KITA Discourse Series 05/2018: Long-Distance Interaction and Language Survival in Eastern Indonesia, 21 June 2018

On 21 June 2018 (Thursday), KITA Discourse Series No. 5/2018 was held with the following particulars:

Title: Long-Distance Interaction and Language Survival in Eastern Indonesia
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Timo Kaartinen, University of Helsinki
Venue: KITA Meeting Room

Abstract: After the Dutch colonization of the Banda Islands in 1621, a community of seafaring Muslims left Banda and resettled in several parts of the Eastern Indonesian archipelago, preserving their language and oral traditions in two villages in the remote Kei Islands. These villages maintained trade contacts to places outside Kei, and from the 1950s onwards their inhabitants have pursued circular labor migration and education in cities around Indonesia. Throughout this history of migration, the Bandanese have maintained a firm boundary between their own and other local languages, even as their aesthetics of powerful speech projects Bandanese and the regional or national lingua franca as parallel domains of meaning and authority. In urban and national settings, code switching and β€˜glossing backward’ from Indonesian risk erasing Bandanese as a distinct domain of meaning, but speakers persist in maintaining grammatical and phonetic differences between Bandanese and the national language of Indonesian. By insisting on Bandanese as a distinct linguistic form, the Bandanese continue to project a linguistic otherness to their immediate neighbors, including those relatives who fail to acquire fluency in the language. While this impairs the transmission of the language from parents to children within the same locality, interest and competence in Bandanese continues to be fueled by long-distance interactions that involve family visits, large-scale congregations, child-borrowing, and smartphone communication. Through an exploration of such conflicting strategies of linguistic survival among the Bandanese, I seek to reveal how a former history of migration provides a framework for interpreting present-day mobility.

About the Speaker: Timo Kaartinen received his PhD Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2001 and was appointed as Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki in 2016. Prior to this appointment he has held full-time teaching positions at the Universities of Helsinki and Tampere starting from 2000, including a total of six years as acting professor. He has held research fellowships with the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2014-2016), the Academy of Finland (1991-1994 and 1995-1998) and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at Copenhagen (1995) and worked as a visiting scholar at the Australian National University (2013), Malaysian National University (1997-1998 and 2005) and the Malaysian Science University (1999). The themes handled in his published work include oral history, the politics of nature, migration and urbanization, linguistic anthropology, legal institutions, and the state. He is the author of β€œSongs of Travel, Stories of Place: the Poetics of Absence in an Eastern Indonesian Society” (2010), based on rural and urban fieldwork among the Bandanese, a small ethno-linguistic group that derives from the famous Spice Islands of Maluku. His other Indonesian field site is West Kalimantan where he has done research related to β€œNature Making, Land Conversion, and the Global Resource Economy”, a comparative project which explored human responses to rapid environmental change in several tropical countries. His current research is focused on linguistic networks and minority language survival in Maluku.