Abui Erotic

The Abui are the mountain people of Alor, and they say so themselves: the name comes from their own word for mountain, and they call their language the mountain tongue. Alor is a rugged island at the eastern end of Indonesia's Lesser Sunda chain, closer to Timor than to Bali, and the Abui hold its central highlands, the ridges and dry valleys inland from the regency capital of Kalabahi. They are the largest of the island's many ethnic groups, with a population usually put in the tens of thousands, and their villages traditionally sat on high ground, which made sense in an era when neighboring clans raided one another and took heads.

What sets them apart from most of Indonesia is speech. Abui is a Papuan language, part of the small Timor-Alor-Pantar family, with no relation to the Austronesian languages spoken along the Alor coast and across the rest of the archipelago. Nobody is certain how these languages ended up a thousand kilometers west of New Guinea. Most Abui today also speak Alor Malay, and in some villages children are growing up with Malay first, so the language is well documented but not entirely secure.

Missionaries arrived under Dutch rule in the early twentieth century, and the great majority of Abui are now Protestant, most of them in the Evangelical Christian Church in Timor, the main Protestant body of the region. Older practice runs alongside it. The center of a traditional village is the mesbah, a raised stone platform that serves as an altar and a dance floor. On it the community performs the lego-lego, a circle dance in which dozens of people link arms and move in a slow ring, often through the night, to the sound of chanting and gongs. The other great object of Abui life is the moko, a bronze hourglass drum descended from ancient Dong Son designs. Mokos were cast elsewhere and traded in over centuries. On Alor they became heirloom wealth, graded and named, and they remain the core of bride price alongside pigs and cloth.

Descent runs through the father, and clans hold land and ritual roles. The Abui also carry an unusual place in the history of anthropology: the American ethnographer Cora Du Bois lived in the village of Atimelang in 1938 and 1939, and her book The People of Alor became a foundational study of the culture and personality school. Today the village of Takpala, with its tall pyramid-roofed houses, is where visitors meet Abui culture, but most Abui live by farming maize, cassava and candlenut on steep swidden plots much as their grandparents did.