The long journey of the rice maiden from Li’o to Tanjung Bunga:

Abstract

The ‘long songs’1 I have been working on in Indonesia, in both the Toraja and the Lamaholot regions, have a basic similarity: they tell the story of journeys. In the Toraja region (Sulawesi), they were called ossoran, from the verb mangosso’ (‘to tell in an ordered way, according to a succession’). They described the origin of something—an object (iron, a cordyline leaf ), a human, a spirit (the bugi’ )—and recounted its progress from a distant place (the sky or elsewhere) to the site of narration in the human world. These were not genealogies, because there was no question of a succession of filiation. They were about journeys or peregrinations in space. These stories, in octosyllabic lines, performed through songs and dances during many days, bringing the whole community together, were banned by the