A Comparative Study of “Unmarried” Female Chiefs in Central Flores, Indonesia: An Austronesian Perspective Part 2

Abstract

In a previous paper on indigenous polities and their origin myths in the Lionese-speaking area of central Flores, eastern Indonesia [Sugishima 2017], I explored the Austronesian context in which an “unmarried” sister of the supreme chief assumes the status of female chief in Lise Tana Telu, the largest Lionese chiefdom. Although not all chiefdoms have such a female chief, it is widely recognized that the primordial cross-sex sibling bond in mythical, ritual and other forms is the source of life at the level of indigenous polity. Such siblingship at the polity level takes various forms in the Lionese-speaking area. As a sequel to the previous paper, this article examines on the basis of my recent field research in central Flores the hypotheses and typologies of the diversities previously presented. It then expands the scope of comparative research to the Rajadom of Sikka, which extends to the east of the Lionese-speaking area. In the concluding remarks, phenomena that may be the subject of the comparative research are listed from central part of insular Southeast Asia and Polynesia, and the directions in which future research should be developed are envisioned. One of them is a critical reconsideration of Sahlins’ theory of stranger-king [e.g. Sahlins 1981, 2008], which does not take into account the fundamental importance of the primordial cross-sex sibling bond in indigenous Austronesian polities.