So my name shall live: Stone-dragging and grave-building in Kodi, West Sumba

In many different parts of Indonesia, people have built large and im pressive graves for the dead, and have marked their burial with elaborate rituals and lavish distributions of food. The flamboyance of Balinese cremations, Toraja cave burials, Batak sarcophagi and Borneo mauso leums are by now familiar to wider audiences. The explicit links between the splendor of the funeral ceremonies and the social status of the deceased are also clear. In this paper, I shall discuss how the grave building ceremonies of Kodi, West Sumba, have added an interesting twist to this familiar pattern of ostentatious celebrations of death: in West Sumba, prominent men do not need to rely on the willingness of their relatives to construct large graves for them after their deaths. They can instead sponsor stone-dragging ceremonies themselves. In this way, several years or even decades before their death they may assure them selves of a prestigious grave and the enduring renown of a great feast giver. The living tradition of megalithic grave-building that we find on Sumba challenges two familiar assumptions about grave-building which are frequent in anthropological writings. The first concerns the chrono logical sequence of death and tomb-building, and the rites of passage interpretation of funerary symbolism which has been current since Hertz and Van Gennep. By detailing specific Kodi ideas about the construction of the tomb and the journey of the soul, we can come to understand the particular terms of their own cultural eschatology. The second concerns the political significance of such mortuary edifices, and their role in the demonstration and legitimation of social-religious leadership. Here, the