The ethnographic case studies in this volume are presented in geographical order from the west moving eastward. Each paper contributes to several of the comparative themes identified above. A brief description of the content of each case study is provided in advance in order to identify which of these themes they are most relevant to. These descriptions also reveal some of the unique variations and less obvious commonalities in the ways different Austronesian societies have approached the basic social issue of regulating the relationship between people and land.
In the first paper, Minako Sakai discusses the ‘Kute’ as an indigenous territorial category and institution in South Sumatra (Chapter Two). The Sanskrit-derived Old Malay word kute (‘a fortified town or palace’) was used widely in the highlands of South Sumatra. The author examines how the term and the category ‘kute’ survived by looking at the case of the Gumai. At a level of state administration, kute has been replaced with a succession of other terms, including marga, dusun, and finally, desa. Like kute itself, these newer terms have acquired some of the meaning of an underlying Austronesian territorial concept that envisages a shared social identity based on a specific ‘foundation event’. Many Gumai villages in the South Sumatran highlands are thought to have been established by, and thus trace their ‘origin’ to, a single ancestor, the Puyang Ketunggalan Dusun. Villages contained a small ancestor house (lunjuk or rumah puyang) for the spirits of the founding ancestors, where rituals would be held to commemorate the village origins. The morpheme pu in puyang could be a reflex of puqun, which is a Proto-Malayo-Polynesian reconstruction meaning ‘tree’, ‘trunk’, ‘base’ or ‘source’. Villages are inhabited by the descendants of the puyang and their affines. The population is divided into origin groups called jungkuk which are ranked in order of precedence based on birth order and ritual seniority.
My own paper (Chapter Three), Ritual Domains and Communal Land in the Highlands of Bali, explores the significance of ceremonial domains (banua) among highland Balinese. Banua, in Bali, are ritually defined regional territories of variable size. About 15 of these domains have been identified, studied and compared by the author. Each is under the spiritual protection of the deified ancestors who first cleared the forest and established settlements. These ancestral deities are located in village temples. The temple of the oldest settlement in a domain is gradually transformed into a regional temple where the most senior ancestors are venerated by people from all branch villages within the domain. Origin myths and rituals retrace the path of the first ancestors, their emigrating descendants or new immigrants, thus creating the image of a complex land- and time-scape that has been inscribed and is perpetually re-inscribed by human action. Despite their focus on origin histories, regional ritual alliances among villages are voluntary associations, and the status distribution among participants is fluid and contested.
Status relations among villages in a domain are defined by notions of precedence and are thus asymmetric. This has few economic implications in contemporary banua. Ritual status differences between households within a village do, however, have such implications. Only village-founder households have access to land owned collectively by the village (tanah desa) and administered by a council of elders (kerama desa), who are seated in order of precedence in the village longhouse (descending in rank from the ‘tip’ to the ‘trunk’ end). Claims to village-founder status, furthermore, necessarily draw on the origin narratives of the domain of which the village is a part.
A case study of a local origin myth is used to show that the historical transformation of a village into a much more complex regional domain coincides with a shift from material to symbolic resources as the object of primary concern. The idea of a shared land or territory is retained and commemorated in a ritual context, even when individual villages have already gained independence in all practical matters in the course of this transformation. The shift to a predominant concern with symbolic resources is underpinned by a desire to participate in a regional process of status competition among Bali Aga villages, and also reflects their efforts to establish a degree of political unity among themselves vis-a-vis the outside world.
Graeme MacRae’s paper (Chapter Four) complements this account of highland Balinese domains by exploring how such domains were built on in processes of state formation. MacRae examines inter-village networks of ritual association that have been brought into the context of a traditional Balinese state, the Kingdom of Ubud. South Balinese traditional culture tends to be seen, in the mainstream of local society and in scholarly studies, as originating in Majapahit Java and ultimately in Indic culture. A close examination of ideas and practices to do with land and landscape, however, suggests greater commonalities with other Austronesian societies. The paper examines the interface between these Austronesian and Indo-Javanese dimensions of southern Balinese ideas of land and landscape. MacRae also considers transformations of this landscape in the wake of Dutch colonialism, Indonesian independence and the more recent internationalisation of Bali’s political economy.
In his paper (Chapter Five), Phillip Winn describes a rather unusual case. He shows how the idea of a ‘blessed land’ (tanah berkat) has helped to define the Banda Islands as a ‘shared destination’ for migrants from different ethnic origins, rather than as a ‘shared origin’ site with a set of indigenous custodians. Despite the diverse historical origins of the contemporary population—who were brought to the Banda Islands by the Dutch after their original inhabitants had been killed or dispersed—a similar sense of shared identity and moral community is conveyed by such narratives of immigration. In a conjuncture of land (tanah) and local tradition (adat tanah), the roots of moral community are envisaged as existing in place. Tanah itself is viewed as eliciting, endorsing and enforcing moral practice through the actions of Muslim founder-spirits and through people’s membership of a traditional village (negeri adat). This model of society has facilitated social participation irrespective of ethnic divisions.
In her paper ‘Mapping Buru: The politics of Territory and Settlement on an Eastern Indonesian Island’ (Chapter Six), Barbara Dix Grimes begins by exploring small territorial units known as fena, which she identifies as a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian *benua. On Buru, there is a strong relationship between particular fena and the ‘origin group’ (noro) considered to be the traditional owners of that land. In any one settlement, one clan is usually dominant numerically and socially. Thus the territorial concept fena and the social category noro become almost interchangeable, even though, usually, some fena residents are immigrants. There is no evidence for any territorial organisation larger or more complex than the fena in the sparsely populated interior of Buru, except for some references to regional clusters such as the seven fena (fenar pito) that comprise the regency of Masarete. The island was dominated politically by the small coastal kingdoms of Muslim immigrants who were later recognised by the Dutch as the rulers of Buru as a whole. More recently, much confusion has arisen from a lack of correspondence between fena and the territorial unit ‘desa’ which was introduced by the Indonesian Government.
Still within the Moluccas, Christine Boulan-Smit’s paper looks at the structure of the hena among the Alune of West Seram (Chapter Seven). The ‘Wele Telu Batai’ (‘Three Rivers’) upland region of West Seram is divided into a number of territorial units occupied by Alune or Wemale communities of shifting cultivators. In modern Indonesia, these are designated as desa (villages) and kecamatan (subdistricts). In Alune, however, the smaller units are called hena, and alliances of several hena along a river system are called batai (literally, ‘tree trunks’). The paper describes how a hena is organised internally, particularly in relation to the origin group (nuru) who were its founders. As a territorial unit, the hena is a single body or entity, no section of which may be fenced, divided or sold. It is also a social unit aware of its origin, history and ritual duties, all of which are supported by narratives of origin. Boulan-Smit then describes how hena are linked together within the larger domain-like institution of the batai in a complex order of precedence. This status order is articulated through the seating order of hena representatives at customary meetings (nili ela), as they sit in a row from the trunk to the tip end of a ritually felled tree trunk (compare with Reuter, this volume, on orders of seating on the main beam of longhouses). The batai network as a whole is envisaged as a tree-like shape. Botanic metaphors are thus used as a signifier of precedence relationships. Batai also belong within even larger named regional clusters such as Wele Telu Batai.
In a seminal paper entitled ‘From Domains to Rajadom: Notes on the History of Territorial Categories and Institutions in the Rajadom of Sikka’ (Chapter Eight), Douglas Lewis discusses a historical process that is of general relevance to eastern Indonesia, whereby some societies gave rise to local states while others did not. For example, the Ata Tana Ai in the eastern part of Sikka in Flores never formed a secular polity but maintained a traditional division into five tana or ‘ceremonial domains’, which closely resembles the social organisation of highland Bali, Buru and Seram (see above). Central Sikka, however, developed a local state: a single polity under the rule of a royal house that originated in the Portuguese era and continued as a semi-autonomous state under the Dutch, not unlike the Kingdom of Ubud in Bali. Before the advent of the rajadom, Sikkanese lived in a domain-based society similar to the Ata Tana Ai. Lewis discusses what the domains of Sikka were like before the rajadom, how the Sikkanese rulers established their hegemony over central Sikka and what changes in territorial categories and institutions resulted from the evolution of domains into a rajadom. He concludes that Europeans played a significant role in, but did not cause, the development of local states in the region. Large-scale states such as Srivijaya, Majapahit and Mataram predated the arrival of Europeans in South-East Asia, and the societies of eastern Indonesia had long been involved with these kingdoms through maritime trade.
The merger of a large number of domains into a single polity required the people of Sikka to reconceptualise categories of territory. The scale of tana in central Sikka was small. Perhaps as many as 45 discrete tana coexisted in an area of no more than 700 square kilometres, and the tana, negeri and natar of the older Sikka had no boundaries. The shift to a new idea of territory as bounded landscape was thus significant. In the place of many centres of local, ritual authority, a polity was created in which the raja bore a singular political power over the older, more local centres. A new system of status and prestige came into being within which the authority and power of officers and ministers in the raja’s government eclipsed those of the ritual leaders of the domains. The old offices of tana pu'ang and other ritual specialists survived, but—similar to the priests of some Bali Aga temples (Reuter 2002a)—their function came to be the legitimation of the new order.
Still concerned with Flores and with a case reminiscent of the Ata Tana Ai, Philipus Tule’s paper is entitled ‘We are Children of the Land: A Keo Perspective’ (Chapter Nine). Tule describes Keo as a ‘house-based society’. As in several of the preceding cases, the status of a clan house (sao) is defined by its positioning relative to other houses within a settlement or hamlet (nua, a reflex of *banua) and area of land (tana). The paper explores social and cosmological interconnections between tana, nua and sa'o among the Keo. Local participants speak of these interconnections in ritual speech as essential to maintaining a state of harmony, whereby ‘the land is not shaky and stones are not trembling’. In keeping with this ideal, disputes over agricultural land and house land (dae sao) are mediated by the Lord of the Land (’ine tana ame watu) or other, lower-ranking leaders (mosa daki). Since Keo regard land as their mother and stone as their father, they reject the idea of individual ownership of ancestral land (tana ine embu, or tana suku). Only an individual affiliated with a source house (sao puu) and settlement (nua oda) has the right to cultivate such land. The social bond between people who share ancestral land is maintained through active participation in rituals related to the ancestral house and land.
In his paper ‘Contending for Ritual Control of Land and Polity: Comparisons from the Timor Area of Eastern Indonesia’ (Chapter 10), James Fox compares traditional categories of ‘land’, ‘territory’ and ‘domain’ across three closely related societies, and describes the ritual and political offices and ceremonies associated with these categories. The first case study examines categories of land and domain among the Rotinese, and is focused on the island’s central domain (nusak) of Termanu. Termanu’s elaborate origin narrative establishes a separation of political power and ritual authority by drawing a distinction between its newcomer ruler and a particular clan lord who holds the title of Head of the Earth (dae langak). The narrative illustrates a common Austronesian mythological theme whereby an ‘outsider’ is installed ‘inside’ and granted the right of rule. This theme is important in that it shows how Austronesians have mediated the land-related or other (material or symbolic) resource conflicts that frequently arose between earlier and later groups of migrating peoples.
The second case study concerns the Atoni Pah Meto of West Timor. Land (pah) is primary within the Atoni concept of identity and prominent in many of their traditional titles. Like the people of Flores and Roti, they have a long history of European contact but their political formations predate this period. Amanuban is the most important domain and became the dominant Atoni state in West Timor for a significant period during the 18th and 19th century. Houses (ume, uem) represent Atoni origin groups (kanaf) at the level of the local settlement. Settlements (kuan > Tetun, knua >PAN/PMP *banua) are significant not as ordered space but as a local stage for an ordering of precedence among particular kanaf.
Both cases are then compared with the Tetun of West Timor, whose major domain, Wehali, is regarded by many as the sacred centre of Timor as a whole. Wehali is rai feto, ‘female land’, as opposed to rai mane, ‘male land’, and is the traditional site of the Nai Bot/Kukun, ‘The Great/Dark Lord’. The authority of this lord was once acknowledged through harvest rituals attracting delegations from a large area of Timor, including many Atoni domains. Similar to the botanic imagery of the origin myth mentioned in Boulan-Smit’s paper on Seram, according to its origin myth, Wehali is a great banyan tree that offers shade to its constituent groups. The ordering of subgroups within this confederation follows a fourfold division, as among the highland Balinese. Wehali itself is known as the Rai Lidun Hat, Rai Sikun Hat: ‘Four Corner Land, Four Section Land.’ As on Roti and Bali, the land is envisaged as a body with its ‘tail’ to the west and its ‘head’ to the east. The general term for ‘earth’, ‘land’ or ‘territory’ among the Tetun is rai. An alternative term is rae, which is related to the Rotinese for earth, dae. On its own, rae has the sense of uncultivated ‘land’ rather than ‘earth’. Within this scheme, Wehali is the rai hun, leo hun: ‘Land of origin, Leo of origin.’ Whereas among the Rotinese, a leo is a clan-like origin group defined by its position within a particular nusak or domain and thereby confined to that nusak, a leo among the population of Wehali is a named residential group—a hamlet—comprising specific named houses. The Tetun term for ‘settlement’ or ‘village’ outside of Wehali is knua (> *banua). Wehali has no knua and the term is used only in a metaphoric sense.
Andrew McWilliam’s paper stays within the same region, and discusses Fataluku Forest Tenures and the Conis Santana National Park in East Timor (Chapter 11). McWilliam explores customary tenures and land-management practices in the context of an emergent government land policy in East Timor’s most easterly district, Lautem. During the period of Indonesian rule in East Timor (1975-99), much of the forested zone was classified as a ‘natural conservation reserve’. On paper at least, this prohibited logging and other forms of extractive activity. Under the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) from 1999, the area was reclassified as a ‘Protected Wild Area’, and, in 2002, through its Directorate of Forestry, the independent East Timor Government initiated a program to demarcate the area as the country’s first National Park. The prospects for the successful establishment of the park are in question due to the contested status of the region. This ownership issue arises because the greater part of the forested zone in this proposal is not composed of old-growth forest. Rather, the forest is a mosaic of former swidden gardens and settlement sites. Customary tenures and local claims of Fataluku-speaking populations to the forestry zone remain intact. As a result of consultations with community leaders, government forestry staff informally acknowledge the existence of ‘traditional land’ (Bahasa Indonesia: tanah adat) in the park area, but there is no formal agreement, at this stage, on the prospective status of their ownership claims. Nor has there been any sustained study of the ethnographic context within which these claims emerge. This paper offers a preliminary contribution towards this end.
The focus moves beyond Indonesia with Mark Mosko’s paper (Chapter 12), entitled Self-Scaling the Earth: Relations of Land, Society and Body Among North Mekeo, Papua New Guinea’. The territorial categories in the language of North Mekeo (the PNG/Western Papua Tip cluster of Western Oceanic) are pangua or paunga (‘village’) and ango (‘land’ or ‘territory’). The paper investigates these terms in relation to indigenous conceptualisations of society that employ body metaphors and a systematic fourfold pattern of ‘inside–outside’ (aongai-fangai) distinctions. Such spatial metaphors and associated fourfold divisions of society are widespread in the Austronesian world. North Mekeo classify land, body and society through analogous classificatory and procedural (temporal) mechanisms in terms of inside/outside distinctions and transactions, which consist formally of relations of self-similar or fractal scaling. Consequently, the three contexts of ‘land’, ‘body’ and ‘society’ can be seen as constituting a single semantic domain.
John P. Taylor’s paper, ‘The Ways of the Land-Tree: Mapping the North Pentecost Social Landscape’ (Chapter 13), examines concepts of land and place, and their relationship to land-use practices, in the region of North Pentecost, Vanuatu, which belongs to the Raga language group. The paper begins by identifying important local delineations of territory and geography (vanua, tano, uma) and related concepts of social or personal emplacement (bwat) and movement (hala). Such concepts are pivotal for defining kinship-related patterns of settlement, land use and social organisation. As in Seram, Wehali and elsewhere in the region, botanic metaphors are used to describe relationships between places. This is illustrated beautifully with a tree-like map drawn by a local informant to show how territories are connected through a history of human movement. With reference to the hamlet cluster of Gelau, the paper describes the emergence of such patterns from their early beginnings, through colonial transformation to the present.
Mary Patterson’s paper (Chapter 14) is entitled ‘Finishing the Land: Identity and Land Use in Pre and Post-Colonial North Ambrym’. Land and place categories in northern Vanuatu show a distribution that tends to feature one or the other of the vanua and tan terms. Both words might be present, but if vanua is prominent in local discourse then tan is not, and vice versa. In Ambrym and South Pentecost there appears to be no reflex of vanua. In Vao Island north-east of Malakula, however, venu and vanu refer to a ‘village’ or ‘place’ and in mainland Malakula vene appears as part of clan names. Similarly in Malo, tan appears as part of clan names. In East Ambae, vanue is important but tano less so. Vanue is not just land (tano), it is lived space in which place and people are part of each other.
In North Ambrym, conflict over land use and alienation at the local and national level has given rise to a new rhetoric of connections to land that employs Austronesian territorial categories with a complex history, now refracted through the lens of post-colonial identity politics. The paper examines the North Ambrym context, where novel ways of making status claims are in effect a dynamic refiguring of autochthonous and reticular connections to territory near and far, which appear in mythological and ritual contexts.
Steve Francis’s paper ‘People and Place in Tonga: The Social Construction of Fonua in Oceania’ (Chapter 15), provides an important comparison with a society in Polynesia. The author examines the usage of the term fonua (‘land/people’) as a territorial and social category in the Kingdom of Tonga. Fonua, a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian reconstruction *banua, is an important marker of local belonging as well as regional identity in Tonga. Francis shows how modern Tongans employ this social category in varying political, economic and social contexts; political in the sense of elite-commoner relations, economic in the context of land use and landownership, and social within the framework of village, island, regional and national identities. Fonua is used as an inclusive social and territorial concept, which incorporates links between local and global scales, the physical and metaphysical, the land and the sea. These links are illustrated through an examination of myth, history, social relations and local boundaries.
In sum, the papers in this volume illustrate the wealth of cultural diversity and important recurrent themes in how Austronesians have conceptualised the dynamic relationships between people and land. Local models of human movement and emplacement reveal a reflexive awareness of the conflicting human tendencies towards mobility and localised interests. They address issues of legitimacy in relation to territorial claims by linking them to cultural constructs of social identity, which, in the Austronesian world, are focused primarily on narrative histories of human movement. These models of society are not prone to primordialism but are instead founded on a celebration of the historicity of human society as a living, growing entity. In this world view, territorial and social categories are often closely interlinked. Founders and newcomers (who are often also affines) are afforded a place in Austronesian cosmological models, and their harmonious interaction is seen as no less integral to society than male and female is to the perpetuation of life itself.