Territorial Categories in Central Sikka

Territorial Categories in Central Sikka
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Tana (SS), natar (SS), and negeri (BI) are three commonly used markers of territories in central Sikka but they are slippery words in Sikkanese discourse.

The word tana in Sara Sikka encompasses the following meanings:

niang tana : ‘the earth, the world’. For example, ata teri niang ’era tana are ‘the people who live (sit) on the land and arise (stand up) from the earth’, and ata tawa tana , ‘people who arose from the earth’, are autochthons (BI orang asli ).
territory, district, region: tana Sikka is the ‘region of Sikka’, which is innately ambiguous insofar as Sikka refers variously to the village of Sikka, the Regency of Sikka, and the aggregate of domains that demarcated central Sikka from its neighbours to the east and west.

The word natar in Sara Sikka means:

kampung (BI: village). Thus Sikka, Natar is specifically the village of Sikka.
desa : ‘village’ in Bahasa Indonesia, but note that Wilkinson defines the word in Malay as ‘region; country; country-village’ and comments, ‘a word used rather loosely, viz.: (i) of a territorial unit of any size … (ii) of the country in contr[ast] to the townships … (iii) in Java, a country hamlet; = (Mal[ay]) kampong’ (Wilkinson 1959: 277-8). While not wishing to suggest that the Sikkanese speak Malay (much less an old form of Malay) rather than Bahasa Indonesia, use of the word desa in contemporary Kabupaten Sikka accords as well with Wilkinson’s definitions as with modern Bahasa Indonesia, in which desa means ‘village’. ^[7]

The word negeri is Malay and Bahasa Indonesia, but is used commonly in Sara Sikka and is used frequently in certain Sikkanese texts. Here matters become truly confused. In contemporary Bahasa Indonesia, negeri means ‘country, land’ (Echols and Shadily 1989: 386), but Echols and Shadily note that in Malay and in eastern Indonesia the word denotes ‘village’, an observation supported by recordings of Sikkanese speech and the word’s use in early Sikkanese manuscripts. Noting the origin of the word in Sanskrit, Wilkinson defines negeri as

settlement; city-state … used loosely (Mal[ay]) of any settlement, town or land ... more specifically (Min[angkabau]) of an autonomous area or group of villages under a penghulu andeka … or other territorial chief, e.g. Negeri Sembilan (the ‘Nine States’, each autonomous though collectively under a suzerain). (Wilkinson 1959: 802)

I belabour the reader with these definitions because they are of key terms and because they warn us to take care about usage in context. The ‘looseness’ in usage that Wilkinson notes is firstly a matter of variation in the meaning of a single word across the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago and, secondly, a matter of lexical polysemy in the context of a single linguistic community. The pairs tana and natar in Sikkanese and negeri and desa in Indonesian are used commonly in Kabupaten Sikka and, more importantly for my purposes here, occur frequently in the Sikkanese texts from which I will draw evidence for territorial categories in central Sikka. It is thus crucial to be as certain as possible about the multiple meanings of the terms in the context of Sikkanese usage.

The inhabitants of some of the villages of central Sikka have preserved the ritual sites (mahé) which, in Tana ’Ai, would mark the centres of tana, ceremonial domains (Plates 1, 2 and 3), with this difference: whereas the mahé of Tana Wai Brama is in a clearing hidden within a stand of primary forest some distance from human habitation, the mahé of central Sikka are located in the centres of villages in public spaces reminiscent of the ritual sites of the societies of central and western Flores. These central Sikkanese sites can be taken as direct evidence for past ceremonial systems in central Sikka and as indirect evidence for the location of the centres of tana, which were perhaps similar to those of contemporary Tana ’Ai. ^[8]

Plate 1: Remains of Mahé Mo’ang Hi’eng at Héwoklo’ang (1979)

Plate 2: Remains of the Mahé at Baomékot (1979)

Plate 3: Remains of the Mahé at Kangae (2000)

Plate 4: The organisation of the Rajadom of Sikka in the era of Mo’ang Don Alésu da Silva (Pareira unpublished [2002]: 12-13)

Additional evidence for territorial categories effective in Sikka’s past designated by the terms tana, natar and negeri in central Sikka can be found in interviews with Sikkanese informants in the years 1977-2002 and, of particular value, in the narratives of the foundation myth and subsequent history of the Rajadom of Sikka, written by Mo’ang Alexius Boer Pareira and Mo’ang Dominicus Dionitius Parera Kondi, two Sikkanese authors of the first half of the 20th century. ^[9]

One of Mo’ang Boer’s notebooks (Document 001, Sikka Manuscripts Collection; Pareira unpublished [2002]) includes a rough chart (Plate 4 and Figure 1) ^[10] of the organisation of the Rajadom of Sikka in the era of the first raja, Mo’ang Don Alésu Xamenes da Silva, a time undated in the history of the rajadom.

Figure 1: The Organisation of the Rajadom of Sikka in the Era of Mo’ang Don Alésu da Silva (after Pareira unpublished [2002]: 12-13)

Mo’ang Boer’s depiction of the structure of the Rajadom of Sikka ‘in ancient times’ indicates two levels of organisation. The first shows the relation of the first raja to eight office-holders called kapitang (captains) and indicates their responsibilities. Most of the kapitang were drawn from groups that Boer identifies as suku (SS ‘clans’) of Sikka Natar and from clans outside Sikka Natar that were allied closely with lepo geté (SS ‘great house’), the royal house of Sikka. This is an interesting point because the people of contemporary Sikka Natar deny that they belong to clans and that suku are categories of Sikkanese society. ^[11] They point out that Sikka Natar is divided into ’wisung wangang, which are extended family groups. The people of each ’wisung bear a Portuguese (P) name and are associated with households and territorial homesteads within the village.

In Boer’s chart, the eight kapitang are shown as holding offices labelled by two Malay titles and six Portuguese titles. Five of the offices are identified as being associated with clan names or villages. Boer’s list of the kapitang under Don Alésu, the first of the Sikkanese rajas, and explanatory notes about the meaning of the titles (from left to right in Boer’s chart) are given below. ^[12]

Kapitang Moor: Pengurus Keadilan (Manager of Justice)	From capitão mor (P): until the beginning of the 20th century, the commander of a Portuguese village militia.
Kapitang Salaf: Pengurus Pertanian (Manager of Agriculture)	The origin of the title salaf is obscure, but three possibilities can be identified. 1) from capitão de sala or capitão de salas (P), possibly a captain in charge of bureaucracy, provisions, supply, ordnance. 2) Salaf is not an Arabic word but might derive from safra (P), ‘harvest’. It is possible that in borrowing this word the Sikkanese first changed it to *safara or *safala, which was further altered by metathesis (→ *salafa) and the loss of the final vowel (→ salaf). An alternative evolution might have involved a metathesis first (safra → *serafa, *sarafa or *salafa) followed by the loss of the final a. Dr A.N. Baxter (personal communication) notes that the loss of the final vowel is curious since Sara Sikka allows both vowels and consonants at the end of syllables. A third possibility is that, in drawing on oral history as his source, Boer might have mistranscribed the word in his manuscript.
Kapitang Djantera, Source of the Earth, Clan Georpung: Tanenti General (Lieutenant General)	Djantera might derive from dianteira (P), ‘vanguard’. Boer wrote in Malay and used the orthography common in Indonesia in Dutch times in which /j/ was written dj and /y/ was written j (sadja ‘only’, saja ‘I’). Djantera would have been pronounced /jantera/ in speech, but Boer might have intended that the ja in the word (which in the Dutch orthography has the sound /ia/) be pronounced as /ia/, the j replacing the i in dianteira. If this were the case, then the Sikkanese word would be pronounced /diantera/, but if he intended the dj to be pronounced /j/, then the word would be pronounced /jantera/ and would have been altered from the Portuguese when it came into the Sikkanese language.
Kumandanti Sjabandar Maumere	Syahbandar (Malay) is a harbour master.
Kapitang Guarda: Pengawal (‘First’, of people) (First Minister?)	Kapitang Guarda from (P) capitão da guarda or ‘captain of the guard’. Boer identifies this kapitang as ‘monyeru’ and with the Irimida. An irimida (SS) is erimida (P), a chapel or small church usually built outside and some distance from a village. The word monjeru (in Boer’s writing, pronounced /monyeru/) is somewhat puzzling. It might be related to monge (P), ‘friar, brother of a Christian order’. Boer equates monjeru with koster (Dutch), ‘sexton, verger’ (Küster in German; Latin custos, ‘guard, keeper’). Boer notes that this officer ‘Gelar dewan gredja [sic] jaga gredja irimida’, that is, ‘holds office on the church council and looks after the church’s chapel’.
Costa de Ornay of Paga, ‘bergelar djrey’, ‘holds the office of djrey’	Djrey: the combination of consonants djr (jr in modern orthography) does not exist in Malay or Bahasa Indonesia. However, the change from /di/ to /ji/ is common in Portuguese itself and in Portuguese creole languages and this term is almost certainly from de rei (P: ‘of the king’). Boer describes the holder of this office as responsible for the church council and for serving as ‘Tanenti General waktu perang’, that is, ‘lieutenant general in time of war’. The sense of the term might be that of a minister plenipotentiary.
Kapitang Alveris: Pengurus keamanan (Manager of Safety, Security)	In the Portuguese military, alferes was a rank between sargento and tenente. Boer equates kapitang alveris with pengurus keamanan (BI), ‘manager of safety, security’.
Kapitang panteru: Pengurus peperangan (Manager of War)	The shift from /p/ to /f/ is common in Portuguese words borrowed by speakers of Malay and Tagalog and if this happened in Sikka, panteru might well derive from infante (P: ‘infantry soldier’). Baxter (personal communication) has suggested that in a purely local formation, infante (P) acquired the Portuguese agentive suffix -ero (which became eru in Sikkanese) to form a local Sikkanese word, panteru, meaning ‘infantry’ or, better, ‘one who is involved with the infantry’. -Ero is highly productive in South-East Asian creole varieties of Portuguese, such as that of Malacca, and such a change in Sikka would not be surprising. In his chart, Boer equates kapitang panteru with ‘pengurus peperangan’ (BI), ‘manager of war’.

Below these kapitang, or ministers, Boer identifies the Mo’ang Liting Puluh, Ten Sitting Lords, whom he describes as constituting a ‘DPR’ (BI: dewan perwakilan rakyat), a legislative council or legislative assembly. The Sitting Lords are identified further by clan and the negeri (villages and village clusters) which were their responsibilities.

The word ’liting (SS) means 1) ‘base, foundation’ and 2) ‘chair’, and in Sikkanese ritual speech there are references to

du’a deri é’i ’liting pulu	the du’a (honorific for women) who sits at the seven foundations;
mo’ang ’er é’i ’ler walu	the mo’ang (honorific for men) who stands at the eight leaning places. ^[a]
^[a] Du’a mo’ang are leaders and ritual specialists.

Boer identifies each of the Ten Sitting Lords not by name, but by clan affiliation. This identification is highly significant because the people of Sikka Natar are not, strictly speaking, divided into clans, whereas the people of the central hills of Sikka are. Below each Sitting Lord, Boer drew a pair of crossed elephant tusks. Ivory tusks were one of the main goods with which, according to the mythic histories of the rajadom, the early rajas secured alliances with the leaders of local communities in the central hills and mountains of Sikka (see Lewis 1998b, 1999). Below each of the 10 pairs of crossed tusks and clan names, Boer lists a number of villages in the following groupings:

1.	Wolokoli Iang Puho Rohé Dobo Moro Pau Boa [= Baot?]	4.	Warut Krado Halé Hébing Nata Watu Ipir Hébar Hepang	7.	Wutik Arat Tak [Tok?] Géhak	10.	Pogong Bola ’Ai Bura Kokor Watu Witir
2.	Egong Lere Nata Koli Hébing Halé	5.	Kroa Baomékot Maget Hiding Tadat	8.	Koting Wolo Huler
3.	Nitung Kangae Habi Geté Habi Gahar	6.	Kéwa Héwaklo’ang Kopang [Kopong] Héo Botang	9.	Rohé Puho Dokar Natar Koli Lere

An 11th group of villages has been pencilled in below the main list:

11.	Ili Gétang Baobatung Moro Piring Dobo

If duplicate names are ignored ^[14] and the placenames are drawn onto a map of central Sikka, these 11 groups of villages form territorial clusters (Map 2). Although Boer does not do so in the document I have cited, I am strongly inclined to view the territories delimited by these clusters as tana, domains with which the early Sikkanese rulers treated during the era in which they created the rajadom.

Map 2: Clusters of placenames and villages identified with the Ten Sitting Lords

Towards the end of the notebook, Boer makes the following observation and appends a list of villages with which Raja Don Alésu made alliances (Pareira unpublished 2002):

Nora Don Alésu balong wawa Malaka mai dadi ratu é’i Niang Sikka te neti nora bala bala gawang gu mai bano néte natar baké na’i mangung ore na’i lajar. E’i Nuhang Ular tana lorang té’i é’i bahagian Tahi La’i sebela selatan molé é’i Tahi Wai sebela utara é’i natar natar wawa ba’u te’i.				When Don Alésu returned from Malaka and became Raja of the Land of Sikka he brought many elephant tusks which he then placed in the villages to raise up masts and sails. ^[a] This he did on Snake Island [Flores], in the land between the Male Sea to the south and the Female Sea ^[b] to the north, in many villages here.
There were Masts and Sails in the villages of:
1.	Mudebali	16.	Pora Nelu	31.	Béi Nara
2.	Runut	17.	Mage Panda	32.	Ili Getang
3.	Warut	18.	Manu Kako	33.	Dobo Baobatung
4.	Egong	19.	Wolosoko	34.	Kéwa Héwo Klo’ang
5.	Waidaki	20.	Nua Lolo	35.	Ngalupolo
6.	Kroang Popot	21.	Natawulu	36.	Kota Ndona
7.	Warut Krado	22.	Nilo	37.	Masebewa
8.	Rohe	23.	Rane	38.	Kroa Baomekot
9.	Wolo Koli	24.	Koting	39.	Ngalu Poto Pogong Bola
10.	Ili Leku	25.	Wutik	40.	Wolomari (Lio)
11.	Mbengu	26.	Kailiwu	41.	Wolotopo
12.	Molik	27.	Kode	42.	Molik (Ndori)
13.	Rangga Se	28.	Brai	43.	Kota Jogo
14.	Wolowaru	29.	Habi Weko	44.	Wolo Mage Feondari
15.	Nggéla	30.	Nitung Kangae
^[a] The gift of twin elephant tusks, mangung lajar (mast and sail), to cement alliances between the rajas of Sikka and the negeri (villages) of the district, is a recurring theme in Boer’s and Kondi’s texts of the mythic histories of the Sikkanese rajadom. ^[b] Tahi La’i (the Male Sea) and Tahi Wai (the Female Sea) are the Savu Sea and the Flores Sea, respectively.

Although much can be made of these lists, what should be noted immediately is that the structure of the raja’s government depicted in Boer’s diagram (Plate 4 and Figure 1) is not that of the raja’s government under the Dutch. The arrangement of government in Dutch times was territorial: the kerajaan (BI: rajadom) was divided into a number of districts, each headed by a kapitang. The captaincies came to be (more or less) the first kecamatan ^[17] in the early years of the Indonesian administration of Sikka, but note that the kecamatan have changed over the years since the introduction of the kabupaten system of government in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Boer’s diagram does not mention districts, but depicts a unified and hierarchical system of government. The raja is at the apex. Next is the level of the ministers, who were drawn largely from the Sikkanese nobility. Below the ministers are the Ten Sitting Lords, who were the heads of villages or clusters of villages and who are depicted as an advisory council to the raja. At this level the system begins to appear territorial, but note that the territories were not headed by kapitang, who were appointed by the raja and were not necessarily from the districts over which they had authority, but by locals who might (in some instances) have been tana pu’ang.

In 1982, Dr J.K. Metzner published a detailed study of the geo-ecology of agriculture in central Sikka. That work includes a section on ‘Traditional Land Tenure’ in which Metzner provides a map of ‘the chief traditional territories (tana) of the ‘lord of the earth’ (tana puang)’ ^[18] (Metzner 1982: 110; Map 3 below). The map is a reconstruction of the tana of Sikka in the ‘pre-contact era—that is until about the end of the nineteenth century’ (Metzner 1982: 110). Metzner’s reconstruction requires correction on many points, but the pattern he identifies can be taken, for the purposes of this paper, to be correct in its essentials. Metzner writes:

The size of a tana puang territory was essentially contingent upon population density. As [Map 3] shows[,] the tana puang territories were clearly smaller in densely populated Central Sikka than in eastern and western Sikka. The boundaries of these territories … are not official, although they are sufficiently accurate in Central Sikka. … [The map] thus serves to convey an approximate idea of former adat ^[19] territories. In one of the most densely populated portions of central Sikka—at the saddle of Nita and around Maumere—however, it was not possible to delineate unequivocally the borders of such territories. (Metzner 1982: 111–3). ^[20]

Map 3: Metzner’s reconstruction of the tana of Central Sikka. ^[21]

Map 3: Metzner’s reconstruction of the tana of Central Sikka. This map is redrawn from Metzner (1982: 112). A few corrections have been made, but otherwise the tana names are as Metzner recorded them. As will be argued below, it is likely that the tana of Sikka changed through time, which means the enumeration of tana and reconstruction of tana centres and possible boundaries is extremely difficult and, at best, speculative. I hope to publish another map of Sikka’s tana and a tentative reconstruction of their evolution in the future.

If we somewhat arbitrarily exclude the mainly Lionese regions of western Sikka and Tana ’Ai in the east from consideration and limit our focus to the tana of the central region of Metzner’s map, ^[22] we find 48 tana. Comparing the names of tana on Metzner’s map with the 44 names provided by Boer in his list of mangung lajar villages, we find the concordance between Metzner’s and Boer’s enumerations of places likely to have been considered tana is only 13 names. Despite confusion about the names of the tana and some errors in Metzner’s spelling of tana names, it is striking that the numbers of tana listed by Boer and Metzner (44 and 48, respectively) are very nearly the same.

Metzner’s suggestion that the number of tana in the densely populated central region of Sikka was strikingly greater than in the eastern and western reaches of the rajadom was justifiable. As Metzner implies, it might well have been the case that as the population and population density of the central region increased through time, older and larger tana might have fragmented into smaller domains with the result that the number of tana in the region increased in the course of Sikka’s history. If this were the case, we glimpse a dynamic and changing array of domains, which is in marked contrast with the situation in Tana ’Ai, whose oral histories represent the domains of the region as unchanged since their creation.

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