Beneath the Volcano is the first major account of the Nage, who inhabit the central part of Flores in eastern Indonesia. The book focuses on Nage ideas concerning a variety of spiritual beings and how these influence both ritual practices and ideas about human beings. In exploring these subjects, the author sets out to uncover a classification of spirits. While quite different from taxonomies of natural beings, Nage ways of linking named categories of spirits nevertheless reveal a regular conceptual order. In describing this order, use is made of a version of Dumont's notion of 'encompassment'. Common ideas informing relations between Nage humans and several categories of spirits are further interpreted as instances of a pervasive principle of 'symmetric inversion', according to which human beings are spirits for the spirits.
The author describes Rindi culture within an analytic framework that illustrates connexions between, and common principles among, often apparently disparate realms of thought and action. The book contains chapters on the house; the village and the domain (an aggregate of villages); space and cosmos; religion (the notions "hamangu" and "ndewa"; divinity and the ancestors; the powers of the earth); the cycle of life and death; social order (class stratification; the division of authority; descent groups) and the system of asymmetric prescriptive alliance by which it is governed; marriage prestations and the various ways of contracting a marriage. The study is based on 22 months of fieldwork.
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