Leiden, The Netherlands
Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya
As a border area between Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures, the Bird's Head Peninsula achieved growing importance as a 'laboratory' to test prevailing theories, classifications, and paradigms from both (East) Indonesia and New Guinea Studies. In the early nineties, this consideration led to the creation of the Irian Jaya Studies Project, a Programme for Interdisciplinary Research (ISIR). Since the initial years of the project, which was launched in early 1993, the need for an international, interdisciplinary conference such as this one made itself undoubtedly clear and has finally come to fruition. The conference was organized by ISIR in co-operation with the IIAS, and with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI).By Jelle Miedema
In order to accommodate a variety of participants, contributions, and views from the field of East Indonesia Studies and beyond, for the first international conference on the Bird's Head Peninsula, an encompassing central theme had been chosen: 'Perspectives on the Bird's Head'. In several ways the conference formed a (new) stimulus to the Bird's Head Studies, or rather, the integration of the Bird's Head Studies into both New Guinea and East Indonesia Studies.From an interdisciplinary perspective, the conference was highly stimulating, not only because of the detailed 'individual' research perspectives presented, but also because of the commentaries from both (East) Indonesian and Papua New Guinean research agendas. These generated 'new' views which help to place findings in wider, cross-disciplinary frameworks. Ideas about 'fertility', known from the central western Bird's Head Ayamaru area, for example, had a much wider significance inside and outside the Bird's Head. The insights concerned are just one example of how new perspectives can cross areal boundaries and integrate results of investigations from the wider -- yet administratively and scientifically separate -- fields of study focusing on Eastern Indonesia or on Papua New Guinea.
Another discussion point which arose during the conference concerned a concept with a 'double' meaning: development. The conference enabled at least some participants to formulate their contribution to the Bird's Head research programme: more focus on 'historicity', or rather, on 'development' as an indispensable concept for comparison, analysis, and integration of the data. But the afore-mentioned was, as expected, only one notion of development. Representatives of LIPI emphatically reminded participants that, although an orientation towards theoretical research is very important, scientific research should provide practical information to assist development programmes. This point was reinforced by participant the Rev. Jenbise from Irian Jaya, who reminded his fellow participants that the objects of scientific research should not be forgotten, and that it was a common responsibility to keep an eye on current develop-ments: 'The Bird's Head must not become a second Tembagapura'. NB: In Irian Jaya 'Tembagapura' is synonymous for grand-scale, (over)exploitation of natural resources. Earlier, the issue of natural resources was dealt with in a local as well as a global context by Professor Soegiarto (Member Advisory Board LIPI), who recommended that corporations and governments in the industrial world assume more responsibility for ensuring that bio-resources prospecting be done with more legality and with the informed consent of the communities involved.
The conference resulted in divergent, but not mutually exclusive, discussions and research recommendations in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities, ranging from a focus on local worlds (local forms of Christianity), to a call to expand the scale (time, place) and/or to reconsider scales of comparison. In pre-ISIR times, research was restricted to areas situated mainly in the interior of the Bird's Head. With the advent of ISIR, however, some gaps in knowledge about inland cultures and languages have been reduced, while the diversity and complexity of the peninsula's mosaic increases in and near the coast. This implies that future research must pay more attention to 'urbanization', and also to the 'Sprachbund' character of Bird's Head languages.
The field of (comparative) linguistics formed also an overlap with Natural Sciences, where discussions ranged from a comparison of western Melanesia with the islands to the west, the Philippines and Indonesia, to species and genetic property rights.
One major theme dealt with in the field Social Sciences and Humanities was the dynamics of long-term, inter-regional processes of change (but not excluding short-term, 'local' pro-cesses of change). Within some disciplines, these processes are studied through a comparison of correla-tions between groups of phenomena across the Bird's Head, each phenomenon studied first in its own context of time and space. This comparison of clusters of phenomena is seen as an important tool by which to realize a cross-disciplinary integration of data.
One example of the ISIR Programme's cluster approach concerns (a discussion of) the rise and distribution of the prevailing ceremonial exchange system (the kain timur system), and its impact on several domains of life. The cluster approach -- including the use of a centre-periphery model, to deal with imported cloths -- has now been extended to the field of oral tradition, particularly tales about 'trickster-transformer-culture hero' figures. The attempt to integrate the study of patterns in mythology with patterns of mobility and politics is characterized as 'a striking example of how an explanatory order can be brought into what is at first a bewildering array of motifs' (keynote Professor A.J. Strathern). Another example of a cluster approach is presented in the field of linguistics. Especially in the keynote contribution by Professor Foley, a re-orientation towards a detailed study of the ethnography of speaking of a community in a given historical and cultural context, was stressed in order to be able to go beyond the mere classification of a language as 'Papuan' or 'Austronesian'.
The conference was sponsored by ISIR, Leiden University, Research School CNWS (Leiden), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
:Dr Jelle Miedema, co-ordinator of ISIR, is attached to the Projects Division of the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, Leiden University.
The ISIR project is a Priority Programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) carried out under the auspices of the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO).