AUTONOMY AND HETERONOMY IN THE KAHUA RITUAL: A SHORT MEDITATION ON

HUAULU SOCIETY
Author(s): VALERIO VALERI
Source: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde , 1990, Deel 146, 1ste Afl.,
RITUALS AND SOCIO-COSMIC ORDER IN EASTERN INDONESIAN SOCIETIES. PART II:
MALUKU (1990), pp. 56-73
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27864096

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VALERIO VALERI

AUTONOMY AND HETERONOMY IN THE

KAHUA RITUAL
A SHORT MEDITATION ON HUAULU SOCIETY

'Il tente d'approfondir le myst?re d'un corps qui, tout ? coup, comme par l'effet d'un choc
int?rieur, entre dans une sorte de vie ? la fois ?trangement instable et ?trangement r?gl?e;
et ? la fois ?trangement spontan?e, mais ?trangement savante et certainement ?labor?e'.
(Val?ry 1957, 1:1397)

The Huaulu of Northern Seram are not an easily excitable people. Parti
cularly in moments of tension they make a point of showing (one is
tempted to say 'showing off) self-control and restraint. This is an attitude
which I understand well. Thus every time that I have gone back to visit
them, our obvious emotion was carefully covered by polite restraint and
even by studious silence. We waited to get used to each other again, or
rather to get over the embarrassing situation of return, before we began
talking about what was really on our minds.
I was somewhat surprised, then, to receive, almost immediately after my
latest arrival, in February 1988, in Alakamat, the main Huaulu coastal
settlement, the important piece of news that a kahua feast, held to celebrate
the initiation of four boys, had already been going on for almost a year in
the inland village of Sekenima, and that there were plans to conclude it
shortly with an impressive climax. I would have expected such information
to be held back with relish for as long as possible and then dropped,
casually but triumphantly, in conversation. That this did not happen gave
me a measure of the almost overwhelming sense of elation that having
been able to successfully bring the feast off gave the Huaulu. It was obvious
that for once they found a greater source of pleasure in the release offered
by blurting out the news than in the sense of control involved in holding
it back.
But I soon realized that there was an additional reason why I was told

Acknowledgments: Field-work in Seram in the years 1971-3, 1985, 1986 and 1988 was
carried out under the auspices of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (Jakarta) and
of the Universitas Pattimura (Ambon), and was materially supported by grants from the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (twice), from the Social Science
Research Council and from the Lichtstern Fund (Department of Anthropology, University
of Chicago). I wish to thank all these institutions for their help. I also wish to thank the
Guggenheim Foundation for a Fellowship that allowed me to analyze a certain amount of
my field-materials. My warmest gratitude goes to all the Huaulu, and in particular to my
friend and mentor of many years, Pulaki Isale ('Moalatu').

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 57

the news so soon. And even this reason I understood very well, because
it had the same sentimental, if not intellectual, resonance for me as for
them. Since the feast occurs every five years on average, my arrival just
before its conclusion seemed almost too good to be true, one of those
serendipitous occurrences whose probability is so minimal that we must
classify them as 'luck'. Such tautological reifications of the improbable are,
however, alien to the Huaulu who, equally struck by the felicitousness of
my presence, immediately tried to explain it by more causally oriented
concepts. More importantly, they looked for reasons that would further
magnify in their eyes and those of their neighbours the importance of their
feast, and which would allow them to bask in its glory. I was thus asked
if it was true that I had come at the right time because I had dreamed of
the feast. The question implied a belief that their ancestral spirits had
warned me of its occurrence. The belief flatteringly legitimated my pres
ence and my long-standing relationship with Huaulu, but also legitimated
the feast as such, since it indicated ancestral approval of it ? an approval
which, as I was soon to learn, some doubted and for which signs were being
anxiously sought ? and the drawing power of the feast on me and on the
world that had supposedly sent me to report on it.
Retrospectively, I now see that many of the basic values and ideas and
feelings that I was to discover through my experience of the Huaulu
experiencing their feast were already present in the form in which they first
conveyed to me the news of its occurrence, a form which also implied
certain conclusions about the meaning of my presence among them on that
occasion. The feast encompassed me, too, and this showed even more
clearly that its basic meaning derived from the fact that it encompassed
all Huaulu. And this encompassment of me and them seemed to find its
echo in, and to provide a kind of ontologic?l guarantee for, the strange
correspondence between my reaction to the fact that the kahua was taking
place and their own reaction.
News of the feast delighted me because it seemed to demonstrate the
continuing vitality of Huaulu culture, a vitality made possible by an
obstinate and unanimous traditionalism in the face of isolation (all other
groups in the area are now Christian or Moslem) and of many threats,
including the unwelcome presence, since 1985, of a number of American
families belonging to the New Tribes Mission. This fidelity, this strength
in the face of pressure and even derision, this ability to stand alone and feel
the better for it, moved me and made me think more than ever how
extraordinary this little people was, how worthy of survival because
capable of it. Somewhat to my initial surprise (but now I am surprised by
my own surprise, since I knew that the Huaulu are blessed with an absolute
lack of modesty), this was also what their success in organizing the feast
made the Huaulu feel about themselves. They kept saying that this success
was a sign of their continuous collective strength; but they also added that
this strength was also a consequence of performing the feast.

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 58 Valerio Valeri

This paper is an attempt to understand why the kahua is capable of

giving the Huaulu this sense of collective strength ? the highest value
from their point of view1 ? and to indicate some continuities and changes
in the means employed by the feast to achieve this result.

Autonomy and heteronomy in Huaulu society

Who are the Huaulu? What is the kahua? I shall attempt to answer the first
question only through the second. Nevertheless, a few basic facts about this
people must be given preliminarily (see also Valeri 1975-6, 1980, 1989,
1990). The Huaulu are a very small population (168 souls on May 23,
1988) living by hunting, river-fishing, gathering, a little horticulture, and
the exploitation of the sag? palm and of fruit-trees. In recent years, the sale
of copra, cloves, deer antlers and parrots has provided them with some
monetary income. But the cash economy has become relatively important
only in the coastal settlement of Alakamat. Formed over the past fifteen
years or so, due to pressure from the local Indonesian authorities for at least
some of the Huaulu children to attend school in the Moslem village of Besi,
this settlement may at times contain almost half the Huaulu population,
but there is a constant movement back and forth between it and the inland
settlements. The place is not, however, considered a village (ninianiam):
in Huaulu eyes it has a status similar to that of the many hunting, fishing
and gathering posts which they maintain scattered in their territory, and
where one or a few families live isolated for rather long periods on end.
The only settlement considered a village proper is found inland, at about
eighteen kilometres from Alakamat, on the rocky, steep hill of Sekenima
? a perfect natural fortress, where the Huaulu have built their villages
since the late nineteenth century. Earlier, they lived further inland, in
the tall and rugged mountains a few kilometres from the present village.

1 I use the term 'strength' (or, sometimes, 'force') as a shorthand for a variety of Huaulu
expressions or implicit evaluations which signify the ability to be superior to others (for
instance: ita lesi asie 'we have the upper hand over them, we are stronger than them'), to
make them 'afraid' (/ mutau ita) because, ultimately, of a force (called karamati, from
Indonesian keramaf) of metahuman origin. This ability includes moral and cognitive
manifestations, but its fundamental ones are physical: superior violence and superior
procreative powers. Both are apprehended in a single aesthetic image: the beauty of the
naked, muscular male body, which is both threatening and attractive. Throughout the
kahua feast, I heard elders exhort the young men to display their naked chest and legs and
thus to avoid wearing shirts or pants like their Christian guests, 'because our religion
(akama [from Indonesian agama]) is a religion of the naked body'. 'Naked', of course, only
comparatively speaking, since it is also a religion of the loincloth and of the headcloth.
Such 'Hellenizing' over-evaluation of the male body (which in no way precludes the
appreciation of female beauty) should not be surprising in Huaulu society, which remains
today as intensely militaristic in spirit as any Greek polis. One may even ask if the Huaulu
value of autonomy ? to be discussed below ? might not have its roots, as in ancient
Greece, in the heroic ideal of individualistic militarism. Perhaps the Barbarians are closer
to the Greeks than these (or we) like to think.

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 59

The contrast between a single central settlement, the village proper, and
many peripheral ones, reflects not a seasonal variation, as is the case in
other societies, but a constant pulsation due, in the first place, to an
economy predominantly based on the exploitation of undomesticated
resources and thus requiring the population to scatter over a vast territory.
Such pulsation cannot be understood exclusively in ecological terms,
however. Leaving the village for extended periods of time is often moti
vated by tensions or even open conflicts between members of the com
munity, by the desire to escape from authority or to protest against it (since
this is a society where one votes with one's feet). It can also be an attempt
to escape from the obligations involved in a denser and more integrated
state of social life. Whether it be for a few hours, days, months or even years
in a row, the Huaulu escape into the immense forest that surrounds their
village to find freedom, that is, a state where they can decide for themselves
and provide only for themselves: in a word, be autonomous.
The pulsating settlement pattern thus reveals a permanent tension be
tween the values of autonomy and heteronomy2 in Huaulu society. On the
one hand, the social units (descent groups, households or even individuals,
depending on the context) may act (and speak of themselves) as if they
were fundamentally autonomous, self-defining and constantly negotiating
their relations. On the other hand, they may act (and describe themselves)

2 I take the fundamental meaning of 'autonomy' to be 'independence', that is, a condition

of self-determination (with regard to both action and conceptual representation). Inasmuch
as 'heteronomy' is the antonym of 'autonomy' in this sense, it means 'dependence',
determination by others (again, both in the way one acts and in the way one represents
oneself). Since this dependency may be due, as in Huaulu, to an ideology of hierarchical
complementarity and encompassment rather than one of domination, my definition of
'heteronomy' is obviously wider than the one found in the most widely used American
dictionary, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language which defines the word
as 'the condition of being under the rule or domination of another'. I trust that my
definitions explain why I have found the contrast of'autonomy' and 'heteronomy' a useful
shorthand for the various contrasts discussed here and in the rest of the paper, although
they (and of course the word 'freedom' that I have used above) have no counterpart in the
Huaulu vocabulary. Indeed I am concerned here with areas of Huaulu experience that
underlie many of their activities and discourses, but which they do not analyze with lexical
labels, contrary to what I must myself do to make them understandable to a Western
audience. By the use of words like 'autonomy ' and 'heteronomy', I try to evoke certain
Western experiences to push the reader beyond them, so that he can achieve a certain
intuitive understanding of what it is to be a Huaulu, and more specifically, of what a Huaulu
experiences in a kahua feast. Such a procedure seems to me inevitable in anthropology,
and is not more questionable than the 'translation' of a culture exclusively based on the
translation of its vocabulary. Among the many reasons one can adduce for this claim, I
will only mention the most radical one. Because there is no translation of foreign words
without a description of foreign experiences in the words of our own language, there is
no real epistemological difference between our translation of labelled experiences and that
of unlabelled experiences, provided we have sufficient non-lexical evidence for their
existence (cf. Valeri 1990).

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60 Valerio Valeri

as if they were the complementary and therefore mutually entailing parts

of an unchanging whole.3
While in the first case society is implicitly and often explicitly viewed
as open because consisting of fundamentally equal (since equally complete
and thus autonomous) units, in the second it is described as a bounded
system in which the number and order of the parts is fixed and not open
to negotiation. In the latter view, Huaulu has a quadripartite structure
whose units (Huaulu, the clan that conceptually stands for the whole and
governs it, Allay, Tamatay and Peinisa) are ranked in the order of their

3 The claim of autonomy and thus of equality is ultimately ideological, and for this reason
does not need to rest on any material or institutional feature of the social unit that makes
it. Nevertheless, such features account for the likelihood that actual claims of autonomy
and completeness are made by certain kinds of units, and that people are able to act
according to their claims.
Claims of autonomy are often made by lineages (ipa). These are self-sufficient and
autonomous units in most respects: property (particularly land), governance, most rituals,
and 'foreign policy', since traditionally war and peace are (or rather, were) made by
lineages (or individual heroes) and not by Huaulu society as a whole. Lineages are not self
sufficient with regard to their reproduction, because of the rule of exogamy, but even in
this area they may stress their autonomous choice of allies over their dependence on
traditional wife-givers, which is emphasized in the hierarchical image of society. The
tension between autonomy and heteronomy at the lineage level is reflected by the imperfect
integration of the mythical traditions of lineages and the global traditions that represent
Huaulu society as a hierarchical whole.
Claims of autonomy may also be made by male individuals. Such claims make sense
in terms of Huaulu experience because a male adult is usually a self-sufficient being from
most economic and ritual points of view: he can do practically everything, and is usually
also a shaman (shamanism is almost a necessary stage in the achievement of manhood)
and a performer of the most essential rites. Furthermore, lineage affiliation depends less
on descent than on transactions and negotiations: ultimately, it has much to do with
individual inclination and choice. An adult man is of course not self-sufficient with regard
to his reproduction, and is usually dependent on his lineage in this matter. Yet even in the
area of marriage the potentiality exists for asserting one's individual choice. This potential
was much greater in the past, when an individual could acquire a prestigious bride by
accomplishing heroic feats in war.
Economically speaking, the household is just an extension if not an appendix of an
individual male, because he is capable of performing all the tasks of his wife (while she
is barred from performing many of his tasks, such as hunting, warfare, setting traps, and
so on, and is thus neither conceptually nor materially autonomous). Indeed a male, contrary
to a female, may live alone and the lone hunter (often also a head-hunter) is a popular
theme in Huaulu oral literature. But from the reproductive point of view a household is
more than an extension of its male head and as such it may be viewed as an autonomous
unit in its own right. In fact, it is the unit that most frequently secedes from society or
manifests the greatest autonomy from it in practice.
Naturally, it does not follow from the fact that individuals or households or lineages may
function autonomously with regard to the activities mentioned above that they actually do
function autonomously. But the whole point is precisely that cooperation or exchange in
these activities is conceived of as a matter of choice, not of necessity. The potential for
autonomy is always present in the minds of people, and conditions their attitude to one
another. It allows them to think of Huaulu as a confederation or association rather than
as a hierarchy, if they so wish.

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 61

arrival to the 'navel' (the conceptual centre) of the territory. Each division
? and to some extent each lineage (ipa) included in it ? has attributes
that are not possessed by the others but all of which are necessary to the
existence of society. Each thus depends on the others by a sort of onto
logical decree and is therefore viewed as inherently heteronomous.
I must emphasize that we have here a contrast between two images of
social relations, not merely a contrast between structural levels or between
an 'empirical' level of forces that tend to be divisive and a properly cultural,
normative counterpart predicated on ideas of hierarchy. The tension to
which I am referring would not be adequately described by such canonical
anthropological contrasts as that of'interest' and 'value' (Sahlins 1981:68
70), or that of 'instrumental' and 'expressive', 'power' and 'ritual' (Geertz
1980: 18-9,46), nor even by something akin to Dumont's (1966) encom
passing subordination of artha by dharma. Depending on the context, and
often on their position in the hierarchical system, the Huaulu invoke the
one or the other image of their society. Thus when, as frequently happens,
a young man challenges the authority of an older one over him, his ultimate
argument is the right of every adult male to change at will lineage, village
or even tribal affiliation, and thus the quasi-contractual, negotiable charac
ter of social relations. Such threats of secession are even more common
when an entire lineage or even clan is involved in conflict with others. In
these cases, the image of complementarity and mutual dependency clearly
recedes into the background: the fundamental equality of all lineages is
implied by references to a 'former' state of lesser integration to which one
may revert at any time ? a state in which, it is said, 'everybody is his own
Latu (ruler)'.
The setting of anarchic equality in a mythical past that can easily
become present once again indicates one of the modes by which the
Huaulu attempt to mediate the contradictory opposition of the two images
of society which they use. This mode implies a contractual view of the
polity's genesis: it depicts a society formed by the consensual confeder
ation of originally separate and autonomous groups. In contrast to myths
which account for the parts by the breaking apart of an originally undif
ferentiated whole (cf. Valeri 1984; Traube 1986; Geertz 1980:15), the
origin myth of Huaulu society puts the parts ontologically before the whole
and views the latter as a reversible result, not as a primary, and therefore
unchallengeable, condition. Thus the myth is less a charter (that is a quasi
legal, binding document) for the established hierarchical order than an
expression of (and a means of perpetuating) the ambiguous relationship
between the conflicting values of autonomy and heteronomy, of nego
tiation and subordination. In the movement by which it affirms the superior
value of hierarchy, and thus of heteronomy, the myth makes this contin
gent on what turns out to be another important value ? an essentially
egalitarian notion of autonomy.
In sum, while the relationship of the two values is asymmetric, it is not

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 62 Valerio Valeri

one of unproblematic 'encompassmenf : it defies the socio-logical totali

tarianism of Chinese boxes or of Russian matrioshkas. The pulsating
character of settlement, and some mythological ruminations, are among
the signs of an ever-recurring and never resolved tension. It is in the context
of this tension that we must situate the kahua if we are to understand the
overwhelming value that the Huaulu attach to performing it.

The kahua
The word kahua refers, strictly speaking, to a night dance, more specifi
cally to a ronde, in which both men and unmarried women participate (the
married ones should not, because the orgiastic implications of the dance
are in conflict with the stricter requirement of conjugal fidelity for married
women in this context).4 In a wider sense, kahua refers to the entire feast
of which the dance is the most important component.5 The feast is always
held to celebrate an event that enhances the society's self-esteem inasmuch
as it confirms its enduring vitality. Today such events are the initiation of
boys, the installation of somebody in an office, the rebuilding of the
community house or the completion of major repairs on it. In the past, a
kahua was also held every time one or more heads were captured; further
more, each of the above occasions also required a successful head-hunt.
There was no kahua without a severed head then. As the Huaulu put it,
one should 'see blood' (/ oi lasiem) and also: 'we must feed the progenitors'
(ita umanaki aylaem\ on this, more anon). The paradigmatic connection of
successful head-hunt and kahua is so strong that even today the feast is
the occasion for rumours, both in Huaulu and outside it, that a human life
has been secretly taken to make the dance possible. The decision to hold
the feast thus raises considerable anxiety among the peoples who were the
traditional 'game' (peni)6 of the Huaulu. These rumors are made possible
by the fact that, since the Dutch administration officially forbade the taking

4 Normally there is equality between the sexes with regard to adultery (cf. Valeri 1990), so
the double standard employed in this context may be an indication that men's dominance
is emphasized in it.
5 Throughout the paper, the word kahua, when used alone, will refer to the feast as a whole.
When I refer to its meaning 'nocturnal dance' I will use it in combination with 'dance' unless
this is made unnecessary by the context. The word has no other meanings that I could
ascertain. Like the present form of the feast itself, and a fair number of the chants used
in it, it is said to be an already ancient borrowing from the Openg, a neighbouring people
with whom the Huaulu have affinal and political connections. Judging from the accounts
that I have received the original form of the feast was not much different from the present
one: only more complex and difficult to perform. The chants and music were also different.
On Huaulu multilingualism and propensity for cultural borrowing, see Valeri 1985.
6 These peoples were for the most part the Eastern neighbours of the Huaulu (Nisawele,
Manusela, etc.), the coastal Moslems of Central-Northern Seram (Laufaha: Wahai, Sawai,
Besi etc.), and various peoples in Western Seram too numerous to cite here. The Huaulu
refer to these peoples as 'game' because they use metaphors taken from hunting to describe
the taking of human heads. Thus 'head-hunting' is not an inappropriate expression for the
activity it signifies: indeed one may say ita Upe akaniem ('we look for [= hunt] heads').

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 63

The diurnal usali dance

of human heads, the rites connected with this activity went underground
and ceased to be public. Thus nobody can know for sure whether head
hunting still occasionally takes place or not. The Huaulu themselves
masterfully entertain the suspicion that it does, recognizing in it a powerful
deterrent against their traditional enemies and finding a source of pride in
the fear that many, particularly among the coastal people, still feel for
them. If head-hunting has ceased to be a living reality in a material sense,
it is still a living psychological reality ? and that is what really matters,
since even in the past rumours and a certain element of secrecy were
essential to this practice's social efficacy. Here, as in other areas of Huaulu
life, words speak ? and spoke ?- louder than deeds.
The still overwhelming presence of head-hunting, and of the ferocious
enmities that it presupposes, are felt in the war dance (usali), which is the
obligatory diurnal counterpart of the nocturnal kahua dance. Throughout
the day, and with heightened intensity at the beginning and ending stages
of the festive period (which can stretch over quite a long time), the men
repeatedly engage in dancing the usali (glossed as cakalele in Moluccan
Malay) in the middle of the village plaza, in front of the large community
house inside which the night dancing of men and women begins at sunset.
When, as in 1987-88, the feast is held to celebrate the initiation of boys,
they should dance at each usali. This prescription underlies one aspect of
the dance: it is practice play for war ? and as such it helps the newly
initiated to learn fighting techniques as well as to develop the necessary
endurance. The dance can be a learning device because it imitates actual

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 64 Valerio Valeri

war. It is this aspect of stylized and idealized representation which evokes

most prominently the head-hunt as a preliminary to the feast.
The kahua feast is so closely connected with the community house that
the latter's principal name is luma akahuaniam, 'house for dancing the
kahua\ Other names are luma potoam, 'the big house', or luma sualeam
(suale probably derives from suane, the word for this house among some
of Huaulu's Western neighbours, such as the Ruma Olat, and among the
Nuaulu of Southern Seram). These common names are rarely used, how
ever, since each community house has a proper name, which commemo
rates a settlement in the distant past. The present house is named Kaka
lasiwa (often abbreviated to Kalasiwa); the previous one, which had
recently been built when I first arrived in Huaulu in early 1972, was called
Talakafe.7 Traditionally, the community house was also a shrine in which
the collective heirlooms, including the heads taken as trophies, were
preserved. The bundle that contained the most important heirloom, called
Leautuam, hung from the roof at the centre of the veranda. A hunted head
was put on the floor under it as an offering and was surrounded by the
singers and dancers during the kahua. At the end of the feast the newly
captured head joined the older ones that hung under the ridgepole.
The Leautuam is allegedly a live penis descended from heaven, a gift
from Upu Lahatala, the sky god, who is the ultimate personification of
maleness and who is often but not invariably paired with his wife Puhum,
the mother earth. This symbol of male potency is supposed to give the
Huaulu invincibility in war and the ability to produce many children.
Through it, they address Lahatala and Puhum and offer human sacrifices,
whose token is the victim's severed head. Because they are conditions for
the existence of Huaulu as a whole, the Leautuam and other heirlooms are
called luma upuem, 'masters of the house', that is, of the community house
which embodies the social totality. Like Lahatala and Puhum, and other
divinities, they are also put in the generic category of aylaem, literally
'progenitors'. This term refers to both dead and still living progenitors and
is used as an honorific for any important male person. It may also refer
to any person or animated object from the past that is a condition for
Huaulu life in the present and is thus viewed as a progenitor in a meta
phoric sense. When the Huaulu say that by offering human heads they 'feed
the progenitors' they refer principally to the Leautuam, to some other
fetishes associated with it, and ultimately to Lahatala and Puhum them
selves. Only these are specifically said to request heads because they 'eat
humans' (i ae manusia). Nevertheless, the obligation to take heads is
enforced (through threats of malady, sterility, lack of success in the hunt,

7 Although Kakalasiwa is given the folk etymology 'defeating Siwa' (Siwa is the political
territorial moiety opposite to Lima, to which Huaulu belongs; cf. Valeri 1989), the other
house names do not seem to have any meaning beyond their reference to ancient settle
ments.

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 65

etc.) by the human progenitors as well, and from this point of view one can
say that human sacrifices must be offered to satisfy them too. Indeed, the
Leautuam appears more as the central focus of a cult rendered to the
generic notion of 'progenitor', than as a manifestion of such a notion that
is exclusive of its other and more ordinary manifestations, such as the
ancestors proper.
When the Dutch began patrolling the Huaulu area in the early part of
this century, and the soldiers took to spending the night in the community
house, it became necessary to remove the luma upuem from it in order to
protect them and to guarantee the observance of the connected taboos
(among which is one that forbids bringing a gun into the presence of the
Leautuam). Furthermore, the display of heads was considered incompa
tible with the prohibition on head-hunting, whose enforcement had ac
quired a legitimizing value for colonial domination in the eyes of the
Dutch. Thus the heads were put in a cave at a short distance from the
village and the heirlooms were enshrined in a special house (luma maku
woliam, 'sacred house') built on the eastern side of the village, somewhat
apart from the other houses.
Nowadays, then, the kahua begins with a prayer at this house. All the
elders in festive dress (which also happens to be battle dress) lay their
hands on the sacred bundle where the Leautuam is preserved, while one
of them (usually the Latunusa, literally 'Lord of the Land', but in fact the
priest of Huaulu as a whole and the official preserver of its traditions)

The nocturnal kahua dance

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 66 Valerio Valeri

informs the luma upuem of the onset of the feast and asks for their
protection, success in hunting, fertility of the women, etc. Then they
commune with the luma upuem and with one another by chewing sacra
mental betel which, in contrast to the ordinary kind, must be swallowed
rather than spat out.
Then the elders move to the community house, where they ritually bring
down the drums hanging from the crossbeams and set them in place on
the veranda together with gongs. At a signal from the Latunusa or some
other elder, who gives the first beats, some men start the music of the usali,
the war dance. Other men descend to the ground in front of the community
house and dance frenetically, with many interruptions, until sunset. When
the darkness is complete, the singers and drummers sit at the centre of the
veranda and the kahua dance begins. It must never be interrupted until well
after dawn, when the slow night beat suddenly turns into the frenzied one
of the day and the men, mustering all the energy left to them, rush out and
break into a spirited war dance. After this they rest until the afternoon,
when they dance the usali again and, after sunset, they kahua until dawn.
And so on for at least five days, and more often for ten. Then the feast may
slacken. But for several months (and sometimes, as in 1987-88, for more
than one year) dances will now and then be held for a few nights in a row,
sometimes building up momentum, and lasting until people and the food
are utterly exhausted. While the dance is not continuous, the innumerable
taboos that mark the ritual period are. Many of these taboos mark the
primacy of the kahua over all other activities. For instance, it is taboo to
perform any other ritual that involves the use of drums, although curing
rituals may be performed in an incomplete form, that is, without drumming
and dancing. Other taboos stress the continuous presence of sacred forces
in the communal house. For instance, it is taboo to sweep under it (all
Huaulu houses are on stilts) during the whole period. If boys are initiated,
they must observe various taboos (such as a taboo of leaving the village)
that mark the continuous presence of the aylaem in them {aylaem tuwe hini
asie) throughout the feast, even in the periods when no dances are held.
Concluding the feast is no easy matter, and this helps to explain why the
kahua period may continue for very long. A time when everybody will be
able to attend must be agreed upon (quite a feat when one considers how
far apart the Huaulu themselves often live), enough food must be accumu
lated, invitations must be sent out to neighbouring peoples, etc. It is thus
the end of the feast, its climax, that is its most important and its qualifying
stage, which makes it a success or a failure. This puts the kahua among
those many processes of Huaulu culture in which the end is more highly
valued than the beginning, since they stress a completeness that exists not
as a given (and thus at the origin) but as a result of human effort.
The last night of kahua is followed by a morning of paroxysmal war
dancing, in which (as in other important performances of usali throughout
the festive period) several of the dancers receive gifts of valuables of the

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 67

kind employed in affinal payments.8 Earlier in the morning the elders go

to the luma makuwoliam to 'call the masters of the house' (i tika luma
upuem) and ask their permission for 'the kahua to come down' (ala
akahuaniam kesia). As at the beginning of the feast, abundant game, health
and long life and many children are prayed for. As soon as the war dancing
has ended, food is brought in enormous quantities from all houses to the
community house, while the war drums rumble incessantly. The feast thus
ends with a lavish banquet which all present in the village must participate
in (the men eating on the veranda, the women in the kitchen). A ritually
prescribed component of this meal are five cuscuses of the makilam variety
? the male spotted one, whose particular aggressiveness makes for its
assimilation to the kapitan, 'war leader'. This prescription suggests that a
symbolic incorporation of defeated enemies is supposed to occur in the
subsequent meal. The banana leaves on which the food has been laid are
carefully collected and wound into a large package which is fastened under
the roof (it is taboo to let it fall). All leftovers should be left on a shelf under
the roof, where they can later be picked up and eaten ? but cannot be
removed from the community house.
Then the elders and the people for whom the feast is held (in March 1988
the newly initiated boys) consume sacramental betel at the centre of the
veranda floor, in the very place around which the dancers circled and
where the severed head stood in the past. Afterwards those in whose
honour the feast is held and those who wish to join them dance the usali
five more times before the drums are ceremonially suspended from the
beams and poles of the house. The feast is then finished, but the following
night (and sometimes four more nights) is spent in sewaa, that is, the kind
of competitive singing which is required at funerals to send away the

8 Indeed, most of the payments that go to the Huaulu dancers count as affinai prestations
and must be reciprocated later, as all such prestations are (cf. Valeri 1980). The gifts are
given to honour the dancer and, more importantly, to reconfirm the affinal relation between
him and the donor. Thus a peaceful and heteronomous relation is reproduced at a time
when the dancers seem to threaten and question this by a spectacular display of individual
violence, and hence, in Huaulu eyes, of autonomy. In sum, here as elsewhere, marrying out
is an alternative to dying out. This also explains why affinal gifts are given not only to those
among the non-Huaulu guests who are considered as affines (albeit distant ones), but also
to those who are completely unrelated and who belong to groups of former enemies. Such
gifts, by creating debts and thus a state of heteronomy, are able to convert the threat of
violence contained in the dance into the negotiation of an ongoing state of quasi-affinal
truce. Incidentally, many Huaulu tales assert the power of affinity to counter the dange
rously asocial tendencies of the autonomous male, which find their strongest expression
in the violent activities of hunting and head-hunting. One famous tale tells of a hunter who
is unable to obtain a wife because his mother's brother (the prescribed wife's father in
Huaulu) only has sons. At each birth of a new male cousin, he removes himself further from
the village, building his house deeper and deeper in the forest. Finally he becomes so
identified with the wild that he sleeps with two female pythons who appear to him in human
form. Fortunately the hero is saved from falling completely into animality and asociality
by the news that his aunt has finally given birth to a girl. He goes back to the village and
stays there to marry her.

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 68 Valerio Valeri

shadows of the dead. Indeed, the ancestral shadows which have attended
the feast must now be persuaded to leave their descendants alone. In this
final act of separation of the living and the dead the long ritual truly comes
to an end.

Some interpretive remarks

Even this drastically reduced summary cannot fail to suggest the com
plexity of the kahua ritual and thus the difficulty of keeping my interpret
ation short. I will only be able to discuss a few points, mainly concerning
the feast's place in the dialectics of concentration and dispersion and of
heteronomy and autonomy.
The most stringent requirement of the feast is that all members of the
society attend it. Refusal to do so indicates almost a state of rebellion
against society and is strongly disapproved of. Furthermore, a passive
participation is not enough: I have heard dozens of harangues, and not only
from persons in authority, exhorting people to throw themselves into the
dancing with more passion, to participate in the singing and to stay awake
throughout the night. It would seem, then, that the feast constitutes the
most encompassing, and at the same time most intense state of social
relations. It realizes as pure action the image of global society which is
normally realized only statically in material objects, such as the heirlooms
and the community house. The feast animates these symbols, which are
ordinarily left alone, and in the process appropriates them: signification,
moving from the usually empty house to the dancing crowd that fills it,
ceases to be purely transcendent, that is, purely reified and fetishized, to
return into the pulsating, self-signifying body of the community. In terms
of belief, this sudden collapse of the cleavage between signifier and sig
nified is interpreted as the coming together of the living and of the dead,
who are supposed to participate invisibly in the feast and to add their
strength to that of their descendants. Sensuously, the provisional ? and
always precarious ? coincidence of signifier and signified is experienced
in the body, as pleasure. It is precisely this element of pleasure that makes
the kahua ritual a feast (cf. Valeri 1979) and which gives it much of its
power to create sociability.
Quite explicitly, then, the kahua presents itself as the strongest counter
to the state of spatial dispersion, to the loosening of social relations, which
constantly threaten the coherent existence of this society. It resocializes the
Huaulu for a while. But what makes them go to the feast? As I have
mentioned, the kahua is obligatorily celebrated every time there is an event
that proves once again the society's vitality and strength. However, this
begs the question of why the different groups or individuals continue to
recognize themselves in their society and thus decide to attend the feast.
The question is complex and is further complicated by the politics of
community house building and maintenance. Although the clan called
Huaulu is symbolically identified with Huaulu society as a whole and

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 69

therefore receives the title Latu, 'Lord', it does not have a monopoly on the
community house, which is the most concrete embodiment of the social
totality. Any man of any lineage who is able to mobilize the village and
lead it in this enterprise may build the house and name it with one of the
names that belong to the stock of house names of his lineage. This 'big
man' becomes the guardian of the house and lives in it. Obviously such a
contingent leader is not always to everybody's taste and this may prompt
some people not to attend a kahua held in the house that he guards. At the
same time, it is very revealing of the tension between hierarchy and
egalitarianism in Huaulu society that only a big man with real influence,
rather than a structural chief, can actually attract people to the feast and
persuade them to manifest in this guise their continuing identification with
the larger society.
While the reasons for choosing to reconfirm this identification by par
ticipating in the kahua are complex, all events that can be construed as
proofs of Huaulu's superiority over neighbouring societies tend to re
establish more strongly the boundary between it and them, and thus to
motivate an unambiguous statement of identity. In other words, there is
nothing that succeeds like success. Superiority is conceived of as superior
strength and this explains why no reason to celebrate is stronger than the
ultimate manifestation of strength, that is the killing of a non-Huaulu, and
also why in the past all other reasons to celebrate were reinforced by this
reason, by going on a head-hunt.
Even in its structure, where the violent war dance alternates with the
peaceful nocturnal ronde, the kahua feast demonstrates the complemen
tarity of external opposition and internal solidarity. More exactly, there is
a transformative relation between the two. The violent tracing by males
of a boundary between Huaulu and non-Huaulu turns into an internal
strengthening of relations, of which it is the necessary premise. This
transformation has many facets, but two of them seem particularly rel
evant. One is that the shift from the usali to the kahua dance is in fact a
shift from a violent affirmation by each man of his inalienable autonomy,
to a docile blending of each with all others. This is made evident by the
contrast in form and emotional tenor of the two dances. Whereas in the
night kahua the bodies of the dancers are entwined and thus their move
ments must be highly coordinated, indeed in unison, in the usali their bodies
are separate and coordinated only at a distance by the rhythm of the drums.
Furthermore, the moments of coordination and rhythm alternate with
moments of non-coordination and lack of rhythm in which each individual
dancer attempts to impress the public with shows of strength and fury.
These shows are the most important part of the usali and establish the value
of an individual's performance more than his ability to keep the rhythm
of the dance. Sometimes the dancer is so carried away that he runs amok
and attempts to destroy everything (and even everybody) in his path. In a
sense, each dancer dances alone, coordinating his movements with those

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70 Valerio Valeri

of others ? at one point aligning with them, at another facing another

dancer threateningly ? or, in contrast, standing alone, as he chooses. In
this, the dance seems to reflect the characteristics of warfare, and in
particular of the head-hunt. These were highly competitive and individu
alistic pursuits, with only moments of freely chosen coordination and
nothing like military discipline. But everything happens as if, by finding
its outlet in a game whose stakes (the heads) are provided by outsiders, the
affirmation of individual autonomy can be socialized and turned into its
contrary. This contrary, this state of mutually accepted interdependence,
is vividly represented by the highly coordinated night dance.
The second facet of the transformation to be considered concerns the
relationship between man and woman. Women are excluded from the war
dance, which, moreover, may be dangerous to their procreative powers (cf.
Valeri 1990). This echoes the more fundamental incompatibility between
female fertility and male violence in the head-hunt. Women and the men
involved in a head-hunt or in war must avoid each other because they are
reciprocally dangerous to each other. In particular, they must not have
sexual relations. But once the victorious warriors have been reincorporated
into the village by a purification and especially by the offering of the head
to the luma upuem, their destructive power turns into its contrary: they
bring to the village the blessings of the luma upuem, blessings that are
activated by engaging in sexual relations both during and after the night
dance. Potency in vanquishing other males is thus turned into potency in
sexual pursuits. Perhaps this transformation is represented by the main
symbol of male strength, the Leautuam himself who, on presentation of
the head (or simply on being told that it has been taken), is supposed to
become so erect and taut as to vibrate. The transformation of violence into
sex (or some other form of eroticism) is in itself a passage from extreme
autonomy to a form of heteronomy, since erotic relations imply that men
are dependent on women. But there is more to these relationships with
women than eroticism, since women also mediate between men as, to
some extent, men mediate between women. This is clearly represented in
the night dance, where each man must hold another man's hand on the
back of the woman who separates them and, reciprocally, a woman holds
another woman's hand on the back of the man who stands in between
them. The dance seems to represent in an idealized form everyday life,
where the tendency towards autonomy of individuals or groups is coun
tered by the heteronomy implied by alliance. However much one tries to
be autonomous, one cannot autonomously reproduce oneself: this is the
reason why the relations between man and woman and affinal gifts play
such an important role in the 'taming' of anarchic and violent autonomous
tendencies that seems to take place in the kahua. But if the relationship
with women and through women reproduces the strength of males and of
male-centered groups, then it is also the premise of a reverse transfor
mation of heteronomy into (male) autonomy. This explains why at dawn

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 71

the peaceful, double-gendered night dance shifts again to the violent,

exclusively male, war dance. The transformation from autonomy to hete
ronomy is never irreversible, never definitive, but delineates an unresolved
tension at the very core of the feast and thus of Huaulu society.
Some of the power of the kahua feast resides in its ability to contain and
regulate such tensions rather than to suppress them. It achieves this result
by, among other devices, transforming potentially destructive tendencies
into a constructive (but very fragile) game of competition (military and
erotic). In the past, the various transformations made possible by the feast,
and its power to recreate, at least while it continued, the wider Huaulu
society, were embodied in a potent object: the human head that was
brought from the outside to be encompassed by the rotating circle of men
and women at the centre (Valeri 1989, 1990). Today an emptiness at the
centre of the group of dancers marks a still potent presence, and yet an
absence that makes the Huaulu conscious of the distance between past and
present, of their ultimate inability to be as good as their forebears and thus
of their vulnerability to ancestral retribution.
But this emptiness at the centre risks being misleading. By attracting
attention too exclusively to a remembered presence and thus to an ultimate
absence, it makes what is actually present invisible. For the vanquished
enemies (and I surmise that I should put myself among them9) have not
disappeared from the feast: they appear in it in another guise. In the past,
before head-hunting was forbidden, an enemy could only attend the feast
as an omiam, a 'human victim'. Today, the enemy is still there to give
validity to the feast ? but as an invited guest. And he is still vanquished,
shown to be inferior ? yet not with the sword, but rather with the gifts
that are offered to him when he dances and on other occasions, with the
abundance of food, with the splendour of the feast itself. From an invol
untary guest, the enemy has been transformed into a voluntary victim. His
very presence at a feast that has proved attractive to him testifies to his
vulnerability, his inability to resist Huaulu seduction. This is all the more
significant because it is believed that the victims of head-hunting were
seduced into defenselessness by the superior magic of their vanquisher.
The old complementarity of external opposition and internal solidarity
thus survives, although overtly the sharp boundary between enemy and
friend seems to have collapsed, since some at least of the enemies attend
the feast. This gives the feast a greater self-constitutive, or, if one likes,
'performative' (in the Austinian sense ? cf. Austin 1975) character than
it had in the past. While even in the past a performance of the feast was
not simply the celebration of a victory, but also a victory in its own right,

9 I surmise this because after all the white men (putiputiem) were among the Huaulu's worst
enemies. And, however much they accepted me, the Huaulu have always jocularly remin
ded me and themselves that as things stood in the past, I would not have stayed alive long
among them.

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 72 Valerio Valeri

today it has become mostly the latter. There are no more victories to
celebrate but the celebrations of victories.
The performative, rather than simply celebrative, character of the feast
is also made evident by its main constituent: the dance. Indeed, the dance
is not just an expression of joy at an event that demonstrates society's
strength: it is itself a device for creating an experience of that strength. It
achieves this by multiplying each individual body through its rhythmical
union with all other bodies. In the past, this muscularly derived sensation
of force reinforced the one derived from the visual contemplation of the
severed head: an external, tangible sign was thus fully transformed into an
internal sensation and as such circulated in every body to become the
substance of the collective body. Nowadays the absence of human sacri
fices places on the dance the principal onus of creating the sense of
collective force which is the source of the efficacy of the kahua. But the
increased reliance on an experience which is purely internal, non-objec
tified, or rather objectified only in the body, makes the aesthetic synthesis
offered by the ritual more labile than it probably was in the past.
Or perhaps this is an impression that I owe to the Huaulu's own sense
that something is incomplete, and therefore less compelling, in a feast
truncated of its truncated head. For ultimately even in the past the conflict
between autonomy and heteronomy ? the ultimate source of instability
in Huaulu society ? could only be transcended in the dance. Indeed, this
activity ? as Radcliffe-Brown (1964:247-253) so masterfully showed ?
offers the experience of a compulsive force that comes at the same time
from outside and from inside and thus achieves a miraculous coincidence
of internal spontaneity and external constraint. But, contrary to Radcliffe
Brown, I would stress the ephemeral, unstable and even individually
variable character of such aesthetic (and thus pleasurable) syntheses of
inner and outer states. Their moral power has been greatly exaggerated
in anthropological studies of ritual, at least if the moral is identified with
the collective (cf. Valeri in press). We should have learnt from Nietzsche's
The Genealogy of Morals that pleasure is not such compelling stuff as pain.
Certainly, the limits of aesthetic integration in the kahua feast are blatantly
evident whenever individual excitement breaks away from the collective
rhythm that stimulates it and explodes in some of the worst acts of
internecine violence. This danger is obviously greatest in the war dance,
which for this reason is frequently presided over by elders holding formi
dable ratan sticks with which they furiously beat the dancers who go
berserk back to their senses. I witnessed several such episodes during the
recent kahua.
But the lability of aesthetic integration should not be seen only nega
tively, as a lack of power. For the choice of a mode which is ultimately
unable to create permanent constraints and permanent closures guarantees
the continued survival of autonomy in its vital struggle with heteronomy.

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 Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Kahua Ritual 73

Let me conclude with this minor theme, which I hope to develop elsewhere
into the symphony it deserves.

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