Table of Contents
The first task in this paper is to locate the problem at hand within a theoretical framework that identifies its significance. [1] I begin with an examination of the idea of land and domain among the Rotinese. My specific focus is on the central domain (nusak) of Termanu on the island of Roti itself. Although there is considerable linguistic and cultural variation among the domains of the island, the Rotinese share a basic understanding about the nature of their domains. They have all been subjected to similar formative influences. Among the domains of Roti, Termanu was the domain selected by the Dutch East India Company to establish its strategic presence in the second half of the 17th century and, as a consequence, through much of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was politically and socially paramount in developments on the island.
Nearly one third of the Rotinese population now lives on the island of Timor, having begun migrating there in the early 19th century. Although the Rotinese have brought to Timor many ideas of identity based on the particular domain from which they originated, they have not formed new domains (nusak) on Timor. This fact is itself significant and suggests that the nusak was a particular historical formation. Such a formation could not be replicated culturally in the new conditions the Rotinese encountered on Timor in the 19th century.
Having considered Rotinese ideas of land and territory, I will extend my analysis to two societies on the island of Timor: the Atoni Pah Meto who are also known as the Dawan, the dominant population of West Timor, and the Tetun, particularly the southern Tetun, whose centre in Wehali is regarded by many Timorese as the ritual centre of the island. For purposes of comparison, I focus on the domain of Amanuban among the Atoni. This domain rose to considerable political prominence, particularly in the 19th century, when it successfully resisted Dutch colonial incursions into the mountains of West Timor. For the southern Tetun, I consider Wehali itself, whose ritual head was regarded by the Dutch as Kaiser (Keizer) and by the Portuguese as Emperor (Imperador) of the island of Timor. Wehali was the ritual centre of a network of tributary states, which the Dutch and Portuguese regarded as paramount to the political organisation of the island.
At the outset of this paper, it is important to note that land and territory in eastern Indonesia are oriented space. On Timor, this orientation is based on two primary axes: an east-west axis (in line with the ‘path’ of the sun) and another crosscutting axis, which is, depending on the lie of the land, generally north-south. Thus the ‘head’ of the land is to the east; the ‘tail’ to the west. These axes and the values associated with them are part of the origin structures of the societies of Timor and are implicit in the local understanding of origin narratives. What constitutes the idea of the ‘centre’, however, varies among these societies and is usually constructed by reference to the categories of up/down or inside/outside. Subtly but invariably, the centre is given either a ‘male’ or ‘female’ symbolic valency. Wehali insists on an emphatic self-definition as ‘centre’ and ‘female.’
In the communicative context of eastern Indonesia, to focus on any category prompts consideration of the dyadic sets within which that category occurs. Critical knowledge in the societies of the region is invariably encoded in formal pairs of semantic terms whose relation to one another provides an understanding of the cultural sense of both terms. [2] The ritual languages relied on to recount the most fundamental cultural knowledge are expressed in dyadic, profoundly poetic forms of speaking (see Fox 1988).