So my name shall live: Stone-dragging and grave-building in Kodi, West Sumba

Abstract

In many different parts of Indonesia, people have built large and impressive graves for the dead, and have marked their burial with elaborate rituals and lavish distributions of food. The flamboyance of Balinese cremations, Toraja cave burials, Batak sarcophagi and Borneo mausoleums are by now familiar to wider audiences. The explicit links between the splendor of the funeral ceremonies and the social status of the deceased are also clear. In this paper, I shall discuss how the gravebuilding ceremonies of Kodi, West Sumba, have added an interesting twist to this familiar pattern of ostentatious celebrations of death: in West Sumba, prominent men do not need to rely on the willingness of their relatives to construct large graves for them after their deaths. They can instead sponsor stone-dragging ceremonies themselves. In this way, several years or even decades before their death they may assure themselves of a prestigious grave and the enduring renown of a great feast giver.The living tradition of megalithic grave-building that we find on Sumba challenges two familiar assumptions about grave-building which are frequent in anthropological writings. The first concerns the chronological sequence of death and tomb-building, and the "rites of passage" interpretation of funerary symbolism which has been current since Hertz and Van Gennep. By detailing specific Kodi ideas about the construction of the tomb and the journey of the soul, we can come to understand the particular terms of their own cultural eschatology. The second concerns the political significance of such mortuary edifices, and their role in the demonstration and legitimation of social-religious leadership. Here, the JANET A. HOSKINS is a Ph.D. graduate in social anthropology from Harvard University

Feeding Stonehenge: cuisine and consumption at the Late Neolithic site of Durrington Walls

“…The evidence for feasting accords well with accounts of feasting and voluntary labour mobilisation for megalith building in many different parts of the world (e.g. Layard 1942;Hoskins 1986). It does not fit expectations of a slave-based society in which labour was forced and coerced.…”

The megalithic complex of highland Jambi: An archaeological perspective

“…In this scenario, the influx of wealth and prestige goods may have enforced the power of individuals or groups who became main actors in this enterprise. the main actors would have been those who could mobilize the huge amount of manpower needed to create and move the megaliths and who could bear the cost of elaborate rituals, which have been documented in other stone-erecting communities such as on Sumba or nias (Hoskins 1986;Bonatz 2002).…”

The DaVincis of dirt: Geoarchaeological perspectives on Native American mound building in the Mississippi River basin

“…Kidder (2011;Kidder et al, 2009) suggests resources for mound building may have been mobilized through the direction of labor by socially powerful agents within society, such as age-grade oligarchs or possibly charismatic persons who claimed ritual authority through appeal to supernatural forces. The capacity to mobilize labor among politically acephalous societies is actually not uncommon and we need not always appeal to ranked political systems to explain large-scale labor efforts (Gibson, 2000;Hoskins, 1986;Johnson, 1994;Tuzin, 2001). …”