To the extent that the Indonesian island of Sumba is famous, it is for its horses. A quick google search will return dreamy images of the setting sun illuminating riders on the pristine beach, or the elegant sandalwood ponies, originally bred here on Sumba and […]
People on Sumba depend on the goodwill of the ancestors and in the Zaizo ritual, the requests of the living flow through the music and ultimately reach the ancestor spirits. As I wrote in the last post about gongs, Zaizo rituals related to the ancestors […]
The first, middle and last rule of thumb in ethnographic fieldwork is that you gotta spend time with your informants to get to know them. Sounds easy enough. Do a bit of “deep hanging out”, participate in stuff and go write about it. Well, in […]
ethnographica 