Ngada Erotic

Walk into a Ngada village and the layout tells you who lives there before anyone speaks. Houses face each other across a long open plaza, and down the middle stand pairs of ritual objects: the ngadhu, a thick carved post under a conical thatch roof, and the bhaga, a miniature house not much bigger than a kennel. One is male, one female, and each pair belongs to a clan. Add the stone platforms where the dead are remembered, and the plaza becomes a genealogical diagram you can walk through.

The Ngada live in the highlands of central Flores, in eastern Indonesia, mostly in and around Bajawa, on ground that slopes off the near perfect cone of Mount Inerie. It is cool at that altitude and wet enough for coffee, and Bajawa arabica has become the region's calling card. Their language, Ngadha, is Austronesian, one of a tight cluster of central Flores tongues that shade into each other as you move east toward the Nage, Keo and Lio. Neighbors can half follow one another and still insist the languages are separate.

Descent runs through the mother, which sets the Ngada apart from most of Indonesia, and a child's clan is settled by the kind of marriage the parents made. In the common arrangement the husband moves into his wife's house and the children belong to her clan; a larger transfer of bridewealth can move them to his. Named ancestral houses hold it in place, and a roof finial, a small man with a blade or a tiny house in his stead, marks whether that house is an origin house or a branch.

Almost everyone is Catholic. The Dutch only established themselves here in the first decade of the twentieth century, and mission schools followed, but conversion did not work as replacement. Catholic marriage and burial sit on top of an older order with a sky deity above, earth spirits below and the ancestors close at hand, and buffalo are still killed on the stone platforms when the occasion calls for it. The clearest sign is Reba, the new year festival held village by village in December and January, built on the ceremonial eating of yam, nights of chanted verse, and the public recital of who came from whom.

Day to day, people dress like other Indonesians. Ceremony brings out the indigo: women in near black tube skirts banded with narrow white patterning, the finest sewn with beads and shells and once restricted to women of rank, men in a wrapped hip cloth and knotted headcloth. Bena and Wogo receive tour buses now, which the Ngada seem to have absorbed with more composure than most.