Songs of Travel Stories of Place

Songs of Travel Stories of Place

(Timo Kaartinen)

This book concern about history and memory are encaosulted in a framel photograph kept by Madingin, my adoptive father in Banda Eli, the village where I did fieldwork in 1994 through 1996. The man facing the camera stands next to arrangement of flowers in a coat and long sarong, wearing round syeglasses and a light turban. His thin features
suggest maturity and refinement but not an advanced age. The man’s dress and the  surrounding decoration indicate that the photograph belongs to the colonial period which is just about to end. Is the picture of Fiding , Mading’s father , taken in 1949 in Makassar capital city of the short lived state if East Indonesia. Shortly before fidin passed away on his pilgrimage to Mecca.

My focus is on narrative proccupation with long distance travel, a movement between diffirent places and times, find’s photograph examplifies a special poetic of absence which for some of his relatives, provides the ground for memories and hopes of intersubjective presence. Songs and stories about travelers like him motivate and enable actual travel to distant places, maintaining an engagement between a small scale community and the arena of larger historical and politicak events,

A related issue concern local, ideological responses to the colonial and national modernity in the poetic expressions and performative practices discussed in this book, external commercial and poitical  power appear not merely as alienating forces but also as sources of hidden agency and self awareness. The ethnography of Eaastern Indonesia suggests that ambiguous responses to state power are common in societies which remained outside the effective reach of the state until less than one hundred years ago (Kuipers 1997 , Rutherford). The misfit is one between localized territorial classifications of community and the fact that communities are signified by their relationship to other places.

The community  described in this book is part of a historical world focused on places and people in control of maritime trade . the present day center of its reproductive life is Banda Eli, a village in the Kei Islands a local archipelago in Maluku, the vast maritime area which covers much of eastern Indonesia. This village was founded by exiles from Banda, famous center of spice production and trade which the Dutch East India.

They belonged to a regional mercantile aristocracy which was not undermined by early Dutch presence. For more than a century, the Bandanese defied the Dutch spice monopoly by planting nutmeg trees outside their lost homeland and together with alies based in other locations . they operated a vast regional trade network to a changing world market more quickly than the Dutch Company could do people in Banda Eli and Banda Elat two outponsts of this trade network in the Key Islands are unique in maintining distinct local language identified with the ancestors from Banda.

Maritime voyages area a central themes in their oral traditions . according to the argument developed in this book , the memory of ancestral migrations and contemporary pattern of cultural existence which may have been less durable for those exiles from Banda who settled in more familiar linguistic and social environment.