I Call You through Fire: A Pakkado Love Magic Parallelism

Abstract

The main concern of this article is to elaborate on the magic of Pa’issangang Baine 'knowledge about women’ within ‘Pakkado’ (people who speak I) in West Sulawesi, Indonesia. More specifically, the article focuses on this spell in individual ritual contexts, not in ordinary activity. The spell is performed by certain actors, and focuses on the characteristics of the utterances. The type of knowledge is categorized as a spell and is practiced by men who want to attract beloved women. Albeit, it also used by women to gain beloved men. The techniques used are recordings and field notes. The utterances are taken from a single informant. The rationale of the research is to give a better understanding of spells within the society who speak I. Nowadays, this spell lives only within the heads of aged populatons. Some people are worried about the death of this magic language, but only some attention has been directed at its preservation. The research also contributes in two ways; practice and academic. Practically, it is one way for revitalizing the magic word into written text; academically, it shows fascinating language use from semantic and pragmatic points of view. The writer applies some linguistic tools to analyze the utterances and the activity of performers in producing words such as in the poetic function of language use (Jakobson 1960), and in the deictic field (Hank, 2005). The features of this spell show the act of using parallelism and sentences repeated many times (Fox, 1988). In addition, it also shows the variety within a deictic system. Mandar is an ethnicity located in West Sulawesi—on the island of Sulawesi.