Abstract:

"A CELEBRATION OF ORIGINS is a realistic portrait of a rarely performed cosmogonic ritual in Indonesia.... To it's great credit, A Celebration of Origins evokes the contested nature of ritual. It demonstrates how ritual performance implicates delicate political relationships based on pragmatic alliances, festering antipathies or developing jealousies. Conflict is the thread that weaves together the disparate themes of the film. A finely crafted, sensually striking film with a compelling story which focuses on one of the central themes in contemporary anthropological debate: the contested nature of social - and ritual - life." "A CELEBRATION OF ORIGINS is the first of a series of films by E. Douglas Lewis and Patsy and Timothy Asch about the ritual life of the people of the domain of Wai Brama in eastern Flores, Indonesia. The people of the Tana'Ai region of Flores live in seven ceremonial domains, of which the domain of Wai Brama is the largest and, according to the myths of origin, the oldest. The people of Wai Brama are shifting cultivators, hunters and gatherers who, unlike their neighbors, have maintained their traditional ceremonial and social system. A CELEBRATION OF ORIGINS, filmed in 1980, depicts the first celebration of these rituals since 1960. The rituals, which require the participation of the entire community, had been delayed by poor harvests and epidemics. The film focuses on a small group of ritual leaders who struggle to hold the celebration in the absence of the Source of the Domain, the ritual leader of the community, who died after initiating the rituals. Many of the important principles of order in the domain are manifested in the Celebration of Origins including those governing relations between men and women, human beings and the deity and spirits, and the clans and houses which constitute the domain. These rituals do not merely affirm a traditional social order: they are also an arena in which the community is confronted by and responds to the changing social, religious, economic and political milieux of life in a modern nation state. The film is thus also about the ways in which a remote, traditional community struggles to reconcile the demands of a tradition which has served it well in the past with the demands of a modernizing polity and the Catholic Church."