RESEARCH AMONG THE TEHIT, IRIAN JAYA

Jaap Timmer

Working title: Objectification and praxis: A study of social dynamics and the role of cultural schema among the Tehit of the Bird's Head peninsula, Irian Jaya, Indonesia.

Fieldwork: Teminabuan, Irian Jaya; June 1994-December 1995.

As a research fellow, Jaap Timmer is currently preparing for fieldwork among the Tehit on the south east coast of the Bird's Head peninsula. Thematically, this project comes within the framework of the multidisciplinary ISIR - Irian Jaya Studies project. In line with the ISIR project, the first aim of the present project is to give a synthetic account of Tehit society and culture, and a second aim is to compare particular developments in the area at issue with situations and developments in the region.

Proceeding from causes or general principles (cultural schema) to consequences of particular instances in time and space, the research proper embraces social organization, salient cultural ideas and knowledge, circumstances and concerns in terms of which people respond to events, and insight and experience they judge central to their lives. The project also makes a plea for new concepts and perspectives that could put the analysis of social and cultural change in the Bird's Head peninsula on a finer footing, i.e., it aims at arriving at a more complete understanding of the relation between cultural models, individual action and social power relations.

The empirical focus of the project will be on local and regional variation in meaning, use, ideas, and historical knowledge of "kain timur" (cloths and other valuables that were imported into the Bird's Head for centuries (until the second world war) in exchange for slaves and Birds of Paradise). Analytically, "kain timur", its use and meaning, is considered as a cultural schema, or a cultural scenario, i.e., a symbolic program for the staging and playing out of social interaction. In the spirit of Fredrik Barth's recent work, "Balinese Worlds" (Chicago University Press, 1993) I will emphasize variation and practice in the use of "kain timur" in Tehit society, because the significance of that which unfolds cannot simply be read from a formal book of rules. To account for what is happening (and what has happened) in Tehit society, the research is intended to determine the face and import of what people see and how events are understood and interpreted by means of the probably salient cultural scenario that surrounds the use of "kain timur". It means that the researcher must identify correctly the keys (embedded in different traditions of knowledge, depending on people's background, which differ greatly in contemporary multicultural Irian Jaya) that the parties in Tehit society themselves are using, as events unfold(ed).

Jaap Timmer, ISIR - Irian Jaya Studies, Rapenburg 35, 2311 GG Leiden. Email: ISIRTIM@rullet.LeidenUniv.nl.