The flow of life in Buntao’; Southeast Asian animism reconsidered

Abstract

Focusing on the traditional cosmology of the Sa'dan Toraja of Indonesia,1 this article aims to contribute to the recent revival of the animism debate within anthropology (Descola 1992,1996; Ingold 2000; Viveiros de Castro 1998; Bird- David 1999; Stringer 1999; Pedersen 2001) and to further our understanding of a particular Indonesian cosmos (see also Van der Veen 1965; Nooy-Palm 1979; Bigalke 1981). This is a cosmos which, as the local priests put it, was brought into being when 'the sovereign of the word' {datunna kada) died and decomposed. However, the demise of this primordial being did not create something out of nothing. Echoing the evocative ambivalence of the Greek term arche (beginning and principle), the same priests described the sover- eign's death as garonto' Man ('the beginning of the path'). In other words, they insisted that the potential for life was always already there. What the original death did was to 'open a path' - that is, force life to realize itself by moving or unfolding in a kind of 'flow' (also Man). Moreover, as it had to reproduce the essential qualities of the life it forced to unfold, this path had to be oriented in a specific way - that is, from right to left (Man kanan). Thus, in the following discussion, the first question I shall be asking is whether this unfolding can be construed as animism. Furthermore, as this unfolding is thought to reproduce a number of qualities embedded in the 'essence' (bombong) of life itself, the second question with which I shall be concerned is whether this emphasis on bombong implies the existence of a preordained universe of essential qualities (un)equally distributed in a