Savu is a relatively small island, situated furthest south in the Indonesian archipelago. Its length is about forty kilometers, its breadth about twenty kilometers, and the total surface only 460 square kilometers. The closest larger islands are Sumba to the west of Savu and Timor to the east. The present population is about 85,000 individuals, but just as many Savunese are scattered across Southeast Asia.
The history and traditions of this island are the subjects of this comprehensive study written by anthropologist Geneviève Duggan and historian Hans Hägerdal. Their book must be the definitive history of this island. What makes the culture on Savu special is the genealogical knowledge of the inhabitants, which totally permeates their existence. Most of the inhabitants know the names of their ancestors going back several hundred years. On other Indonesian islands this is knowledge restricted to the aristocracy, but on Savu it is shared by all. As early as the eighteenth century Captain Cook’s crew noticed the extreme interest of the population in their own past. The genealogies which are covered in the book are both patrilineal and matrilineal and in many cases go back as far as four hundred years. The keepers of this partly secret tradition are above all the priests, who are in command of secret and sacred recitations.
Each author has outstanding qualifications for the task at hand. Geneviève Duggan is an anthropologist who has lived on the island for three decades, during two of which she has been collecting source material for the book. She several times mentions Jan Vansina’s Oral Tradition as a source of inspiration, and her own meticulous documentation will most likely give impulse to future anthropological fieldworkers. Duggan is primarily responsible for the first four-to-five chapters, in which the genealogies of the island’s leading clans are investigated. She is also the author of a fifty-page appendix, “The Knots of the Land,” a calendar of the highly elaborate ritual life within the five domains of the island, presented in tabular form.
Her co-author, the Swede Hans Hägerdal, is on the staff of Linnaeus University in southern Sweden and is an expert on the history of Southeastern Asia. He has written surveys of the histories of China and Vietnam, but his special field of interest is the history of the islands of Indonesia, as reflected in the archive of the Dutch East India Company, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), in The Hague. Another important source since the 1870s has been the reports of Dutch Protestant missionaries.
The two authors complement each other in a very stimulating way. Their sources sometimes overlap but more often they differ. Duggan’s material provides an inside perspective on the history of the island and follows the lineages which have had the greatest religious and political significance. Hägerdal’s sources reflect the historical events from an outside perspective. The earliest colonizers were the Portuguese who arrived in the sixteenth century and were a century later succeeded by the Dutch. The latter have had a considerable impact on the island, where, however, the indigenous culture has been remarkably vigorous.
The book gives a good picture of the economic structure of the island through the centuries. The main source of nutrition has been the extraction of syrup from the Lontar palm, while the breeding of horses for export has been an important source of income. From the arrival of the Portuguese until the early nineteenth century, the slave trade was administered by the rajas, who had been recruited by the colonial powers from the local island aristocracy. The slaves were taken from the interior parts of the island and often ended up as workers in gold mines established by the colonizers. The VOC archive also gives information about trade in sandalwood and turtle shells.
Duggan’s detailed inquiries into the ancestors of the Savunese are presented in no fewer than fifty-nine genealogical figures, which altogether take up more than one thousand names of individuals in leading positions who have lived on the island from the seventeenth century onwards, extending to our time. One can easily realize what time-consuming work it must have been to compile these figures! In the chapters, she provides what is known about these individuals through oral and written sources. Often they are observed just flashing by in brief glimpses, but some she presents in full-length portraits.
Chapter 1 contains a presentation of the cosmogony of Savu and its mythical ancestors, who are connected with various parts of heaven, the sea, and land. Savu has two flood myths. The first man on Savu, who settled on the island after a flood, was pulled up from the sea by a god with a fishing hook. The legends about ancient settlers describe them as small with large ears and feet. Cultural innovations such as slash-and-burn agriculture are attributed to specific ancestors, the memory of whom is maintained through annual rituals. The sacrifice of animals is a common ingredient in the ceremonies, and the meat of the animals becomes part of a common meal; the everyday diet otherwise is vegetarian. An important ritual is the annual boat ceremony, in which gifts are sent out to the ancestors. The functions maintained through the genealogies are those of “justifying the division of religious and political tasks, and validating land ownership” (96).
Duggan several times stresses the importance of the female lineages. They are called wini, and each wini has particular textile patterns, created by its founder, which are used by followers as a sign of the lineage. Both male and female lineages have special houses where rituals are performed.
As opposed to the archipelago north of Savu, where the dominant religion is Islam, the Savunese are Christian Protestants. Their oral tradition contains narratives about Ju Deo who was sent to humans by his father and who performed several miracles. He was eventually crucified, but his mother Ina Ju Deo annihilated the perpetrators by sprinkling her breast milk on them, and together with her son ascended to heaven. The similarities to biblical texts are obvious, and the narratives have been interpreted as stemming from contact with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.
The activity of Dutch Protestant missionaries going back to the eighteenth century led inhabitants of Savu to embrace Christianity, the earliest being the local aristocracy. A devastating smallpox epidemic in 1869 led to the death of about half of the island’s population and resulted in the weakening of ancestor worship and a rapid spread of Christianity. Today, interest among the younger generation in the old religion is weak, but old rituals, such as reciting the genealogy of the deceased person, still exist.
The last 125 pages of the book consist of six appendices and a glossary of selected Savunese words. I have already mentioned one of the appendices, “The Knots of the Island,” a table of annual rituals and festivals that provides ample food for the reader’s imagination. The others are a rather modest section, “Narratives”; a list of the traditional system of exchange (until recently Savu had no monetary economy—one example is that the cost of a woman’s sarong was four pots of syrup); a list of rajas and fettors (executive rulers); and finally, statistics covering present conditions, where one learns that the number of motorbikes in 2015 was around 14 000, while there were less than 300 cars.
The subtitle of the book, “History and Oral Tradition on an Island of Indonesia,” calls for a comment. Oral tradition can be many things. For a folklorist it includes songs, proverbs, children’s games, folk medicine, and a great deal else. In this book about Savu, it almost exclusively means oral traditions that reflect the history of the island. For instance, ritual cockfights are briefly mentioned several times, but there is no description of them. Duggan probably assumes that this is not necessary since the readers are familiar with Clifford Geertz’s well-known essay on the Balinese cockfight. A specification of the subtitle therefore could be “The History of an Island of Indonesia, as Reflected in Oral Tradition and Written Sources.”
With its careful, comprehensive description of Savu history through five centuries, Duggan’s and Hägerdal’s book is an impressive achievement. It will, I believe, be of fundamental importance for all future studies of the history and ethnography of the region. Since the language on Savu has proven to be related to languages in Oceania, this book also has much to offer to scholars in that field of study. Folklorists interested in genealogies and mythological and historic narrative tradition will find interesting reading in Duggan’s chapters. But it deserves mention that Hägerdal, in his historical chapters, gives a vivid and well-informed overview of the region, quoting many highly dramatic sources.
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[Review length: 1450 words • Review posted on May 21, 2020]