Yoonhee Kang
Yale University
My dissertation aims to show the subjectivity and diversity of marginality by examining the interplay among marginality, emotions and performances of verbal genres among the Petalangan people in Indonesia. I conducted ethnographic and linguistic field research among the Petalangan people for a period of 14 months from January 1998 to March 2000.
The Petalangan people, one of the indigenous ethnic groups of Riau province in east Sumatra, live in the forested Kampar river hinterlands and practice swidden farming, fishing and gathering. Geographically remote and socially isolated, Petalangan society has been deemed "backward" or "primitive" compared to other communities in Riau. With recent economic changes in Indonesia, however, many government-sponsored palm oil plantations and logging companies have infringed upon Petalangan territories and Petalangan communities have been forced to leave their ancestral lands. In response to this marginalization process, the Petalangan people have tried to revitalize their local oral traditions, which have been stereotyped as "archaic" or "uncivilized" by neighboring Malays, to claim the authenticity of their local culture.
Petalangans experience and express their marginal positions in emotional terms; they feel 'fear,' 'shame,' and 'humility' in their relations with powerful outsiders as well as among themselves. Focusing on emotion as an interpretive tool and a situated practice, this study explores how the Petalangans' culturally specific discourses on emotions operate in relation to their marginality through a specific language practice. Given that many Petalangans use magic spells to control others' feelings and emotions as well as to overcome their feelings of subordination, the Petalangan oral literature appears not as a collection of fixed texts but as an ongoing social practice in which the traditional oral literature and performances converge with the politics of marginality and the politics of emotion. My analysis of the Petalangan language practice suggests that the Petalangan people use their "primitive" forms of oral tradition to perform their identity as marginal people, and yet simultaneously to contrive their position as citizenry in the modern nation-state. Marginality is not merely a 'constraint,' but also works as a 'resource,' which the Petalangan people exploit to survive their economic and political marginalization.Chapter I : Introduction
Chapter II: Ethnographic Background of the Petalangan Society
Chapter III: Petalangan Social World
Chapter IV: Introduction to Petalangan Religious Language
Chapter V: Addressing the Invisible World: Belian, a Petalangan Healing Ritual
Chapter VI: Collecting Honey with Love Songs: Multifunctionality of the Petalangan Honey-Collecting Ritual, Menumbai
Chapter VII: When Words Become Bodies: Magic Spells, Embodiment, and Gender
Chapter VIII: Conclusions