The sense of sensory terms and use of the senses in central Flores (Indonesia)

ABSTRACT

Languages that divide the five conventional senses into two named categories, one including vision and the other all non-visual senses, occur sporadically around the world. Focusing on Ngadha-Lio, a group of Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken on Flores Island (eastern Indonesia), the present discussion reaches several conclusions. First, Ngadha-Lio speakers have special terms and other verbal means of distinguishing the several non-visual senses. This contradicts the idea that languages with two main sensory categories recognize just two senses, as does evidence for hearing being the prototype of the non-visual senses. Drawing on animal naming and metaphor in one Ngadha-Lio language, Nage, it is further shown how speakers place the greatest value on vision in distinguishing different kinds of animals and connecting these with humans. This applies even though in ritual and myth Nage make greater use of smell, touch, and taste than Westerners typically do. Vision also unites animals and humans while distinguishing both from invisible spiritual beings, detectible only through non-visual senses, thus revealing the role different senses play in delineating major ontological categories. Finally, attention is given to the way Ngadha-Lio, like other Malayo-Polynesian languages, verbally identify physical and emotional feeling with the non-visual senses, and particularly touch.

KEYWORDS:

• Sensory language
• the senses in ritual, myth, and metaphor
• ontological contrasts among the senses
• internal feeling
• Malayo-Polynesian languages; Ngadha-Lio.

Acknowledgements

The ethnography on which this paper is based was conducted at various times between 1984 and 2018, and supported by grants from the British Academy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The paper has benefited significantly from the generous advice of several people. Included among these are two anonymous reviewers and Professor David Howes of Concordia University, Montreal, who read the earliest draft and suggested ways in which the essay could be developed. I am also grateful to Ame Heribertus Ajo, a Nage man now living in east central Flores with whom, in a series of emails, I reviewed the use and meaning of various sensory terms in the Nage language that I recorded in the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Burenhult and Majid (2011) point out, “basic” here can be understood in the same sense Berlin and Kay (1969) employ it when referring to “basic color terms.” See also Viberg (1983, 124).

2. Two or more of these olfactory verbs – nguzu, ngudu, ngido/ngijo and possibly even mazo – could be related among themselves; see also Nage izu, “nose.”

3. On comparable uses of ginger in New Guinea, see Howes (2003, 149-50). Ginger is also employed as a common curative on Sumba, the large island immediately south of Flores.

Additional information

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Gregory Forth

Gregory Forth is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, where he taught from 1986 to 2019. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Forth’s research and teaching interests include: religion and cosmology, theories of symbolism, oral narrative, folk-biology and folk-taxonomy, human-animal relations, and kinship, marriage, and sexuality. For over 40 years Forth has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Indonesia, since 1984 on the island of Flores. Based largely on this research he has published over 100 articles in international journals and edited books, as well as several single-authored books, mainly in the fields of social/cultural and linguistic anthropology. Recent titles include Why the Porcupine is not a Bird (2016), A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path (2019), and Between Ape and Human (May 2022).