About the Website

This website focuses on Abui plants. It details a list of 53 plants, noting their English and Abui names (and where possible, their scientific names and etymological reconstructions). Particular emphasis will be given to (1) how the Abui people use these plants as medicine (2) the cultural relevance of these plants to the Abui people and (3) oral stories connected with how these plants got their names or became used as healing plants/ culturally relevant.

Oral stories, especially, are pivotal in Abui culture. Abui myths and legends, known as tira, are centred on historical events. These stories are interpreted by locals under a meta-historical lens, rendering them as myths and legends. These narrative genre enact and elucidate the lasting relationship between the physical landscape (rocks, caves, water bodies, places, and coastal areas) and the Abui people (Kratochvíl et al., 2016). Unsurprisingly, oral traditions have been used to account for the origins of certain Abui place names and micro-toponyms (Perono Cacciafoco and Cavallaro, 2017).

Below is one such example of an oral story, Children of Mon Mot.

References

Kratochvíl, F., Delpada, B., Siao, R., Ng, X.Y., Kelly, J.M., Dang, M.T., 2016. Children of Mon Mot — Documentation of a tira legend of the Abui community (Eastern Indonesia). In: Conference of Virtual Systems and Multimedia.

Perono Cacciafoco, F., Cavallaro, F., 2017. The legend of Lamòling: Unwritten memories and diachronic toponymy through the lens of an Abui myth. Lingua: An International Review of General Linguistics. 193, 51–61.