My primary database consists of five texts, available as translations into Indonesian, which stemmed from the development of a Makassar literary tradition during the early sixteenth century. These texts are called lontarak after the palm-leaf strips on which the first texts were composed and copied, a name which persists despite the adoption of paper by at least the seventeenth century (Cense 1966). They include the “chronicles” of Gowa (Wolhoff and Abdurrahim n.d.) and Tallok (Rahim and Ridwan 1975) which describe the succession of Gowa and Tallok rulers. A royal diary (Kamaruddin et al. 1985-86) has sporadic entries up to 1630 and numerous entries thereafter. Finally, two short texts (Bulbeck 1992) chart the Maros and Sanrabone dynasties.

While these texts do not always provide self-explanatory information, ambiguities could generally be resolved as a result of earlier research on the Makassar texts (e.g. Mukhlis 1975), scholarly studies of the coeval Bugis (e.g. Caldwell 1988) and European records (e.g. Andaya 1981), and my archaeological survey of Gowa (Bulbeck 1986-87, 1992). A very detailed picture emerges of the “Who’s Who” of the Makassar world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, allowing the analysis of social organization through statistically demonstrable associations. This paper presents only the most important results and accordingly I restrict the methodological discussion to the main points.

To start with, many individuals accumulated titles during life or even received a posthumous name, making it necessary to collapse the recorded names into the minimum number of clearly discrete individuals. E.g. if a person was named “Daeng x Karaeng y”, and the “Daeng x” who carried out certain acts could not be clearly distinguished from the “Karaeng y” who carried out other acts, then I assigned both sets of acts to the one life history of “Daeng x Karaeng y”. This procedure was facilitated by constructing genealogical diagrams which attempted to situate individuals and their marriages in real time (e.g. Figure 1). For statistical purposes the only relevant individuals are adults, here defined as those individuals who cannot be shown to have died before reaching marriageable age. Definite sub-adults were excluded, firstly because they would not normally have attained their expectable titulation, and secondly because Gowa’s “bureaucratic” posts were held only by adults. I then extracted those individuals who could be paired with some adult next-of-kin of known sex and title — whether as spouses, full siblings or parent-offspring. To these 545 individuals I added a further 14 individuals, of unknown genealogical links, who held a “bureaucratic” post (Bulbeck 1992). Various subsets of these 559 individuals can then be employed according to the topic under review.

The skeletal royal genealogy shown here (Figure 1) is incomprehensible unless the reader takes the time to understand my conventions. The symbols for individuals are stretched between upper and lower points which represent dates of birth and death. Marriages are shown by horizontal lines whose vertical position marks when the marriage occurred. (Note that Figure 1 does not distinguish between recorded dates and my estimates.) Sometimes the spouses could not be juxtaposed and so the “lines of marriage” cross symbols standing for other individuals, as indicated by the horizontal lines which intrude into a symbol from either side. Individuals resulting from a depicted marriage are joined by a vertical line to the line of marriage. When only one parent is depicted, descent is shown by slanting lines, including slanted bifurcations for full siblings.

Secondly, my analysis relating marriage strategies to political change will use the concept “lineage group” (see Map 1). These “lineage groups” constitute a heuristic device for dividing up the world of socially significant individuals as seen from the vantage of the Makassar royalty. The term is deliberately ambiguous to accommodate status lineages within a descent group, descent groups, and aggregates of descent groups.