Presented as part of the Centre for Research in Language Change (CRLC) Seminar Series
Ambon Island in the Central Maluku region of Eastern Indonesia has a long history of contact with non-indigenous cultures. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch colonizers caused many inland villages on Ambon to relocate to the coast, including a group of villages in the north-eastern corner of the Island: Tulehu, Tengah-tengah and Tial. In these villages, traditional narratives which tell of the origins of the villages are still current. A central feature in these narratives is an account of how the villages came to have their names. None of these narratives mention the European presence or its role in the relocation of the communities. Instead, the narratives seek to construct identities for the communities based on relations to natural phenomena such as bird cries and the sea. This paper examines linguistic aspects of several such narratives to show how ideas of place and identity are imagined in these communities and contrasts this with the contemporaneous Dutch account of Rumphius (1678). The comparison highlights the way in which the indigenous narratives construct identity in terms of communities rather than individuals and with a clear relation to the natural world rather than in relation to human activity.
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The CRLC promotes, coordinates and sponsors research on all aspects of language change and on the history of particular languages and language families.
The Centre is a focus for all research in this field at the Australian National University (ANU), combining interests of researchers in the School of Language Studies and the School of Archaeology and Anthropology in the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) as well as the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific.
We seek to actively promote the formulation of cross-campus and inter-university projects and seek appropriate funding for them, support directly selected projects or aspects of them, organise seminars, lectures and conferences, publish appropriate works and publicise the interests and achievements of historical linguistics at the ANU.
The CRLC is uniquely devoted to research on language change across language families. Scholars connected with the Centre will play a role in defining the discipline on a world scale.
Image: "Maluku Islands en" by Lencer - own work, used:Maluku Locator Topography.png by User:Sadalmelik. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maluku_Islands_en.png#/media/File...
