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1. Bringing order to the world Visitors to Dawera and Dawelor soon realize that the boat is more to the islanders than simply a means of transport. As a model of order it plays an important role in local culture. This is particularly apparent in the symbolism relating to the villages. The settlements are built according to an age-old pattern, in which nautical concepts such as 'pilot' and 'helmsman' function as spatial categories. The basic pattern has undergone many adaptations over the years, but it is still clearly recognizable. 'Eyries' Tales from the past tell us that the present-day location of the villages - almost all of them are situated on the beach - is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, each settlement was built on an elevated cone of rock which was difficult to reach - in many cases it was only accessible by means of one or more wooden ladders which could be pulled up after people had climbed up or down them. The reason for this isolated location was the continual threat of war. Most villages were also surrounded by walls for fear of enemy attacks. Within each of these 'eyries', in and around an impressive house known as the 'sacred house' or 'great house', lived a single large family group descended from a single ancestor (a 'descent group'). The structure of the great house was basically a 'roof on posts'. These posts were about two metres in height and they supported a bamboo floor. This in turn supported a roof made of coconut palm leaves. There were no intermediate walls. In this house, or in one of the outbuildings, the villagers were born, entered into marriage with a member of the group, had children, and died. The village, or to put it a better way, the great house, was a fully self-sustaining community. The members of such house communities saw themselves as a ship's crew, and this notion was elaborated in various ways. Architecture It was most strikingly evident in the architecture. Long, upwardly-curving extensions were fitted to each end of the ridge pole of the great house, so that the line of the roof resembled the basic form of a boat.
These extensions were fork-shaped, a characteristic motif of the stem and stern posts of both the sailing vessels and tree-trunk canoes of the islands. Spatial orientation Less visible was the elaboration of the notion of a ship in the spatial orientation of the great house. The building was associated with a boat 'sailing', following the orbit of the sun, from east to west. Inside the house this symbolic course was reflected in the names of the living spaces. The interior was divided into two halves separated by a relatively narrow central space. In accordance with the 'course', the eastern living space was called the 'helmsman's area', and the western space the 'pilot's area'.
Both halves of the house were, in turn, divided into two 'rooms', separated from each other by a fireplace. The names of the four areas thus created also reflected the symbolic course. Standing with one's back to the east - thus facing west - the 'right helmsman's room' and the 'right pilot's room' were on the right-hand side of the great house, and the 'left helmsman's room' and the 'left pilot's room' were on the left-hand side. The lord of the village The symbolic ship's crew was led by a symbolic helmsman, the head of the descent group. He was traditionally linked to a specific room in the great house. Each of the rooms represented a line of descent, which went back to the founder of the group. The mutual relationship was compared to that between older and younger brothers, the right helmsman's room being regarded as the oldest line of descent. Traditionally, this line supplied the leader of the house community, the man who represented all members of the group in dealings with the outside world and who officiated at rituals in the name of the group. In the local language he was addressed as orletol ('lord of the village'); in Moluccan Malay he was called tuan tanah ('lord of the earth').'Earth' here is meant in the sense of 'soil'. The superiority of the right helmsman's room was also expressed in the construction of the house. The main post, which was called mekamulol ('the one who holds the helm') was the first post erected when a house was built, and it was situated in this room. The sacred heirlooms of the house community were also kept there. These objects, called pusaka in Moluccan Malay, mainly consisted of gold ornaments and what are known as basta, imported lengths of cotton cloth decorated with block-printed motifs.
New villages It is not known when cones of rock ceased to serve as places of settlement for these nautically based societies. For reasons we can only guess at, however, at some time in the distant past, probably some centuries ago, the continuity of the descent groups must have come under threat. Most of them abandoned their isolated existence and began to live together on larger rock plateaus. Villages consisting of three or four originally isolated house communities were created, societies which again formed themselves into a symbolic boat which still 'sailed' westwards. Instead of four rooms the boat was now formed by a number of great houses in which the position of each group's great house showed that group's symbolic role within the greater whole. The groups living to the east functioned as helmsmen, those to the west as pilots. The function of 'bailer boy' was created for those groups living in the centre of the village.
Double function These new settlements also recognized the function of lord of the village. The provision of the ritual leader was reserved for the group that had first settled on the plateau and could therefore be regarded as the founder of the new settlement. The leader of this group thus filled a double role - he was the symbolic helmsman of both his own group and the newly-formed community. The symbolic role of the lord of the (new) village was reflected in the village layout. The great house of his descent group usually stood at the eastern edge of the site; his group functioned as a symbolic helmsman within the larger whole. In this way the traditional pattern of ordering the house community was maintained in the layout of the larger villages. There was a notional ship's crew led by a symbolic helmsman. To the beach Today, however, this type of village is also a thing of the past. Despite the fact that the 'eyries' had been abandoned, waging war remained part of the normal way of life and the villages on the plateaus were also provided with impressive fortifications. In 1890 the Dutch government official Van Hoëvell wrote: "The native villages on the various islands which form the Babar group have all, with the exception of the principal village of Tepa and a few native villages on Wetang, been constructed on steep heights and surrounded by strong walls, which is a necessity in view of the incessant state of war. Nowhere, however, did I see such thick and high walls as on the islands of Dawera and Dawelor. The native village of Angkoeki, among others, has walls three metres thick and six metres high, entirely built of stacked blocks of sandstone and provided with doors." [9] This situation was a thorn in the side of the Dutch colonial government and at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century the islands were pacified. All the settlements on rock plateaus were evacuated and the present-day villages were built along the coast at places where they were easy to control. The traditional boat model once again served as a guideline for the layout of these new villages - the hilltop settlements were simply rebuilt on the beach. In some instances during the forced resettlement villages were merged, but even in the larger communities thus formed the familiar boat configuration was retained: the villages were constructed as two or three ships 'sailing in convoy'. The present day During the process of scaling-up - from the isolated house communities to the villages on the beach - the endogamous marriage principle was abandoned, although there is still a tendency to marry a 'house member'. Under the influence of the missionaries the physical construction of the houses also changed in the course of the 20th century. The length and width were reduced and the posts became shorter, while at the same time the floor and roof were separated by increasingly high bamboo walls.
The final result can be seen in recently built houses; the ground has become the living room floor and the roof is supported by walls the height of a man. Members of a descent group now live in single-family houses situated around the much smaller 'great house', the interior of which no longer follows the original design. It is usually occupied by members of only one descent line - that of the right helmsman. Here, as in days gone by, ancestral heirlooms are guarded; a task that members of the oldest line will not readily abandon.
In the second half of the twentieth century the role of the lord of the village became more and more diminished by the advent of Christianity. Increasingly often a Protestant minister functioned as the symbolic helmsman of the settlement. Only during the celebration of the (western) New Year festival, based on an ancient fertility ritual, [10] does the old tuan tanah continue to play a prominent role in some villages. | | ||||||||||||||||
