G Forth
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1650 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | G Forth |
| NOMBRES | G |
| APELLIDO | Forth |
| FIRMA | FORTH G |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6298-8665 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 93 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 156 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 93 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1969 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Aboriginal flood narratives and the thunder complex in Southeast Asia
The ancestors of the dingo were brought to mainland Australia around 4000 years ago by people who arrived by boat. The identity of these voyagers from the north, however, and the nature of their interactions with the Aboriginal population of Australia, are unknown. Here, we propose that Indigenous flood narratives from the Kimberley contain evidence for contact between Aboriginal people and early Asian seafarers in the form of the “thunder comple…
The Religious Values of the Traditional Ceremony in Building a Bengkulu Malay Traditional House
Building a house is part of Bengkulu Malay customs.In the Malay culture, the process of building a house cannot be separated from traditional processions which contain traditional Bengkulu Malay religious values.This research examines the religious values of the traditional ceremony in building a Bengkulu Malay traditional house It employs a descriptive-qualitative method.Data collection techniques involve notetaking from documents and literature…
The Cooked Child
In several publications J. H. Brunvand has discussed an ‘urban legend’ labelled ‘the baby roast’. While treating this as an American tale current in the 1970s that spread to urban locations in Europe and elsewhere, Brunvand also mentions much older Malayo-Polynesian narratives from the South Pacific exhibiting the same theme—a child-minder mistaking an infant for food and cooking it. Yet he reaches no conclusion on whether this remarkable resembl…
The sense of sensory terms and use of the senses in central Flores (Indonesia)
Languages that divide the five conventional senses into two named categories, one including vision and the other all non-visual senses, occur sporadically around the world. Focusing on Ngadha-Lio, a group of Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken on Flores Island (eastern Indonesia), the present discussion reaches several conclusions. First, Ngadha-Lio speakers have special terms and other verbal means of distinguishing the several non-visual senses.…
Animal Mockery in Southeast Asian and African Origin Mythology
Found in many parts of insular Southeast Asia and the adjacent mainland, a widespread complex of taboos concerns actions that are believed to result in a disastrous storm and, sometimes, petrification of offenders. The most typical offenses involve somehow mocking non-human animals, or in a few cases plants or trees. One aim of the paper is to isolate, as a distinct component of this complex, a series of myths that describe how acts of animal moc…
Evidence and extinction
This article explores the possibility that Homo sapiens may not be the only surviving species of the Homo genus. The study is sparked by the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a small-bodied hominin found in Indonesia, and its resemblance to 'ape-men' described by local people on Flores Island. Through extensive ethnographic research in the Lio region of Flores, the author finds that local accounts of these 'ape-men' pre-date scientific discovery an…
Surviving Dragons
Besides their namesake island and several immediately neighboring small islands, Komodo monitors (Varanus komodoensis )—better known as Komodo dragons—also occur on the larger island of Flores to the east. Apart from the extreme western part of Flores, the giant lizards occur along the island's northern coast; but how far eastward they extend remains a question. Early in the twentieth century, reports by local people described dragons as present …
Making Fun of Animals
Forty years ago Robert Blust published a comprehensive, comparative analysis of what he called the ‘thunder complex’. Found among linguistically and culturally diverse populations in the Philippines, Indonesia, and peninsular Malaysia, the complex comprises a series of taboos and rites that centre on a belief that certain actions involving a confusion of categories will bring about a punitive storm and the death of offenders in resulting floods, …
Verhoeven's Living Negritos and the Story of Zakharias Ze
A Catholic priest and amateur palaeontologist, Father Theodor Verhoeven (SVD) is best known for his discovery of sites on Flores Island (Indonesia) that yielded fossilized remains of Middle Pleistocene stegodons and lithic materials suggesting early occupation by pre-sapiens hominins. Eventually, these finds influenced investigations that resulted in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in Liang Bua cave. Verhoeven's earliest fieldwork, however, co…
Ambiguous Birds
Drawing on previous publications by the author, this article brings together information on folk classification and symbolic values of bats among the Nage people of the Indonesian island of Flores. This information is supplemented by new data from more recent field-based ethnobiological research in Nage and other parts of Flores, and is analyzed comparatively with reference to ideas about Chiropterans from other parts of the world. The way Nage a…
A Reply to Whitney's Review of Why the Porcupine is Not a Bird
Classifying Mermaids
Folk biological classifications and the taxonomic schemes of scientific biology have often been conceived as two monoliths that sometimes correspond and sometimes do not—as, for example, when folk zoologists classify whales as fish. The Lio people of Flores Island describe dugongs ( Dugong dugon) as creatures that are half human and half fish, thus, essentially like the European image of mermaids. The characterization relates to a myth, widesprea…
Taboo and Descent in the Articulation of Gender Relations
In the Lio region of Flores Island patrilineal groups coexist with taboos on animals and plants inherited through females, a combination previously interpreted as reflecting a system of double unilineal descent. Drawing on ethnography from the Lio district of Mego, maternal taboos are shown to accompany similar prohibitions conceived as a property of patriclans, most of which, however, are incumbent not on male clansmen but on their wives. As is …
Bad Mothers and Strange Offspring
One way birds communicate knowledge to humans and facilitate communication among humans is through metaphors. A recent book discusses animal metaphors, nearly a third of which employ birds as vehicles, used by the Nage people of Flores Island (eastern Indonesia). As applied to human beings and human behaviors, bird metaphors reveal considerable overlap with other animal metaphors; thus, a full understanding of these requires additional attention …
Mego Kin Classification
This is the first published account of kin classification of Mego, a district in the extreme eastern part of the Lio region of Flores Island. Despite recent changes affecting marriage practices, the terminology survives as a classification of asymmetric alliance. Terminological usage is discussed with reference to traditional social forms and comparatively, in relation to several other Lio terminologies, cognate terms in other Ngadha-Lio language…
Rites of Passage
Rites of passage are inextricably associated with Arnold van Gennep. Such rites are most closely associated with initiations of various kinds and with major changes in the life cycle. As Van Gennep showed, changes of social status typically comprise ritual acts distinguishable as “rites of separation,” “rites of transition,” and “rites of incorporation.” During the second half of the twentieth century, several anthropologists built on Van Gennep'…
Ethnozoology
Coined in 1890, the term “ethnozoology” denotes one of the main branches of ethnobiology. Addressing ways in which humans relate to animals, ethnozoologists investigate knowledge of animals revealed in systems of naming and classification as well as practical, economic, and symbolic uses of animals characteristic of particular societies. Typically, ethnozoology considers the entirety of nonhuman animals known to members of particular ethnolinguis…
‘Living’ in Nage, or the Meaning of ‘Life’ in an Eastern Indonesian Society
Originating in 19th century cultural evolutionary theory, a revised concept of ‘animism’ has in recent years found new life in anthropology in the writings of ontological relativists. Continuity is found in the reputed attribution of life by members of small‐scale non‐western societies to inanimate objects as well as to organisms. This new animism is typically contrasted with western or modern scientific thought, either exclusively or primarily. …
Elderly People Growing Tails
Since the inception of the discipline, anthropologists have endeavored to explain why people the world over develop ideas that lack empirical support and how such ideas are accepted as true. This article deals with a claim found among the Nage people of eastern Indonesia, namely, that extremely elderly people grow tails. The idea is discussed in relation to local experiences of aging and the elderly and in relation to cosmological beliefs with wh…
Racial science and human diversity in colonial Indonesia
Indonesia is known as a region whose inhabitants display not only great cultural and linguistic diversity but also marked physical differences in regard to body size, skin colour, hair texture, and
Purity, Pollution, and Systems of Classification
Ideas of purity express a value for keeping different categories of things—be they substances, natural kinds, or social statuses—separate from one another, thereby avoiding consequent impurity or pollution. Necessarily, therefore, notions of purity and pollution are connected to systems of classification that define the culturally recognized categories to which purity rules apply. Issues of pollution, as well as the closely related concept of tab…
Fish’ and ‘Non-Fish’ in Lio and Nage
Based on recent field research on Flores Island, this paper describes the classification of fish found among the Lio people. Formally, Lio fish taxonomy closely resembles that of the Nage of central Flores, discussed in a previous paper (Forth 2012), but differs insofar as several kinds of freshwater fish, all members of the Gobioidei, are subsumed in a named folk-intermediate taxon labeled mbo. Most attention is given to Lio names for folk-gener…
What a Little Bird Tells Us About Symbolic Thought
Among symbolic representations of animals, birds appear to play a disproportionately large part. This paper explores the symbolism of a particular bird, the Russet-capped Stubtail (Tesia everetti), among the Nage of eastern Indonesia. The stubtail features in several contexts of Nage augury, myth, and metaphor but, in each instance, it stands in opposition to another bird category (or, more specifically, "folk-generic"). I also show how different…
Eastern Sumbanese Bird Classification and Nomenclature
Expanding on previously published research into folk classification of birds in the eastern part of the Indonesian island of Sumba, this article reports new information on bird categories and classification recorded by the author in 2015. New folk taxa are described and identified and scientific identifications for previously reported taxa are added or revised. Information on local bird classification from the Kambera region is compared with data…
Lumpers, Splitters, and Other Variations in Nage Animal Classification
Variation in folk knowledge of biological kinds among members of a single ethno-linguistic community has long been a focus of ethnobiological attention and interest. Concentrating on variable local understandings of animal names, this paper discusses three forms of binary names applied to animal categories among the Nage of Flores Island, eastern Indonesia. It is shown that while some people, the "lumpers," regard such names as unproductive binom…
People of the Source
Society and Exchange in Nias
Indonesia
Separating the dead
In central Flores, local people represent obligatory exchanges of objects at funerals as signalling a cessation of relations between affinally related groups, thus contradicting a well-established local principle whereby affinal relationships transcend the lives of individual participants. Illuminating this contrast is a mortuary context that comprises rites emphasizing separation and a particularly negative view of the dead to the exclusion of a…
What a Little Bird Tells Us About Symbolic Thought
Among symbolic representations of animals, birds appear to play a disproportionately large part. This paper explores the symbolism of a particular bird, the Russet-capped Stubtail (Tesia everetti), among the Nage of eastern Indonesia. The stubtail features in several contexts of Nage augury, myth, and metaphor but, in each instance, it stands in opposition to another bird category (or, more specifically, "folk-generic"). I also show how different…
Time and temporal classification in Rindi, Eastern Sumba
Folk Knowledge and Distribution of the Komodo Dragon (Varanus komodoensis) on Flores Island
The world's largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, occurs not only on its namesake island but also on the far larger eastern Indonesian island of Flores. Since it first became known to western science in the early 20th century, local people have provided information on the species, its ecology, and distribution on Flores. While the lizard's occurrence in westernmost Flores has been known since its discovery by Europeans, this paper reviews recent eth…
Symbolic classification
Central to Rodney Needham's writing on symbolism was 'symbolic classification', an analytical category which, although often associated with Durkheim and Mauss, was demonstrably Needham's own coinage. This article traces the development of the usage from its first appearance in 1959 to Needham's later expression of doubt as to its meaning. Following a critical discussion of Needham's use of analogy, class inclusion, and ranking in defining 'symbo…
Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe
Originally a figure of folklore, the European wildman gained prominence as a literary and artistic figure in the late Middle Ages, and in this form has commonly been interpreted as exercising a definite influence on later European representations of non-western peoples, non-human primates, and pre-sapiens hominids. Comparing the European image with wildman images encountered among indigenous peoples outside of Europe, this essay comprises a criti…
Pigeon and Friarbird Revisited. A Further Analysis of an Eastern Indonesian Mythico-Ornithological Contrast
Anthropos , Seite 495 - 514
Hominids, hairy hominoids and the science of humanity
Details of the discovery were first published on 28 October 2004 in the journal Nature, in an article and three shorter pieces. See Mirazon Lahr and Foley 2004, Brown et al. 2004, Morwood et al. 2004, Dalton 2004. With regard to finds of Homo erectus on Java, this position is argued at some length in a semi‐popular book by Curtis et al. (2000). In a newer classification, the term is ‘hominin’— referring to a member of the ‘hominini’, which includ…
The Play of Time
Hunting the Wren
Hunting tfie Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. 234 pp
Rambu solo', 'la fumee descend
Eastern Sumbanese Bird Classification and Nomenclature
Expanding on previously published research into folk classification of birds in the eastern part of the Indonesian island of Sumba, this article reports new information on bird categories and classification recorded by the author in 2015. New folk taxa are described and identified and scientific identifications for previously reported taxa are added or revised. Information on local bird classification from the Kambera region is compared with data…
Animals Crossing
In many parts of the world one encounters a disapprobation of living beings, either animals or humans, walking, jumping, or otherwise crossing a corpse.Nearly as widespread as aversion to the act is one supposed consequence: the corpse is believed to become reanimated.Drawing on a variety of cases, this article describes the distribution of the idea both in ritual practice and myth and establishes its fundamental form.Consideration is given to ho…
When Is a Fish Not a Fish? Questions Raised by a Nage Life-Form Category
Speakers of a Central-Malayo-Polynesian language, the Nage inhabit the central region of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores. Their folk taxonomy of animals (ana wa) contains three named life-form taxa, one of which is ika, fish. A review of component folk-generic taxa, however, reveals that Nage do not classify five kinds of freshwater fish as ‘fish’ (ika), even though they further apply ika to various marine fish (including sharks and rays)…
Flores after floresiensis
In a recent article (Forth 2005) I discussed possible implications for several sorts of anthropology of the discovery, on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores, of skeletal remains interpreted as a new species of Homo – Homo floresiensis. The discovery was, and remains, controversial, not least because the creature so classified, interpreted by the discovery team as an endemic dwarf descendant of Homo erectus, stood just over a metre tall and h…
Public affairs; Institutionalized nonmarital sex in an eastern Indonesian society
A recent revival of anthropological interest in kinship has evidently extended even as f ar as such long-standing questions as the universality of 'marriage'. More particularly, Cai Hua (2001) has argued that marriage is encountered in all societies except one: the matrilineal Na or Moso of southern China, who ensure biological and social reproduction by way of impermanent sexual liaisons called 'visits'. Continuing in a universalist vein, Cai (2…
Ritual and Ideology in Nage Mortuary Culture
Nage kin terms; A new form of eastern Indonesian social classification
The region of central Flores known as Nage or Nage-Keo has so far received very little attention from ethnographers.This applies as much to the Nage system of kinship and marriage as it does to other areas of society and culture.So far not even a list of kin termsl has appcared for Nage.The main objective of this paper is to rectify this lacuna by describing the classification encountered in and around Bo'a Wae, a major village and the administra…
The Pa Sése festival of the Nage of Bo'a Wae (Central Flores)
Elderly People Growing Tails
Since the inception of the discipline, anthropologists have endeavored to explain why people the world over develop ideas that lack empirical support and how such ideas are accepted as true. This article deals with a claim found among the Nage people of eastern Indonesia, namely, that extremely elderly people grow tails. The idea is discussed in relation to local experiences of aging and the elderly and in relation to cosmological beliefs with wh…
Nage Lizard Classification
Speakers of a Central-Malayo-Polynesian language, the Nage of Flores Island, Indonesia, name five folk generic categories of lizards. Ethnographic questioning and observed speech indicate that Nage additionally recognize a more inclusive, but unnamed, taxon glossable as ‘lizard’. Evidence for this taxon has further been generated by a modified form of free-listing. The article analyzes the results of this method, obtained from questioning seventy…
Human beings and other people
Speakers of a Central-Malayo-Polynesian language, the Nage of central Flores possess three terms for 'person, people' and 'human being': ata, hoga, and kita ata. The paper explores various semantic and social contexts in which the terms are differentially employed. Further discussed are lexical connections and semantic parallels with terms in other Malayo-Polynesian languages and the way these bear on the referents of Austronesian protoforms. Par…
The Politics of Species
Rindi
The House
I mE HOUSEThe Rindi house is a microcosm which in its structure expresses categories and principles with the widest application in Rindi thought and action, and so provides a comprehensive representation of orderly, universal forms and relations.Since, as I shall later iIIustrate, both life and death begin and end in the house, it can be regarded, moreover, as the centre of the macrocosm for the group with which it is associated.The house thus pr…
Death
As in similar societies, death, like birth, in Rindi is conceived not as a single unique event, but as a gradual and protracted process of transition requiring at each stage the ritual intervention of the living. 1 Since I obtained rather more detailed infonnation on death and funerary usages than on most other topics, the following account is somewhat condensed; but I have omitted nothing th at substantially affe cts the analysis.The different c…
Time’ and the expression of temporality in eastern Sumba
1982). ‘Time’ and the expression of temporality in eastern Sumba. Ethnos: Vol. 47, No. 3-4, pp. 232-248
Blood, Milk and Coconuts
Time and temporal classification in Rindi, Eastern Sumba
Indonesia
Rambu solo', 'la fumee descend
Kambera Temporal Classification; A note on an early reference
Rindi
Indonesian Religions in Transition
Komodo as seen from Sumba
The purpose of these notes is to record several observations regarding the terminology of relationship found on the eastern Indonesian island of Komodo as described by Father J. A. J. Verheijen in his valuable linguistic and ethnographic monograph (1982).The occasion for doing so is provided by Professor Needham's recent, mostly formal, analysis of Verheijen's data (1986), and more particularly by a notable omission from the comparative evidence …
The Pa Sése festival of the Nage of Bo'a Wae (Central Flores)
People of the Source
Construction Sacrifice and Head‐hunting Rumours in Central Flores (Eastern Indonesia)
In a recent contribution to Oceania (59:269–79, 1989), R.A. Drake analyses a kidnapping rumour that has regularly appeared in Borneo during the last 90 or more years. According to the rumour, agents of the state require a human sacrifice, and especially a human head, to place beneath the foundation of a bridge or other modern structure that is being erected, in order to lend it durability. This rumour, Drake argues, draws crucially upon the wides…
Shamanic Powers And Mystical Practitioners Among The Nage Of Central Flores
Apres avoir repris la definition du shamanisme de Wilken, l'A. compare les praticiens mystiques (« toa mali ») et les personnes qui entrent en transe (« ata ta'a hitu ») chez les Nage des Flores centrales afin de comprendre leurs pratiques spirituelles. Si les deux s'engagent dans des voyages de l'esprit, ils s'opposent dans les methodes (reve/transe, nuit/jour, relation avec les esprits libres/avec les âmes des morts, identification avec les sor…
General/Theoretical Anthropology
Conjecture, comparison and the coaxing of souls
Sumba Bibliography
Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia
Ritual and Ideology in Nage Mortuary Culture
Nage kin terms; A new form of eastern Indonesian social classification
The region of central Flores known as Nage or Nage-Keo has so far received very little attention from ethnographers.This applies as much to the Nage system of kinship and marriage as it does to other areas of society and culture.So far not even a list of kin termsl has appcared for Nage.The main objective of this paper is to rectify this lacuna by describing the classification encountered in and around Bo'a Wae, a major village and the administra…
Signifying Animals
Society and Exchange in Nias
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