Remembering and Recreating Origins: The Transformation of a Tradition of Canonical Parallelism among the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

I have been studying an oral tradition of strict canonical parallelism intermittently for nearly half a century. I began my research on this oral tradition based on the island of Rote in eastern Indonesia in 1965, and have continued these efforts, now with greater urgency, to the present. I have also been investigating issues in comparative parallelism for roughly the same period of time. In 2014 I published Explorations in Semantic Parallelism, which marked an important stage in this research. This volume is a collection of papers both new and old. For example, I reprinted my first survey of the field in 1977 published in honor of Roman Jakobson together with a longer paper on the “trajectory” of subsequent and continuing developments in the study of parallelism. Explorations in Semantic Parallelism also reprints several of my papers on the study of the Rotenese tradition of canonical parallelism together with various papers that continue to extend my study of this tradition. My personal understanding of the Rotenese tradition of canonical composition has grown over several decades, while the tradition itself has been undergoing change. My perceptions of this change are intimately linked to my increasing comprehension of the tradition as a whole. In this paper I take stock of the work on that tradition to date and to put it into perspective. I also describe the changes that have occurred in the tradition over the course of my research as I gradually gained new perceptions of its fundamental underpinnings. Much of my general research on Rote has been historically oriented. The island has its own extensive oral historical traditions as well as Dutch archival records that date to the mid-seventeenth Oral Tradition, 31/2 (2017): 233-258