Table of Contents
Introduction [1]
Two forms of Sikkanese society can be distinguished in contemporary Kabupaten[2] Sikka of eastern Flores on ethnological grounds. One is that of the Ata Tana ’Ai in the eastern region of the kabupaten. The other is that of central Sikka, which includes the villages of the central hills and mountains and the north and south coasts of the regency. [3] The main difference between the two societies that will concern me here is this: whereas no secular polity ever developed in Tana ’Ai, by the beginning of the 20th century, the society of central Sikka constituted a local state, a single polity under the rule of a Sikkanese royal house, which traced its origins through 18 rajas and at least 16 generations. [4] The Rajadom of Sikka dated at least to the Portuguese era in eastern Indonesia, evolved into a semi-autonomous state under the Dutch policy of zelfbestuur (self-rule) in the 19th and 20th centuries, and reached the apex of its power and independence in the absence of the Dutch Colonial Government in the decade immediately after World War II. Tana ’Ai came under direct Sikkanese rule only in the last three decades of the history of the Rajadom of Sikka. Indeed, Sikkanese rule had so little practical effect in Tana ’Ai that contemporary Ata Tana ’Ai still recognise five tana, or ‘ceremonial domains’, in their region today (see Map 1) and remember very little of the rajadom or its Sikkanese rulers.
In these two societies we thus see, recapitulated on the scale of a single Florenese region, a pattern characteristic of eastern Indonesia generally, whereby some societies gave rise to local states while others did not. In the case of Sikka, on a relatively local scale, the question becomes: how did Sikka become a state while the Ata Tana ’Ai retained a society founded on ceremonial domains? This is an ethnological and a historical question. Any advance towards an answer should contribute to solving two general problems in eastern Indonesian ethnology and history. Firstly, how did local states arise in eastern Indonesia? Secondly, why did some societies in eastern Indonesia develop into local states while others did not?
In examining the specific case of Kabupaten Sikka, I will make the following ethnological assumptions: 1) the nature and organisation of the Tana ’Ai domains did not change greatly during the two or three centuries in which the Sikkanese Rajadom evolved; and 2) despite differences between the societies of Tana ‘Ai and Sikka, before the advent of the rajadom, Sikkanese communities were domain-based societies similar to those of Tana ’Ai. These assumptions are justified on the evidence of contemporary ethnographic research in Sikka, which includes oral histories of people in Sikka Natar (the village of Sikka on the south coast of Flores from which the rajadom and the contemporary kabupaten took their names), the myths of origin of the rajadom, and the origin myths of the immigrant groups who make up Sikka Natar.
I shall approach the Sikkanese case by addressing three questions: 1) What were the domains of Sikka like before the rajadom and the arrival of the Dutch? 2) How did the Sikkanese rulers establish their hegemony over central Sikka? And 3) what changes in territorial categories and institutions resulted from the evolution from domains to a rajadom in central Sikka?
I shall begin with a brief, comparative reference to the domains of Tana ’Ai in far eastern Sikka. I do this because I assume that the basic features of tana (‘domains’, in Sara Sikka [SS], the language of Sikka) in the area of Tana ’Ai were in the past also those of the tana of central Sikka.