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The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern In- donesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and are under pressure from the local Malay variety as well as the national lan- guage, Indonesian. This volume studies the internal and external linguistic history of this interesting group, and showcases some of its unique typological features, such as the preference to index the transitive patient-like argument on the verb but not the agent-like one; the extreme variety in morphologi- cal alignment patterns; the use of plural number words; the existence of quinary numeral systems; the elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component; and the great variation exhibited in their kinship systems. Unlike many other Papuan languages, Alor-Pantar languages do not ex- hibit clause-chaining, do not have switch reference systems, never suffix subject indexes to verbs, do not mark gender, but do encode clusivity in their pronominal systems. Indeed, apart from a broadly similar head-final syntactic profile, there is little else that the Alor-Pantar languages share with Papuan languages spoken in other regions. While all of them show some traces of contact with Austronesian languages, in general, borrow- ing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact with Malay and Indonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of the Alor-Pantar region.

elevationals --- alor-pantar languages --- comparative linguistics --- papuan languages --- typology --- linguistics --- numeral systems

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This is a volume about the life and power of ritual objects in their religious ritual settings. In this Special Issue, we see a wide range of contributions on material culture and ritual practices across religions. By focusing on the dynamic interrelations between objects, ritual, and belief, it explores how religion happens through symbolic materiality. The ritual objects presented in this volume include: masks worn in the Dogon dance; antique ecclesiastical silver objects carried around in festive processions and shown in shrines in the southern Andes; funerary photographs and films functioning as mnemonic objects for grieving children; a dented rock surface perceived to be the god’s footprint in the archaic place of pilgrimage, Gaya (India); a recovered manual of rituals (from Xiapu county) for Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, juxtaposed to a Manichaean painting from southern China; sacred stories and related sacred stones in the Alor–Pantar archipelago, Indonesia; lotus symbolism, indicating immortalizing plants in the mythic traditions of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia;

ritual --- rituality --- ritualism --- digital games --- assassination --- initiation --- nizarism --- Templar Order --- Abui --- Alor --- Lamòling --- Alor-Pantar Archipelago --- oral legends and myths --- traditional religions --- Manichaeism --- ritual manual --- Xiapu manuscripts --- Buddhist worship and repentance ritual --- Diagram of the Universe --- children --- objects --- funerary photography --- death ritual --- continuing bonds --- Hinduism --- India --- material culture --- ritual --- Vi??u’s footprint --- place of pilgrimage --- sacred geography --- imaginative embodiment --- Ravana --- Sri Lanka --- Sinhalese Buddhist Majority --- ritualizing --- procession --- healing --- ritual creativity --- Nilotic lotus --- sacral tree --- ankh --- sema-taui --- Bible --- kingship --- libation ritual --- South America --- colonial period --- religious transfer of meaning --- multiple readings of images --- mask --- Dogon --- funeral --- performance --- symbol --- embodiment --- Hinduism --- India --- Govardhan puja --- cow dung --- gender --- ritual art --- nature --- human-nonhuman sociality --- symbolic anthropology --- ethnography