The singing from the Headwaters: Song and tradition in the headhunting rituals of an upland Sulawesi community. (Volumes I and II).

The Singing from the Headwaters is an ethnographic commentary on the sumengo, a genre of song performed during headhunting rituals in the Pitu Ulunna Salu uplands of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The study explores the noetic world of sumengo tradition, relates it to the ritual reproduction of community and polity, and establishes its relevance for an understand ing of symbolic violence. Material for this study comes from the author's twenty-seven months (1983-85) of fieldwork with a minority religious community--followers of ada$\\sp\\prime$ mappurondo, the indigenous ritual tradition. In this community, sumengo play a constitutive role in the discourse of headhunting ritual, a ceremony which commemorates village tradition, history, and polity. During this ceremony, no enemy is slain, no head is taken. Ritual efficacy hinges not on actual violence, but on the headhunt as imagined and voiced in lyric. Similar idealized reenactments figure in the headhunting traditions of many Southeast Asian societies. Thus, the findings of this study not only yield insight into local practices but may be broadly relevant to the cross-cultural understand ing of ritual violence as well. The first part of the commentary is devoted to the social, historical, and ritual contexts for the sumengo. It consists of a detailed ethnographic sketch of the contemporary mappurondo community; an analysis of past headhunting practices in light of ideologies of exchange; a precis of current practices; and a structural-functional analysis of sociocultural processes taking place in the ritual frame. The second part of the commentary comprises a noetic analysis of the sumengo and sumengo tradition. It begins with a look at the key rhetorical and aesthetic features of the sumengo. Song repertoires of different villages are then compared and related to social configurations and to the noetic constraints of orality, writing, and the commemorative process itself. The findings lead the author to argue that the ritualized violence of headhunting ensues in part from the noetic demands of the oral commemorative process.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyFolkloreMusicUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162189/1/8920536.pd