Content area
Abstract
This is an ethnography of the Dou Donggo, a group of about 20,000 people subsisting on the cultivation of swidden and irrigated rice in the western highlands of Bima Regency, at the eastern end of Sumbawa Island, Indonesia. It is based on more than two years of field research, and focuses primarily on Dou Donggo ethnicity and social organization.
Part I is devoted to a description of the regional context. In particular, interethnic relations between the Dou Donggo and the more numerous lowland Dou Mbojo are examined. It is argued that these are best understood as the outcome of an historical process in which a special political status within the Bimanese Sultanate has produced ethnogenesis.
Part II is devoted to a description of the village community: its demography, social differentiation, economy, ecology, and unifying cosmological and spiritual beliefs.
Part III is devoted to a formal description of social ideology, social structure, and their expression in social behavior. Teknonymy, kinship terminology, and pronominal usage are described, as are kinship, household, marriage, inheritance, and the morphology of patrilineal clans and several kinds of kin groups based on differing cognatic rules of recruitment. It is argued that these kin groups are more discreetly bounded than has been thought characteristic of kindred organization and that they in fact constitute "fixed-term corporations." Several case studies of kin groups in action are presented, and the work concludes by placing Dou Donggo social organization in a broader Indonesian context and by noting the trajectory of structural change.
