SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

né I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes
Tropical Semiotics I n j
the ka buru said to the young woman, "Remove all your clothing and leave it
at the base of the tree here; take my clothing instead before you climb up."
The young woman did so and climbed up the tree. While she was in the top
branches picking leaves, she heard the ka buru whispering to herself below.
"What is she saying?" the young woman wondered and called out to the ka
buru. "No, it is only that some biting ants have stung me," the older woman
replied. Then the young woman heard the sound of the tree trunk being struck
repeatedly. "Now what is she doing?" she wondered. The ka buru called out
to her, "I am going to marry your husband. You will stay here and die." And
with that, the trunk of the hagenamo tree elongated greatly and the branches
spread out in all directions and the young woman was marooned in the top of
the tree. She looked down at the ground now far below her and thought, "How
shall I leave this place now?" and she cried. That night she slept. In the morning
she awoke and found that someone had built a fireplace and a small house.
In this house she lived. At night while she slept, someone had fetched firewood
and with this she made a fire.
She lived in this manner in the little house in the hagenamo treetop and
presently she became pregnant. She continued to live in this manner, and then
she bore a son. She gave birth to this child in a small confinement hut that
someone had built for her. The unseen provider also began to bring food for
the small infant boy as well as the mother. When the child grew up to be a
toddler, one night the woman merely pretended to be asleep. Waiting there in
the dark, a man arrived and held the child. The woman quickly arose and
grabbed the man's wrist. He said to the woman, "Release me," but she refused.
Finally, the man said to her, "The ka buru who trapped you here is married
to your husband. But here near this tree where you live, they will soon come
to cut down a sago palm. You must make a length of hagenamo rope and tie
one end onto the middle of the sago frond. In this manner, you may pull yourself
and your child onto the top of the palm. When they come to cut down the
palm, you can then jump off and return to the ground." The woman did as
the man instructed her, and with the aid of the rope she and her child pulled
themselves onto the sago palm.
The ka buru and her husband arrived to set up the sago-processing equipment.
While the ka buru erected the washing trough, the man began to chop
down the palm. When it fell, he went toward the top to remove the fronds and
gave a cry of surprise when he saw his other wife sitting there with a child.
The ka buru heard his exclamation and called out to him, "What is it?" "No,"
he replied. "Some wasps have stung me." The ka buru asked suspiciously,
"You haven't found another woman perhaps?" The man meanwhile looked at
his long-abandoned wife and was filled with shame. He brought her over to
where the ka buru was making sago and the two women continued working
together. They all returned when the task was done and lived together.
The two women began making a garden together, but the ka buru would
constantly shift the boundary marker between her ground and the younger cowife's
ground, making her own bigger. The younger woman repeatedly moved
the marker back to its proper place and the two eventually fought. The husband
discovered their quarrel and blaming the younger wife, hit her on the
head with a stick, drawing blood. The young woman became very disconsolate
and remembered the words of her treetop husband: "While you live with your
husband on the earth, I will be around. If he mistreats you, call out to me, I
will be flying in the sky above." For he was really a hornbill and his name was
Ayayawego or Yiakamuna. Now the young woman called out to him, "Ayayawego,
Yiakamuna, come fetch me!" There she waited and she heard the cry
of the hornbill. It approached and grabbed the woman by her hair and pulled
her up along with her child. They then returned to their treetop home. The
overwrought husband cried, "Come back, wife!" But in vain. At the same
time, the ka buru turned into a cassowary and crying "hoahoa," she departed.
That is all.
Any mature Foi person hearing a recitation of this story would bring to the
act of interpretation a series of collective understandings, expressions, categorizations,
and metaphors which do not need to be explicitly stated in the narrative.
In the case at hand, these presuppositions might include: (i) the principle that
providing nourishment for a child is an essential part of being a parent, (z) the
metaphor of calling co-wives "sisters" and the norm that, despite inevitable tensions,
they are supposed to cooperate in supporting their husband, (3) the rule
that collecting leaves of the hagenamo tree is a task for female labor, while production
of sago requires the intersexual cooperation of a marital couple, (4) the
knowledge of other folktales saying that, originally, the hornbill hawk lived on
land and the cassowary in the sky, until the two exchanged positions, and (5)
the metaphorical labeling of the hornbill and the cassowary as "cross-cousins."
Given these assumptions, the story is obviously a commentary on the "difficulties
of polygyny and its resolution through the separate marriages of women" (Weiner
1988:163).
Weiner's formal analysis can be condensed in the following list of substitutions
(some of which I have expressed differently for clarity):
A: solitary female labor in the garden to collaborative female labor gathering
edible hagenamo leaves
B: wife puts on ogress's clothing
C: through treachery, ogress replaces wife, who moves from ground to treetop
D: terrestrial female treachery replaced by arboreal male nurturance
E: wife, who ascended on hagenamo tree, descends on sago palm
F: terrestrial husband replaces arboreal husband; female cooperation replaces
rivalry
Substitution F returns the plot to the original situation, which has been significantly
transformed: whereas at the beginning the ogress, though calling the
young woman 'sister,' tries to steal her husband, at F the two women find themselves
in the relation of co-wives.
Although up to this point only half of the story has been segmented, it is
possible to subject the method to a provisional evaluation by seeing if these sub-