In Zairin Zain, Bien Chiang, Mifta Rahman and Jean C.Y. Cheng, eds., Social Adaptation of Indigenous People in the Traditional House to a New Modern Habitat, 22-43. Untan Press, Pontianak, Indonesia., 2023
Over the past 40 years, I have conducted research on traditional house structures and settlement ... more Over the past 40 years, I have conducted research on traditional house structures and settlement patterns in both Mindoro, Philippines and South Sulawesi, Indonesia. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the house served as a microcosm in both places, linking the middle world occupied by humans to other levels of the cosmos. In Mindoro, the Buid people traditionally lived in isolated homesteads scattered across the mountainous landscape, abandoning a house whenever someone died in it and moving on to a new site. Between 1960 and 1980, most Buid communities decided to move to concentrated settlements the better to protect their land from lowland settlers. In the face of armed conflicts in 2003, the Buid of Ayufay concentrated themselves still further, building one large house in which the entire settlement of eighty people could sleep. In the Makassar village of Ara, South Sulawesi, traditional houses were constructed on three axes that reflected the structure of the cosmos and were scattered evenly across the landscape. The Japanese occupation of 1942-1945 led to the breakup of extended families, and the Darul Islam insurgency of 1954-1960 led to a government mandated move of all houses to the side of the main road. In both the Philippines and Indonesia, a strong contrast can be observed between conservatism in the architectural design of houses, on the one hand, and the adaptation of settlement patterns to the demands of external political forces, on the other hand. In this way, villagers have been able to balance respect for their ancestors with the demands of the modern state.
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Books by Thomas Gibson
Buku ini merupakan buku kedua profesor antropologi University of Rochester ini, setelah menulis Kekuasaan Raja, Syeikh, dan Ambtenaar: Pengetahuan Simbolik dan Kekuasaan Tradisional Makassar 1300-2000 (Ininnawa, 2009). Hasil penelitian ini mendapat anugerah Clifford Geertz Prize tahun 2008 untuk kategori antropologi agama.
The roots of contemporary Islamic militancy in Southeast Asia lie in the sixteenth century, when Christian Europeans first tried to dominate Indian Ocean trade. Through a detailed analysis of sacred scriptures, epic narratives and oral histories from the region, this book shows how Southeast Asian Muslims combined cosmopolitan Islamic models of knowledge and authority with local Austronesian models of divine kingship to first resist and then to appropriate Dutch colonial models of rational bureaucracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these models continue to shape regional responses to contemporary trends such as the rise of global Islamism. "
Saat model demi model kuasa istana bergantian duduk di singgasana, model ini melekat ke dalam mitos dan ritual lokal. Tatkala raja-raja Sulawesi Selatan memeluk Islam di awal abad ke 17, setidaknya ada enam model kekuasaan yang hadir di wilayah ini. Islam memperkenalkan model-model religius dan politik yang baru, dan menambahkan kompleksitas simbolis di kawasan ini.
Untuk memahami lebih baik kaitan antara pengetahuan simbolik dan kekuasaan tradisional istana di masyarakat Makassar, Thomas Gibson menggunakan banyak jenis sumber dari beragam disiplin akademik. Dia menunjukkan bagaimana mitos dan ritual menghubungkan bentuk pengetahuan praktis (pembuatan perahu, navigasi, pertanian, peperangan) dengan kategori-kategori dasar seperti gender dan pelapisan berdasar keturunan, serta fenomena alam, ruang angkasa dan kosmologis. Dia juga memperlihatkan bagaimana agen-agen historis menggunakan infrastruktur simbolik ini untuk menggapai tujuan politik dan ideologisnya.
As successive empires like Srivijaya, Kediri, Majapahit, and Melaka gained hegemony over the region; they introduced different models of kingship in peripheral areas like the Makassar coast of South Sulawesi. As each successive model of royal power gained currency, it became embedded in local myth and ritual. To better understand the relationship between symbolic knowledge and traditional royal authority in Makassar society, Thomas Gibson draws on a wide range of sources and academic disciplines. He shows how myth and ritual link practical forms of knowledge (boat-building, navigation, agriculture, warfare) to basic social categories such as gender and hereditary rank, as well as to environmental, celestial, and cosmological phenomena. He also shows how concrete historical agents have used this symbolic infrastructure to advance their own political and ideological purposes. Gibson concludes by situating this material in relation to Islam and to life-cycle rituals.
Papers by Thomas Gibson
Buku ini merupakan buku kedua profesor antropologi University of Rochester ini, setelah menulis Kekuasaan Raja, Syeikh, dan Ambtenaar: Pengetahuan Simbolik dan Kekuasaan Tradisional Makassar 1300-2000 (Ininnawa, 2009). Hasil penelitian ini mendapat anugerah Clifford Geertz Prize tahun 2008 untuk kategori antropologi agama.
The roots of contemporary Islamic militancy in Southeast Asia lie in the sixteenth century, when Christian Europeans first tried to dominate Indian Ocean trade. Through a detailed analysis of sacred scriptures, epic narratives and oral histories from the region, this book shows how Southeast Asian Muslims combined cosmopolitan Islamic models of knowledge and authority with local Austronesian models of divine kingship to first resist and then to appropriate Dutch colonial models of rational bureaucracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these models continue to shape regional responses to contemporary trends such as the rise of global Islamism. "
Saat model demi model kuasa istana bergantian duduk di singgasana, model ini melekat ke dalam mitos dan ritual lokal. Tatkala raja-raja Sulawesi Selatan memeluk Islam di awal abad ke 17, setidaknya ada enam model kekuasaan yang hadir di wilayah ini. Islam memperkenalkan model-model religius dan politik yang baru, dan menambahkan kompleksitas simbolis di kawasan ini.
Untuk memahami lebih baik kaitan antara pengetahuan simbolik dan kekuasaan tradisional istana di masyarakat Makassar, Thomas Gibson menggunakan banyak jenis sumber dari beragam disiplin akademik. Dia menunjukkan bagaimana mitos dan ritual menghubungkan bentuk pengetahuan praktis (pembuatan perahu, navigasi, pertanian, peperangan) dengan kategori-kategori dasar seperti gender dan pelapisan berdasar keturunan, serta fenomena alam, ruang angkasa dan kosmologis. Dia juga memperlihatkan bagaimana agen-agen historis menggunakan infrastruktur simbolik ini untuk menggapai tujuan politik dan ideologisnya.
As successive empires like Srivijaya, Kediri, Majapahit, and Melaka gained hegemony over the region; they introduced different models of kingship in peripheral areas like the Makassar coast of South Sulawesi. As each successive model of royal power gained currency, it became embedded in local myth and ritual. To better understand the relationship between symbolic knowledge and traditional royal authority in Makassar society, Thomas Gibson draws on a wide range of sources and academic disciplines. He shows how myth and ritual link practical forms of knowledge (boat-building, navigation, agriculture, warfare) to basic social categories such as gender and hereditary rank, as well as to environmental, celestial, and cosmological phenomena. He also shows how concrete historical agents have used this symbolic infrastructure to advance their own political and ideological purposes. Gibson concludes by situating this material in relation to Islam and to life-cycle rituals.
In the first part of the paper, I argue that the Makassar and the Buid formed part of a single regional system in which coastal societies preyed on the members of autonomous tribal societies practicing shifting cultivation in the highlands. The depredations of the hierarchical coastal societies spawned an ethic in the highlands in which equality, autonomy and communal solidarity were valued above all else. But even within the coastal societies, the lower orders often developed a set of religious values similar to those of the highlanders, values that rejected the hierarchy, dependency and factionalism of the elite. This rejection was expressed through popular interpretations of world religions like Islam and Christianity. Historically, religions promising spiritual salvation from social bondage often arose in the most hierarchical social orders. I argue that hierarchy and equality, dependency and autonomy, solidarity and factionalism should all be viewed as conceptual oppositions that develop in tandem with one another, much like the concepts of “free gift” and “commodity” (Parry, 1986).
In the second part of the paper, I approach popular ideas of salvation among the Makassar through an analysis of the epic of Datu Museng. In reciting this epic, Makassar bards simultaneously recall their experience of Dutch colonialism, express a mystical vision of life as a quest to transcend the social order and reunite with God, and rework a pervasive precoccupation of Austronesian mythology, the fate of opposite-sex twins. They also reveal a profound ambivalence toward the values of equality and hierarchy, autonomy and dependency, solidarity and factionalism. It is only because Makassar society was based on hereditary ranks, slavery and warfare that Makassar religion could develop such a clear ideal of the wandering saint who transcends all worldly spatial, temporal and categorical boundaries.
In the third part of the paper, I compare the salvation Islamic saints promise the Makassar with the salvation Jesus Christ promises lowland Filipinos. In both cases, the lower orders in a hierarchical society can appeal to the transcendental values of a global religion to circumscribe the power of the local spirits and political elites. I contrast this situation with that of the Buid and the immediate-return hunter-gatherers discussed by Woodburn. In these egalitarian societies, the major threat to society comes not from elites who abuse their power but from individuals who place their own autonomy above the needs of the group. Religious rituals are used to assert the primacy of communal solidarity over individual autonomy. The seeds of inequality lie in a widespread tendency to map the opposition between communal and individual interest onto the opposition between male and female, allowing senior men to assert a monopoly of control over collective ritual.
In another sense, however, Lévi-Strauss's concept does have great relevance for some societies in Indonesia in which competition for wealth and power among the upper strata is intense but has not led to stable class divisions. These societies do make use of the house in a manner highly reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss's European, Japanese and Kwakiutl examples. It is this dual nature of the ‘problems' to which the house is a ‘solution' that makes the application of Lévi-Strauss's theory to feudal Indonesia so fascinating and so complex. Because of limitations of space, I will not be able to do justice to this second aspect of the problem. The rest of this paper will be devoted to demonstrating the fact that the house is solving a different problem in “centrist” Indonesia than in feudal Europe or Japan.
In order to understand this history, I shall employ the concepts of ‘ritual practices’ and ‘ritual complexes’ as the basic units of analysis, instead of the more usual individual actors, economic classes and cultural wholes. I will show, first, that ritual complexes are a source of ideal models for political action; second, that they are formed over the course of centuries, and so can be explained neither in terms of particular conjunctures nor in terms of the strategies of individual actors; third, that they pertain to a realm of experience distinct from that of everyday economic activities, and cannot be construed as the direct expression of class interests; and finally, that the models of political order they generate contradict one another, so that no one of them can be taken as reflecting the essence of the cultural whole.
Today’s resistance was yesterday’s hegemony, however: between 1860 and 1910 the spirit cults were a central feature of a feudal social order that Dutch liberals viewed as a barrier to capitalist progress. And today’s hegemony was yesterday’s resistance: between 1910 and 1950 the Dutch colonial state changed sides and encouraged local custom and hereditary chiefs as a bulwark against socialist, nationalist and Islamic agitators. Between 1950 and 1965 new provincial and national elites led an all-out attack on reactionary local practices, recalling the Dutch liberal policy of the previous century. But after 1965, the national state changed sides again and began encouraging local ‘culture’ as a bulwark against socialist and Islamic ‘agitators’.
While policy at the national level has oscillated between radicalism and conservatism, at the local level the hereditary feudal outlook has been steadily losing ground to the achievement oriented democratic outlook. It has now become the last refuge of those for whom the competitive individualism of the modern political economy holds least promise of security: village noble women who were at the center of the old system and are at the margins of the new.
In conclusion, I will argue that what counts as ‘resistance’ depends on one’s point of view, and must be determined anew for each time and place. Further, I will recall Levi-Strauss’s caution in the epigraph that the political motivations of those acting in other times and places are likely to appear obscure to us. Our own intuitions are a poor guide to diagnosing political struggles in which we are not directly involved.
Attempts to institute a new political order will fail unless these rituals are restructured. This is what happened in South Sulawesi, Indonesia between 1950 and 1965, when a radically modernist Islamic insurgency tried to suppress both what it regarded as unIslamic and what it regarded as 'feudal' in traditional religion and society. In the subsequent period, however, the traditional ritual forms have gradually reasserted themselves, as has a measure of the old ranking system. The ethnography will be taken from Ara, a village in South Sulawesi that has undergone great political upheavals in the last century. In this paper, I am only be able to discuss the role of ritual in the colonial or 'feudal' period prior to 1950 in any detail. I allude to the post-colonial insurgency and restoration at the end.