The accessibility of the founder-figures through ritual practice, and through them, tanah Banda, existed as the centre and focus of the Banda negeri, acting in ontological terms as the personification and source of the link between land and territory, place and people. Participation in collective ritual practice not only constituted the negeri as a social-territorial unit—a ritual polity—but provided the basis for a population of predominantly diverse immigrant ancestry to claim a legitimate sense of Bandanese identification. Adat fundamentally offers the legitimate terms of access to and engagement with local place and identification. In this instance, this is achieved not through articulating lines of precedence and their outcomes in social organisation but by stressing the continuity of adat and the enduring and active presence of the datu, depicted not only as the source of autochthonous adat, but importantly also as Muslims. As Muslims, residents can construct a direct identifying link with the founders that is able to transcend questions of personal derivation and origins, particularly in the absence of local claims of autochthony.

The key mark of ‘deeper understanding’ in local terms was to speak about the religious meanings of adat. Among adat specialists (orang adat), adat practice was often represented as incorporating symbolic elements (lambang) relating to religion or, as one informant suggested, ‘reminders of religious matters’ (‘peringatan hal-hal agama’ [Hatta]). After completion of one significant, involved and lengthy adat ritual I spoke with the Lonthoir ritual leader about his approach to adat practice and its relation to agama. He stressed that they were in essence the same; the motivation and method followed the same indistinguishable path (‘jalan bersama, bersatu’[Lonthoir]). He stated that adat must not be understood as the forerunner to religion but rather as the pembawa, the ‘carrier’ or ‘bearer’ of religion. Adat practices contained and communicated religion and religious thought. He locked the index fingers of each hand around the other and pulled fruitlessly—there was no separating the two. A local healer (dukun) in Negeri Selamon offered the same image, saying that adat ‘carries religion’ (‘membawa agama’), and stated firmly that it was not possible to speak of them as distinct or different (‘tarbisa bilang beda atau lai”).

The substance of these kinds of interpretations was not confined to adat experts. A doxic, taken-for-granted quality existed in the broader community with respect to the fundamental commonality of Islam and adat. On the day of an important adat event in Lonthoir I woke early to hear the mosque playing Muslim songs through loudspeakers as it did on Islamic feast days such as Maulud, Hari Korban (Hari Raya Haji), Lebaran (Idul Fitri/Hari Raya) and Isra Mi’Raj. ^[21] I asked a neighbour why the mosque was playing music. He answered: ‘because there’s a celebration in the negeri ... to make our place lively ... aren’t you aware of the festivities?’ (‘Karna ada ramai di negeri ... supaya bikin katorang pung kampung ramai ... tarlihat ada ramai?’). When I suggested the celebration was an adat occasion rather than a hari raya, he replied: ‘Adat, religion—it’s the same thing. When practising adat you have to use incense, don’t you?’ (‘Adat, agama—sama. Kalau kerja adat musti paki kamanyan ka?’). In pointing to the use of incense, he was identifying one of the defining elements of sacred action which applies equally to occasions of house-based gatherings for the recitation of Muslim prayers and various contexts of adat practice. This was true also of numerous other features, such as men and women wearing articles of attire locally defining of Muslim affiliation while engaging in adat ritual practice. The participation of the local imam was viewed as necessary, as was Muslim prayer involving Qur’anic readings.

Wherever it occurs in Indonesia (or Malaysia) the notion of adat rarely possesses a determinate meaning—its significance is highly contingent and potentially broadly embracing. Adat often signifies far more than ‘conduct’ or ‘custom’ (both of which are common glosses), frequently emphasising local ideas of a sacral code that provides a focus for the identity of a particular community (Milner 1982: 95). Indeed, early dichotomised representations of local adat versus global Islam have been effectively undermined, for example, by Peletz (1981: 151) who characterises adat as ‘a unitary, all-embracing concept encompassing an expansive set of institutions governing the conduct of all personal, kin, and local affairs’. Interpretations of adat as ‘rules that constitute a way of life’ (Bowen 1991: 25) or ‘socio-culturally regulated behaviour’ (Rousseau 1998: 7) far more clearly open the way for religious thinking to occur within the rubric of adat, in that rules or regulations operate in a moral universe that draws its legitimacy from some source. Warren (1993: 3), for example, agrees that adat must be understood as incorporating the moral idea of social consonance and the behavioural imperative of propriety (viz. Geertz 1983: 207-14). She maintains this involves an underlying religious-social vision involving the necessary correspondence of cosmic and human relationships towards which it is directed.

This view effectively serves to evoke the potential of adat as itself constituting a source of governance, in the sense that Government can be understood as heterogeneous and pervasive rather than emanating from a single controlling source such as the State. This perspective is akin to Foucault’s ‘Governmentality’ neologism, which places stress on aspects of the relationship of the self to the self (Foucault 1988: 19) and the modes through which the individual establishes their relation to a rule and recognises themselves as obliged to put it into practice (Rabinow 1997: xvii). Though stopping short of a detailed elaboration of a generalised link between religion and Governmentality, Foucault does trace the power of religious subjectivity in the shaping of human life. Such analysis is developed throughout Foucault’s explorations of the nature of power, religion and the subject, where Carrette (2000: 150) suggests religion emerges as a politics of self; for example, in describing processes of subjectification ‘the way in which people are invited or incited to recognise their moral obligations’ whether divine law revealed in a text, rational rule, natural law, a cosmological order (Foucault 1997: 264). The religious self is always a part of the historical technology that produces and maintains the self. Indeed, religion can be viewed as a politics of self, revealing the truth of what we are by the practices we perform. To paraphrase Ricoeur (1995: 70), sacred practice is a continuing interpretation of the substance regarded as grounding the community—for the community to address itself to a substantially different notion of the sacred would be to make a decision concerning its social identity.

In the case of the Bandas, local interpretations of Banda adat in terms of idealised discourses concerning morality and religion involves thinking about negeri communities as (in ideal terms) moral communities. This perspective incorporates local concern with issues of correct practices, Islam itself and identification as Muslims—indeed, it is through ‘Islamic’ discourse that the particular moral community regarding itself as ‘Muslim’ appears:

We should not assume that religion and culture make up any a priori system of meaning, and we should not look for what is essential in Islam; rather than that we should look for historical social formations within which Muslims themselves engage in discourse on what should be central to Islam. (Manger 1999: 9)

In the Bandas, ideas of the moral governance of Islam drew on a local vision involving the spirits of place—the Muslim datu who carried Islam to the islands, and the islands themselves as tanah berkat. The negeri adat find their raison d’être in these representations, so that adat (and ritual practice in particular) becomes a way of collectively preserving, transmitting and renewing the morality seen as inherent to Islam. In this sense adat practice in the Banda negeri adat could be said to act ‘on behalf of the source’(viz. Lewis 1996: 167) with the notion of ‘source’ combining three dimensions that together effectively constitute a local moral community: the source of land, the source of sociality, the source of legitimacy (Lewis 1996: 167). In the Banda case, the source of the local was also the local source of Islam. This is the full significance of thinking about the idiom of tanah berkat.