It would be simple enough, but somewhat facile, to assume that local states and the territorial categories and institutions that attend them arose on Flores—and elsewhere in eastern Indonesia—when and where local communities came into sustained contact with Europeans. Certainly Europeans played significant roles in the development of local states in the archipelago of Nusa Tenggara Timur. Officers of the Dutch Government, for example, intervened in local affairs to nominate one house or another as a ruling house. But it is less clear that Europeans caused the rise of states. In any case, attributing the advent of states to the influence of Europeans does not answer the question of why it was that states arose in some places but not in others (even though those non-state regions came at some stage in their histories under the influence of or were incorporated into states). It is the case that places that experienced long and continuous contact with Europeans came to have local rulers. Examples in eastern Indonesia include Larantuka (Portuguese and Dutch) and Roti and parts of south-western Timor (Dutch). But it is less clear why communities such as Sikka, which had occasional but probably not continuous contact with the Portuguese and Dutch before the Dutch established a permanent governmental presence on the island, would have developed state structures.

In considering this question we should bear in mind two facts. Firstly, there were large-scale states in Indonesia that predated the arrival of Europeans in South-East Asia. Secondly, while the societies of eastern Indonesia were to some degree remote from the western Indonesian archipelago and mainland South-East Asia, where such states thrived in pre-European times, they were not cut off from communication with those ancient centres. Indeed, through maritime trade, courts and kingdoms such as Srivijaya, Majapahit and Mataram exerted profound and lasting influences on quite distant communities, which were neither part of their territories nor under their direct rule. In a most useful work on trade and state development in South-East Asia between 1000 and 1500 AD, Hall commented:

By the thirteenth century this Western demand [for South-East Asian spices] had greatly enhanced the commercial importance of Southeast Asia as a source of trade goods in Western eyes and as the source of valuable spices in particular. … During this time merchants based on the Java coast carried on two kinds of external trade, a trade with East and West (primarily with India and China) in spices and other luxury goods, and an export-import trade in rice to the Moluccas and to other parts of the eastern and western archipelago in exchange for spices and cloth. … Java’s success as the intermediary of the international spice trade was based on a mutual dependency that came to exist between Java and the islands of the eastern archipelago. (Hall 1985: 209-10)

Hall identifies a trade network in the Java Sea as one of five South-East Asian trade zones that arose between 1000 and 1500 AD, one that ‘included the Lesser Sunda Islands, the Moluccas, Banda, Timor, the western coast of Borneo, Java, and the southern coast of Sumatra’ (Hall 1985: 226). He goes on to say: ‘The new east Java-based state of Majapahit that came into existence at the end of the thirteenth century established a loose hegemony over the eastern and western archipelago’ (ibid.).

In other words, models for local states in eastern Indonesia predate the European era in eastern Indonesia. Trade networks would have served not only as media for the exchange of goods, but also of ideas. While Sikka itself may not have played a central role in these networks, its location near the epicentre of an arc from south Sulawesi through the Banda Sea to Timor, which was part of those networks, would have guaranteed that its people were exposed to the people and ideas of other parts of Indonesia. When exploring the histories of eastern Indonesian states it may be fruitful to keep in mind that, whatever influence the Europeans might have had on the development of eastern Indonesian states, their origins and underlying structures might have been Indonesian.

In central Sikka, the evolution of a large number of village domains into a single polity under the rule of a raja from Sikka Natar would have required the Ata Sikka to reconceptualise categories of territory. This reconceptualisation, like much culture change in Sikka, involved not so much the redefinition of tana and negeri as the addition of a new concept of territory and new territorial categories. Thus, in 200 years of history, the Ata Sikka acquired kampung (BI: ‘village’), kerajaan (BI: ‘rajadom’), desa (BI: ‘village-based municipality’), kecamatan (BI: ‘district’), and kabupaten (BI: ‘regency’), all of which were coeval with new institutions of government and administration. The tana, negeri and natar of the older Sikka had no boundaries; none, at least, until the first map-makers arrived on the scene. Although 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—the reconceptualisation of the idea of territory by the addition of the concept of territory as bounded landscape to the early concept of territory as places within the fluctuating realm of a local centre of ritual power would have been considerable. It involved a shift from a social world made up of many centres of local, ritual power to that of a polity in which the raja bore a singular power that, while delegated through new institutions of government, overrode the powers of the old local centres. In those centuries, the Sikkanese brought about a profound shift from a polycentric and polycosmic to a monocentric and monocosmic culture.

Unlike the older domains, under Dutch administration, the rajadom came to be bounded. The boundaries of the rajadom necessarily implied territories of similar constitution beyond those boundaries, and thus a sense of Sikka as a part of Flores and as a part of a larger political entity. The rajadom introduced new institutions that evolved mutually with the new concepts and a new hierarchy of officeholders whose authority encompassed all the old domains. Thus a wholly new system of status and prestige came into being within which, in later years, the authority and power of district officers and ministers in the raja’s government all but completely eclipsed those of the ritual leaders of the domains. The old offices of tana pu’ang and ritual specialists survived, but their main function came to be the legitimation of the new order. It may be worth quoting here an observation I made in one of my earliest publications on Sikka:

There is a striking similarity between the character of the ritual office of tana pu’ang in Sikka [Natar] and the Dae Langgak of the Rotinese domains. In Sikka, as on Roti, the tana pu’ang claims priority of authority because of earlier presence. The present tana pu’ang of Sikka Natar recounts that his forebears actually created the Sikkanese rajadom by nominating one Sikkanese lineage as that of the ratu [raja]. ^[38] As on Roti, the Sikkanese tana pu’ang, except in his role as ritual lord of the earth, is treated by members of the community (especially by those of the noble lineages) as socially inferior and something of a buffoon (Fox 1980: 109). To be sure, the office of the tana pu’ang in Sikka Natar has survived the institution of the rajadom by many years. (Lewis 1988: 318, footnote 9)

Although there are men in the villages of central Sikka who still claim the position, few modern Sikkanese can identify the tana pu’ang of their home villages. Yet it is the case that, in modern Maumere, events occasionally occur in which it is necessary for someone to act in the capacity of tua adat (ritual specialist). When such an event occurs it is rare for anyone with a link to one of the old ceremonial systems of central Sikka to serve. Most frequently, a knowledgeable retired schoolteacher or other student of Sikkanese history and culture assumes the role of tana pu’ang on occasions such as the funerals and marriages of influential people. ^[39] Thus the concept of the tana pu’ang as efficacious ritualist who personifies the order of a domain persists in modern times among the most sophisticated Sikkanese and in a society whose contemporary political and economic structure is that of a kabupaten derived from a rajadom.