrilineage. Attendance at such a ritual opens each participant to public scrutiny and, if he is guilty of a violation, to the danger of discovery. Thus, success- fully organizing and sponsoring such an event is an achievement in demonstrating the commitment of the group to resolve its own tensions.

Mbora Wonda declared that the feast had been a success. His complaining neighbors attended it, and their shares of raw meat were informal compensation for the pigs they claimed had been stolen. He hoped that the implicit apology in the orator’s admonition to his nephews would end malicious gossip and help him to feel better physically. He did not, however, expect a complete remission of his symptoms, since he shared Kodi belief that his disease was hereditary and would probably eventually kill him. However, by performing this rite, he had placated angry spirits and resentful neighbors who associated the illness with stealing. In doing so, he assured that the disease which afflicted him would not work its way throughout the rest of his kin, attacking the young and healthy as well as the old and feeble. The rebellious nephews each brought large pigs, which they showed to have come from their own pens, submitted to the test of priestly scrutiny. And Mbora Wonda’s goal to treat the causes of his coughing without compromising his dignity or his kin was also fulfilled.

And yet, Mbora Wonda’s explanation of the effectiveness of this rite, while acknowledging all of these other factors, was phrased in a formally different idiom. He did not say-as we might-that the air had been cleared concerning the stealing controversy, so he felt less under pressure and therefore healthier. Instead, his explanation focused on the musical penetration of his body and its magical effects. He said that his “soul had been lightened by the voice of the drum and gongs”. To understand Kodi symbolic action, we must ask why he attributed the effectiveness of the oratory not to its indirect

826 JANET HOSKINS

reference to the controversy, but instead to its trans- lation into the highly abstract language of percussive intervals and durations. Musical rhythm was made to stand for a public discussion of social problems, and the drum itself was the transformer of a tangle of confused obligations and denials into the unity of the group.

Mbora Wonda said that his throat softened and began to feel better as soon as he heard the drumbeats for the first night of preparations. At each beat, he professed to return closer to good health, and his vulnerable soul grew stronger and lighter. The hamughu, cognate with the common Indonesian semangat, is a personal soul anchored to the top of the head at the forelock. It can be separated from the body in severe illness, and vanishes with breath at death. The strengthening of the patient’s soul through hearing the drumbeats suggest a more complex relation of myth, music and healing.

THE EFFICACY OF SYMBOLIC ACTION: HOW WORDS BECOME ORDERED SOUND

The Kodi invocation of musical instruments as intermediaries with deities and ancestors stems from the social conditions which must be fulfilled to use music in a symbolically effective way, and from the graded contrasts between communication forms which emphasize rule following and those which emphasize content. Since illness is treated as a failure of communication between the human and spirit world, healing is accomplished by re-opening blocked communication, and its transposition to another level: intelligible words are blended and transposed into ‘sounds’ which are intelligible only to the listening deities. It is not enough for the human par- ticipants to achieve a more tolerant understanding of the situation, this must be distilled into “the playing of the flutes and fiddles, the sounding of the drums and gongs”. An abstract musical expression is needed for the rite to be fully efficacious. Therapeutic effectiveness is epitomized by the couplet which refers to music, although it is a complex of ritual speaking, dances, divination and sacrificial offerings.

Because of the expense of feasting, the illness of a poor and unimportant man is rarely “carried up to the upperworld” by the beating of drums and gongs. At best, a spear divination may be held, followed by promises to hold larger feasts at a later date if good harvests and prosperity permit. Thus, the staging of any one of these singing ceremonies is an act of display, showing off one’s leadership and following, particularly among lineage members willing to contribute.

Yet the drum and the spear are the only sacred objects stored in the lofts of Kodi houses which lack a clan or lineage ‘history’ of acquisition by members of a specific clan or lineage. The generalized ‘biography’ recited before each performance slips past hierarchical divisions attached to all other important ritual objects, which are often the subject of drawn out litigation or even violent disputes over ownership. Everyone, in effect, shares in the heritage of the drum and spear, but other objects are more charged with partisan disagreements. Porcelain vases, magical weapons, gold ornaments, and particularly sets of

gongs are anchored within named ancestral villages, and thus incapable of ritual transcendance.

While offerings can occasionally be made to lineage treasures (the tanggu marupu or ‘spirit possessions’ of each ancestral house), they are most regularly made to the spear and drum, anthropomorphized helpers of people in distress. In the largest feasts, the gongs are also given a share of cooked rice, meat and betel nut, and are summoned and addressed with ritual names. The division of labor among the ritual objects, however, is clearly asymmetric: the spear serves as the ‘cutting edge’, which opens up the problem for ritual mediation, and the beating of the gongs sounds after the oratory offers dancing and celebration to ‘cau- terize’ the wound and allow some closure and finality to the proceedings. But the middle stage-the dangerous journey to the source of healing blessings, which effects the transformation-belongs to the drum alone, assisted by the singer and orators.

Types of communication in Kodi ritual could be arranged along a continuum of intelligibility and accessibility, with those at one end being most clearly discursive and informational and those at the other fading into the category of pure form and sacred ‘sound’. This order would then correspond with the temporal sequence of their use in a curing ceremony, and the hierarchical ordering of their importance and efficacy in healing illness. At the lowest point, we find ordinary speech, which is used in the diagnostic conversation between the diviner and the patient. Information received in these conversations is then translated into the vaguer, more allusive metaphoric couplets of ritual speech, and repeated in the spear divination and dialog between singer and orators. The sung couplets are much more difficult for the audience to follow and understand, as they are slowed down to fit the rhythm of the music and often half muffled by the noise of the beating of the drums and gongs. Most obscure are the percussive beats of the instruments, following a standard pattern, with no overt content at all. The musical accompaniment which seems so important to the Kodinese would seem to an outsider to be simple repetition with little variation-an ordering rhythm with no ‘sense’.

Kodi curing rituals therefore move from intelligible but troublesome ‘words’ (where the problems to be resolved are alluded to euphemistically) to seman- tically opaque but effective ‘sound’. Mbora Wonda identified the beats of the drums and gongs as the elements which actually improved his illness, but he did SO because of the other conditions which accompanied their playing: the participation of the whole community in sacrifices and exchanges, their gather- ing as an audience to be instructed and entertained with the ancestral spirits and local deities. The controversy expressed indirectly in the discursive mode of the orator was neutralized by its association with the rhetoric of unity which prevailed over the feast, eventually confirmed in the auguries.

Not all Kodi ceremonies are successful feasts of unity and cohesion (more divisive events are discussed in [I 5]), but the effectiveness of efforts to heal through symbolic action depends on an acceptance of these rules. Kodi healing techniques have two aspects: they attempt to reform the sick patient, on the model of the experiences of the drum, and they

The drum is the shaman. the spear guides his voice 827

attempt to reunify the community, through the dramatization of the sufferings of the individual and the neutralization of grievances against him. Mbora Wonda was able to use the moral leverage of his own suffering to pressure guests into accepting a compromise solution. This new compromise was then celebrated in oratory and music, where it is transformed into pure sacred ‘sound’. The nondiscursive and unintelligible character of drum beats achieves its communicative eloquence through what it is not: not a defense of individual actions but a surrendering to a greater order, not an argument but a chorus of voices, feet and people moving in unison.

The drum represents the bridge between the human and spirit worlds, the instrument which brings them into contact and then re-emphasizes their separation. Men and spirits can only understand each other so far, and at a certain point the Kodi choose to celebrate the distance between them (and the possi- bilities for exchange which that brings) rather than endeavoring to keep all of the bridges standing. One bridges these two worlds only briefly, announcing this passage loudly with a pattern of fierce sounds, and then dismantling the connection once the crossing is past.

The drum has the particular power of music to dissolve everyday rhythms into culturally structured ones. Its sounds create an acoustical impression which re-arranges perception and subjects it to order, a dissociation which allows the patient’s personal subject to be replaced by the collective subject. Su- zanne Langer noted that music presents an organized flow which works in opposition to the mundane organization of sounds, so that all musical rhythm exhibits “a tendency to appear disassociated from its mundane environment . . . the impression of the illusion, enfolding the thing, action, statement or flow of sound that constitutes the work” [16]. Music introduces its own temporal structure, made out of sound and intonation and the dynamic movement of its own elements. In Levi-Strauss’ words, music “im- mobilizes passing time; it catches and enfolds it as one catches and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind” ]171.

Patterned sound is identified by the Kodi as the “language understood by the spirits”, and it is privi- leged over the elaborate formal couplets of ritual speech in its supposed efficacy. Far from simply distracting the patient with ‘noise’, the rhythmic impact of music organizes sensory experience into punctuated intervals with a culturally standardized form. But if music frees the individual from the everyday rhythms which, for the patient, are seen as an affliction, how does it acquire transformative power? How does it become what Langer calls “the image of passage, abstracted from actuality to become free and plastic and entirely perceptible” [16]? The answer lies in the series of dispfucements of the patient’s identification from the drum to the singer, and finally to the sacrificial animals killed on his behalf. Communication gradually becomes less intelligible to the human audience and more wholly focused on the spiritual audience, which finally ab- sorbs the message entirely into the realm of mysteries of the upper world. Once this is accomplished, the patient is freed from the burden of his own guilt and

responsibility, and can join the others in festive celebration.

Since drumming is associated with trance healing in much of the Malayo-Polynesian world [ 18-201, the effectiveness of Kodi ceremonies can be compared to the trance methods of other areas. In many In- donesian societies where healing involves shamanistic trance, the afflicting spirit struggles with the shaman in an imaginary battle which the shaman performs for both the patient and the community. Trance is produced by a conjunction of the collective demand for a resolution of the situation and the patient’s demand for a cure: the shaman’s self-consciousness is literally invaded and displaced by the drama that he is willing to play. He unconsciously revives some of his own conflicts in the ones that he represents for his audience, and portrays them with an insight that derives from personal experience [21].

In Kodi healing, the psychic conflicts of the patient are represented by the mythic account of the origins of the drum, but there is no acting out of these conflicts by a human shaman. Instead, the reasons for conflict are discussed in veiled language and nonhuman intermediaries are sent on a dangerous journey to recover the soul of a still living person, which is eventually returned to the community. Infractions are formally denied, yet indirect apologies are also presented and assurances of further compliance are made through sacrifice. The account of the drum’s journey offers an imaginary equivalent of trance and spirit possession, but the patient and priests remain spectators to this drama, and not the immediate actors. Finally, the tensions between the representation and the reality are dissolved by the patterned rhythms of music, which abstracts conflicts into an ordered flow of sound and makes them acceptable to the ears of the listening deities.

These observations permit a further modification of the model of shamanic effectiveness proposed by Levi-Strauss [2], and modified in recent publications by Schiefflin [7] and Atkinson [6]. Levi-Strauss argued, using a parallel with psychoanalysis, that it was “the transition to verbal expression” which induced the release of the physiological process of childbirth, because the woman’s pain was no longer chaotic and inexpressible, but had been given an ordered and intelligible form. Kodi ceremonies use the myth of the drum as only the first stage in a series of mediated communications, completed when a dialogue between singer and orators has been translated into abstract musical beats. Thus, ritual efficacy depends on the discursive symbolism of a mythic narrative, but it is not accomplished until a social consensus has been achieved, and this consensus is celebrated through musical performance, the sounding of the drums and gongs.

The process of healing involves both a paradig- matic identification with the myth of the drum as a companion and metaphoric sufferer, the double of the patient, and a representation and denial of the afflicting agent (the thieves among the house descendants), the shielded but focused objects for ritual speeches addressed to the audience. The drum is a metaphoric substitute who lays the groundwork for the rite in the first part of the evening; the sacrificial animals become the metonymic substitutes which are

828 JANET H~SKINS

given by the sponsor and take his place in the concluding ceremonies after dawn. In between, it is the prayers addressed to the drum and the spear which act as transformers, moving the locus of the illness away from the patient and on to the mediating objects.

In the terms proposed by Tambiah [22], the ‘performative’ goals of the ceremony (its power to trans- form illness through conventional expectations) are accomplished through the identification with the drum, while the ‘cosmological’ aspects (its wider significance within systems of explanation) are vali- dated through the summoning of an audience to hear these explanations, and their ‘payment’ in the gift of raw sacrificial meat. Social rifts are resolved through the airing of disagreements, and their reduction to ultimately unintelligible rhythmic sounds, which are sent up to the deities. The patient’s suffering is alleviated through identification with the story of the afflictions of the drum, who is eventually reconstituted as a healer and intermediary.

Thus, the ‘biography’ of the object ultimately becomes the biography of the patient, who is himself reconstituted from a floating, directionless existence into one formed and ordered by the authority of social precedent. The myth is told beforehand to validate the ritual; the ritual actions follow to add legitimating force to the mythic scenario, and the healing process is completed through the conjunction of these two methods.

As forums for the resolution of social tensions, these rituals are not simply ‘expressive’ (that is, a symbolic staging of the emotions), but also an analytic method within Kodi society. They offer a locally constituted hermeneutic, an interpretive effort to isolate and understand social tensions and work towards their resolution. The variety of performative genres used (music, dance, oratory, gesture, sacrifice and divination) address these issues as separate ‘scores’ which together orchestrate the aesthetic whole. Deception and things left unsaid are as important as the explicit content of the myth and oratory. Consensus is achieved through artistic illusion as well as a social airing of differences: it is a triumph of signs over substance.

Acknowledgemenrs-Doctoral research in 1979-1981 was supported by the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, under the auspices of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (LIPI) and Universitas Nusa Cendana of Kupang. Return visits in 1985, 1985, and 1986 were funded by the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University and the Faculty Research and Innovation Fund of the University of Southern California. I would like to thank

Penny Van Esterik, Joel Kuipers, Carol Laderman. J. Stephen Lansing, Charles Leslie, Gary Seaman and Valerio Valeri for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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The drum is the shaman, the spear guides his voice