Dualism and Hierarchy: Processes of Binary Combination in Keo Society

Society in the Keo region of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores reveals a pervasive pairing of villages, clans, and other groups. This work studies such pairing, using results from fieldwork conducted by the author over a period of fifteen years. It analyzes a form of society that has occupied anthropologists since the inception of their discipline—morphological dualism, or dual organization—and explores these issues through original ethnographic studies of numerous Keo domains and settlements.