Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju of Indonesia (review)

Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju of Indonesia. By Anne Schiller. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii + 178 pp., introduction, maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Small Sacrifices combines an ethnographic depiction of secondary burial practices and the costs of the ritual sacrifices associated with them, along with a discussion of how these practices have become a focus for contested issues of identity among the Ngaju as a result of the Indonesian New Order that emerged during the Suharto administration. The “small” in the book’s title is intended to express the irony of the situation. The “sacrifices” are costly, in terms of material goods, for the participants. The new bureaucratic council that has been put in charge of religious affairs for the Ngaju has declared that this practice should be stopped, because “now we live in an era of small sacrifices” (124). Anne Schiller poses the question, in her examination of the situation, whether the funerary ritual itself will disappear in the future, becoming “a small sacrifice on the road to development” (146).

One of the book’s strengths is its dual insistence on in-depth ethnography and an awareness, paralleled by that of the author’s major informants, of historical change. Tiwah, the elaborate forms of secondary burial among the Ngaju that have been described by Douglas Miles and Hans Schärer, have recently been inserted into the context of a struggle for recognition by the Ngaju Dayak of central Kalimantan. This is as much a political movement as anything else. Because the state recognizes only certain entities as official religions and because religious identity is important for political reasons and for the aims of “development,” what was a set of variable and flexible customs has come under the threat of bureaucratic standardization. The Indonesian state does not recognize tribal practices as forms of religion proper but only as examples of adat (customary law), seen as being “in the blood.” This issue then becomes a device for either incorporation or peripheralization of tribal groups within the state. The Ngaju were able to establish a stake for themselves in a wider national world only by gaining acceptance for their practices as a version of Hinduism. As commonly occurs, they have begun to develop a perception of their need to achieve wider forms of solidarity in an expanded political environment, a perception neatly expressed by one of their leaders in the image of the amulet string. If the amulets are not tied together, their magic cannot work well (146).

The ethnography of secondary burial is striking in itself and replete with classic anthropological themes such as rites of reversal in which participants “throw filth” at one another or arrive representing the nonhuman wild arena of persons outside of the kin network. The author attends closely to issues of variability, the roles of ritual specialists, choices as influenced by costs and aims, and the ways in which rituals structure the experience of identity. She also elucidates the issue of “correctness” in rituals in ways that resonate closely with materials from New Guinea and perhaps elsewhere. Correctness is oriented performatively to results: if a death or sickness occurs after a particular ritual sequence, it is taken as an omen of incorrectness and the ritual is thus changed. Correctness does not therefore mean invariance, although the main forms of ritual are adhered to. Conversely, bureaucratically enjoined standardizations can also lead to anxieties when misfortunes occur. Correctness thus becomes a focus for resistance.

An interesting part of the discussion has to do with the relationship between kinship structures and secondary burial rituals. Ngaju kin networks are ego-focused bilateral sets of people, optatively mobilized for specific purposes, without any descent-based corporate groups. Affines are included for certain purposes, but unless they are also cognates they are excluded from a family ossuary (as a poignant photograph...