Why the Porcupine is Not a Bird: Explorations in the Folk Zoology of an Eastern Indonesian People 9781487510053

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WHY THE PORCUPINE IS NOT A BIRD Explorations in the Folk Zoology of an Eastern Indonesian People

Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird is a comprehensive analysis of knowledge of animals and human-animal relations among the Nage people of central Flores in Indonesia. Gregory Forth’s in-depth discussion of how the Nage people conceptualize their relationship to animals covers their naming and classification, their symbolic and practical uses, and the changing ecology of central Flores. His study reveals the empirical basis of Nage classifications, which align surprisingly well with the taxonomies of modern biologists, and also shows how the Nage employ systems of symbolic and utilitarian classification distinct from their general taxonomy. Adopting a critical approach to current theory, Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird is an important contribution to the fields of ethnobiology and cognitive anthropology. (Anthropological Horizons) gregory forth is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethnographic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in several other academic disciplines: women’s studies, history, philosophy, psychology, political science, and sociology. For a list of the books published in this series see p. 377.

GREGORY FORTH

Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird Explorations in the Folk Zoology of an Eastern Indonesian People

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0004-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4875-2001-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Forth, Gregory L., author Why the porcupine is not a bird : explorations in the folk zoology of an eastern Indonesian people / Gregory Forth. (Anthropological horizons) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0004-7 (cloth). – ISBN 978-1-4875-2001-4 (paper) 1. Nage (Indonesian people) – Ethnozoology – Indonesia – Flores Island. 2. Ethnozoology – Indonesia – Flores Island. I. Title. II. Series: Anthropological horizons GN476.76.F67 2016

590.89’995

C2016-900174-1

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Preface

vii

ix

Note on Orthography

xiii

1 Introduction 3 2 Investigating Folk Knowledge: A Methodological Prospectus 3 Animals, Humans, and Other Mammals 52 Part One: Mammals 4 Animals of the Village: Domestic and Partly Domestic Mammals 75 5 The Giant Rat of Flores and Other Never-Domesticated Mammals 105 6 Symbolic and Utilitarian Dimensions of Mammal Categories: Varieties of Special-Purpose Classification 135 Part 2: Non-mammals 7 8 9 10

Birds, or “Creatures That Fly High in the Sky” 165 Snakes: The Life-Form Nipa 185 Neither Fish nor Fowl: A Non-mammalian Miscellany 207 Things with Tails but without Backbones: Invertebrates in Nage Folk Zoology 227

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Contents

Part 3: Comparisons and Curiosities 11 What’s in an Animal Name: Comparative Observations on Animal Nomenclature, Classification, and Symbolism 249 12 When Birds Turn into Mammals and Mammals into Fish: Nage “Beliefs” about Animal Transformation 276 13 Animal Mysteries and Disappearing Animals 295 14 Concluding Remarks

313

Appendix 1 Terms for Human and Animal Body Parts

325

Appendix 2 Growth Stages in Several Wild Mammals

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Appendix 3 Nage Invertebrate Categories

329

Appendix 4 Animal Names Used as Personal Names in Central Nage Notes

343

References Index

363

349

341

Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 9.1 9.2 9.3

Indonesia 2 Flores and adjacent islands 14 Central Flores 17 Peak of the volcano Ebu Lobo 19 Folk taxa from the most to the least inclusive 31 Author with informants in the village of Tolo Pa 45 Elegant pitta 71 Trophy buffalo horns 77 Nage horseman near Ola Kile 81 Brindled dog 92 Wolo Wawo villagers castrating a young pig 96 Young house cat suspected of wild cat parentage 99 Timor deer 106 Deer-antler carrying frame 107 Flores giant rat 116 Palm civets 124 Pet macaque 130 ’Abu villager holding a recently killed porcupine 152 Live porcupine inside a trap 158 Russet-capped stubtail 175 White-rumped kingfisher 176 Skin of a Reticulated python 195 Water monitor 209 Freshwater gobies 213 A splitter’s view of Nage frog taxonomy 220

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9.4 10.1 10.2 12.1 13.1 13.2 13.3

Figures and Tables

Turtle shell adorning the wall of a Nage house 225 Golden orb-web spider 235 Fidelis Laja Ga’e holding the shell of a large land snail Blue-green leaf beetles 277 Many-lined skink 299 Electric-shock fishing equipment 309 A shock-fisherman’s catch 310

Tables 3.1 5.1 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 12.1

Features of Nage life-forms 63 Murid folk-generics 123 Wild-domestic mammal equivalents 137 Domestic mammal composites 141 Bird folk-intermediates 167 Bird folk-specifics 168 Snake folk-generics 187 Lizard folk-generics 208 Fish taxa 212 Categories of frogs 219 Names for folk-generics 253 Referents of animal folk-generic names 256 Monotypic and polytypic folk-generics 269 Composition of Nage polytypic generics 271 Contemporary zoological transformations 278

237

Preface

Although somewhat cryptic, the title of this book is integral to its thesis, and its significance is therefore explained in the early pages of the first chapter. Some years ago, after publishing several articles on other forms of animal life known to the Nage people of Flores, one of Indonesia’s eastern islands, I decided to produce a comprehensive piece concerning mammals. Soon after I began the project, however, I realized that in order to understand Nage relations with mammals – in regard to classification, practical uses, and symbolism – it would be necessary to look closely at how Nage connect mammals with other categories of animals, including how one mammal was or was not connected with birds. As the project advanced I further realized that Nage folk zoology as a whole bore upon several issues of current and enduring theoretical and methodological interest, both in ethnobiology and in general anthropology. Hence the present book. Having mentioned previous writing, I should clarify that no part of this book has been published previously; thus in its entirety it represents an original whole. At the same time I have obviously built on earlier work, and it has therefore been necessary to cite this, especially so that interested readers may follow up specific issues and arguments in greater ethnographic and analytical detail. Much of what I say about Nage folk zoology departs from current social and cultural anthropological approaches to human-animal relations in non-Western communities, particularly recent writings invoking a revamped concept of “animism” and a highly relativistic notion of “ontology.” This disagreement, however, stems less from a pre-existing theoretical predilection than from the fact that much of what I have learned about Nage knowledge and treatment of animals, during a period of over 30 years,

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Preface

contradicts what many anthropologists have written about small-scale societies – groups which used to be called “primitives” but which in some circles appear to have become equated with “animists.” To show how this is so, it has been necessary to review in considerable detail information relating to the variety of ways Nage think about and relate to animals. But although my focus is a single ethnographic case, the study raises important challenges for widely advertised and currently popular approaches to the same sort of subject matter. To cite just one example, Nage animal knowledge can readily be demonstrated to conform to an “ontology” that Descola (2013) defines as “naturalist” and claims is exclusive to Western societies. Since first visiting Flores in the early 1980s, my fascination with that island has only increased. What success can be claimed for the present study owes much to many people, but first and foremost to the Nage who, for over three decades, have allowed me to share in so many aspects of their lives. It is impossible to mention all their names, and perhaps also improper to single out individuals. But I want especially to thank long-term field assistants Cornelis Kodhi Léjo and Fidelis Laja Ga’e as well as regular informants and people who helped me in collecting specimens or otherwise observing particular zoological species. Among the latter I should give special mention to Theresia Mea Béli and her late husband Thomas Cola Bha, Fidelis Lowa Sada, Yohanes Soda Ule, Joseph Méze Bha, and Petrus Lape Ga’e. In providing international scientific identifications for Nage zoological categories, mostly from photographs taken of specimens, I am extremely grateful to several professional zoologists. Among these were entomologist John Acorn of the University of Alberta, who generously and enthusiastically offered advice on a variety of insects and other invertebrates. Dr Heather Proctor and Dr Allison Murray of the university’s Department of Biological Sciences provided information on freshwater fish species, as did Professor Akihisha Iwata, an ichthyologist at Kyoto University and an internationally recognized specialist on the suborder Gobioidei. I am similarly grateful to Dr Guy Musser of the American Museum of Natural History for providing valuable information and insight into Flores murids and most notably Papagomys armandvillei, “the giant rat of Flores.” In a more general way, the manuscript has benefited from the suggestions of three anonymous reviewers. I am all the more grateful for their considerable expenditure of time and effort in the light of the apparent fact that most appeared to hold views quite different from the one

Preface

xi

represented here. Nevertheless, they provided a balanced and detailed review of the manuscript and, in one case, a comprehensive and extensive list of queries and counter-arguments. The opportunity to respond to these has, I believe, improved the book significantly. At various times field research was funded from grants awarded by the British Academy, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Alberta. Research visits to Indonesia were sponsored by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Nusa Cendana and Artha Wacana Universities in Kupang, and St Paul’s Major Seminary in Ledalero, Flores. The assistance provided by all of these bodies is highly appreciated. Finally, thanks are due to Dr Chris Healey for producing accurate and attractive line drawings of the Flores giant rat, the Russet-capped stubtail, and the Water monitor (Figures 5.3, 7.1, and 9.1). Gregory Forth May 2015

Note: By “folk zoology” I refer to knowledge of animals found among a specific linguistic group, in this case mainly the Nage. “Ethnozoology” (a branch of “ethnobiology”) can then be reserved for the study of folk zoology. Zoology as practised for example in universities around the world I refer to as “scientific zoology” or “international zoology” (see also “scientific” or “international” biology, taxonomy, and so on), and in the same regard I speak of “international science.”

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Note on Orthography and Language Groupings

Vowels English comparisons are approximate. /a/ (as in “cat”) /é/ (as in “may”) /e/ in the first syllable of bisyllabic words is the schwa, tending sometimes to a short /e/ as in English “get.” In monosyllables (e.g., me, “to bleat [of a goat]”) and in the second syllable of bisyllabic words (e.g., Nage, pronounced roughly as “Nagay”), it is pronounced as /é/, as it is when followed or preceded by a glottal stop (as in le’e, “bow”). In these instances the sound is not written as é in the interests of parsimony and also to accord with the practice of literate Nage themselves. /i/ (as in “fit”) /o/ (as in “dot”) /u/ (as in “flute”) Consonants All consonants have approximately the same value they do in English, with the following exceptions: /bh/, an implosive /b/ /c/, pronounced as in “chat” /dh/, an implosive /d/ /gh/, voiced velar fricative /ng/, always pronounced as in “singer,” never as in “finger”

xiv

Note on Orthography

/’/, marks the glottal stop, which occurs only initially or between vowels (see ’e’e, “ugly, plain”) Language Groupings Throughout this study I refer to “Austronesian” and “MalayoPolynesian,” two language groupings which include Nage and other languages of Flores. Austronesian comprises indigenous languages of Taiwan as well as Malayo-Polynesian languages, which include most languages now spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Madagascar. “Proto-Austronesian” refers to the protolanguage, or ancestral language, of all of these and to prototerms reconstructed by historical linguists. Similarly, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian denotes the hypothetical ancestor of all current Malayo-Polynesian languages.

WHY THE PORCUPINE IS NOT A BIRD

Figure 1.1. Indonesia

1 Introduction

The subjects of this book are the Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores and their knowledge of the non-human animals that inhabit their country. Flores has received considerable attention in recent years as the discovery site of a remarkable species, a physically primitive, late-surviving member of the genus Homo interpreted as Homo floresiensis. Although this species is mentioned again in later chapters – necessarily so, as Nage claim once to have been familiar with hominoid creatures bearing a striking similarity to the presumably extinct floresiensis (Forth 2008) – the present work is mostly focused elsewhere. Specifically, my interest is in ways Nage people relate – practically, conceptually, and emotionally – to the variety of extant animals they encounter in the present day. The title of this study is inspired by that of a famous essay in folk biology, “Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird?” (Bulmer 1967), but has been chosen to make several opposing points and to advance different perspectives. According to Bulmer, a pioneer in the study of folk zoology, the Kalam1 people of New Guinea – unlike international scientists, most Westerners, and other New Guinean peoples – claim the cassowary, a flightless bird, is not a bird. By contrast, the way in which Nage treat porcupines (Hystrix javanica) reveals a partial conception of these mammals as birds, or more generally non-mammals. Yet Nage are otherwise quite sure that porcupines are mammals – or, as they say, animals like “dogs and pigs” – so in this case the disagreement concerns two different ways a category is cognitively accommodated, not between different cultures but within one and the same culture. How far a similar analysis could apply to Bulmer’s Kalam lies beyond my present brief. But a further difference concerns the demonstrable

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

fact that the two ways Nage classify porcupines – which, as I later show, reflect different kinds of knowledge – are both based in observable, morphological features of the animals. Bulmer by contrast argues that the cassowary’s exceptionalism, and in a sense the Kalam’s as well, derives not from physical features separating it from other birds (unlike what obtains with bats, which Kalam, like most people, do indeed classify as birds) but from a symbolic representation linking the creature more closely with humans. In so doing, Bulmer advances a relativist position to explain a single society’s classificatory treatment of a flightless bird with reference to ideological features that are peculiar to the culture concerned. By contrast, my aim is to demonstrate how another smallscale society’s knowledge and classification of animals, while obviously shaped by experience of life in a particular cultural and natural environment, can be adequately explained with reference to percepts and cognitive operations that are available to all human beings. The idea that members of a single society can classify animals in two or more different ways is hardly original. Also responding to Bulmer’s interpretation, Roy Ellen (2006:63–89), writing on the classificatory treatment of cassowaries among the Nuaulu people of the eastern Indonesian island of Seram, has similarly argued that Nuaulu, in different contexts, classify these flightless birds as “birds” (manue) or, together with pigs and deer, as game animals (peni) – a classificatory contrast I would characterize as “taxonomic” and “utilitarian.” (For the time being, “taxonomy,” a concept further discussed in Chapter 2, can be defined as referring to a comprehensive classification based on relations of inclusion, contrast, categorical exclusivity, and transitivity.) Indeed, fundamentally the same sorts of distinctions have been invoked by a variety of authors. Among many possible examples I would cite Morris (1979), who speaks of “folk biological taxonomy” and “symbolic classification”; Wierzbicka (1984), who contrasts “taxonomic categories” (or “supercategories”) and “functional categories”; and P.M. Taylor (1990:44), who, drawing on Atran (1983), distinguishes “folk taxonomy” from “cross-cutting classifications” pertaining to “cosmology, cultural usefulness, and ecological affiliation.” Further, comparable to these several oppositions is the distinction Bulmer himself later drew between “natural taxonomy” and “artificial” classifications (1974), as well as Berlin’s (1992) better-known contrast of “general-purpose” and “special-purpose” classifications. As identified by various anthropologists, different kinds of classification operating within single societies, it is important to point out, are

Introduction 5

evidently analytical or “etic” constructs comprising conceptual distinctions which the classifiers themselves do not necessarily recognize. Certainly, I have yet to find Nage words that correspond to “taxonomy” or “utilitarian” or “symbolic classification” – terms I employ throughout this study – or for that matter any word that translates as “classification.” But this is not to say that something approximating “emic” recognition of these or similar contrasts is not possible. For example, Wazir Karim (1981:188) identifies indigenous terms expressing two contradictory ways the Ma’ Betisék of Malaysia conceive of animals: as beings “similar to humans” (and thus not to be eaten) and as “food.” In a partly comparable vein, Nage discourse reveals that they too recognize epistemological distinctions among the different sorts of knowledge associated with these classificatory differences. As will become clear, Nage are committed empiricists who, with unfailing regularity, voice scepticism regarding things (including physical or behavioural features of animals) they have “never seen with [their] own eyes” or the claims of others about objects they have not witnessed themselves, and they will often refuse to engage in speculation for the same reason. Yet all this specifically pertains to empirical matters, the validity of which could in principle be settled by perceptual information. It explicitly does not apply, for example, to religious propositions – for example, that porcupines exist in the spirit world as sheep or goats, or that certain spirits can themselves assume the form of a variety of animals. Indeed, Nage describe spirits as beings that are normally invisible and whose existence and character therefore cannot be confirmed by empirical observation. As this may suggest, for Nage as for most people, spiritual knowledge is essentially inherited knowledge, whose ultimate source they identify as the ancestors. The objects of such knowledge – the things that inform Nage symbolic classification – thus inhere, largely or solely, in the statements of social superiors, and although symbolic representations too draw selectively on phenomena, their validity is founded on the trust, overriding a characteristic scepticism, that Nage place in ancestral authority. The foregoing may suggest something of a consensus among anthropologists concerning a people’s classification and knowledge of animals. Yet the common view that members of a single community can systematically classify things in more than one way coexists with a variety of theoretical persuasions. For a large part these can be reduced to two general positions, which for convenience (although at some risk of overgeneralization) can be summarized as “relativist” and “cognitivist.”

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

The relativist position, sometimes also called “functionalist,” has for some time been the predominant view in social and cultural anthropology. According to this approach, the way people classify plants and animals, including how they represent and combine categories in the construction of folk taxonomies, is ultimately determined by their material value. The view is most famously enshrined in Malinowski’s classic dictum, offered in explanation of animal totemism, that “the road from the wilderness to the savage’s belly and consequently to his mind is very short” (1954:44). But more modern, and accordingly more subtly phrased, versions are not difficult to find. To cite just one example, a senior ethnobiologist (Meilleur 2010:160) has recently stated – quite correctly although, it seems, not disapprovingly – that ethnobiologists generally accept “that folk taxa are often economically significant, and that their lexicographical structure and perceptual content ... are closely related to this functionality.” Although obviously bound up with anthropology’s emphasis on cultural differences (which for many practitioners remain the discipline’s raison d’être) and a concomitant inattention to widespread similarities among human cultures, the persistence of this sort of relativism is remarkable. Certainly, it has been countered many times, and not least by Lévi-Strauss (1966:9), who observed, equally famously, that the extensive knowledge of natural environments found in small-scale societies the world over responds not to “practical” but to “intellectual” needs, and that people will classify plants and animals regardless of pragmatic value. The findings of the present study support this position. The majority of Nage animal categories do not comprise creatures of any economic or other practical importance; nor does the way Nage separate or aggregate categories to form higher-order taxonomic groupings (such as “bird” or “snake”) reflect, exclusively or primarily, either utilitarian or symbolic values. As Meilleur’s statement would suggest, relativists not only regard what members of particular ethno-linguistic populations know about animals as being fundamentally “cultural,” that is, mainly reflecting material concerns and ideological predilections; they also see particular cultural interests as significantly shaping people’s perception of local animal kinds. Expressed another way, the claim is that people will see only or mostly what their culture leads or allows them to see. From this it follows that relativists are especially attentive to differences in classificatory practice between different ethno-linguistic groups and, furthermore, to ways folk classifications diverge from the taxonomic practice of international biological systematics. In fact, it has sometimes

Introduction 7

been suggested that, more than reflecting any actual isomorphism, manifest concordance between folk and scientific taxonomy may be a product of the researchers’ questioning procedures (Ellen 1986). At the same time, ethnobiologists of various theoretical persuasions appear to agree in recognizing the existence of “basic” categories, reflecting an inherent notion of “natural kind” (Ellen 1993a:67–8) and operating as common, readily perceptible (or psychologically salient) components of folk biological classifications everywhere. An especially clear demonstration of this is the notion of “natural taxonomy” advanced by Bulmer, who, as illustrated by his interpretation of Kalam cassowaries, otherwise maintained a largely relativist position (see also Chapter 11). Therefore, it would seem that the main difference between contrasting ethnobiological approaches lies primarily in how far folk classifiers the world over actually vary in the ways they reconcile cognitive universals (like “natural taxonomy”) with culturally specific values and interests in plants and animals. Relativists, of course, generally view pan-human psychology as exercising a minimal influence on particular classificatory schemes, or as no more than a common core which permits myriad elaborations. They tend also to treat culture as a largely independent variable. And there is a related tendency, apparently more prevalent in cultural anthropology generally than specifically in ethnobiology, to conceive of classification – not just of biological kinds but of all sorts of things – as a culturally specific yet unitary phenomenon. Differences in ways different people classify are then ascribed to a general cultural difference – or sometimes, seemingly more specifically, to the idea that members of different cultures differ in their “modes of thought” or “criteria of rationality” (Sperber 1996a:70). Described as “universalist” by Atran (1990:214), the view that single cultures operate with single all-encompassing schemes of classification stems from the writings of Durkheim and Mauss (1963 [1903]), who saw classifications of animals and plants as having their social evolutionary origin in relations among social groups. A wellknown example of such universalism is Mary Douglas’s (1966) theory of pollution and taboo, where tabooed animals are construed as creatures that are peripheral and therefore anomalous in relation to a society’s major zoological categories (“beasts,” birds, and fish in the Old Testament, for example; see further Forth 2013). Advancing a rather different although equally relativist and universalist theory of humananimal relations, a more recent example is found in the work of Philippe Descola (2013 [2005]), who divides all human societies into just four

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“ontologies” (cosmologies, or ideologies) on the basis of whether, with respect to just two parameters, they consider animals as fundamentally similar to or different from humans. Contrasting to relativist and functionalist views of biological classification are what it is convenient to distinguish as a “cognitivist” perspective. Cognitivists too might be called “universalists,” but in the radically different sense that their ultimate concern is to identify constant factors in human thought. Like relativists, cognitivist ethnobiologists study plant and animal classification in culturally specific groups. Yet their primary focus is on resemblances and continuity between different societies and the pan-human cognitive processes that would account for these, even though in recent years they have given much attention to knowledge variation within ethno-linguistically definable communities (see Atran and Medin 2008 for example). It follows, therefore, that writers of this theoretical inclination see commonalities between folk classification and international scientific taxonomy as reflecting human thought operating on and mentally processing the same natural materials – a position that gained substantial support from Atran’s (1990) demonstration of Aristotle’s natural philosophy as providing the vital historical link between folk taxonomy and scientific taxonomy. Treating folk taxonomies as ultimately products of innate processes of human thinking, cognitivists further conceive of these as directly reflecting pre-existing discontinuity in biological nature, which in turn reflects processes of biological evolution. At the same time, such discontinuity is manifest perceptually especially in a particular kind of folk taxon. Exemplified by English categories like “hawk,” “trout,” “maple,” and “tulip,” this is the “folk-generic,” identified as the universally most salient (and in that sense “basic”) taxonomic unit by Berlin and his associates (see Berlin 1992) in their development of a framework for the comparative, crosscultural analysis of folk biological classifications. Comprising a standard series of folk taxonomic ranks, Berlin’s scheme has proven to be of wide applicability since its introduction in the 1970s. In spite of a sustained critique spanning several decades – and due in part to refinements reflecting further research conducted by Berlin and others – the scheme, in the words of two senior ethnobiologists (at least one of whom has been a regular critic of Berlin), still “provides an essential common framework for comparative analysis” (Hunn and Brown 2011), and I have therefore used it in the analysis of Nage animal classification (see Chapter 2). In a cognitivist perspective, people everywhere reveal fundamental similarities not only with regard to formal features of their classifications.

Introduction 9

Owing to pre-existing discontinuities in the natural world and the way these are apprehended in human cognition, different kinds of animals and plants are inevitably perceived as essentially different, or as revealing different “essences” (Atran 1990:83–5; Atran and Medin 2008:21–2). Such essences, however, pertain exclusively to organic things, and cognitivists have accordingly been concerned with demonstrating how humans everywhere conceptualize living beings in a fundamentally different way from non-living things, including inorganic entities, artefacts, and spiritual beings. If this is correct, it follows that biological entities will be mentally processed in ways different from non-biological ones (contrary of course to a universalist view of members of a given culture operating with a single conceptual scheme) and, by the same token, that they will be subject to different forms of classification. Expressed another way, human cognition is marked by “domain specificity” (Atran 1990, 2002; Boyer 2001), meaning that specific operations are applicable to different ontological categories constituting different mental or conceptual “modules,” as they have sometimes been described (Sperber 1996a; Atran and Medin 2008:29, 65–7). Another important distinction in cognitive analysis is that of “intuitive” and “counterintuitive” representations, that is, representations that are consistent or inconsistent with ordinary experience – or what Sperber (1975, 1996a:70–1) has variously called encyclopedic knowledge, empirical knowledge, or “everyday empirical knowledge.” In his early work, Sperber (1975) distinguished such “empirical knowledge” specifically from “symbolic knowledge” (or “symbolic cognition”), consisting in statements which, in order to be retained in the memory and accepted – even taken to be “true” – are processed quite differently from ordinary knowledge of things in the world. Exemplified by religious beliefs, symbolic statements, more specifically, can be treated only as “representations of representations,” or metarepresentations (Sperber 1996a:71; Atran 2002:107–12). Sperber further distinguishes a “semantic knowledge,” or knowledge of word use, and in an essay devoted to representations of animals (1996b) shows how “taxonomic thought,” or what could equally be called taxonomic knowledge, involves a combination of empirical (or encyclopedic) and semantic knowledge. Providing illustrations of empirically informed taxonomic knowledge and symbolic knowledge respectively are the Nage ideas that pythons are large snakes (and are one of several kinds of snakes) and that certain spirits commonly assume the form of pythons (as they can

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

do of several other kinds of animals). The two sorts of knowledge further coincide with the two sorts of classification I similarly distinguish as “taxonomic” and “symbolic.” (Of course, I have also spoken of “utilitarian classification,” a notion whose connections with empirical and symbolic knowledge of animals I further explore in Chapter 2.) Classifying animals symbolically, on the basis of their association with spirits – as in the Nage identification of pythons and certain other animals as forms in which spirits will manifest themselves in the phenomenal world – reintroduces the contrast of intuitive and counterintuitive ideas. Writing about religion, Pascal Boyer (e.g., 2001; see also Atran 2002:100–7) has developed this contrast in a particular way, arguing that spiritual beings actually combine both. Counterintuitive components (e.g., the ability to become invisible or forgo any physical form) are what distinguish spiritual or supernatural beings, as ontologically distinct entities, from natural beings, while intuitive components (e.g., the ascription to spirits of human thoughts, feelings, and intentions) link them with empirical beings, thereby grounding them in ordinary experience and thus making them intelligible and possible to retain in memory. Following Boyer’s analysis, it would appear that spirits everywhere are represented in radically different ways from humans. In contrast, Ellen (1993a:176) has claimed that the Nuaulu treat spirits as “natural kinds,” thus implying that this Indonesian people make no, or no absolute, distinction between the natural and the supernatural and, moreover, that they process them cognitively in the same way – as indicated by Ellen’s further statement that “Nuaulu recognize spirit categories in much the same way as they recognize categories of animals.” If this is correct, then Boyer is evidently incorrect. However, Nage certainly distinguish spirits from animals, and they do so in ways that expressly refer to counterintuitive features of spirits and which simultaneously make sense of manifest differences between their taxonomic and symbolic classifications of zoological kinds. At the same time, it should be recognized that counterintuitiveness is not exclusive to supernatural representations, being equally present in scientific theories (see Wolpert 1992), although there it is articulated with intuitive knowledge in different ways. As I show, the contrast therefore has other applications in the analysis of Nage ideas about animals, including ones that have nothing to do with spirits and cannot properly be called symbolic. Examples include representations of animal transformation (Chapter 12) and other ideas about animals which at least some Nage equally consider unlikely or even uncanny (Chapter 13).

Introduction 11

How Nage conceive of animals in relation to spirits and humans, the two other members of the “trichotomy” recently advertised by Lloyd (2011), is a concern that runs throughout the present study. Since people everywhere appear to treat animals, humans, and spirits, both conceptually and in practice, as quite different sorts of beings, the three can be conceived as major divisions in a pan-human ontology – an “ontology” entailing that most comprehensive of classifications, a division of the world into things which are held to exist. As Boyer’s analysis suggests, despite their differences, humans, animals, and spirits are everywhere conceived as possessing features in common. At the same time, ethnography reveals recognized similarities and differences among the three to be culturally variable, so that it may be possible to speak of culturally specific ontologies. To the extent that both perspectives can be accepted as valid – and that local differences can coexist with universal commonalities – one might glimpse some reconciliation between relativist and cognitive approaches. Yet certain relativists have argued that whole cultures possess radically different ontologies and, more specifically, that some represent animals and humans as beings of essentially the same kind. A very conspicuous instance of this view is Descola’s aforementioned theory (2013) which involves a reworked model of animism held to characterize an ontology typical of small-scale societies. Descola defines animism as a representation of animals as resembling humans in their “interiorities” while differing in their “physicalities,” or physical constitutions. Somewhat recalling Atran (although at the same time radically contradicting Atran), “interiority” refers to an inner “essence,” and indeed in support of his theory Descola cites ethnographic instances where animals, like humans, are described as possessing a “soul.” However, insofar as the Nage compose a smallscale, traditionally non-literate society of subsistence cultivators that might well be expected to exemplify an “animistic ontology,” what they say about animals, especially how they resemble and differ from humans, seriously discredits Descola’s approach. By the same token, Nage folk zoology provides no support for another currently popular interpretation of human-animal relations. This derives from Viveiros de Castro’s characterization of Amazonian societies as manifesting “perspectivism” (1998), a cosmology that treats the human-animal contrast as entirely relative, so that humanity and animality are no more than contrasting perspectives of the other held equally by both human and non-human beings.

12

Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

As their sceptical empiricism may suggest, far from being “animists” or “perspectivists,” Nage describe humans and animals – and also spirits – as beings of radically different kinds. Yet this assessment pertains in the first place to an everyday empirical knowledge, one that comprehensively informs what I distinguish as a folk taxonomy of animals, and it has less relevance to their symbolic knowledge, or even to their utilitarian knowledge of animals. As “universalists,” Descola and Castro give no recognition to such epistemological distinctions. Nevertheless, it might be expected that, in symbolic contexts, Nage represent humans and animals as more similar than they otherwise do. It turns out, however, that they do not. Rather, Nage symbolic representations link empirical animals not with humans but with spirits, and moreover their understanding of animals most closely conforms to “naturalism,” a culturally specific “ontology” which Descola characterizes as exclusive to the modern West. Suggesting that Nage may be “naturalists” of course risks endorsing Descola’s dubious typology. It also glosses over not only distinctions between different ways of conceptualizing and classifying animals within a single society but also differences among individual members. Explaining variation of the latter sort has of course been a perennial challenge to anthropologists of all persuasions. Various writers, including many working within a largely relativist paradigm, have demonstrated connections between variability in animal and plant knowledge (e.g., how far individuals can identify specimens with local names or how many subtypes they recognize within a single category) and social differences of age, gender, occupation, and the like (see, for example, Berlin 1992; Ellen 1993a). In addition, comparative cognitive research has shown not only how folk taxonomies function cross-culturally in forms of inductive reasoning but also how the same inferential processes can produce knowledge of animals that varies as much within cultures as between them, and specifically on the basis of differential exposure to the same animals in the same environments by individuals of identifiably different ethno-linguistic backgrounds (see Coley et al. 1999; Atran and Medin 2008:67–74; Ross and Revilla-Minaya 2011). Of course, in some measure intracultural variation still reflects social and cultural factors (bound up, for example, in a particular division of labour); yet arbitrary differences in intellectual proclivity and interest among individuals, correlated with differential experience of the natural world, also seem significant. As should be expected, Nage too differ internally in particular areas of animal knowledge and classification (see Chapter 2), but not to

Introduction 13

such an extent that one cannot legitimately speak of “Nage folk zoology.” Moreover, internal difference of this sort is not to be confused with the epistemological contrast of a taxonomic knowledge and the distinguishable types of knowledge which inform Nage utilitarian and symbolic classifications. While frequently noted, this kind of contrast has not been given the attention it deserves in anthropology. In what follows, therefore, I endeavour to show how “special-purpose” – or “artificial” (Bulmer 1974) – classifications of animals, exemplified by the Nage association of porcupines with birds, are fundamentally derivative of a more comprehensive folk taxonomic knowledge in which porcupines unequivocally figure as mammals, and moreover that essential to this relationship are certain features of folk-generic taxa, the cognitively most salient components of folk taxonomies everywhere that reflect universal recognition of something that can be called a “natural kind.” These concepts will necessarily receive more attention below. But first, Nage knowledge of animals needs to be located in its wider geographical and cultural contexts. Flores Island and Nage Country With a length of over 300 kilometres and an area of some 14,300 square kilometres, Flores is the third largest of the Lesser Sunda Islands and, after Timor, the second largest island in the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. Human inhabitants now number around two million, with nearly 45 per cent residing in the western region of Manggarai. Flores is an extremely mountainous island, and the population is most concentrated in coastal regions. Nevertheless, except for the highest elevations, much of the landscape has been considerably modified by human activity, including forest clearance for settlement and cultivation. Such modification has of course increased since the Dutch established a colonial administration on the island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after which the indigenous population expanded significantly. Lying 8 degrees and 40 minutes south of the equator, Flores has a tropical climate, although temperature and rainfall and therefore forest cover are naturally affected to a large degree by elevation. Also affecting soil fertility and vegetation are numerous volcanoes, including 14 that are still active. With the exception of wetter regions near the south coast, rain falls mostly during the west monsoon, which in interior regions of central Flores occurs between late October and early May.

Figure 1.2. Flores and adjacent islands

Introduction 15

In many places, water is scarce during the dry months, when many streams cease to flow, although this is less a problem in more elevated regions like central Nage (the setting of the present study) than in more northerly areas and especially in places close to Flores’s north central coast – the eastern limit of the famous Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis (Forth 2010b). Located to the east of Wallace’s line, Flores falls within the Australasian biogeographic realm and, except for an absence of marsupials, has a fauna more closely resembling that of Australia and New Guinea than western Indonesia (which falls within the Asiatic realm). Like that of other eastern Indonesian islands, Flores’s fauna has been described as depauperate and unbalanced (Sondaar 1989), displaying low species diversity. Low diversity especially characterizes the island’s endemic Pleistocene mammalian fauna, which preceded the introduction of several larger mammals by humans in Holocene times. Before 7,000 years ago, and after the extinction of stegodons (prehistoric elephants) 17,000 years ago, mammals comprised only bats and rats, some of these endemic to the island. The two groups still make up the largest number of mammalian species on Flores; the remainder comprise domesticated or currently wild or feral kinds introduced by humans during the last several thousand years. As far as mammals are concerned, this may suggest a limited scope for ethnozoological study. Yet Nage knowledge of local animals is detailed and multifaceted, thereby facilitating study in depth as well as breadth, while a relatively small number of folk categories provides an especially manageable field for a comprehensive monographic treatment. Not mentioned in the foregoing is another kind of mammal: members of the genus Homo. The prehistoric human occupation of Flores remains shrouded in considerable mystery. What have been identified as stone artefacts associated with stegodon hunting indicate the presence of hominin hunters since nearly one million years ago (Brumm et al. 2010), but although some of these hunters were therefore contemporary with Homo erectus on Java, their identity is otherwise uncertain. Remains of modern humans (Homo sapiens) occur on neighbouring islands, notably Timor, as early as 40,000 years ago. By contrast, the earliest evidence on Flores is dated to just 11,000 years ago. But the real surprise is that the only pre-sapiens hominin so far discovered on the island is not erectus but an even more primitive, and far smaller, dwarf hominin interpreted as a distinct species, Homo floresiensis. Thus far, floresiensis is known only from a single site (the discovery site at Liang Bua

16

Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

in western Flores), where the most recent date is currently interpreted as 17,000 years ago. How much longer the diminutive hominin might have survived in other parts of Flores has yet to be established, and palaeontological research on other possible habitation sites has barely begun. Nevertheless, it turns out that the sub-fossil hominin physically corresponds, to a remarkable degree, to ebu gogo, a human-like creature Nage claim occupied part of their territory until several hundred years ago (Forth 2008) and which therefore might reasonably be considered a component of Nage folk zoological knowledge, especially in regard to their understanding of animal extinction (see Chapter 13). As the name of a group of modern humans, and in its most general sense, “Nage” refers to an ethnolinguistically distinct population occupying a large part of central Flores (see Figure 1.3). At present, this region forms about two-thirds of the Indonesian “regency” (administrative region) named “Nagekeo,” which covers an area of 1,417 square kilometres and mostly coincides with the Dutch colonial district named “Nage-Keo” (and, eventually, simply “Nage”). “Keo” refers to the culturally related region located immediately south of Nage. Before 2007, when Nagekeo was established as a separate regency, both Nage and Keo formed part of the “Ngada” regency, named after the Ngadha people who reside directly to the west. Comprising a series of mutually intelligible dialects, the Nage language has been classified as a member of a Central-Malayo-Polynesian grouping of Austronesian languages. More specifically, Nage forms part of a group of central Florenese languages designated “NgadhaLio” (after populations located respectively to the west and east) and whose closest affinities are with Manggarai, spoken in western Flores, and languages of the neighbouring island of Sumba. A feature of most Nage dialects, including the central dialect I am concerned with here, and a feature distinguishing these from dialects of Ngadha, Lio, and Keo, is the absence of an /r/, a sound replaced in initial positions by a glottal stop. Since /r/ is retained in some contexts of poetic or ritual speech, however, the sound is likely to have disappeared only during the last few centuries. Other features of Nage phonology are indicated in the “Note on orthography” on page [xiii]. The area I distinguish as “central Nage” (a term I use also to refer to the population) is the locus of this study and has its centre in the village of Bo’a Wae. As the residence of the native administrator, or “raja,” of Nage, Bo’a Wae was the “capital” of the colonial region of Nage-Keo and remains the principal settlement within what are locally called the

Figure 1.3. Central Flores

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

“three Nage desa.” (Indonesian “desa” denotes an administrative village or municipality, in most parts of Flores typically comprising several indigenous villages.) The three desa – from east to west, Nage ’Oga, Nata Nage (where Bo’a Wae is located), and Nage Sapadhi – all include “Nage” in their names, and although the details are contested (see Forth 2009b), the three are commonly described as a historical as well as a cultural and linguistic unity originating in an ancient and long abandoned village named “Nata Nage.” Since the 1980s, the three desa have been split into smaller named units owing to population increase, yet older Nage still speak of the “three Nage desa.” Altogether, inhabitants of central Nage numbered 11,652 in August 2014. Especially in Nata Nage, the most central of the three desa, this figure has for several decades included a number of outsiders, mostly people from other parts of the greater Nage region who have come to work in local government offices, schools, and other modern facilities. However, these outsiders appear to have had little influence on local folk zoology, as details of animal knowledge do not differ noticeably between Nage resident, for example, in or near Bo’a Wae village and inhabitants of the remotest central Nage villages. This of course is not to say that the region has not been affected by social and cultural change, most notably from conversion to world religions, modern education, and the introduction of a national language, the Malay-based Bahasa Indonesia (hereafter simply called “Indonesian”). Nevertheless, comparison with systems of animal knowledge described for other small-scale societies indicates that such factors have had little effect on Nage folk zoology, for example by introducing knowledge drawn from international biology. Central Nage settlements are located on the northwest side of the large and still active volcano Ebu Lobo (elevation 2,124 metres; see Figure 1.4). A short distance to the north of Bo’a Wae village lies the “Flores highway,” the Dutch-built main road that connects the eastern and western extremities of the island. Intervening between many of the older inhabited villages, the road thus transects the most populated part of central Nage. As Nage recognize, it also roughly demarcates two ecological zones; accordingly, knowledge concerning particular animals varies somewhat between people living to the south of the road and those living to the north. Not far south of the highway, thus closer to the volcano, the terrain rises abruptly; this is also a more forested area, although Nage describe it as having been less continuously covered in the early part of the twentieth century owing to a more extensive practice of swidden cultivation. To the north of the road, the terrain

Introduction 19

Figure 1.4. Peak of the volcano Ebu Lobo from a garden in the central Nage region of ’Ua

descends until, after a few kilometres, it becomes generally flatter and gives way to a more open landscape of scrub and scattered trees, eventually merging into savannah. This is the area better suited to pasturing large livestock. It is also where one finds deer, the most prized of Nage game animals. Defining the northern (and topographically lowest) limit of central Nage is the Ae Sésa, the largest river in central Flores, which flows into the Flores sea near Mbai. Not far south of the Ae Sésa lies Ola Kile, the northernmost major village in central Nage. Populated by members of the clan Deu, the clan of the former colonial rulers of Nage, Ola Kile can be called a satellite of Bo’a Wae. Partly through marriage, Ola Kile people are more closely connected than other central Nage with regions to the north – including Rawe, Poma, and Menge Ruda – and this influence is sometimes detectable in their speech. Yet in all essential respects they form part of central Nage. The eastern limit of central Nage lies just east of Tiba Kisa, the main village of the Nage ’Oga people, while the

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

western limit falls just beyond the village of Ola ’Ewa (also known by its old name, Nage Mi). Like the village of Bo’a Wae, both Ola ‘Ewa and Tiba Kisa are located close to the main east-west road, but, also like the old colonial capital, they remain major ceremonial centres and residences of some of the largest and most important Nage clans. Outline of Central Nage Society and Culture Having already mentioned changes affecting Nage society and culture in the twentieth century, I should perhaps stress that this study is squarely focused on Nage as I have known them during the last 30 years and therefore concerns their present knowledge of and relations with animals. At the same time, I found little to suggest that what people told me and how I observed them relating to animals reflect anything other than older, long-established patterns, substantially unaffected by recent technological innovation, the introduction of modern education, or conversion to Christianity. This of course applies mainly to older people (particularly those born before 1960), who composed the majority of my informants. Younger people did sometimes differ from their elders in animal knowledge, but interestingly enough, not usually in a way that suggested influence from modern Western understandings of things biological. In fact, the attitude of sceptical empiricism that characterizes Nage folk zoology in general was better represented among older than among younger people. Nage traditional culture is exclusively oral, and almost without exception ideas about local plants and animal species are still communicated by non-literate means. For a large part, moreover, social life continues to be organized by relations among clan and villages. The village (bo’a), a settlement usually comprising no more than a dozen permanent houses (sa’o), forms a largely independent political unit, and traditionally Nage recognized few formally constituted or named territorial entities (political districts or domains) more inclusive than the village. At the same time, it is not villages but named, preferentially patrilineal, clans (woe, ’ili woe) which function as the largest land-owning corporations, with component “houses” (lineages) and individual families holding more specific rights. Most villages contain members of more than one clan, and segments of the same clan are in most cases resident in more than one village. Conveying a broader sense of “human habitation” or “settlement,” the concept of bo’a (village) further contrasts with witu (forest), a term

Introduction 21

that further denotes all areas of uncultivated or unsettled land covered in wild vegetation. As qualifiers of animal categories, bo’a and witu distinguish “domestic” from “wild” forms, as in wawi bo’a (domestic pig) and wawi witu (wild pig). Apart from being the realm of wild animals, witu for Nage is the domain of nitu, an unrelated term referring to morally ambiguous spirits considered the owners of all wild creatures and from whose control Nage hunters must, partly by ritual means, release these animals. Another contrast that will later gain significance is wolo (hill, mountain; upland) and mala (plain, lowland). In central Nage, mala refers to the more northerly, “seaward” (lau) part of the territory, whereas wolo applies to the more elevated and permanently populated part. Conveying the more general meaning of “dry land,” wolo further contrasts with ae (water), and in these senses the terms occur in animal names distinguishing categories associated with highland and riverine or coastal areas respectively. As the contrast with witu (forest) may suggest, Nage villages occupy an area cleared of vegetation. The area is rectangular, and the two short sides are distinguished as the “head” (ulu) and “tail” (éko), with the head oriented “upward” or “landward” (zéle, zéta) in the direction of higherlying ground and usually a prominent peak. In central Nage, this is always Ebu Lobo, the active volcano that dominates the landscape over a large part of central Flores. Nage mostly construct component houses in two rows along the two longer sides of the village, thereby orienting these to a complementary spatial axis labelled mena and zale. The practice of distinguishing the two principal ends as the “head” and “tail” – terms further applied to several sorts of more inclusive social-spatial entities – might suggest a conception of a village as an animal, or as similar to an animal. Although Nage represent Flores island as possessing a head and a tail (see Chapter 8), they do not otherwise articulate this idea in respect to villages. Nevertheless, a specific association of villages with animals is revealed in the practice of erecting, in the very centre of the most important settlements, a forked and decorated post (peo), an object employed exclusively in sacrificing water buffalo, the most valued of Nage sacrificial animals. Collective buffalo sacrificing is moreover an act which for Nage publicly articulates social and territorial unities and affirms, or occasionally revises, rights to land (Forth 1998a, and in regard to Keo see Forth 2001). The right to slaughter buffalo at forked sacrificial posts is restricted to men of the higher social stratum: a category of village, clan, and house leaders named mosa laki, or “true bulls.” As anthropologists will recognize, this usage not only symbolically identifies

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

sacrificers and victims but also recalls of the designation of prominent men as “bulls” among Nuer pastoralists in the Sudan (Evans-Pritchard 1940:179). Participants in major buffalo sacrifices typically include invited guests as well as clans resident in the host village. Where non-residents are involved, such participation is one way in which villages and their component clans are connected with one another in regional networks. Another way is through marriage. Named clans are normally exogamous and, although villages are not, the majority of marriages in central Nage involve spouses belonging to different villages. Nage marriage rules further prohibit a man from marrying a weta, a category that includes sisters, daughters of father’s sisters, and female parallel cousins. More positively expressed, a man should marry a matrilateral cross-cousin (li ana) and ideally a first cousin, a genealogical mother’s brother’s daughter. As is characteristic of many eastern Indonesian societies, these rules express and effect an asymmetric system of affinal alliance whereby men should take brides from groups from which their own groups have previously taken wives, thus entailing a categorical distinction between “wife-givers” (moi ga’e) and “wife-takers” (ana weta). Over the last several decades the Catholic Church has largely succeeded in banning marriage of first cousins, but exogamous groups still maintain affinal ties by marrying more distantly related cross-cousins and continue to recognize established alliances through exchanges of material goods and services. In addition, direct exchange – whereby a group that in the past has given wives to and received bridewealth from another begins to take wives – remains prohibited and is both rare and strongly disapproved of, even when individuals are only distantly related genealogically (as in a particularly informative case I encountered in 2014). Since marriages always require an exchange of domestic animals, as in fact do all occasions when affines meet formally, the distinction of wife-giver and wife-taker informs a special binary classification of domesticates: buffalo and horses – the principal components of bridewealth – are given by wife-takers to wife-givers, as are goats, dogs, and domestic fowls, whereas wife-givers reciprocate with pigs. To initiate and maintain affinal relations, therefore, a group must have regular access to domesticated animals of all kinds, either from its own stock or by occasionally prevailing on in-laws of the opposite kind (e.g., wife-takers when one needs buffalo to give to wife-givers). Nage kinship thus shapes one use to which domestic animals are traditionally

Introduction 23

put, and since nearly all domesticates serve as sacrifices, so too does religion. Nowadays cattle, introduced by the Dutch, form further components of Nage livestock, as occasionally do sheep, and these, together with buffalo, horses, and other older domesticates, provide regular sources of monetary income. Water buffalo also serve as work animals in wet rice cultivation, a technology introduced in 1936. In fact, in view of their spiritual as well as material significance, buffalo are crucial to the operation of Nage society and, as further shown in Chapter 4, their importance would be difficult to exaggerate. Although cultivation and husbandry provide the bulk of dietary needs, Nage men are avid hunters, and the contribution of wild animals to local protein intake is not insignificant. Except for mice and shrews, all wild mammals are killed for consumption, as are many larger birds, lizards, fish, and crustaceans. Hunting nevertheless has something of the air of a male recreational activity, and Nage men expend considerably less time and effort in the chase than in cultivation. Cultivation is the main subsistence activity of women, who also tend chickens, pigs, and small livestock kept in or near settlements. By contrast, it is mostly men and youths who look after larger animals – buffalo, horses, and nowadays cattle – often kept further away in pasturing areas outside of settlements. And another men’s occupation – in fact one which, like hunting, is exclusively male – is palm wine tapping and distilling, conducted in distilleries usually situated just outside permanent villages. Before the introduction of irrigated rice cultivation, Nage grew a variety of crops either in swiddens (uma ’aca) or in more permanent dry fields (uma woka).2 These included various cereals (dry rice, maize, millet, sorghum), tubers, and pulses, but over the last several decades this variety has been reduced owing to increased reliance on wet rice. Not only has rice replaced other cereals as the Nage staple but, since the 1970s, people have begun regularly selling and buying rice through a government initiated cooperative (Koperasi Unit Desa, or KUD). During the same period, many cultivators have also started producing introduced crops exclusively for sale, including coffee, cloves, and vanilla. At busier times in the agricultural cycle, many Nage take up residence in field huts (kéka), sometimes built in clusters and always located near cultivated fields, usually at some distance from the villages (bo’a). Pigs and chickens are raised near field huts, and dogs, rarely separated from their male owners, are as ubiquitous in field

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

settlements as in villages, serving in the former places to counteract the depredations of wild mammals and birds that feed on ripening crops. Even before the introduction of irrigated rice, some people, mostly of lower rank, would reside more or less permanently in field huts, rarely returning to the villages. This practice is generally disparaged, especially by higher-ranking Nage. Yet even at present many Nage men seem to spend most of their days “in the fields” (zili uma), with some hardly ever returning even to attend virtually mandatory Sunday church services. In the twentieth century, following the encouragement or direction of colonial and subsequent national governments, inhabitants of villages located on the higher slopes of the Ebu Lobo volcano began founding new settlements further downslope and closer to the main road. As village populations have expanded, more houses have been built outside of village sites and along the sides of modern roads, thus facing towards the road rather than inwards, towards a central village plaza. Concurrently, concrete and sheet metal have largely replaced wood, bamboo, and thatch (ki, Imperata grass) as building materials. But Nage continue to employ wood to frame even “stone houses,” as they call buildings otherwise constructed of concrete blocks. Combined with population growth and increased clearing of land for settlement and cultivation, this continuing demand for wood has contributed to the depletion of local forests. Nevertheless, in that part of central Nage south of the main road, thus on the higher slopes of the volcano, one can discern two countervailing developments. On the one hand, villagers have moved northward, towards the road, and although gardens are still planted on the mountainside, these are proportionally fewer than formerly, and swidden cultivation is practised less often because of government restriction and a shift to irrigated rice, cultivated in more northerly, lower-lying regions. As a result, one now finds continuous stretches of montane forest where Nage report there were once few large trees. On the other hand, the same forests are increasingly exploited for lumber. These developments have undoubtedly affected wild animal populations. Yet some reported declines, for example in wild pigs in areas upslope of the main road, probably reflect over-hunting more than reduction in forest cover or changes in forest use. Contrasts of old and new are manifest in other ways. Along the main road, and in the very centre of the central Nage region – thus in the area surrounding Bo’a Wae village – the construction of modern buildings, including a church, a mosque, schools, small shops, and local government offices,

Introduction 25

has since the 1980s resulted in the creation of what could be described as a small town. But one only has to travel a short distance away from the road in order to encounter older settlements surrounded by trees and stands of bamboo, whose inhabitants are still primarily engaged in subsistence agriculture and whose men still regularly hunt. The residents of these settlements also retain a substantial knowledge of local fauna and flora. It is these people and their folk zoology that are the subjects of the present study. Besides the economic and demographic changes described above, another factor affecting Nage culture and society has been conversion to Catholicism, beginning early in the twentieth century but developing on a large scale only after the middle of the century. Apart from very small numbers of Muslims and Protestants (nearly all immigrants involved in modern institutions and resident along the main road), almost all central Nage are now Catholics. During the first half of the twentieth century, central Nage proved a difficult place for missionary activity, even in contrast to other parts of the larger colonial district of Nage. Although missionaries tended to blame the Dutch colonial authorities, a major problem was apparently passive resistance from the family of the native rajas in Bo’a Wae, and for this reason the first mission station was not established near Bo’a Wae but well to the east, near the village of Raja (Forth 2004b:28–33). The pace of conversion did not pick up significantly among Nage until after the events of 1965 and 1966, when a military government came to power in Indonesia after crushing what was represented as a communist coup. People who had yet to convert to a world religion, or who had previously been little more than nominal converts, then flocked to the Catholic Church for fear of being judged atheistic communists. In spite of their relatively new religious affiliation, however, Nage maintain indigenous spiritual beliefs and, for a large part, traditional rituals. Also in full vigour is an annual collective hunt of deer and wild pigs, an undertaking which is equally a ceremonial performance rationalized by a charter myth. And although Catholicism has modified local marriage practice, before a Church wedding can occur Nage require that all unions be legitimated through exchanges of bridewealth and counter-gift, a large part of which comprises domestic animals. As a result, animals both wild and domesticated remain as central to Nage life as ever, while several domestic kinds have assumed a new importance as objects for sale and a source of increasingly essential money.

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

Volume Organization The bulk of this study comprises two sections. Part 1 (Chapters 4 to 6) deals with mammals, while Part 2 (Chapters 7–10) deals with several kinds of non-mammals (including, in Chapter 10, invertebrates). Presenting animals known to Nage in this way may seem arbitrary, but it nevertheless accords with a distinction which, although not itself coinciding with two folk taxa, implicitly informs several aspects of their animal classification. I have also chosen to treat mammals first largely because they are the animals most familiar to Nage and the ones people know most about. And another reason for dealing with mammals before non-mammals is quite simply that, whereas aspects of Nage knowledge of birds, snakes, and other non-mammals have been discussed in previous publications (e.g., Forth 1995, 2004a, 2011a), for the most part Nage knowledge of mammals has not. Separately addressing the several “life-forms” of ethnobiological analysis (see Chapter 2), each of the chapters in Parts 1 and 2 does more than discuss how Nage categorize animals. As the aim is to investigate all aspects of human-animal relations, each chapter also examines practical uses that Nage make of animals – most notably in regard to appropriation, exchange, and consumption, but also as work animals and pets – and how others negatively affect human lives, as well as the symbolic employment of animals in spiritual ideology and cosmology, ritual, augury, myth, and metaphor. (A comprehensive study of Nage animal metaphors is planned as a separate volume.) Some chapters further attend to the derivation of animal names and the history and prehistory of animal introductions, especially in regard to domestic and other non-indigenous kinds. Advancing several comparative issues, Part 3 necessarily departs from an implicitly phylogenetic approach. Chapter 11 includes a comprehensive review of animal nomenclature and examines variation in the internal composition of different animal life-forms. In regard to recurring formal patterns in naming, and especially with reference to the way Nage conceive of folk-generics as admitting subclasses (or “folkspecifics”), I further consider how far Nage zoological classification might reflect widespread cultural forms and principles, as opposed to perceptual contrasts inherent in natural discontinuity. In a similar vein, Chapters 12 and 13 enquire into areas of Nage animal knowledge which appear to be at variance both with ordinary Nage experience of animals

Introduction 27

and with the findings of international zoology and yet are also not readily accommodated either to symbolism or to utilitarian thought. Chapter 12 examines a series of animal transformations: common ideas that depict an animal of one kind changing permanently into another kind. Chapter 13 begins with a review of other remarkable representations of animals and explores their possible grounding in actual experience of the species concerned, as opposed to circumstantial, linguistic, or other non-perceptual factors. The remainder of the chapter then focuses on Nage understandings of extinction and their views on animals perceived as diminishing or disappearing from their region. Major findings of the study and their relevance for a general understanding of human knowledge of non-human animals are then reviewed in the final chapter (Chapter 14). The next chapter (Chapter 2) discusses issues of method and methodology, thereby preparing the way for an exploration of more specific and substantive topics. Chapter 3 then investigates various aspects of the Nage concept of “animal” and provides a prelude to the chapters on Nage folk mammalogy that immediately follow.

2 Investigating Folk Knowledge: A Methodological Prospectus

In analysing ways Nage categorize and otherwise talk about animals, I recognize a fundamental distinction corresponding to what have been called “general-purpose” and “special-purpose” classifications. Introduced by Berlin, the designations are admittedly vague, but as shown in the previous chapter, the contrast nevertheless coincides with distinctions widely recognized among anthropologists and ethnobiologists. It also highlights important conceptual and cognitive differences and is therefore essential to any comprehensive understanding of folk zoological knowledge. A general-purpose classification is equivalent to a taxonomy, a concept I define below. Special-purpose classification minimally comprises what can be analytically distinguished as symbolic and utilitarian classifications. As applied to folk taxonomy, “general-purpose” has evidently caused some misunderstanding. “General” does not necessarily mean that such a classification is used more often or more widely within a population. In fact, the opposite may be true insofar as, in their daily thinking and discourse and while engaged in particular activities, people may, for example, more regularly associate and distinguish animals with regard to their practical values, thereby manifesting a utilitarian classification. As much as with “general,” the problem appears to lie in “purpose,” which itself can suggest specific (or “special”) applications. However, rather than attempt to coin a new phrase, I continue to employ “general-purpose” in describing folk taxonomy,1 equating this with what Bulmer has called “natural taxonomy.” Bulmer characterizes natural taxonomy as providing the “necessary core of all systems of folk classification applied to plants and animals” (1974:97); as “cross-cutting” culturally more specific “artificial classifications”; and moreover as a

Investigating Folk Knowledge

29

scheme of observable differences recognizable to Western field biologists and therefore permitting translation between folk classifications and international scientific ones. As with international scientific taxonomy, folk taxonomy primarily reflects differences and similarities among organisms observable in the natural world. As I show with reference to the Nage, special-purpose classifications also draw on empirical percepts, albeit in far more selective and arbitrary ways; furthermore, they make use of the same basic components as does Nage folk taxonomy – more particularly the same folk-generic taxa (categories like “hawk” and “maple”) – while ordering these to form more inclusive classes in quite distinct ways. As this should suggest, differences between taxonomy and other forms of classification do not entail that these are not interconnected, nor indeed that people have cognitive difficulty switching between different modes. That a people’s elemental taxa – their folk-generics – figure as the typically named units of all their classifications (including ones that can be distinguished as non-taxonomic) has, so far as I know, never been explicitly articulated before. But it goes to the heart of the connection between “general-purpose” and “special-purpose” classifications, revealing this as a relationship whereby classificatory schemes pertaining to specific activities and particular social and ideological settings are subsumed, in a definite way, by a general-purpose classification which perhaps only in this sense can properly be called “general.” Taxonomy and Other Classifications The units, or building blocks, of a taxonomy are self-evidently “taxa” (singular “taxon”), entities treated as “bits” or “chunks” (D’Andrade 1995) of reality. Like any category, taxa are usually named, but they can also be unnamed (or “covert”). For ordinary anglophones, examples of animal taxa include “hawk,” “bird,” and indeed “animal.” In both scientific and folk classification, a taxonomy is formally defined with respect to interconnected relations of inclusion (English vernacular “bird” includes “hawk”); contrast (“hawk” contrasts with “crow,” or otherwise stated occupies the same taxonomic “rank” as “crow”); mutual exclusivity or discreteness (“hawk” exclusively denotes a kind of “bird” and never simultaneously a kind of “snake,” for example); and transitivity (if a creature is a hawk, then it is necessarily also a “bird” and an “animal”). As indicated just above, in any taxonomy animals are categorized primarily on the basis of morphological and

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Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird

behavioural properties; that is, it is these empirical factors that determine whether a given creature is or is not to be included in a particular category (e.g., “hawk”) as opposed to a contrasting category (e.g., “sparrow”) and whether a given category (like “hawk”) belongs to a particular superordinate category (e.g., “bird”). However, in the Nage case at least, there is no concept of physically similar categories at the same level of contrast being substantially “related” in any particular way, for example as “siblings,” or deriving from common ancestors, as in modern evolutionary theory. Another feature distinguishing a folk taxonomy of animals from other kinds of classification is its comprehensive or encyclopedic character, in which respect it is worth pointing out that these adjectives express two senses of “general.” I refer to the fact that a taxonomy will include all categories of empirical animals known to members (although not necessarily to all members) of an ethnolinguistic group. It has often been remarked how folk biological taxonomies are typically “shallower” than the taxonomies of international science, involving far fewer levels. To be sure, a number of Nage taxa, especially ones comprising insects and other invertebrates, are subsumed only in the most inclusive taxon, “animal” (ana wa), and do not themselves admit subcategories. Nevertheless, about half of Nage “basic” taxa (or folk-generics) form part of at least three taxonomic levels – comparable, for example, to those occupied by English “animal,” “bird,” and “hawk” – and some form part of four, five, or even six. There is much more to be said about differences between taxonomy and special-purpose classification, but before doing so I should attend to the several taxonomic ranks included in Berlin’s (1992) scheme, which I employ throughout this study. As is consistent with the pivotal character of folk-generics, the six taxonomic ranks displayed in Figure 2.1 are most usefully discussed in an order different from the lineal arrangement articulated in the diagram. I should also stress that the diagram’s implicitly “genealogical” form is incidental to the relations of inclusion it is intended to illustrate and that there are other ways of representing these – for example, as a series of containers of varying sizes with smaller ones nested inside larger ones, or by horizontally arranged series separated by inequality signs (