The exemplary center: Poetics and politics of the kingly death ritual practice in Toraja, south Sulawesi, Indonesia

This dissertation is a study of the way the Torajans of south Sulawesi Indonesia use poetics in conjunction with politics in the context of a tradition of cultural performances in the kingly death ritual practice. Thus, this dissertation is about poetical and rhetorical mechanisms through which speakers are involved in a dynamic, dramatic, and theatrical discursive interaction whose outcome is unanticipatable. The main goal of this dissertation is to understand Toraja social action via context-bound performances, as such performances index social values, spatial concepts and metaphors, and tensions among community members. My approach to this material is grounded in a broadly informed linguistic anthropology.; I identify three interrelated ritual speech events of the kingly death ritual practice (bado&eegr;, rette&eegr;, massali pada&eegr;) in which the use of verbal art performance intersects with political processes. I discuss some aspects of grammar or more precisely politicized grammar that is integrated in the poeticized political processes. From the perspective of the number of participants involved in these ritual interactions, it should be understood that the sequence represents the ritual movement from dialogic performance to monologic political oratory.; It is shown that the mediation of the implicit poetic structure of the analyzed chunked coherent groups of interactive poetic lines performs two inter-related powerful functions (invocation of contextual parameters and self-reflexive capacity) in relating the denotational text to international happenings that give us the best reading of what is culturally and politically going on in real time discursive interaction. Using this theoretical apparatus, in addition of drawing from ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, and literary study, I show how it indexes some aspects of non-verbal contexts such as kinship, myth, and political institution, cultural values of various sources that mediate and organize the knowledge that performance and audience members alike depend on when making real time sense of ritual and which, thus, may contribute to the shaping and the selection of certain forms and motivate their interpretation. Moreover, in this dissertation I remain sensitive to how external forces, such as those imposed by the regional and contemporary Indonesian nation state, are also relevant to the production of ritual meaning(s). Today, in Toraja, local rituals are imbricated with national and international politics.