AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN: Storytelling is extremely important in Southwest Maluku, simply because we don’t really have a written history, so we only have a spoken... not really history, even, because we don’t have tense. So, in the moment that I tell the story, it happens. I use past tense because that's what you're supposed to do in English. But when you're an audience over there, then it's happening on the moment that you tell the story.

My name is Aone van Engelenhoven. I'm a university lecturer at Leiden University, and my research is on storytelling, specifically in East Indonesia. I am originally from Southwest Maluku.

KATERINA TEAIWA (NARRATOR): Statues like this one offered a way of remembering and communicating with specific ancestors, functioning like a telephone.

AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN: They would put them up in the house and only the storyteller would go there. And he would take down a statue and then he would put it in front of him and then he would tell a story about it.

So nowadays we use a photograph of something. You have a photo of someone and then you can tell the story around it, my granddad would do that. But in the old days, we wouldn't have photos, so you have the statue.

KATERINA TEAIWA: Traditionally, groups of ancestor statues were kept in the rafters at the top of the house, where they were safe.

AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN: You're not supposed to go up in the house. You grow up, that specifically in the old houses, that was not done. Even my grandmother in the Netherlands, she found it kind of uncomfortable if I would go play up there.

KATERINA TEAIWA: Today, Aone van Engelenhoven is continuing these storytelling traditions in his own family.

AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN: My children, for example, I made sure that they were used to storytelling. Because I see it as intangible heritage.