Although they are dispersed widely, from Sumatra in the west to Tonga in the east, the 14 societies discussed in this volume share a common cultural and historical heritage. Linguistic, biological, archaeological and anthropological evidence shows that contemporary Austronesian-speaking societies have a common origin and history of dispersion. This history can be traced back some 6,000 years, to when their ancestors began a long series of migrations from southern China via Taiwan to South-East Asia and onward to Madagascar, Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and New Zealand (Bellwood, Fox and Tryon 1995). This history of migration was accompanied by continuous cultural adaptations and transformations. There were also long-term interactions with earlier inhabitants and their cultures—in Halmahera and Melanesia, for example—which sometimes led to the assimilation of Austronesian languages and culture by other populations. Today more than 1,000 different Austronesian languages are spoken by an estimated 270 million people in this vast region.
The linguistic diversity of these societies is matched by their cultural diversity, and the preceding volumes in the Comparative Austronesia Project series since 1993 have illustrated some of this staggering variety of social forms. The shared Austronesian heritage of these societies is, however equally evident. Two of the most important dimensions of this shared cultural heritage were described in the first volume of this series, The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, as a common tendency towards
the tracing of local origins and the reliance on a variety of narratives for the construction of a shared past. Thus the sharing of a journey may be used to define relatedness whereas claims to precedence, often based on the order of events in particular narratives, figure prominently as a means of defining social difference. (Bellwood, Fox and Tryon 1995: 10)
Social history tends to be depicted as a temporal sequence of events identified with named locations, which are all part of the pathway of an ancestral journey and can be ranked according to their proximity to the point of origin. This often gives rise to place-based models of human relatedness or ‘topogenies’, to use a term introduced by James Fox in another of these earlier volumes, The Poetic Power of Place (1997). Rather than or in addition to using genealogies in which named personal ancestors are used to establish connections between the living, many Austronesian societies rely on lists of placenames or topogenies to establish historical links between groups of people within and across different localities in a region. Topogenies are thus narrative accounts of a complex history of human movement and emplacement. Topogenies are used to explain (and often also to contest) how contemporary societies came to be grouped and status differentiated as they are today.
In Austronesian-speaking societies, the most salient social categories are often based on cohabitation or shared usage of a named area of residential or agricultural land by a particular group of people. One reason why place is such a common, convenient and powerful marker of identity, in the Austronesian world and beyond, is that the membership of place-based groups need not be homogenous. Whether they are ancestral origin houses, named settlements, domains or regional ritual federations, place-based social categories are very useful to societies with a complex history of human migration and relocation. The complexity created by movement demands a social capacity for maintaining unity in the face of diversity at the local level. At the same time, co-residents will usually compete for the control of local resources to some degree. This creates a tendency to construct a system of social differentiation by stressing diversity of origins in other contexts to serve as a status marker. The Austronesian model for this simultaneous sharing and dividing of the land focuses on human movement and utilises associated ideas of precedence as the main classificatory principle for regulating access to land.
The topogenies of Austronesian societies are therefore valorised as ‘moral’ spaces wherein individual locations are not simply distinguished but are ranked in order of precedence, as are the people whose identities are indexed to these locations (Fox 1997: 4). This suggests that—although it may often be owned collectively within localised groups—the way land is shared is neither free and unproblematic nor necessarily equitable in Austronesian societies. Land has indeed been the single most important material resource, and land rights have constituted a primary privilege in the predominantly agriculture-based political economies of this region.
The balance between the value of the privileges and the cost of the obligations attached to land usage rights is variable across different communities depending on demographic and other factors. A need to restrict access to land ownership or usage rights has been felt most frequently in cases where population growth within an expanding system of segmentary social organisation has led to a local scarcity of agricultural land and a corresponding increase in value. Maintaining privileged access to land through claims of precedence was not only about securing land for personal use. Even under conditions of relative abundance, land was still valuable because any excess could be distributed profitably to client newcomers in return for ritual or political allegiance. In future, land scarcity seems set to become a more or less continuous condition and will reach an unprecedented pitch as land values continue to increase across the South-East Asia-Pacific region. The discursive space between place and identity is likely to become more and more contested and politicised as a result.
Variations in resource scarcity are an important aspect of the operating conditions of all human societies, and Austronesian societies are not unique in this sense. As far as these fluctuations are concerned, Austronesian societies can differ more from one another, and vary more within themselves over time, than they differ from many non-Austronesian societies at any given time. What makes human societies unique are not fluctuations in the existential problems they face in managing finite resources but the distinctive cultural strategies they develop for distributing these resources and for mediating resource conflicts whenever they arise.
The Austronesian model of emplacement through narratives of movement is one such strategy. The distinguishing feature of this model is that it typically creates a fluid and evolving system of social differentiation based on a principle of precedence ranking which, in turn, is predicated on a fundamental assumption of human mobility in a context of segmentary expansion or migration. The main task of this comparative volume, then, is to spell out how this basic concept of emplacement through growth and movement plays out in different Austronesian societies—under a variety of different operating conditions and as a result of continual cultural innovation—to produce a wide range of comparable social formations of variable size and character.
Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at a workshop held on June 18-19, 2001 at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, entitled ‘Sharing the Earth, Dividing the Land: Territorial Categories and Institutions in the Austronesian World’. The aim of the workshop was to identify and discuss common categories, organisational principles and historical processes of innovation among related populations in different parts of this region. Participants were asked to describe territorial institutions of varying size in the societies they had studied, from house or longhouse territories to the more extensive lands belonging to a hamlet or village, and to look at how these different layers of territorial organisation interrelated conceptually and institutionally. Special attention was to be paid to larger, regional institutions such as domains, chiefdoms or polities, which tended to be composed of several of the smaller territorial units and might, in turn, have provided the building blocks for early state formation in the region.
Four important dimensions for the comparison of Austronesian models of emplacement could be identified in subsequent discussions, and each of these were exemplified by several of the case studies in this volume. These comparative dimensions concern: 1) the territorial categories of Austronesian languages; 2) the specific metaphors that characterise Austronesian models of emplacement and social identity; 3) how ceremonial domains have been transformed by, and also contributed to, the formation of more complex polities, and 4) how traditional ways of relating to the land are being challenged within the context of modern nationstates and their globalising economies.
The terminology we use to designate different territories and social relations to land in Western societies—words such as ‘estate’, ‘village’, ‘domain’, ‘territory’, ‘proprietor’, ‘tenant’ and their reflexes in other European languages—are not suitable to serve as universal categories for the purposes of cross-cultural comparison. The meanings of these terms are embedded irrevocably in a distinctly European political history and legal tradition, and even within that tradition there is much heterogeneity. It may be impossible to avoid completely the use of these loaded terms in the act of translation. It is possible and indeed imperative, however, to develop an appreciation for the semantics and pragmatics of local categories.
The meaning of key terms within a society arises from their conceptual relation to the local cosmology and idiom wherein they are embedded, and their pragmatic use is revealed in relation to local behavioural models for the pursuit of communicative and strategic interests. ‘Territorial categories’ in Austronesian societies thus need to be understood in the context of a culture-specific perception of land and a rationale for legitimising land ownership, which, in turn, is associated with a specific pattern of social organisation. These considerations have prompted the authors to approach the task of comparative analysis by exploring the relevant indigenous Austronesian categories, rather than imposing a set of alien categories derived from a European tradition of political history and social science.
Comparison has revealed that, with few exceptions (see below), words used by speakers of contemporary Austronesian languages to designate named tracts of land are reflexes of just three Proto-Austronesian reconstructions. Variations in the actual meaning of these related terms are somewhat more pronounced. For example, the size of the units of land referred to by the same set of reflexes differs across cultures, as does the relative emphasis placed on centres versus boundaries in defining these units. Their meaning within the general local model of relations—between humans and the land, and among ‘emplaced humans’—however, remains fairly consistent. At a more pragmatic level, finally, the comparison has exposed substantial variation in the practical significance these traditional territorial terms carry across contemporary Austronesian societies, particularly in view of major political and economic changes in their recent history.
Three sets of reflexes are of particular interest in exploring categories of people and land due to their wide distribution and pivotal social significance in Austronesian languages and societies. The first set are reflexes of the Proto-Austronesian (PAN) reconstruction *banua (banua, banwa, wanua, vanua, fanua, panua, manua, banuah, banuwa, banwa, binua, bonua, menoa, nua, knua, fua, whenua, hena, fena). The reflexes of *banua are variable in their meaning across different languages and contexts, but generally refer to a designated ‘stretch of land’, ‘territory’ or ‘dwelling place’ of varying size, and/or to the inhabitants of such a place. Two other sets of reflexes that carry a similar meaning are reflexes of the reconstructions *tanah (tana, tanaq, taneq, taneh, tano, ’ano) and *daya (darat, dare, dae, rae, rai). James Fox considers these sets of reflexes and their variable semantic contents in more detail in his postscript. It is important, however, to discuss in advance some of the implications of these linguistic family resemblances among Austronesian populations.
It would be easy to succumb to a sense of frustration as one tries to pinpoint the actual significance and limits of the link between linguistic and cultural similarities within this region and in general. The problem with the idea of a comparative ethnology based on comparative linguistics, as so often in social theory, is not really that the link between language and culture is intrinsically ambiguous or indeterminate. It is simply extremely complex. Without delving into the depths of communication theory, and for the specific purposes of this present discussion, one way to account for a good part of this complexity is to adopt a socio-historical perspective to comparative ethnology. This approach assumes, first, that the link between words and their meaning is fundamentally arbitrary, and, second, that the link, such as it is, is socially constructed over time among populations of regularly communicating individuals. Once constructed, the link can be very durable, so that contemporary reflexes of a word may retain much of the original meaning for centuries, even millennia. A total loss or reassignment of meaning is also possible, however, and subtle fluctuations occur all the time. An incentive for changing the meaning of words might arise, for example, from gradual or sudden changes in a people’s way of life, their environment, economic activities and relations with other populations.
The relationship between language and social history is clearly significant insofar as systematic similarities between languages, and even loan words, are always the sediment of historical connections or interactions, including migration, conquest, trade and individual travel. At the same time, the use of similar terms in different societies is insufficient in itself to serve as a predictor of specific cultural similarities because there is a constant drift in the local meaning of terms, which is a function of their embeddedness within ever-evolving social contexts. This drift may explain why the social performance of cultural meaning is often less conservative than the social performance of words as signs in a given language.
What does this entail for the present set of Austronesian case studies? By definition, linguistic connections can be traced between any two Austronesian languages, and this reflects the historical fact that the speakers of these languages are related populations and the sociological fact that language tends to be conservative. This does not provide a guarantee that the two societies will also show cultural similarities. Nevertheless, it is very likely indeed that they will, given that the link between words and their meanings is also quite conservative, especially with very basic words such as ‘land’ or ‘house’. Similarly, there can be no guarantee that societies whose members speak closely related languages are culturally more similar than speakers of more distantly related languages within the same family. Looking at the case studies in this volume, for example, one could point out that the languages of Buru, Seram, Banda, Sikka, Keo and Timor all fall within the Central Malayo-Polynesian Group, those of Bali and Sumatra within the Western Malayo-Polynesian Group, and those of North Mekeo, North Pentecost, Ambrym and Tonga in the Oceanic Group of Austronesian languages. I would argue, however, that the comparative evidence so far is insufficient to support a claim that cultural similarities are greater among societies within than across these language groups. Other factors, such a geographic proximity and ease of interaction between populations, are as, or more, important in this context.
It also needs to be considered that throughout the region new terms with initially quite foreign meanings were introduced to refer to territorially defined administrative units within early Indic states, coastal trading polities, colonial states or independent modern nation states. The local meaning and social significance of an introduced term, such as the Sanskrit word desa (‘village’) in Indonesia, for example, can match that of earlier, local Austronesian terms (banua in this case) more closely than it matches the meaning and social significance of the same term in the original language and society from which it is derived. This semantic localisation of introduced terms can be a complex historical process. In the part of the region that came under the influence of Indic kingdoms, for example, terms first introduced as Sanskrit loan words (desa, kuta, negara) were later adopted and heavily reinterpreted by modern nation states such as the Republic of Indonesia. Their usage has spread correspondingly, within the new boundaries of these nation states and far beyond the geographic reach of the early Indic kingdoms that first adopted them. Thus the term desa (dinas), for example, reached West Papua only in the 1950s, and only as the designation for a modern, Indonesian administrative structure. In Bali the situation is more complicated (Reuter 1999). Here the classical Indonesian adaptation of the Indic term desa still exists, referring to the ‘desa adat’, an institution that has survived from the times of Bali’s early Hindu polities. This more traditional desa coexists and competes for significance with the same modern Indonesian administrative unit we now also find on Buru. The latter is referred to as the desa dinas in Bali in order to distinguish it from the desa adat.
In many contemporary Austronesian societies, modern territorial terms and associated administrative units thus coexist with earlier schemata for the social construction and division of space. The physical boundaries of these old and new categories may or may not coincide, though there is often some degree of continuity. Conflicts tend to arise when new administrative boundaries divide people who consider themselves historically related and part of a social whole or, conversely, throw together people who do not have any recognised traditional connections.
Metaphors of socio-spatial relations, like all metaphors, are figures of speech whereby a thing is spoken of as being that which it only resembles. The metaphors Austronesians use to imagine and reflect on the social structure of a domain or similar socio-territorial unit show striking similarities. Again, this suggests that the usage of such metaphors tends to be rather conservative, notwithstanding the fact that their meaning and social implications will vary from one society to the next.
Botanic metaphors are among the most commonly used metaphors for social relationships in the Austronesian world. The source ancestor of a clan or founding clan of a village, for example, may be referred to as the ‘trunk’ or ‘root’ and his descendant or newcomer clients as the ‘leaves’ or ‘tips’ of the same tree. Similarly in a topogeny, the place of origin is usually the ritual centre or ‘trunk’ of the domain, to which a path of origin is ceremonially traced back along one or several ‘branch’ villages, beginning from the newest settlements or ‘tips’. The people who reside at, or in some other way can lay claim to, the origin site tend to maintain a position of ritual precedence or of political authority in the domain, but rarely both. Botanic metaphors generally suggest a segmentary process of spatial expansion due to organic growth from within, but can and are applied also within local societies featuring a population with multiple origins.
Body metaphors are also used widely for the imagery of social space in the Austronesian world. In highland Bali, for example, differently ranked members of the village council of elders are associated with specific body parts of sacrificial animals, which are divided among them to be consumed during ritual meals. Indeed, some of the titles of elders are derived from body parts, especially from the divisions of the forelegs (Reuter 2002a, 2002b). The ‘head’ of domains is often associated with the most upstream inhabited locations at the source of river systems. Left and right body halves are often associated with ceremonial moieties or other forms of dual social categories. The four extremities of sacrificial animals, finally, tend to be associated with some form of fourfold division of space and society (see Mosko, this volume), which is also a common pattern within the region.
Of all the metaphors used to conceptualise socio-territorial units in Austronesian societies, the most important is that of a ‘path’ or ‘journey’; a trajectory of human movement through space and time. The significance of mytho-historical movements through space is evident particularly in the cosmological organisation of larger, regional socio-territorial units, including ritual domains and pre-colonial kingdoms. Such domains and polities tend to be composed of smaller units linked together by a history of ancestral migration, beginning at a shared point of origin or, sometimes, ending at a shared destination, which is then transformed into a point of origin for all future purposes (see Winn, this volume).
An idiom of relatedness based on kinship and marriage is also used frequently to conceptualise the unity and divisions of local society, along with the boundaries and divisions of land claimed by various groups. Among highland Balinese, for example, historical ties between villages are often expressed figuratively by postulating asymmetric kinship relationships between village ancestor deities. Often the physical landscape contributes to, and is subsumed within, the imagery of a more complex socio-physical totality that is attributed with a numinous quality. In such an integrated world, the land and its people are so tightly interwoven that it is futile to try to discuss social categories without reference to categories of land, and vice versa.
There is considerable variability in the relative complexity of land-related categories and land tenure arrangements in Austronesian societies. Among other factors, these variations seem to depend on: a) the relative abundance of land and the general conduciveness of ecological and climatic conditions to intensive agriculture on that land; b) the population density; c) the social diversity, especially in terms of the presence or absence of immigrants (in small or large numbers; with or without a separate ethnic identity, language or religion; with or without colonial or modern state sponsorship); d) the degree of local access to regional or international trade networks; and e) the degree of direct foreign intervention in local affairs. More complex social and political systems might have evolved first in areas that could sustain large and dense populations through intensive agriculture, division of labour or trade, or where an influx of migrants necessitated more complex models of emplacement.
It is likely that some of the larger, regional systems of Austronesian socio-territorial organisation provided a foundation for the formation of polities and early states. While local developmental processes might have been enough to create social systems of considerable size and complexity in their own right, it is evident that the first major states did not build on the logic of an indigenous Austronesian social system and cosmology alone. This is true particularly for the greater part of South-East Asia, which has been subject to Indic influence at some time.
A number of the large Hindu-Buddhist polities emerging in the region from the fifth century onward employed Indic notions of divine kingship in order to generate an inter-local form of organisation for the first time in a particular area. Others appear to have utilised and transformed pre-existing, though perhaps hitherto predominantly ritual, forms of regional organisation in order to create a more cohesive and centralised political system or ‘state’ (negara), though still with a strong ritual component (Geertz 1980). In other cases again, there might have been hostility, avoidance or some kind of truce between people with a stake in an earlier system of regional socio-territorial organisation and encroaching Hindu-Buddhist (and later Muslim) polities that were seeking to establish some degree of sovereignty over their territory (Reuter 2002a). The polities that developed in Tonga and elsewhere in the Pacific, finally, appear to have evolved initially without any direct foreign influence.
All of the case studies presented in this book, however, provide evidence of how people’s traditional ways of categorising and regulating access to land were profoundly transformed, once again or for the first time, by their incorporation into the political, administrative and legal systems of colonial empires and/or, more recently, independent modern nation states. The transformations tended to be more incisive than those of earlier periods. Earlier Indic and Muslim states grew out of trade links accompanied by the importation of foreign religions and associated concepts of sovereignty, but essentially had to be built on local foundations to some degree. Colonial states, while they too might have begun as trading ventures, were ultimately built on military conquest or control, and involved the establishment of a government apparatus led by foreigners. Nevertheless, local forms of social and political organisation were maintained as a support structure in many cases, due to the limited resources of the expatriates in many colonial states. This kind of collaboration eventually produced Western-educated local elites who later led the anti-colonial struggle and put themselves at the head of the newly emerging independent states in the region. In cases where such collaboration was limited and colonial rule was more direct, earlier models of land tenure might have all but disappeared.
In many contemporary societies in the Austronesian world, one therefore finds a complex layered patchwork of territorial and other social institutions that can be traced to various stages in a historical movement towards ever-increasing complexity. I will later return to the question of how relevant Austronesian territorial categories still are in the context of complex modern nation states with rapidly globalising economies.