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7. A Short History of Indonesia
Adat of the Archaic Indonesians
WC 3862 The motto of the modern Indonesian state is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, a Sanskrit phrase meaning Unity in Diversity. The diversity of Indonesia is immediately
apparent in a country where the people live on hundreds of islands, separated by shallow, often dangerous seas and speak a Babel of languages and dialects. Despite this, attempts to unify the people into a cohesive nation these past fifty or so years have been surprisingly successful. Foremost among these attempts has been the development of the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, evolved from a lingua franca of the archipelago with help from linguists, politicians and most recently, the media. Dayak drawing on bamboo container showing village life in the after-life1
It is not political or economic unity, however, which is the underlying theme of Indonesian life. Rather, it is a deep seated value placed on harmony among all persons and in all aspects of life. This is a value elements of which have been inherited from the very ancient past, probably from the Neolithic and perhaps even earlier, and which took form during the early metal and megalithic phases of their history as the Austronesian people settled in the archipelago. It is a value which underlies some indefinable and mysterious thing Indonesians call adat, a principal of life which the dictionaries translate as “culture” or “tradition” but which has a far greater binding power over Indonesians than mere custom. In the next part of this course we will be looking at the influence upon the Indonesian archipelago of the Buddhist and Hindu cultures of India and the formation of increasingly powerful polities, principally in Java and Sumatra. 1 Catalogue of Art of the Archaic Indonesians, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts 1982, p. 8. The bamboo container was collected in 1904. Much of this Unit is taken from entries in this catalogue.
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But even there ⎯ and certainly elsewhere ⎯ the indigenous Indonesian adat remained the principal force binding the ordinary people together and colouring all they did even when overtly honouring foreign gods. So now, before we move on to Indonesia in historic times, I will try to sum up some of the manifestations of adat and those aspects of the peoples’ lives which can be said to be truly indigenous and in the next Unit, take a brief look at the arts of the archaic Indonesians. A totality of culture
On my first visit to Indonesia I spent some time in Java and then made a short visit to Bali, travelling there by bus from Surabaja to Denpasar. After leaving Eastern Java we crossed the Bali Straits by ferry to Gilimanuk and proceeded, on rather bumpy roads, eastwards towards the capital, Denpasar. We hadn’t gone very far
when I was struck by how different the houses were from those in Java and perhaps even more noticeable, by the different layout of the villages. There was a kind of open square with houses built around what I took for granaries in the middle. These were raised up on stilts with wooden platforms built in between the stilts. From what I could see from the bus window this was where the village men congregated, sitting and chatting with each other while young children ran and played all around. Further east however, the architecture changed once more, giving way to what most people would recognise as traditional Balinese buildings and the Bali-‐Hindu temples with their elaborate gateways and temple roofs. Later, I came to realise that although I had seen the differences, underneath the veneer the concept of village life was the same. Despite differences in layout and architectural design, the village everywhere was an entity, the world in which its inhabitants lived and with them, the spirits of their ancestors, their gods and guiding spirits, and all this despite the upper layer comprising Indonesian law coupled with Islam in Java and Hinduism in Bali. Dr. W. Stör, in his Foreword to the catalogue of an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in 19822 wrote:
The most important thing is the “totality” of the old culture. This manifests itself in each group in the form of a concept of a harmony of reality and order. This prevails all the way from the creation of the
2 Op. cit. p.11
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Cosmos and the miracles of the gods to daily economic necessities of village life, dealing also with forms of civilization and social organization. It follows that our Western systems of classification into sharply defined spheres are not applicable here. The culture of an Indonesian people forms a whole, although this unity cannot at first be comprehended. It is only possible to try to discern it with the aid of primordial manifestations of the life and culture of these people.
The village is the Universe Dr Stör also observed:
The old Indonesian villages are self-sufficient closed units which provide the framework for the life of the inhabitants. They are the centre of their existence, the basis of their economy, and the pole of their thinking and actions. They are the centre of their universe3.
Utom village, Baliem Valley, Irian Jaya.
In the distant past each village was politically autonomous although where necessity, kinship and other ties made it possible, sometimes two or more communities might join together into a larger self-‐governing unit. For the most part, however, the social pyramid was probably fairly flat, power and prestige seeming to have been determined by age and experience, kinship relationships, popularity and possibly a touch of charisma. In the Neolithic and early metal phases, there was little evidence of power hierarchies, the prevailing authority being then, as even now, what archaeologists and anthropologists call primus inter pares or “first among equals”. This follows on from the system of land ownership in which land, or territory, was vested in the clan or village so that the individual only had the right to exploit it according to his needs in his lifetime. This system of community ownership of the land necessitated two other features of Indonesian life. One was a system known as gotong royong and the other, as musjawat. The first, gotong royong, according to the dictionary4, means “mutual cooperation” or “mutual aid” but digging a little deeper, the
3 Op. cit. p. 11 4 I am using Echols, JM and Shadily, H: An Indonesian-English Dictionary, Cornell University Press, 1965. Note that this uses old system spelling.
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verb from “gotong” means to carry a heavy burden together5, so essentially the term means to shoulder one’s community responsibilities.
Road in Salatiga, Central Java
As an example, when I was in Salatiga in Central Java back in 1969, my hosts’ family asked me if I was coming with them… “Where?” I asked and they replied, “It’s gotong royong… we are all mending the road…” and so off we went, old, young and everyone in
between to a patch of road which clearly needed pot holes filling and some grading and everyone, me included, got stuck in with buckets of soil, shovels and anything else which seemed necessary. This was work on behalf of the village ⎯ actually, an outlying section of the much larger town ⎯ and all who lived there expected to share the work in keeping their little piece of Java in good repair. That this should be done and done on such-‐and-‐such a day had previously been decided by a group of locals and announced by the lurah or headman… These days he has a role within the Indonesian legal system but the role and how it is performed has been handed down the ages from the long ago and remains essentially the function of the village and primus inter pares person acting together. How that council, or any other decision-‐making group, worked is a function of musjawat. In a group made up of equals no one person’s opinion is more important than any other and so, according to musjawat: the debate continues until 100% consensus is reached! Of course such a process is not the most efficient in that for one thing, the debate might have to continue for a very long time before consensus is reached, and for another ⎯ and not uncommon ⎯ the decision ultimately reached might not even be the one originally scheduled. Equally true, although inefficient in time in an economic sense, this process is very efficient in finding the solution agreeable to everyone ⎯ ie,
there is no disgruntled out-‐voted minority at the end of the process. This latter, Western-‐style outcome would not be harmonious and harmony is the ultimate objective. Waringin tree, Bali
This harmony is not only among the villagers but essentially among gods, the living and
most importantly, the ancestors. The village in which one lives is a kind of
5 the verb is mengotong – see entry in above.
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middle earth, somewhere between the upper and lower worlds which owes its existence to a gift from the gods to the founder of the first village. This first village, nowadays usually enshrined in myth, was founded by the ancestor of the clan; as village populations grew, so new daughter villages were founded and so on, down the generations. When a new village was founded, some stones from the previous village were taken to the new location and rituals performed to propitiate the local earth spirits who actually owned the land. To commemorate this and to mark the origin of the village, a tree was often planted. This tree was the waringin ⎯ or banyan tree6 ⎯ which is probably more familiar in its Indian context because it was beneath such a tree the Lord Buddha preached. Other markers of the centre of the village (the navel of the village) can include a forked pole or, in some places, a statue of the founder.
Asmat Bis Pole, late 1950s Omadesep village, Irian Jaya
Province, Indonesia7
Perhaps the most spectacular of all ancestor poles are made by the Asmat people of Irian Jaya. These masterpieces are called bis poles. They are made…
….. in only a limited area of the Asmat region, bis poles were, and are, created as the focal points of a memorial feast honoring individuals who have recently died and become ancestors. Each figure on the poles represents and is named for a specific deceased individual. In the past, the poles also served to remind the living that the dead must be avenged. In Asmat cosmology, death was always caused by an enemy either directly in war or by malevolent magic. Each death created an imbalance that had to be corrected through the death of an enemy. After a number of individuals in the village had died, the male elders would decide to stage a bis feast. In the past, the feast was held in conjunction with a headhunting raid. Today, the Asmat no longer practice warfare and a bis feast may be staged to alleviate a specific crisis or in connection with male initiation.
Sadly, after the feast, the bis pole is carried off into the jungle and allowed to rot. The one shown in the illustration is part of the collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is over 5 meters tall. Traditional life was held together by an extensive kinship system in which exogamous marriage (that is, one married outside one’s own “clan”) was
6 Ficus benjamina 7 flickr.com/photos/wallyg/2586203586/
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essential, other connections being deemed incestuous. Who one married was a matter for the village to decide because more than mutual attraction was usually involved, including defence pacts, land and water arrangements, and of course, continuing cooperation between groups. Children, according to the archaic Indonesian notion, were a gift of great price from the woman-‐giving group to the woman-‐receiving group. The latter group of course then owed some kind of marriage portion or bride-‐price in return but no matter how much they paid, they could never equal the gift the woman-‐giving group had made to them. Thus the debt of gratitude, of consideration and respect, became a binding force upon the group into which the woman had married. Although as I said earlier, in general the social structure of archaic communities ⎯ particularly in very early pre-‐historic times ⎯ was very flat, every person being on much the same level as every other. However, as time went by, and certainly in historic times, in some archaic communities a social hierarchy gradually evolved. In these, “noble” families regarded themselves as above the ordinary people, a position they occupied usually justified in some kind of religious terms and often because of relationship to ancestral figures, including the founder of the village. In the next section, we will see how this escalated as the centuries rolled by until kingdoms were established and some rulers became god-‐kings. The “kings” of later polities had their origins in what some anthropologists8 have called “Big Men”, that is men ⎯ and sometimes women ⎯ who stood out for one reason or another from the rest of the citizens of the village or community. These “Big Men” sometimes went on in life to establish such reputations that in death they were considered
among the Ancestors who were not just highly respected as ancestors had to be, but also worshipped or in some other way, propitiated and asked to intervene on behalf of the living in matters of importance. A pig ritually killed with an arrow in preparation for a feast ⎯ Yali villagers, Angguruk, Irian Jaya9
8 Sahlins, Marshall (1963). "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia". In Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5/285-‐303. Online version: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22292/Marshall-‐Sahlins-‐Poor-‐Man-‐Rich-‐Man-‐BigMan-‐Chief-‐Political-‐Types-‐in-‐Melanesia-‐and-‐Polynesia 9 Photo: Albrecht G. Schaefer
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Feasting was an important part of traditional village life. This was not just a party but a large-‐scale consumption of the community’s resources. In other parts of the world, as among the Northwest Indians of British Colombia where the term originated, such conspicuous consumption has been called a “potlatch”. There, this was usually undertaken to enhance the prestige and social standing of one Big Man but in archaic Indonesia it was for the benefit of the whole community. Although the Dutch during their rule in what was the Netherlands East Indies attempted to stamp out this practice on the grounds that it reduced the prosperity of the place, feasting continued in some places on a grand scale.10 Although often organised around the death rituals of an important person, marriage and other significant social occasions were also times for such communal excess. As we saw earlier when looking at ceremonies surrounding death and burial among the Toraja, sacrifice was commonly part of the ritual ⎯ in the Toraja case, as in many others, of a special buffalo. In the distant past, human sacrifice was also practised, including the sacrifice of slaves who were generally prisoners taken in warfare.
What the Dutch objected to was not so much the sacrifice of one special buffalo but the usual practice of slaughtering many more as the festival continued, in some cases severely reducing the size of herds. Since these herds were the capital of the village or “clan”, feasts on this scale really did reduce the prosperity of the region. Ibiroma, Baliem Valley, Irian Jaya. The men do the cooking?
Feasts on such grand scales have all but disappeared in modern Indonesia although it is still customary to hold what are called selamatan to mark important events such as circumcisions, marriages and even the arrival of a welcome visitor. These are not just family parties but communal events ⎯ more like a neighbourhood party to which all the extended family and close neighbours contribute. People who belong to the community but are living far away will often make long journeys in order to participate in what is a communal responsibility because it involves not just a good time but more importantly, promoting the well-‐being of the community. Much of what features in adat stems from the kinship system which seems to have been inherited from the very distant past. We Europeans (and especially 10 Today such events are best known in the highlands of New Guinea.
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those of us of British descent) are accustomed to a patrilineal system in which people take their membership of a family from their father. This is particularly so among those of us of Norman descent, the Normans inventing the surnames we now use. Those of us who are of Scots descent might know that descent in Celtic Scotland was through both mother and father, although men inherited their membership of their clan from their father and patrilineage tended to take precedence. We also know of matrilineal cultures in which descent is reckoned in the female line. One of the best known of the matrilineal cultures is the Minangkabau of western Sumatra; less well-‐known are the Wemale of Seram Island, about 9,000 of whom live in villages in the centre of the island, and the Ngada of Flores where:
Men handle politics, but Ngada women control all family property. Name, status, and possessions all descend through the female line, and nothing of value is bought or sold without a consensus among clan women. Traditional Ngada houses contain a room where the women can discuss family business. These meetings are highly secretive; the rooms are windowless to prevent eavesdropping, and nothing said in the sanctum is repeated outside11.
In general, kinship in archaic Indonesia was what is known as a cognatic system, that is one in which descent is reckoned in both the male and female lines. One of the results of this system is that what we would call cousins are regarded as close to the individual as his or her brothers and sisters and are as entitled to inherit from uncles and aunts as are their biological offspring. As a consequence in Medieval Java for example, when there were individuals styling themselves as “kings” or “rajas” the succession was often not dynastic, the genealogies of the people entitled to inherit under the cognatic system being less important than the community’s assessment of their sakti or spiritual power which often as not, determined the successful contender’s command over the army and other resources of the time. This sakti12, which is better known in Oceania as mana, is a personal spiritual power of great significance for anyone who wants to rule others. We might consider it some form of charisma or “leadership qualities” but there is more to it than just individual personalities. Many events are taken as symbolic that this or that person has notable sakti and with this, has the favour of gods or spirits or other supernatural powers. One such sign or symbol which had personal significance to me was the way a seemingly simple event was read by friends when I first arrived in Bali and they met me at the bus station: it was raining! Now I more or less expected it to rain often in Bali but 11 See: http://www.threadsoflife.com/textile.asp?id=floresisland#none. Threads of Life is an organisation dedicated to preserving the traditional weaving skills of Indonesia. 12 Also the more abstract form of the word, kesaktian
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apparently not so in the dry season… The rain which greeted my arrival signified (a) the local gods or spirits were pleased to see me there (just who or what these were was never explained); and (b) my sakti must be high13. My hosts went on to explain what a good omen rain was on arrival or departure. “It always rained when President Soekarno came to Bali” they told me, reminding me Soekarno’s mother was Balinese (and making me feel even more important!) According to these ancient beliefs, a person’s soul or spirit is their life force which inhabits us while we are alive and departs like breath on the air when we die. Just where it goes varies from place to place but in general it is thought to rejoin the god of the upper world. But, as Dr. Stöhr reminds us, this life force
…given by the gods also inhabits, in different degree, the animals, the plants, the stars, the mountains, the rivers and their sources, weapons, tools and utensils, even the customs and laws14.
This kind of belief was called animism by the great English anthropologist, Sir Edward Burnet Tylor (1832-‐1917) and many still regard this as the earliest ⎯ ie, most primitive ⎯ form of religion. If this is an attempt to explain things, as science does today, then it is indeed primitive but in most other aspects it is an extraordinarily complex and sophisticated way of linking all aspects of life into a meaningful whole. One of the best examples of such a system of metaphysical thought is the Shinto religion in Japan which may or may not have had a common origin with animism in Southeast Asia. In Shinto, everything, especially things which are wondrous, beautiful or serve their function very well, are believed to be the habitations of nature spirits. So, for example, waterfalls, unusual rock formations, mountains, tea bowls, buckets and even paper bags could all be reverential objects. But it must be clearly understood that the objects themselves are not worshipped or any offerings are not to the object per se: the reverence is to the spirit temporarily inhabiting it ⎯ it is but the spirit’s house15. One of the explanations why Shinto is so attuned to Nature and extraordinarily responsive to beauty is that 13 Once, when I worked for the Immigration Department back in the mid-‘60s I had to visit a small paw-paw growing settlement in Queensland. I drove the several miles over bad dirt road into the village just a few minutes ahead of the storm which broke the long drought. “You brought the rain” the locals all declared and treated me like a king for the three days I was stranded there. 14 Op. cit. p. 14 15 Christians speak of a church as “the house of God”. They might show respect and even reverence towards the building but they don’t worship it.
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the Jomon people lived in close association with Nature for thousands of years and so refined their aesthetics uninterrupted by outside influences16.
Tea bowl by Suzuki Osamu
The belief that some people can be in such close harmony with the spirit world that they can actually influence it led of course to the practice of magic and shamanism. Throughout archaic Indonesia and even into the present is an acceptance of magic, both “white” and “black”.
Learned people with special relationships to the spirit world are called dukun. They are found most commonly in Java, Bali, Madura and among Dayak communities. Of all these it is the Madurese who are the most feared and believed to have the strongest black magic.
Toba Batak shaman's staff "tunggal panaluan"17
Not all dukuns perform the same functions but among those abilities for which they are famous (and feared) are their medicinal and curative skills for which they can use herbs, various inanimate objects of animal body parts, trance communication with the spirit world, offerings and of special interest, the kris, the short ceremonial weapon common among Malay-‐type people which is believed to be endowed, as we will see later, with very strong spiritual powers.
Dukuns can also be called upon to perform exorcisms, divination and soothsaying, manufacture charms and perform blessings, and other varieties of sorcery. Most dukuns are highly respected and believed to be
benevolent ⎯ as is certainly the case of the midwife, the term for which in Bahasa Indonesia is dukun beranak, where “anak” means “child” and the “ber-‐“ is a prefix indicating association or connection.
16 For a detailed discussion of Jomon prehistory and Japanese aesthetics see my Ancient Shells and Gods of Clay – The Magical World of the Jomon, in my U3A course “Genes, Genetics and the Migrations of Man”, on my web site at www.bobhay.org. 17 http://www.tribalmania.com/BATAKSTAFFFINE.htm
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Archaic Indonesia was a world in which the village was a manifestation on earth of the cosmos in which every member had a deeply ingrained obligation to preserve a harmonious relationship among neighbours and family, natural forces, animals and gods, spirits and ancestors. Ancestors were especially important because they knew everyone of their descendents and their spirits lingered nearby so they could keep a watchful eye on the world below. For many villagers, these spirits of the ancestors lived in the waringin trees or other trees surrounding their homes.
The spirits of ancestors hover above the living in the waringin trees.
These are a fig, Ficus benjamina, and grow to huge size, dropping aerial roots which touching the ground, become trunks in their own right. In this way a waringin becomes a family of trees, all
related and interconnected as are the members of the village in which the ancestor is like the old, central trunk.
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