Introduction

The purpose of this article is to analyse two ritual language texts gathered from the Endenese of central Flores and to consider the significance of some of the metaphors employed in them. These metaphors are not only common to other Endenese rituals, but also occur in the rituals of other societies in eastern Indonesia. Thus this paper may, I hope, contribute to a general comparative understanding of eastern Indonesian societies.

The two texts which I wish to examine are examples of what the Endenese call mbuku, a form of ritual speech employed at bridewealth negotiations. The principal metaphors in the two texts are spatial metaphors, involving the idea of a ‘journey’ as applied to marriage relations. Some basic background information on the Endenese and various forms of their marriage is necessary to make the texts and their recurrent metaphors comprehensible.

The Endenese are a people, numbering approximately 78,000, who live in central Flores. To the east of the Endenese are the people called the Lionese, who speak a dialect of Endenese. To the west of the Endenese live another group (sometimes called the Nga'o-nese) whose language could also be classified as a dialect of Endenese. This situation of dialectal diversity provides each population with a wide range of vocabulary with which to create parallel couplets, since it allows the possibility of borrowing synonymous words from a neighbouring dialect. We thus find in the ritual language such dyadic sets as nosi (a Lionese word for ‘to tell, to msixuct’) // sodho (an Endenese equivalent), kerho (an Endenese word for ‘to forget’)//ghéwo (a Nga'o-nese equivalent).