Alune Erotic

The Alune are the people of the western interior of Seram, the large island at the center of Maluku that Moluccans call Nusa Ina, the mother island. That name is not decoration. Much of central Maluku traces its ancestry back to Seram, and specifically to Nunusaku, the mountain at the headwaters of the Eti, Tala and Sapalewa rivers, from which the founding groups are said to have scattered outward to the smaller islands. The Alune live on that ground. Whatever the outside world has decided about them at various points, they hold the origin country of a much wider set of peoples, and they know it.

Their language, Alune, is Austronesian, part of the Central Maluku cluster, and its closest relative is Wemale, spoken by neighbors immediately to the east. The two are near enough to be treated as a pair in most accounts and distinct enough that speakers insist otherwise. Dutch administration lumped both under Alfur, or Alifuru, a blanket term for anyone living inland and unconverted, and the label outlasted the people who coined it. Seram's older political order sorted villages into Patasiwa, the nine, and Patalima, the five, with the Alune on the Patasiwa side. Among the western Patasiwa a men's initiation society, the Kakehan, took boys through seclusion in forest lodges and organized adult male standing, until the colonial government set out to dismantle it in the early twentieth century.

The same pacification campaign pulled highland settlements down toward the coast and the roads, and the consequences are still legible in where villages sit and how far people walk to their gardens. Most Alune are Protestant, inheritors of the Calvinist church the Dutch missions left, with a Muslim minority, and adat runs underneath both: village office, land claims, marriage payments, and the pela and gandong pacts that bind particular villages to each other in obligation across the religious line. Those pacts were tested hard during the Maluku violence of 1999 to 2002, which displaced people across Seram and is within living memory for everyone middle aged. Sago remains the staple, felled and washed from the palm rather than farmed in rows, alongside cassava, rotated garden plots, hunting, and cloves and copra for cash. Ambonese Malay is the language of the market and, increasingly, of the young, which is the quiet pressure on Alune now.