This work is the product of over a decade of patient and intensive labour, and of close and sustained collaborations across several cultures. With its boldly innovative integration of multimedia with written text, it represents a breakthrough in the presentation of research in ethnomusicology. Indeed it deserves attention from ethnographers generally, demonstrating as it does the potential for more multidimensional and comprehensive ways of presenting and preserving our research.
What Dana Rappoport has achieved is remarkable for a number of other reasons too. This is the first study to provide a close contextual analysis of the music that is central to Toraja ritual performance, and it may well be the last. The Toraja traditional religion, known as Aluk To Dolo (Way of the Ancestors), comprised a great corpus of ritual, famed for its complexity, and divided into two spheres, associated on the one hand with the West (mortuary rites) and on the other with the East (rites for the enhancement of fertility and prosperity). During the colonial period, the gifted Dutch linguist H. van der Veen recorded some of the long poems which were part of these rites, and published them in translation, but these texts, valuable as they are, lack the ethnographic context which could bring them to life for the reader. The religion itself is now on the verge of extinction, since a great majority of the people have converted to Christianity. The riches of Toraja oral poetry are at the same time being extinguished, since none of the traditional priests or to minaa who are the carriers of this remarkable oral literature have any successors in training. Rappoport, who commenced her fieldwork in 1993, was thus only just in time to benefit from the knowledge of two notable to minaa, Ne' Ambaa and Ne' Lumbaa, both from the region of Rindingallo. Although she met and worked with many other officiants, it was with these two men that she developed particularly close relationships. Ne' Ambaa died in 1994, shortly after she completed her first fieldwork.
Although one or two kinds of Toraja ritual (notably funerals and house inauguration ceremonies) are still being vigorously executed in Christianised form, converts do not generally allow traditional priests to officiate at their ceremonies, and thus their poetry no longer has an audience. As well as their own long solo recitations, they also provided the verses for the song masters who lead collective performances, thus there is a rupture of transmission when they are excluded from modified rituals. More specifically, while funeral laments are still regularly performed, the great rites of the East which were the occasion for group performances of other types of sung verse are now very rarely carried out, so that one half of the tradition is much more vulnerable to loss than the other.
Songs from the thrice-blooded land comes in a boxed set of three components, and is available in French, Indonesian or English versions. To produce the latter, the author has worked closely with both a Toraja and an English scholar (Stanislaus Sandarupa, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and Elizabeth Coville, of Hamline University). Volume One is an ethnographic analysis of the vital role of music and song in Toraja ritual life. Volume Two provides a more detailed presentation and discussion of the entire Toraja texts of several different kinds of songs, together with their translations. The third and most remarkable component is the DVD containing the multimedia materials: over 40 hours of musical recordings, 120 minutes of video, and 2,000 stunning photographs, together with animations showing how exactly the chants are performed in chorus by a group, who perform a rotating circular dance as their song leaders take turns to initiate the lines from different points within the circle. The DVD is divided into two sections. The first, entitled ‘Multimedia argument’, actively extends the analysis beyond what is presented in the text, through the creative layering or nesting of textual statements, photographs, video, and animation; in the second, ‘Multimedia anthology’, one can access samples of the music from a whole range of rites both by repertoire, or by keyword. There is also an extensive glossary of Toraja vocabulary.
That this is a labour of love is beyond doubt. Although the books bear the publication date 2009, the work has only just been released this year due to delays caused by the technical complications of the multimedia component. To achieve even a simple textual rendition is no easy feat. In performance, syllables are drawn out until the words become difficult to discern, making transcription from recordings a huge challenge. Moreover, Toraja ritual poetry is composed in a high register of the language, full of unusual vocabulary and obscure imagery, and notoriously difficult to translate; as Rappoport puts it, its compressed, elliptical style ‘stays on the edge of meaning’ (Vol. 2, p. 29). The author's dedication to this project is all the more touching in the face of the widespread apathy among Toraja themselves toward the preservation of their own vanishing poetic heritage. Today the ‘quivering tongues’ (pandelo lila) of the bards without heirs are ‘libraries burning down’ (Vol. 1, p. 179).
Rappoport maps out very clearly the hierarchical arrangement of rites within the two great divisions of East and West and the complementary pairing of musical forms, as well as of many other features (types of sacrifice, banners, standing stones, drums, litters, towers, masts), across the two categories. In particular she sheds fresh light on the importance of rites that accomplish transitions between the two realms. Some rites, reserved for the nobility, aid the souls of deceased ancestors to achieve deification, and these accomplish a movement across the division from West to East, closing the loop between death and renewal of life, and binding together the whole cosmological conception. Rites that used to involve the entire community in warding off sickness through vigorous trancing aim to restore the balance of life and energy on earth. In the Toraja scheme of things, music (and poetry) is ‘part and parcel of a great process of exchange between living, dead and divinities’ (Vol. 1, p. 28). It helps the souls on their journey to the afterlife, summons the deities to earth in the rites of the East, and enables persons, houses or villages to acquire a new status; ritual efficacy thus depends upon its powers to move things. The author is particularly insightful in writing of the melismatic style in which the choral singers modulate their voices between semitones, stretching out syllables and dissolving the words into a densely resonating vocal texture. The continuity of the resulting sound is prized by the Toraja as imitative of the music of waterfalls. The ‘thickness’ of atmosphere thus engendered during whole nights of continuous performance is a powerfully sensory experience that gives rise to a sense of ‘suspended time’, the ‘saturated time’ of ritual (Vol. 1, p. 43). Music thus ‘constructs [the rite] acoustically’ (Vol. 1, p. 165). Rappoport points to a curious parallel between music and sacrifice, both of which are performed to saturation point in ritual. Just as livestock must be elaborately dismembered in order for meat to be shared out to the whole community, musical performance (which takes place in the same space) seems to disarticulate the verse by redistributing its syllables only to reconstruct it into a choral unity of sound. At this point, instead of merely reading about it, readers can also see and listen for themselves, and enjoy the thick contextualisation provided by the cross-referencing and integration of the multimedia elements in the DVD.
While Rappoport is not the only ethnographer to explore multimedia's potential to enhance Clifford Geertz's oft-cited goal of ‘thick description’, this is still a very new area and she has set an exceptionally high standard for others to follow. Future projects may find that websites, rather than the DVD format, offer greater technological convenience and stability for complex projects. It is to be hoped that her example will inspire others, since especially where any sort of performance is involved, visual media offer such obvious advantages in providing a vivid record.
