Abui Community (Alor): From Ethnographic Object to Lived Continuity
Takpala Village
Alor Island
East Nusa Tenggara (2022)
Independent field research
Written and photographed by Kevin Jagar
The Abui community of Alor illustrates how indigenous life has been repeatedly reframed—from early colonial misrepresentation to anthropological documentation and contemporary heritage discourse—while continuing to adapt its practices within accelerating modernization.
Image 1. Abui community members in traditional attire with men specifically dressed as warriors with bows and arrows
Image 2. Foot bangles worn by Abui women, used as adornment on daily basis.
Image 3. Abui people supporting one another while performing the circular formation of the Lego-Lego dance.
Alor Island entered European records as early as 1522 through the accounts of Ferdinand Magellan, whose descriptions cast local inhabitants as primitive and inhuman. By the early 20th century, anthropological research by Cora Du Bois and Martha Margaretha documented the Abui as a socially organized community with established material culture, including textiles, metal objects, architectural forms, and ritual instruments.
Archival photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries further indicate the presence of fabric use and metal craftsmanship well before contemporary modernization narratives emerged.
Early colonial accounts reduced the Abui to spectacle and threat. Later anthropological records stabilized them as cultural subjects. Today, modernization and labor migration risk reclassifying Abui practices once again—this time as heritage artifacts rather than lived systems of meaning.
Image 4. Sacred moko drums placed on a stone altar, serving as the ceremonial centerpiece of the Lego-Lego dance.
The Lego-Lego dance, within which these photographs were taken, operates simultaneously as social practice, cultural marker, and visual object — depending on who is watching.
The presence of textiles, moko drums, and architectural forms such as the lopo complicates linear narratives of “cultural emergence” or “loss.” Moko drums, in particular, point to long-standing inter-island connectivity and raise unresolved questions about historical trade routes and metallurgical knowledge in the region.
These materials are not relics of a static past but indicators of adaptive systems that predate—and outlast—external classification.
Today, younger generations increasingly leave the island for wage labor elsewhere, reshaping how cultural practices are sustained. What was once embedded in daily life risks becoming episodic, performative, or externally valued primarily as heritage.
The tension lies not in disappearance but in repositioning—when practices shift from lived necessity to curated representation.
This site was approached through visual documentation during a Lego-Lego performance, complemented by interviews to understand how the community interprets its own continuity amid demographic and economic change. The focus remained on how practices persist, adapt, or recede without assuming inevitable decline or cultural failure.
For curatorial, research, and production contexts, the Abui case cautions against collapsing indigenous communities into singular timelines—whether colonial, anthropological, or developmental. It underscores the need to distinguish between cultural practices as social infrastructure and as representational objects.
Any framing that treats tradition solely as something to be preserved risks overlooking how communities actively renegotiate their ways of living.