Table of Contents
Contemporary societies within the South-East Asia-Pacific Region still maintain a distinctively Austronesian cultural perspective on land and territory. The present volume contributes to the comparative study of Austronesian societies by exploring this important theme of land and territory within their traditional cultures. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that these are cultures in transition and traditional relationships to land are increasingly compromised by the legal and administrative systems of modern nationstates in the region. This volume also contributes to a current debate in anthropology on the conflicting human tendencies of mobility and emplacement. In the context of this debate, many anthropologists have called for a greater focus on mobility to better reflect the increase in human mobility in the current postmodern period. The ethnographic evidence presented herein, however, shows that mobility is not just an issue in the study of contemporary cosmopolitan and migrant populations. A struggle with experiences of displacement and re-emplacement has been central to the historical experience of Austronesian societies for millennia. Many of the presumably ‘traditional’ models of society that have evolved from this struggle reflect a deep understanding of and appreciation for the formative historical influence of human mobility on society. These local models provide an alternative or, at least, some valuable inspirations for Western theories of society, which are only just beginning to afford a central place to the idea of ‘cultures on the move’.
Austronesian-speaking peoples articulate their personal sense of belonging to particular places and lay claim to land or other territorial rights by invoking local histories of ancestral origins and migration. These accounts of human movement and emplacement might be written down but more often they are conveyed as oral histories. Origin histories are also inscribed on the physical landscape in the form of sacred sites, and on the minds of local participants through their shared experience of ritual performances held at these sites. Together these commemorative social practices generate a powerful sense of belonging and emplacement. There is also a strong emphasis on temporality and change. Clusters of settlements or ritual sites are linked through histories of human movement rather than being depicted as static arrays of bounded and separate places. A group and its place of belonging is usually constructed as a station on a pathway of ancestral migrations. People’s rights to land or other localised resources and their social identity are thus inseparable, and both are defined by reference to time, or ‘precedence’. Status and rights to land are indexed on their relative proximity to the sacred origin place or ‘source’ of this path, so that the ultimate ritual overlordship of a territory is often vested in the human representative of this source. At the same time, Austronesians also recognise the significance of secular power and the impact of political change on the historical trajectories of their societies and resource economies. Many origin narratives recognise and attempt to reconcile these conflicting value spheres of religious status and secular power within the models of society they create. According to these models, people share a collective ritual responsibility towards the Earth, which requires and promotes social cooperation. At the same time, they acknowledge that, as individuals with a strategic interest in a political economy based on agriculture, people also have a concern for dividing and controlling land. This volume explores these local models through a method of regional comparative ethnology, with the aim of identifying the key insights Austronesian societies have gained in their efforts to address some of the basic existential issues that arise from the relationship between people and land.
Austronesian-speaking societies occupy a vast and fairly cohesive area stretching from Taiwan to Madagascar and across South-East Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia into the Pacific, as far as Hawai’i, Easter Island and New Zealand. Austronesian societies share a common cultural heritage but have become widely dispersed through a long historical process of migration. In the course of this history of geographic dispersion and expansion, an immense diversity of linguistic and cultural forms was produced. This combination of a shared cultural base and a wide range of creative innovations provided a strong foundation for the meaningful comparative study of Austronesian societies. Recognising this comparative potential, a group of anthropologists around Professor James Fox, acting in collaboration with colleagues in archaeology, comparative linguistics and other disciplines, initiated the path-breaking Comparative Austronesian Studies Project at The Australian National University in the 1980s. Researchers attached to this project have published numerous individual papers as well as an important series of edited volumes (Fox 1993; Bellwood, Fox and Tryon 1995; Fox and Sather 1996; Fox 1997; Vischer, in press). Reflecting the unique research experiences of 14 leading Australian ethnographers in as many different Austronesian-speaking societies, from Sumatra to Tonga, the present contribution on land and territory is a further volume in this series.
Traditional ideas about land and territorial entitlements within the region have had to be renegotiated continuously in the past two centuries in response to a tumultuous history of colonisation and an often equally difficult process of incorporation within the legal and administrative structures of modernising, independent nationstates. Local people’s traditional relationship to land also has been transformed by a gradual and accelerating process of globalisation, whereby concepts of traditional ownership increasingly come into conflict with the principles of an international, Western-dominated, late-capitalist economic and political system. One common type of conflict resulting from these changes is between indigenous peoples and the development agendas of modernising nationstates. Acting in conjunction with multinational corporations, national governments often have dismissed indigenous people’s claims to collective ownership of traditional clan or village land and have legislated to reclassify such land as state-owned or private property. While we may focus on Austronesian traditions, the authors also explore some of these issues of social change. We thus hope to provide a useful resource to readers with an interest in contemporary political conflicts relating to traditional land rights in the Austronesian world and beyond.
In a traditional cultural context, Austronesian-speaking societies have constructed their sense of identity and legitimised their territorial claims to land and other resources by reference to local and sometimes regional origin narratives. These origin histories typically tell a tale either of gradual population growth and associated geographical expansion or of more spontaneous additions to the population with the sudden arrival of immigrants (invaders, refugees, affines or allies). In either case, the narratives tend to treat ‘people’ and ‘land’ as mutually constitutive categories within a single, place- and movement-oriented schema of ancestral identity and sacred geography. Place-based identities are commonly ranked in order of precedence, a concept of temporal order that draws precisely on the fact that different places and groups of people are linked through a history of ancestral migrations. The elements or stations in such pathways of identity are often remembered and narrated as long lists of placenames or ‘topogenies’ (Fox 1997: 8-12), rather than relying on genealogies, which allow people to trace ancestral connections by remembering the names of people. Historical ties between a set of places and resident communities may be commemorated also through complex systems of ritual visiting arrangements and asymmetric ceremonial exchange. Collective ritual performances, in a wide variety of forms, help to reinforce the religious character of this model of hierarchical emplacement by bringing it into the lived experience of the participants.
Their traditional sense of belonging to particular places, however, is much more than just a marker of identity and social status to the agriculturalist peoples of the Austronesian world. Land has also been, and continues to be, a primary economic resource and a matter of great strategic interest in its own right. Although there have been dramatic changes to patterns of land usage in recent times, evidence suggests the overall significance of land has not been declining in the region. The proportion of people engaged in subsistence agriculture may be shrinking, and with it some of the motivation for a religious perspective of land. The scarcity of land is increasing, however, and so are incidents of legal or political contestation of identity-based claims to ownership and usage rights. In this climate of increasing scarcity, old and new ways of thinking about land rights are clashing, sometimes violently. Conflicts frequently arise where village or clan land is appropriated by the State and made available to, for example, timber and mining companies or other development interests. Internal disputes are also common, especially where collectively owned land has been reclassified legally as individual private property and subsequently divided and sold off, to support consumer spending or for reinvestment into new means of production. The case studies in this volume document how Austronesians are attempting to negotiate changing relationships with the land at the nexus between a still relevant traditional way of life and the new rules that come into play as local societies are incorporated within nationalising and globalising political economies.
Local tensions between traditional and contemporary concepts of place raise the more general question of how we should conceptualise the changing relationship between people and land or ‘place’ within an economic and political context of globalisation and a cultural context often loosely referred to as the postmodern or late-capitalist condition. This condition is said to be characterised by an unprecedented degree of human mobility, migration, displacement and de-territorialisation. The case studies presented herein suggest, however, that many so-called traditional cultures have long and openly recognised human mobility and associated processes of social change as fundamental to the existence and historical development of society. Indeed, the idea of mobility has been central in defining identity and status relationships in the Austronesian world. Movement and migration lie at the very heart of their traditional models of emplacement, and also have been central to the historical experience on which these models are based. At the same time, the way in which place is conceptualised in Austronesian cultures also suggests that, no matter how much displacement they might experience, their relationships with the land, their place of origin and their place of residence are matters of utmost importance to all people, and no less so to a people on the move. Detailed ethnographic research and ethnological comparison is thus an essential step towards developing a better understanding of how different cultures have attempted to solve the fundamental conundrum of reconciling a basic human interest in mobility with a similarly fundamental interest in the security of emplacement.
In the remainder of this introduction, I will explore some of these theoretical and comparative issues in more detail, as well as providing an outline of the case studies in this volume.
Contemporary anthropological theorists have moved away from an earlier tendency to view cultures as social systems localised in specific places or territories. Space had sometimes served as a convenient metaphor to articulate a clear and lasting division of the world, assigning to each distinguishable culture its unique and original place—a cultural habitat based on a coincidence of spatial separation and cultural difference. Some authors have directed their critique at the ‘incarceration’ cultures in fixed places (Appadurai 1988) and others at the metaphor of the ‘localness’ of cultures (Clifford 1988), or at the latent functionalist search for cultural stability and social equilibrium (Malkki 1995).
One reason why this habitual linking of culture and topology, of nation and territory, became the focus of much critical analysis was the increasing mobility of culture and people on an unprecedented scale in the 20th century. While still appreciating the merits of detailed ethnographic research, most contemporary theorists now insist that cultures need to be understood as systems in motion. An increasing number of ethnographers are following this advice and are turning away from classical, localised fieldwork to conduct studies of human mobility. Some study loosely connected groups of tourists, itinerant workers, asylum-seekers and migrants, while others observe the confluence of cultural traditions in diasporal, expatriate and multicultural communities (e.g. Lavie and Swedenburg 1996). This new body of anthropological research does indeed show that in today’s world of electronic communication and mass movement, a culture can no longer be associated exclusively with a single place or assigned a definitive homeland, let alone confined within narrowly conceived territorial boundaries. Studies of transnational and intra-national migration, for example, raise questions about how to assign a spatial referent to groups of people whose identity is situated somewhere in between the places of their origin and current residence.
At the same time, it would seem futile to try to deny the basic localising constraints of the human condition. As embodied individuals, we necessarily operate in specific physical environments wherein many of our most important social interactions must take place. Direct face-to-face interaction is dependent largely on the language and other culture-specific codes operative within such a local setting. Even if we accept the postmodernist hypothesis that there is a global trend towards a hybridisation of cultures, there is as yet no universally intelligible language, and the local use of interactive codes is never arbitrary even where multiple codes have become available. Other than exerting an influence on how we satisfy our immediate social and communicative interests, the human condition of situated embodiment also tends to propel us to look locally for resources to satisfy some of our most immediate material interests. One of these interests is to own, borrow or lease a territory or ‘socially demarcated place’ that provides shelter, security and perhaps a source of income.
There are numerous studies on the social construction of place and landscape and on the symbology and politics of space, which all suggest that territory is still very much something humans are prepared to contest, no matter whether the claims to the territory are material or symbolic, political or religious, historical or mythological. Ironically, new research with a focus on movement—whether it has looked at cases of voluntary displacement or forceful eviction—has raised our awareness of the importance and cultural process of constructing spaces, localities and associated identities (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The image of a place or country of origin is often vigorously cultivated by, for example, people living in a diaspora setting. Memories of home are carefully maintained, and not just as a matter of nostalgia. Access to social networks created by transnational emigration, for example, can serve as an economic resource or as a means for generating influence and power in relation to the nation state (Marcus 1993). Ever-new places of mythical origin and pathways of migration are thus being imagined and lived in, and they are often the subject of disputes within and across local social contexts.
The debate about changing relationships between people and places in anthropology reflects on a number of important political issues, trends and events of global importance. The new trend towards research on the mobility of cultures may in part reflect our own lived experience of a postmodern condition of de-territorialisation, which has been brought about by increased mobility, information exchange and a new political economy, incorporating a global system of finance, production, promotion and consumption. To point out how physical displacement through mass migration, social atomisation and the rise of fluid, consumption-based identities have changed our lives, however, is to tell only one half of the story of what might constitute the typical contemporary experience of culture. In this same historical period, we have witnessed a series of conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, which have highlighted the enduring importance of culture and ethnicity in the legitimisation of claims over territories and localised resources. The so-called ‘War on Terror’, the largest of these contemporary conflicts and the one most likely to preoccupy the world for decades to come, likewise draws on ideas of cultural or religious difference. While it is not portrayed as a territorial war, the underlying struggle in this presumed ‘clash of civilisations’ seems to be for the control of localised material resources such as oil reserves. Similarly, the enduring appeal of a defensive territorial attitude is also evident in the recent political history of many Western nations, including Australia, Denmark and Italy, where a ‘tough stance’ on refugees and on other immigration issues has delivered a succession of election victories to conservative governments in the first decade of this new millennium.
These global political trends illustrate the resilience of ethnic and cultural ideas of difference and their strategic function in resource conflicts. Even authors who strongly advocate the study of human mobility and displacement in a globalising world have commented on this stubborn persistence of territorial conflicts (e.g., Olwig and Hastrup 1997: 4). One obvious reason for the resilience of cultural constructs of emplacement is the paramount value of such constructs as a means of legitimising exclusive or privileged control over land and other important material resources. In my view, however, the mere fact that strategic discourses of identity can be useful in resource conflicts does not support the radical constructivist argument that such conflicts are entirely a product of ideology. Resource competition is not contingent on cultural constructs. And, in any case, cultural constructs of place and identity can be just as important for conflict resolution. Despite their strategic legitimising function, shared concepts of identity and emplacement can help to regulate the distribution of local resources among different groups of people and can thus reduce the potential for violent conflict among them. This more positive aspect provides an additional incentive for the cross-cultural study of discourses of emplacement and associated systems of local resource distribution—assuming we accept the basic anthropological idea that there is something we can learn from other societies by looking at how they have attempted to resolve a perennial existential challenge that we too must face.
This volume thus has much to contribute to the debate in current anthropology on the mobility and territoriality of human cultures. It does so by exploring how for centuries people in 14 of the numerous historically and linguistically related societies of the vast Austronesian world have dealt with the very same underlying issues that seem to so concern the postmodern world. The most fundamental of these issues are: first, the dynamic tension between the simultaneous human tendencies towards mobility and emplacement, and second, the link between territorial claims for material resources and the social identity constructs that legitimise and regulate these claims. I will refer to these two as ‘the mobility issue’ and ‘the legitimacy issue’ respectively.
Austronesian social categories of land and discourses about land claims exemplify how the basic issues of mobility and legitimacy have been negotiated in the societies of this region. Like all social systems, Austronesian societies have devised a system for accommodating the inevitable conflicts to do with ‘carving up the land’ while simultaneously allowing people to ‘share the earth’, by finding ways to avoid or reduce violent confrontations in the context of resource competition. By exploring the nuanced strategies Austronesian societies have developed over many centuries, the papers in this volume illustrate that mobility is not really a new issue at all. In the Austronesian world, at least, migration has long been a standard response to tensions arising from population change and resource scarcity in a given locality, and to the allure of finding more abundant resources elsewhere through migration.
Austronesians have always been remarkably mobile, as is evident from their history of continual migration, originating in southern China and moving in numerous waves via Taiwan across the far-flung islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Perhaps it is this remarkable mobility that has inspired them to turn human mobility into the conceptual backbone of a social philosophy wherein concepts of ‘origin’ and ‘precedence’ are the most central constructs.
The concepts of origin and precedence reflect the fact that people on the move will necessarily encounter others who have preceded them and already lay claim to the land to some degree. Various local origin narratives acknowledge that there are different ways in which these earlier settlers can respond to the arrival of newcomers, ranging from assimilation at the margins to accommodation into the very centre of local society. They also illustrate how widely the outcomes of such encounters can range depending on the attitude and power of the newcomers, who might seek a culturally mediated agreement on how to share the land and other material and symbolic resources with earlier settlers, or who might violently or treacherously usurp the precedence claims of the latter.
All in all, Austronesian ideas about people and land show an appreciation that society is the sediment of human movements and, indeed, that life itself is predicated on movement. An example of this celebration of movement in a social context is the appreciation Austronesians tend to show for the ‘flow of life’ that occurs in the context of marriage exchanges between exogamous groups (see Fox 1980). The idea of culture-in-motion, arising from the interplay between time, place and human action, is thus the central idiom of Austronesians’ ‘models of’ their own societies, and of the cosmos as a whole. At the same time, these are also ‘models for’, insofar as they are designed to cope with the potential for conflict over land and other local resources.
A detailed discussion of the comparative ethnology of Austronesian models of movement and emplacement is provided in the postscript of this volume. In order to better appreciate the thematic connections between the papers, however, some of the main features and implications of these cultural models of social space need to be identified in advance.