Stealing with the Eyes

Imaginings and Incantations in Indonesia

Will Buckingham

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781909961432
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

The Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia are remoteand largely neglected by outsiders. Will Buckingham went there, as an anthropologist in training, with a mission. He hoped to meet three remarkable sculptors: the crippled Matias Fatruan, the buffalo hunter Abraham Amelwatin, and Damianus Masele, who was skilled in black magic, but who abstained out of Christian principle.Part memoir, part travelogue, Stealing with the Eyes is the story of these men, and also of how stumbling into a world of witchcraft, sickness, and fever led Buckingham to question the validity of his anthropological studies, and eventually to abandon them for good.Through his encounters with these remarkable craftsmen—which in relating her also interweaves with Tanimbarese history, myth, and philosophy dating back to ancient times— we are shown the forces at play in all of our lives: the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, the tension between the past and the future, and how to make sense of a world that is in constant flux.

PART I

BARANG ANEH

STRANGE THINGS

A view of Saumlaki in the Tanimbar Islands

1

AN EXORCISM OF SORTS

I still dream of Tanimbar. I dream of scattered islands and atolls, of rocky bluffs and of cliffs that plunge down into the blue-green water. I dream of fleets of outrigger canoes putting out to sea for sea cucumber. I dream of journeys on foot up the coast roads at night, the stench of forest buffalo hanging in the air. I dream of frigate birds that wheel and circle over my head. I dream of heirloom gold that flashes in the sunlight like the plumage of fighting cocks. And I dream of the sun, shattered into a million parts. These dreams do not come frequently, but when they do I wake with a nagging sense of unease, a mixture of nostalgia and gratitude and regret.

The last time I dreamed of Tanimbar was some months ago. The dream was so vivid that when I woke in the pale light of an English spring morning, my heart beating fast, it took me a few moments to realise where I was. Beached upon the sheets in the morning light, feeling the tides of the dream pull back, I realised that it was twenty years since I had touched down in Saumlaki.

Later that morning, I took down the old cardboard box that sat on top of my bookshelves and opened it up. Inside were sheaves of letters, tattered photocopies, plastic boxes of photographic transparencies. I held up the slides against the light, one by one. The transparencies were turning green with age. Each slide was like a tiny illuminated flash of memory. As I looked through the slides, names and half-remembered Indonesian phrases returned to me. I had a strange sense that I had unfinished business with Tanimbar, or that Tanimbar had unfinished business with me. I had debts to discharge, obligations to meet, even if I was not sure what these debts and obligations were.

I packed the slides away. It was then I realised that after two decades I wanted to write about Tanimbar. I wanted to pass on the stories I had been told, to trade in things half remembered and half forgotten. It would be an exorcism of sorts. It would be what in Tanimbar they call – or they once called – a mandi adat, a ritual-law bathing that squares all accounts with the past.

I packed the slides and the photocopies and the letters away. Then I went out into the spring morning to clear my head.

I flew to Tanimbar at the age of twenty-three, a fledgling anthropologist. A few years before, whilst enrolled at university as a somewhat lacklustre student of fine arts, I had stumbled across the anthropology section in the library and I was immediately enchanted. From the very start, what anthropology taught me was that the possibilities for human life were many. Anthropology sang praises to the malleability of human existence. The more I read, the more I came to see that the things I took to be common sense, the things that I believed were simply the way things were, were nothing of the sort. Kinship, marriage, ethics, law, religion, life, death, politics – everything that mattered seemed up for grabs. Anthropology was an escape route, a back door by means of which I could slip the net of my own assumptions and beliefs.

So, instead of spending my days in the art studio trying to wrestle with the intractability of paint and canvas, I took to hunting and gathering in the library amongst the anthropology stacks. I read about the Nuer, the Mbuti, the Azande, the Trobrianders, the Ik and the Toraja. And sometime midway through my art degree I decided that, like thousands of anthropologists before me, I too would go out into the field and engage in some ethnography – that curious brand of high-minded intrusiveness amongst peoples too polite, or too powerless, to tell you to go fuck yourself.

I started to make plans. And I came, by degrees, to settle on the Tanimbar Islands, a small archipelago set at the end of the long arm of volcanic islands that stretches from Sumatra to Java to Bali and Lombok to Nusa Tenggara and Timor. There were tantalising suggestions that Tanimbar had strong traditions of carving in wood and stone. I decided I would go to Tanimbar to find out more about these traditions, and to meet the artists who still worked there.

Undaunted by the fact that I had no qualifications in anthropology whatsoever, I wrote a research proposal for the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and contacted universities in Indonesia to ask if they would work with me. I visited museums in London and in the Netherlands. In dusty storerooms I gazed at beautifully carved house-altars, or tavu, adorned with swirling wave patterns; at squatting ancestor figures, or walut; and at kora ulu prow boards from war canoes, decorated with fighting cocks. Meanwhile, I opened a bank account and started to apply for grants to fund my trip. The money began to trickle in.

Somehow, by the time I graduated from my degree, I found myself with a bundle of permission letters, the backing of the University of Pattimura in Ambon, a permission letter from Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia – the Indonesian Institute of Sciences – and a small research budget to pay for the trip. All this is how, towards the end of the summer of 1994, I came to catch a flight to Indonesia.

At the heart of the story that follows are my encounters with three remarkable sculptors – Matias Fatruan, Abraham Amelwatin and Damianus Masele. My instructors, guides and accusers, these three men taught me lessons that I am still struggling to fully master. I am indebted to them. But this book is about other things besides. It is about possession and exorcism, sickness and healing, time and history, uncertainty and change. And it is about how I eventually took fright at the prospect of becoming an anthropologist, and how I came to leave behind anthropology – the art, as Matias Fatruan put it, of ‘stealing with the eyes’ – for good.

2

SHIT-BABY

Getting to the Tanimbar Islands was not easy. It was a late summer afternoon when I boarded the plane to Jakarta. I touched down and found myself a cheap guest room in the Jalan Jaksa, where the travellers’ hostels were. I spent my first two weeks in Indonesia involved in paperwork. I shuttled between government offices, waited in corridors under slow-turning fans, processing documents and collecting official stamps on my growing stack of permission letters, permits and passes. Eventually it was done and I flew east to Ambon, the provincial capital of Maluku province. In the hotel in Ambon, the receptionist, an attractive woman in her mid twenties, looked alarmed when I said I was going to Tanimbar.

‘There are many witches in Tanimbar,’ she said. ‘You must be careful.’ I could see from the expression on her face that she was not joking. I reassured her that I would take care.

From Ambon – having failed to book a space on the infrequent flight to Saumlaki, the capital town of the Tanimbar Islands – I hitched a ride to the volcanic Banda Islands, taking the slow route to Tanimbar. In Banda I gorged on fresh fruit, read and reread anthropology textbooks, and swatted away mosquitoes as I waited for the next ship south. It was a week before the boat arrived – a passenger ship run by the Perintis (meaning ‘pioneer’) shipping line. The ship had once done service as a Chinese cargo vessel – you could still see the Chinese characters beneath the paint on the hull – but had since been converted into a passenger ship. It now carried up to three hundred passengers on the open deck, sheltered from the elements by an orange tarpaulin.

I spent three sleepless nights on the deck of the boat before we put in to port in Tual, the capital of the Kei Islands. I was tired and dirty, and there were several days of travelling to go until we reached Saumlaki. Not only this, but the mosquito bites I had picked up in Banda had already turned into running sores. I disembarked and bought myself some ointment for my infected bites from a pharmacist. Next to the pharmacy was a travel agency. I went inside and asked about the best way to get to Saumlaki. There was an unscheduled flight from Tual the following morning. I booked myself a ticket.

The following day, I hitched a ride to the airport on the back of a motorbike. The plane arrived – a small twin-prop, built in Indonesia after an Italian design. We flew south-west across the ocean, and then down the coast of Tanimbar’s largest island, Yamdena. I could see the road that connected the villages strung out along the seaboard. A couple of vehicles inched along like termites. The villages below me were orderly, their rusting tin and grass roofs extending inland from the beaches in strict rows.

We circled over Saumlaki. Out in the bay, boats were moored along the jetty. The plane banked, the water flashed in the afternoon sun and the ground loomed towards us. There was a blur of treetops followed by the thud of wheels on tarmac. Everybody clapped. My fellow passengers smiled and offered up prayers, to God and to the ancestors.

Saumlaki airport – a couple of miles out of town – was no more than a single-storey building by the side of an airstrip. The plane taxied to a halt and we clambered out. I took my bag and I walked past the sleepy officials, through the arrivals lounge. Outside, a small cluster of minibuses and taxis was waiting to ferry arrivals into town. The afternoon was sunny but not too hot, a breeze coming off the sea. I clambered into a Suzuki minibus. A neatly dressed man with a small briefcase and a holdall got in behind me and smiled. The driver offered to take me to the Harapan Indah hotel. The name, in translation, meant ‘Lovely Hope’. It was the best hotel in town, he told me. There was another hotel, cheaper than the Harapan Indah, but it doubled up as a brothel. ‘You will be more comfortable in the Harapan Indah,’ he said.

Without waiting to fill any of the remaining seats, the taxi driver pulled away. The road into town was lush with thick vegetation. Cows grazed on the verges. My fellow passenger was chatty. He was a government official from Surabaya in East Java, returning from Ambon where he had been attending some meeting or other. He had lived in Tanimbar a long time.

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked him.

He hesitated. ‘Tanimbar is different,’ he said. ‘It is different from Ambon and Surabaya. You have to understand the people here. If you understand the people, you will not have any problems. What are you doing here?’

I told him that I had come to study the art of woodcarvers.

He nodded. ‘You will find it interesting,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of history here. Adat is very strong.’

‘Adat’ is one of those words that are almost impossible to translate with precision. Usually it is translated as ‘ritual law’, which is to say the law sanctioned by the ancestors. In this sense, adat involves everything from land rights to whom you can or cannot marry, as well as questions about inheritance, about rituals and about taboos on particular foods. Adat is so extensive in its reach that it impinges upon almost all aspects of everyday life. But adat is more than just a matter of tradition, ritual or customary practice. I soon came to realise that, for the Tanimbarese, adat had all the force of the laws of nature. To break ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I: Barang Aneh Strange Things
• Part II: Jaman Purba The Ancient Age
• Part III: Jaman Pertengahan The Age of the Ancestors
• Part IV: Jaman Moderen The Modern Age
• Part V: Mandi Adat Ritual Law Bathing
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements