filsafat-budaya- protestan central sulawesi

Department of History, National University of Singapore

Reorganizing the Cosmology: The Reinterpretation of Deities and Religious Practice byProtestants in Central Sulawesi, IndonesiaAuthor(s): Lorraine V. AragonReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Sep., 1996), pp. 350-373Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Department of History, National University ofSingaporeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20062747 .

Accessed: 28/02/2013 05:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and Department of History, National University of Singapore are collaboratingwith JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 05:23:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dhnus

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dhnus

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20062747?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 27, 2 (September 1996): 350-373 ? 1996 by National University of Singapore

Reorganizing the Cosmology: The Reinterpretation of Deities and Religious Practice by Protestants in Central

Sulawesi, Indonesia

LORRAINE V. ARAGON

East Carolina University

Central Sulawesi highlanders have reorganized their precolonial religious ideas throughout the twentieth century to accommodate a new Christian affiliation. Their Protestant concepts of God, Jesus, Satan, and divine justice, however, also incorporate pre-Christian notions

about ancestral spirits, local deities, and theodicy. This indigenization of Protestant doctrine and practice continues as an active process of negotiation between pre-Christian precedents

and postcolonial teachings or political experiences which privilege world religion over

indigenous religion. In this article, I delineate the background of western Central Sulawesi

missionization and analyze how highlanders in the Tobaku region have made Salvation

Army Protestantism compatible with their own deity constructs, moral imperatives, and

modern ethnic identity. Central Sulawesi Protestantism is viewed here not as a syncretic

religion of novice and peripheral Christians but as a viable Southeast Asian sect of a

multi-faceted global Christianity which is continually modified to support both the spiritual and political needs of its congregations.

Central Sulawesi highlanders such as the Tobaku (see map) have transposed and re

labelled their pre-Christian categories of deities and ancestor spirits to conform to

missionary-supplied categories such as God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, and Satan. To contend

with local social problems that are not directly solved by missionary doctrines, they

extrapolate from pre-Christian ethics and cosmology. Their particular Christian practices,

unorthodox from the viewpoints of Western missionaries, need not be viewed as deficient

"rationalization" or incomplete conversion. Rather, they can be seen as active theological

interpretations that fill in open or unresolved aspects of Christian biblical canon.1

Since the 1960s, anthropological writings on religious transition in Indonesia have

described minority peoples' reassessments of their own cosmologies in response to the

The fieldwork upon which this essay is based was carried out in 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1993. I am grateful to the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program for predoctoral research grants in 1986 and 1987, the Indonesian Institute for Science (LIPI) and Tadulako University in Palu for research permits. Important additional funding was granted by the Association for Asian

Studies in 1993 and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1994. I also

wish to thank the Central Sulawesi people and missionaries whose discussions are presented and

interpreted here. I am indebted to Cornelia Kammerer, F.K. Lehman, Clark E. Cunningham and

Mahir Saul for their critical comments on an early draft.

*On the Weberian concept of religious rationalization, see Clifford Geertz, '"Internal Conversion'

in Contemporary Bali", in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 170

89. For a discussion of "incomplete conversion" among missionized Sumbanese, see Janet Hoskins,

"Entering the Bitter House: Spirit Worship and Conversion in West Sumba", in Indonesian Religions in Transition, ed. Rita Smith Kipp and Susan Rodgers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987),

pp. 136-60. For an analogous case of Burmese strategies for elaborating incompletely specified Buddhist doctrines, see F.K. Lehman, "Burmese Religion", in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M.

Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 574-80.

350



Reorganizing the Cosmology 351

Tobaku Highlands, Sulawesi

Indonesian government's active promotion of world religions (agama in Indonesian). These discussions demonstrate that Indonesian ethnic minorities often evaluate the extent

to which aspects of their ancestral traditions parallel features of Christianity or Islam, and

then draw on rhetoric from the world religions to justify and expand their own cosmological ideas.2

By contrast, Tobaku highlanders of Central Sulawesi do not generally discuss or

reevaluate their pre-Christian cosmology. Having experienced Salvation Army missions

and schools in their region since 1918, Tobaku people assume that their religious practices are identical, at least ideally, to the practices of Western Protestants. In other words, one

2See Jane M. Atkinson, "Religions in Dialogue: The Construction of an Indonesian Minority

Religion", American Ethnologist 10,4 (1983): 684-96; Hoskins, "Entering the Bitter House", pp.

136-60; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "A Rhetoric of Centers in a Religion of the Periphery", in

Indonesian Religions in Transition, pp. 187-210; Joseph A. Weinstock, "Kaharingan: Life and

Death in Southern Borneo", in Indonesian Religions in Transition, pp. 71-97.



352 Lorraine V. Aragon

difference between the contemporary Tobaku situation and those reported in some other

missionized regions of Indonesia is the degree to which the Tobaku have come to identify their beliefs with those of foreign Christian missionaries. Their affiliation with Christianity also entails strategic ethnic and political identifications through which Central Sulawesi

highlanders negotiate their status with respect to the nation's Muslim majority.3 The extent of Tobaku identification with Western Protestantism was illustrated when

a troubled indigenous minister asked why he had not been invited to the three-day and

seven-day mortuary rites for a recently deceased American missionary. The Central

Sulawesi minister and his wife were puzzled when they heard that Americans do not hold

three-day, seven-day, or any other extended series of mortuary ceremonies. Not only have

Tobaku customs been reinterpreted to become acceptable to missionary doctrines, but the

degree to which foreign Christian concepts and practices are assumed to match Tobaku

ancestral traditions is extensive. Tobaku reinterpretations of precolonial cosmology are

based on the premise that Christianity operates similarly to their pre-Christian religion, unless explicitly stated otherwise by foreign missionaries.

Although they have largely renounced their pre-Christian rituals, Tobaku individuals

maintain much of the pre-Christian moral logic associated with earlier ritual ceremonies.

The term "moral logic" here refers to the principles of necessary outcome of divinely

regulated events. Although the names and categories of pre-Christian supernatural beings have been adjusted to suit Salvation Army doctrines, in general the anticipated actions

and reactions of supernatural beings have not been altered. Tobaku people account for

uncommon events such as severe illnesses, accidental deaths, or exceptional harvests

according to a set of moral criteria that are drawn from the pre-Christian cosmology and

canon of ethics. Within a discourse of unquestioned obedience to both missionary and

government goals of monotheism, religious reinterpretation occurs by renaming

supernatural forces, and superimposing a set of standardized Protestant rites onto the

indigenous ritual calendar.4

Regional and Ethnographic Background

The fieldwork on which this discussion is based was carried out primarily among the

Tobaku people who reside in the southwestern section of the Kulawi district (kecamatan) of Central Sulawesi. Central Sulawesi is the largest of Sulawesi's four provinces with an

area of 68,033 square kilometres. The provincial capital is Palu, a coastal port located

deep within Palu Bay. Despite its 3.5 per cent growth rate, due in part to government

transmigration programs that move people from overpopulated islands to more sparsely

populated ones, the province's population averages only 22 persons per square kilometre.

This demographic figure, moreover, is misleading because almost 90 per cent of the

population dwells along the coasts, leaving the mountainous interior much more lightly

3Rita Kipp analyses the intersection of ethnie, religious, and class identities of North Sumatra

Karo people in Dissociated Identities: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in an Indonesian Society (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). See also Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) on how the Meratus of South

Kalimantan meld local and national rhetoric to construct an identity of ethnic marginality.

4See also Lorraine Aragon, "Revised Rituals in Central Sulawesi: The Maintenance of Traditional

Cosmological Concepts in the Face of Allegiance to World Religion", Anthropological Forum 6,3

(1991-92): 371-84.




populated. Approximately 64 per cent of the land is still forested, and over 95 per cent

of the province's income is earned from timber, principally ebony, exports.5 The majority of Central Sulawesi highlanders are swidden horticulturalists who cultivate

rice, corn, tubers, and other vegetables on steep mountain spurs near inland headwaters.

These foods are supplemented by forest game, river fish, and occasional supplies bought with income from cash crops such as coffee and cacao. Kinship is reckoned bilaterally with a preference for uxorilocal residence. Usufruct land rights to swidden fields and

village houses usually are inherited by women, generally through female lines. In contrast

to the coastal Central Sulawesi populations who adopted Islam through contacts with

South Sulawesi traders, Central Sulawesi highland groups affiliated with Christianity

following Dutch and post-Independence government efforts to establish world religion among isolated interior peoples.

The Tobaku speak a dialect of Uma, an Austronesian language used by over 15,000

people whose ancestral territories are located along the highland tributaries of the Lariang River.6 Much of this discussion about Tobaku Protestantism applies equally to other

groups of Uma-speakers, such as the Pipikoro and Tole'e, who reside adjacent to the

Tobaku in the southern portion of the Kulawi district. All these groups commonly refer to themselves as "those who use Uma language" (topo'uma). This analysis of religious

change also pertains more generally to highland Christians of the other Kaili-Pamona

language groups.7

The closest neighbours of the Tobaku people are the Moma-speaking Kulawi people

living farther north in the Kulawi district. These linguistically related peoples shared

many patterns of subsistence, material culture, and cosmology even before their common

conversion by European Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century. Although these small-scale, segmentary highland populations are referred to in the colonial era

literature as West Toraja (or Toradja), the highlanders of Central Sulawesi are linguistically and culturally distinct from the Toraja of South Sulawesi, and they do not view themselves as Toraja people.8

In general outline, the pre-Christian cosmology of the Tobaku people shared many features with cosmologies of other Indonesian outer island regions before their conversion to world religions. The concept of outer islands in Indonesia was devised by Dutch

5Gregory Acciaioli, "Introducing Central Sulawesi", in Sulawesi: The Celebes, ed. Toby A.

Volkman and Ian Caldwell (Berkeley and Singapore: Periplus Editions, 1990), p. 155.

6On Uma dialects and territories, see Michael P. Martens, "Dialects of Uma" (Unpublished

manuscript in the files of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1985). 7See Donald Barr, Sharon G. Barr and C. Salombe, Languages of Central Sulawesi: Checklist,

Preliminary Classification, Language Maps, Wordlists (Ujung Pandang: Hasanuddin University Press, 1979) or J. Noorduyn, A Critical Survey of Studies on the Languages of Sulawesi (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991) for the most complete classifications of Central Sulawesi languages.

8For comparative ethnographic descriptions of the region's ethnic groups and cosmologies, see

A.C. Kruyt, Het Animisme in Den Indischen Archipel fs-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1906) and

De West Toradja's op Midden-Celebes, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Uitgave van de N.V. Noord-Hollandsche

Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1938). Further background on the varied ethnic classifications of Central

Sulawesi groups by the Dutch, South Sulawesi coastal groups, and the indigenes themselves can

be found in Lorraine Aragon, "Divine Justice: Cosmology, Ritual, and Protestant Missionization in

Central Sulawesi, Indonesia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1992), pp. 32-38.



354 lorraine V. Aragon

colonial officials to refer to islands other than Bali, Java, and Madura ? the heavily

populated locations where residents first adopted world religions such as Hinduism and

Islam.9

In outer island cosmologies, the cultural and natural universes, as well as the living and the dead, are in a delicate interdependent balance. Crops, weather, livestock fertility, and other facets of nature are affected beneficially or adversely by the ritual and moral

actions of humans. Like nature spirits and higher deities, ancestors are capable of contacting

living humans and either harming them or intervening positively on their behalf. Respectful behaviour, observance of taboos, and routine sacrificial offerings are necessary to obtain

the assistance of ancestors and deities.

Salvation Army Missionization in Central Sulawesi

The Dutch colonial regime interfered little in Central Sulawesi until 1905 when the

government's new "Ethical Policy" resulted in troops being sent to control or "pacify" the

region.10 Groups in the Kulawi highlands eluded conquest until 1908 when a lowlander

led Dutch troops up a little known mountain pass to attack and defeat the startled

highlanders. Once the Dutch army established sovereignty, European missionaries entered

the region to seek Christian converts and promote economic development and cooperation with Dutch authorities. The Dutch government divided regional responsibility for

missionizing the locals among various interested European churches. Western Central

Sulawesi, including the Kulawi district, was turned over to the Salvation Army because

more prominent Dutch churches such as the Hervormde and Gereformeerde were occupied with areas to the east and south that had been controlled earlier.

The Salvation Army was begun as the East London Christian Revival Society in 1865

when a Wesleyan Methodist preacher named William Booth took his message to the

street people of East London. Booth quickly discovered that these lower class individuals, often alcoholics or scofflaws, were unwelcome in established English churches. When

Booth's roving street evangelism was spurned by Methodist churches in London, Booth

and his wife Catherine founded their own sect. They recognized that this prospective audience was not attracted to the staid atmosphere of conventional churches and organ

music so they created a circus-like environment of tents thrown up in public squares with

vivacious music played on guitars, banjos, trumpets, and bass drums.11 In this context,

William Booth and his wife Catherine preached their message of eternal salvation through Christian faith and discipline to individuals who were considered the most sinful members

of British society. Booth remained doctrinally faithful to Wesleyan principles: belief in both Old and

New Testament scriptures, belief in the Trinity, belief in Original Sin and the atonement

90n the ecological distinctions between "outer" and "inner" islands in Indonesia, see Clifford

Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1963). As many subsequent writers have pointed out, coastal Sumatra

and South Sulawesi are exceptions to the inner versus outer islands pattern to the extent that their

inhabitants already were Muslim and practised wet-rice agriculture by the early colonial era.

10For background on the Dutch Ethical Policy, see Robert van Niel, The Emergence of the

Modern Indonesian Elite (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1960), passim. 1

Minnie L. Carpenter, William Booth: Founder of the Salvation Army (London: Wyvern Books,

1957) and Harry E. Neal, The Hallelujah Army (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1961), pp. 6-7.



A Tobaku Salvation Army Officer, Captain Upe, delivering a sermon at a mountaintop planting ceremony, admonishes villagers to worship the Christian God exclusively and not perform any

traditional animist rituals.

A portrayal of the first Salvation Army missionaries sent to the Pipkoro region of Central Sulawesi,

which was published in the Salvation Army's War Cry newspaper issued 19 April 1924.




of Jesus Christ, belief in the possibility of salvation through faith in and obedience to

Jesus Christ, and belief in a final judgement where the righteous will receive eternal

happiness and the wicked eternal punishment.12 It was less a matter of doctrine than

Booth's constituency and approach that made the Salvation Army a distinctive sect. Since

many of his original followers were alcoholics, Booth eliminated the sacraments, which

he saw as tempting his followers with sips of wine. Salvation Army members were and

are forbidden the consumption of alcohol and tobacco in order to purify their physical and spiritual selves from sinful habits. Booth encouraged, yet disciplined, the charismatic

expression of penitence among his followers by restricting their confessions of faith to

particular moments in the church service when those in attendance were called upon to

volunteer their "witness" to the greatness of the Lord.13 Upon the preacher's request, one

or more Sunday congregation members are asked to stand up and relate a testimonial to

the magnificence of God's role in his or her daily life.

The East London Revival Society changed its name to The Christian Mission and then

in 1878 the founder conceived of the current name, The Salvation Army. The organization's emblematic processional hymn was "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" and Booth found military references in the Bible evocative for the kind of energetic and disciplined movement that

he envisioned.14 Once the new name was chosen, the way to structure and clothe the

organization's members became clear to "General" Booth who began to assign military ranks and adopt used British Army uniforms that later were developed into a distinctive

Salvation Army uniform style.

By the end of the 1880s, Salvation Army congregations or "corps" were opened in

other parts of the British empire and European continent. Given the organization's early statement that "The Salvation Army makes religion where there was no religion before",

missionization in Europe's overseas colonies was a natural step for Salvation Army

expansion.15 In 1909, Alexander W.F. Idenberg, the Governor-General of the East Indies contacted

Gerrit Govaars, the first Dutch Salvation Army officer ever commissioned and the newly

assigned Salvation Army Indonesian territorial commander. Govaars was sent from an

established Salvation Army headquarters in Semarang, Java to assess the possibility of

opening missions among the "pagan Toradjas" of Central Sulawesi. Govaars reported in

a 1970s interview that once he arrived in the Palu Valley he met a German named

Zuppinger who had married a "native" woman. Zuppinger, who could speak a local

language, accompanied Govaars on a journey to Kulawi's central meeting place and

temple where Govaars became "the first Christian to preach the gospel in Kulawi".16 Of

his continued travels into the interior farther south, Govaars said:

From place to place we hired carriers, and so traversed the country. We spoke to the

heads of the tribes. One of them listened interestedly to what I told him about Christ,

12Salvation Army, "Salvationist Doctrines", in The Salvation Army Yearbook 1976 (London:

Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, 1976), p. 240.

13Carpenter, William Booth, p. 47.

14Robert Sandall, "From Mission to Army", Salvation Army Yearbook 1948, pp. 17-18.

15Salvation Army, "What is The Salvation Army?", The Salvation Army Yearbook 1976,

p. 35.

16Melattie Brouwer, "Tanah Toradja: Tour of Reconnaissance", The War Cry (17 Nov. 1973):

4, 8.




serving the Lord and not doing bad things. Then he asked: "Are we allowed to eat

pig's meat?"

Upon my affirmative he said: "Oh well, that is all right. Wild pigs eat our harvest,

so we ought to be allowed to eat pigs."17

These comments, familiar ones to all the pioneering missionaries in Sulawesi,

encapsulate one of the primary objections that highlanders had to Islam. By initial

comparison, the Christian religion seemed less of a dietary hardship. In 1912, a Dutch Salvation Army missionary couple was stationed in Kulawi, and managed to gain some

facility in the local language called Moma. Then, in 1917, a British officer named Leonard

Woodward was sent to the Uma-speaking village of Kantewu, a centre in the Pipikoro

region three days further into the interior.

According to Salvation Army documents, Woodward and the Moma-speaking Dutch Salvation Army officer walked to Kantewu and asked the headman for an audience with

village elders. Since Uma-speakers often have some facility in the Moma language, the Salvation Army officers and their Kulawi assistants were able to convey Woodward's

request for land upon which to build a school and a personal residence. The headman,

although sceptical, agreed, reportedly fearing that the white men might be associated with

powerful spirits. The next morning before they returned to Kulawi, the European ministers treated the sick and wounded of the village, adding to the local people's impression of their extraordinary abilities.18

During the next two decades, Woodward, his wife Maggie, and their Indonesian staff worked to convert the Kantewu and nearby village populations into Salvation Army Christians. They distributed previously unknown goods such as European cloth, white

sugar, beads, candy, soap, matches, and medicines supplied by the Dutch government.19 They also established an elementary school system in which the Malay language was

taught using biblical illustrations as instructive devices. Malay was the language favoured

among the archipelago's coastal traders, and it was utilized by the Dutch government and missions for administration even prior to its selection as the Indonesian national language. With the exception of a few long-distance traders, Pipikoro and Tobaku people did not

know Malay, but Woodward introduced it with the help of teachers trained in other areas.

Missionaries introduced colonial money by giving Dutch coins to children for small tasks and then requesting them back as donations in church.20 Many Tobaku adults still recall how officer Woodward, known colloquially as "Mr. Beard" (Juan Janggo), threw

Dutch coins of low denominations into the rivers to entice children to bathe. Once the children had seized their rewards and emerged from the water, Woodward began religious instruction with pictures.

School students, provided with a half hour of religious teaching prior to each day's lessons, were the most quickly converted.21 Woodward then trained the most promising

17Ibid., p. 4.

18Salvation Army, "A Modern Queen Esther", All the World (Apr. 1924): 55-58; "The First

Training Garrison in Celebes", All the World (May 1925): 176-77; Albert Kenyon, Leonard Goes

East (London: Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, 1952). I9See Lorraine Aragon, "Twisting the Gift: Translating Precolonial into Colonial Exchanges in

Central Sulawesi", American Ethnologist 23,1 (1996): 43-60.

20Salvation Army, All the World (May 1925), p. 177. 21Salvation Army, "Chats with Missionary Officers", The Officer (Jan. 1925): 39-88.



358 Lorraine V Aragon

graduates of his school as teachers and sent them to open more schools in adjacent Uma

speaking regions such as Tobaku. Through solicitations and gifts of imported goods, the

European missionaries gradually sought and gained influence over local aristocrats who were well aware of the mission's political support from the Dutch colonial government.

Although it took Woodward four years to gain his first official convert, by 1931 the

Salvation Army had fifty officers ? both Europeans and locally trained Indonesians ?

working in Central Sulawesi.22 Church meetings were held at 71 locations, and 18 schools were in operation teaching some 1,300 pupils.23

When Indonesia gained independence from Dutch rule after World War II, the first

president, Sukarno, established monotheism (Ketuhanan yang Mahaesa) as one of the

five moral principles (Pancasila) for the newly-formed Indonesian nation. His formulation was a compromise solution aimed to placate both the Muslim majority, some of whom

advocated an Islamic state, and important minority populations such as the Balinese and

Chinese who maintained other religious traditions. Towards the end of his presidency, Sukarno declared that Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism were

to be the officially sanctioned religions.24 Following the 1965 coup that brought Suharto

to the presidency, a few indigenous religious sects have been registered as legitimate

religions under the aegis of Hinduism. Nevertheless, most Indonesian people are encouraged

by government schools, officials, and bureaucratic application forms to affiliate, at least

nominally, with one of the world religions. To some degree, government support for missions and churches in Central Sulawesi

continues to the present. Foreign missionaries enter the country under the rubric of

economic development, medical, and educational programs, as well as for overt church

leadership and development. By the late 1980s, only a few European Salvation Army officers remained in Indonesia (primarily in medical and administrative positions) yet numerous Western families representing the Summer Institute of Linguistics, New Tribes

Mission, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and various

independent churches from the United States, Australia, Canada, and The Netherlands

had been working in highland Central Sulawesi for ten to fifteen years. Salvation Army

officers, now virtually all Indonesian-born, are allowed to distribute birth and marriage certificates for the government, and they continue to operate schools and clinics under

government guidelines in some remote highland regions.

Virtually all of Central Sulawesi's highland groups were active members of one or

another Protestant sect by the 1980s. The Tobaku people, in fact, were so enthusiastic in

their allegiance to the Salvation Army Church that many described themselves cheerfully as "fanatic Christians" (Kristen fanatik), in contrast with devout Muslim fundamentalists.

Often people talked about their beliefs in the period "before religion" (belum agama,

Indonesian) with apparent shame, accepting the missionaries' view that the pre-Christian era was a "dark" (gelap, Indonesian) period, marred by "evil" (jahat, Indonesian) actions

such as headhunting, polygyny, and human sacrifices.

22Salvation Army, The Officer (Jan. 1925): 42; Kenyon, Leonard Goes East, p. 49.

23M. Hatcher, "Soul-hunting among Head-hunters", Salvation Army Yearbook 1932, p. 24.

24Niels Mulder, Mysticism and Everyday Life in Contemporary Java (Singapore: Singapore

University Press, 1978), p. 6.




Christianity and Ethnic Identity

Christianity has become integral to the ethnic identities of Central Sulawesi highlanders as their contact with coastal and foreign groups has increased. In an effort to develop the

Palu Valley region during the early decades of the twentieth century, Bugis merchants and

farmers from South Sulawesi were awarded positions as middlemen by the Dutch colonial

government. Many of these Muslim migrants married into local noble families and

influenced the indigenous Kaili people religiously as well as politically. Members of the

highland Central Sulawesi groups regard themselves as weak minorities when compared with immigrant South Sulawesi groups and coastal residents who have more influence at

the national level. Therefore, Salvation Army affiliation provides the Tobaku and other

highlanders with a useful religious status in the contemporary Central Sulawesi political context. It proclaims their distinctive ethnic differences from the Muslim coastal groups, and their relatively minor differences from the other indigenous highland populations that

belong to different Protestant churches.

Central Sulawesi Christians distinguish themselves from Muslims primarily on the

basis of ritual practices. A Tobaku Salvation Army officer said his child once returned

from school and repeated the statement that Islam is superior to Christianity because

Muslims hold their services in "God's language" (bahasa Tuhan) while Christians use

only "human language" (bahasa manusia), that is, Indonesian. The Tobaku minister

found it humorous that Muslims see Arabic as the supernatural language of the Lord.

Nevertheless, Protestant highlanders often make similar judgements that Christianity is

superior to Islam, for example, because Christianity endorses monogamy or because pigs are preferable to goats. These kinds of religious prejudices signify a mild rivalry between

highland and coastal ethnic groups, yet one that is rarely channelled into overtly hostile

actions.

As noted by many early missionaries in eastern Indonesia, interior highlanders usually favour Christianity over Islam because it does not require them to renounce their favourite

feast food, pork.25 Dietary customs are important symbolic issues in regional assessments

of religious differences that are associated with local economic strategies. Coastal Central

Sulawesi groups relying on marine resources, such as the Kaili, apparently were more

ready to conform to Muslim dietary restrictions in return for the material benefits gained by having Muslim traders and sailors as close allies and kin. Benefiting less from coastal resources and trade, highlanders had few incentives to adopt Islam.

Christian sects besides the Salvation Army now are numerous in the coastal capital of Palu and highland regions of Central Sulawesi. Most of these denominations were

introduced during the last half century by Indonesian migrants from other regions who

preferred to establish branches of their own ethnically identifiable churches (started by foreign missions in other districts) rather than join local Salvation Army congregations. Some Western missionaries note with disapproval that most of the Central Sulawesi Christian denominations are ethnically segregated. They say that this essentially preserves the old "ethnic religions" (agama suku), merely retaining pre-Christian community identity and cosmology in a Christian guise. In this respect, Central Sulawesi highlanders have

25H.R. Weber, The Communication of the Gospel to Illiterates Based on a Missionary Experience in Indonesia (London: SCM Press, 1957), p. 14.




not developed the "dissociated" identities of religious, ethnic, and class affiliation described

by Rita Kipp for the Karo of North Sumatra.26

Nevertheless, the Tobaku people's relatively long affiliation with a world religion

prevents them from being included in the Indonesian government's category of "isolated

or estranged ethnic minorities" (suku terasing) although this category primarily includes

highland swidden farmers like the Tobaku. The suku terasing label is applied to largely unconverted highland Central Sulawesi groups such as the Da'a, Wana, and Lauje.27 These minority groups in particular, and highlanders in general, are sometimes targets for

popular derision and aggressive development programs that relocate isolated highland communities to more accessible, yet hotter and less fertile, lowland areas.

The Tobaku people's proud and vocal association with religious organizations of

powerful nations in Europe, Australia, and North America helps to counterbalance their

minority self-image as isolated, impoverished, and technically "backward" (terbelakang) mountain farmers. The adoption of Christianity provides highland minorities in Indonesia

with a legitimate and rival religious status vis-?-vis the Muslim majority. This situation

parallels the adoption of Christianity among highland ethnic minorities in Burma and

Thailand such as the Karen, Chin, Hmong and Akha who thereby distinguish their status

with respect to the Buddhist ethnic majorities of their nations. As has been noted among mainland Southeast Asian groups and among missionized Dayak groups of Borneo,

Christianity can serve as a focus for political unity among small-scale segmentary

populations, thereby aiding them in their negotiation with national majorities already affiliated with other world religions.28

The Pre-Christian Pantheon

Like most areas of Central Sulawesi, the district of Kulawi has no villages that refuse

affiliation with a world religion. Therefore, information about the pre-Christian cosmology of the region is available primarily from ethnohistorical research and from the writings of Albertus Kruyt, a Dutch Reformed missionary who describes Central Sulawesi beliefs

26Kipp, Dissociated Identities.

27For background on the Da'a people, see Gregory Acciaioli, "Culture as Art: From Practice to

Spectacle in Indonesia", Canberra Anthropology 8,1-2 (1985; special volume on Minorities and the

State): 148-72; and Sharon Barr, "Da'a Kinship and Marriage", in Papers in Western Austronesian

Linguistics No. 4, ed. Hein Steinhauer (Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research School of

Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1988), pp. 51-75. On the Wana people, see

Jane Atkinson, "Paths of Spirit Familiars: A Study of Wana Shamanism" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford

University, 1979), "Religions in Dialogue", and The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1989). On the Lauje people, see Jennifer Nourse, "We Are the

Womb of the World: Birth Spirits and the Lauje of Central Sulawesi" (Ph.D. diss., University of

Virginia, Charlottesville, 1989).

28F.K. Lehman, "Who Are the Karen, and If So, Why? Karen Ethnohistory and a Formal Theory

of Ethnicity", in Ethnic Adaptation and Identity, ed. C.F. Keyes (Philadelphia: Institute for the

Study of Human Issues, 1979), pp. 215-53; Cornelia Kammerer, "Customs and Christian Conversion

Among Akha Highlanders of Burma and Thailand", American Ethnologist 17,2 (1990): 277-91;

Herbert Whittier, "Changing Concepts of Adat and Cosmology among the Kenyah Dayak of Borneo:

The Shaman as a Structural Mechanic". Paper presented at the 26th Midwest Conference on Asian

Affairs, 14-15 Oct. 1977, DeKalb, Illinois; Herbert Whittier, "Concepts of Adat and Cosmology

among the Kenyah Dayak of Borneo: Coping with the Changing Socio-cultural Milieu", Sarawak

Museum Journal 26, no. 47 (n.s.) (1978): 103-113.




and practices as he saw them in the first decades of European contact.29 Kruyt names

deities and spirits in a kind of laundry list fashion, noting that some are tied to the earth,

water, or skies, and some are more important than others for certain ethnic groups. Kruyt,

however, never elucidates the relationship of one set of deities, spirits, and ancestors to

another.

Tobaku pre-Christian deities and spirits, however, can be divided into three major

types that vary according to the extent of their domain of control. The Tobaku themselves

do not present this kind of exegesis because they are not accustomed to describing their

pre-Christian cosmology to outsiders ? or even to insiders given the ascendance of

Christianity. Nevertheless, as Dan Sperber notes, symbolic systems can operate very

effectively "without being accompanied by any exegetic commentary".30 The categories

presented here are based on grouping the reported characteristics of each type of pre Christian deity or spirit mentioned, in some cases drawing on comparative and linguistic data from other Southeast Asian or Austronesian ethnographies.

For the Tobaku people, the three major groups of pre-Christian supernatural beings are

the "owner" spirits or pue\ the deified ancestor spirits or anitu, and a group of wandering fearsome beings who now are identified as seta. These last spirits often are unnamed as

individuals, but include trickster spirits of the forest (tau lew), angry souls of women

who died in childbirth (pontiana'), demons sent by sorcerers (tope'ule'), nocturnal flying creatures that eat human livers (popo'), and invisible forest monsters (tope'tilinga).

The type of pre-Christian spirits with the largest spheres of authority are the pue \

literally meaning "owner", but like the Indonesian word tuan interpreted also as "master" or "lord". This Uma term is used to designate spirits with particular spheres of control, such as Pue' Kasu, "Owner of Trees"; Pue' Pae, "Owner of Rice"; and Pue' Ue', "Owner

of Waters (Rivers)". These nature spirits are titled only according to their domain, possibly in part because the use of personal names for high status individuals is considered

impertinent and dangerous. In Central Sulawesi, positional titles rather than personal names also are used to address or refer to parents-in-law, elders, or ancestors.

In the Da'a Kaili language spoken in the mountains around Palu Valley, pue' is not

only a spirit title but also the kinship term for grandparents.31 The use of the term pue' for grandparents also is found as an old term in the Winatu dialect of Uma, reflecting the

regional view that one's grandparents were ? and perhaps still are ?

the true owners

of the world passed on to the present generation. The regional use o?pue' as a kinship term suggests that pue' spirits, like the deified ancestor spirits (anitu), may derive from ancestor or founder cults.

Anitu spirits have claims on people rather than physical domains and constitute an

unusual case because there is now some variation among the descriptions of them given

by Tobaku people. Some people say they are ancestor spirits, while others deny that idea. Some assign them to the "evil spirit" category of seta, while others say they are good

29A.C. Kruyt, De West Toradja's op Midden-Celebes, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Uitgave van de N.V.

Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1938). 30Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 18.

For a parallel classification of spirits for northern Thai ethnic groups, see James Stanlaw and Bencha

Yoddumnern, "Thai Spirits: A Problem in the Study of Folk Classification", in Directions in

Cognitive Anthropology, ed. J. Dougherty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 141-59. 31

Barr, "Da'a Kinship".




because they can help in times of family illness. My conclusion that anitu are deified ancestor spirits of powerful people is based partly on field narratives and partly on the

pervasiveness of the term's cognates in other Austronesian-speaking regions.32 For example,

the term anitu itself is used in the Philippine Cebuano Visayan language, glossed as a

beneficial supernatural being.33 Cognates, such as the Borneo Maloh term antu and the

Timor Atoni and Moluccan Tanimbar terms nitu, refer to ancestor spirits, or sometimes

literally to corpses.34 The Malay or Indonesian term hantu, usually translated into English as "ghost", may share this common history of meaning. For the Tobaku, anitu appear to

be deified ancestors who are important to particular households, bilateral kindreds, or

hamlets.

Some Tobaku people may deny that anitu means "ancestor spirits" (arwah orang tua

dulu in Indonesian) because anitu are a very special type of ancestral manifestation, that

is, the deified kind. Tobaku people do not have an overarching Uma-language term for

"ancestor spirit" that includes all possible transformations of human essence following death. Rather, they have several categories referring to the remains or transformations of

the deceased. Besides anitu, these include kao', which can refer to a newly dead person's

"shadow" spirit; and kiu or rate, corpses or non-deified ancestor spirits that, like anitu,

may do harm if they come into direct contact with the living. Apparently, most ancestors

(to owi, "those long ago") never become anitu or deified ancestors. Spirits of ordinary individuals simply travel to an afterworld (sirowi), which resembles their present village life, and they may reappear in their natal villages occasionally during the life crises of

their living relatives.

Anitu, by contrast, are described by some Tobaku as spirits of very "powerful people" (to baraka) who have been honoured lavishly by their descendants in ritual feasts. The

term to baraka comes from "to", referring to a person in all Sulawesi languages, and

"baraka" from Arabic, meaning "divine blessing" or "supernatural power".35 As spirits

of charismatic and powerful people, anitu become deified companions of the pue ' spirits,

able to intervene positively or negatively in community affairs.

The third type of pre-Christian Tobaku spirits, the ones with no legitimate physical or

human domain, are the seta. This term derives from the Arabic word "shaitan", meaning

the Devil, adopted long ago into Malay language. Tobaku people also use an Uma

cognate (ji 1) of the Arabic word jinn or jinni, which refers to the supernatural spirits of

Muslim folklore, to designate particular harmful spirits or seta. Although the majority of

Central Sulawesi highlanders may have had no direct contact with Islam until the early

32See Andrea Molnar, "Nitu: A Symbolic Analysis of An Austronesian Spirit Category" (MA.

thesis, University of Alberta, 1990).

33John U. Wolff, A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972),

p. 47.

34For Maloh, see Jay Bernstein, "Symptoms and the Reinterpretation of Illness in Taman

Ethnomedicine" (Paper presented at the Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, 19

Nov. 1989), p. 2; for Timor, see H.G. Schulte Nordholt, The Political System of the Atoni of Timor

(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 503; for Tanimbar, see Susan McKinnon, "Flags and Half

Moons: Tanimbarese Textiles in an 'Engendered' System of Valuables", in To Speak With Cloth,

ed. M. Gittinger (Los Angeles: UCLA Museum, 1989), p. 39 or Susan McKinnon, From a Shattered

Sun (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 298 and passim. 35See Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 44-45.




twentieth century, they clearly traded with peoples who did. Dutch reports indicate that

by the nineteenth century, Kulawi peoples were well established in a trade and tributary

relationship with the lowland kingdom of Sigi, which became Muslim through its centuries

old tributary relations with the Luwu kingdom of South Sulawesi.36

According to Kruyt's ethnography, seta are harmful "lower nature-ghosts".37 Early

reports do not indicate how generic or specific the terms seta and j? 7 were before Christian

missionaries entered the region. There is even some question whether the seta spirits were

identified collectively before the arrival of the Islamic term. Present-day narratives suggest that in the pre-Christian cosmology some of the various harmful spirits called seta were

vassals of more powerful spirits such as pue' and anitu, while others wandered unattached

as either named forest demons or unhappy souls of people who died unnatural deaths.38

To summarize, the regional gods called pue ' own specific natural resources such as

land, rivers, gold, or rice, and, like the anitu, they help or harm depending on human

moral and ritual actions concerning those resources. The anitu, deified spirits of important ancestors, may be considered the owners or leaders of the family kindreds. They help or

harm on the basis of their approval of human actions relating to ancestral mores, as will

be discussed below. The various harmful spirits called seta own nothing themselves, and

hence desire to take from the living. These three major types of Tobaku pre-Christian

supernatural beings thus can be viewed on a continuum in terms of their domain or rights of ownership.

Missionary Influence on the Pantheon

The Salvation Army holds church and home services in Indonesian, even when the

majority of listeners have a poor grasp of the language, in order to promote a unified

Indonesian religious community. They do, however, allow the inclusion of some prayer recitations and biblical exegesis in local Central Sulawesi languages such as Uma. Summer

Institute of Linguistics missionaries have worked to translate segments of the New

Testament into the Pipikoro dialect of Uma. A translation of the gospels of Luke and Acts

has been completed.39 The title Pue

' was chosen by the first missionaries to speak in Uma about the Christian

God as the owner or lord of the universe. Jesus also is referred to as Pue ' Yesus, "Lord

Jesus" or "Owner Jesus". The Uma word for "breath/life force" (inoha') was selected by

early missionaries to discuss the Christian concept of an immortal human soul with a

36See Nicolaus Adriani and Albertus C. Kruyt, De Bare'e-Sprekende Toradja's van Midden

Celebes, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1950[1912]), vol. 1, on Central Sulawesi highland-lowland tribute relations, Kruyt De West Toradja's, vol. 1, on

the Islamicization of the Palu Valley Kaili at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Leonard

Y. Andaya, The Heritage ofArung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Seventeenth

Century (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) on the history of the South Sulawesi kingdoms and their contact with Islam during the seventeenth century.

37Kruyt, De West Toradja's, vol. 2, pp. 269, 274.

38Such malevolent wandering spirits appear in much of Southeast Asia. See Hans J. Sell, Der

Schlimme Tod bei den V?lkern Indonesiens ('s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1955) on such spirits in

Indonesia, and Lehman, "Burmese Religion", in The Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 577 on a similar

group of wandering spirits in Burma.

39Lukas paV Sum Pue' Yesus, trans. Michael Martens (South Holland, 111.: World Home Bible

League, 1987).




personal relationship to God.40 The Holy Ghost is called "Breath/Spirit who is Clean/

Smooth" (Inoha' Tomoroli'). Likewise, the Bible is called "The Book that is Clean/

Smooth" (Buku Tomoroli'). By contrast, almost all the pre-Christian pue ' or owner spirits

are categorized by the missionaries as seta, that is, demons. There is only one terminological

exception. The name of the pre-Christian "Owner of the Skies" (Pue' Ijxngi'), is accepted as a local Uma synonym for the Christian God, perhaps because he also is called Lord

of the Heavens in European languages. An Arabic-derived term, Alatala, is also used as an Uma gloss of the Indonesian word

for the Christian God (Tuhan). Alatala is from the Arabic, Allah Ta'ala, meaning "God

the Great One".41 The use of this term, which even prior to Christian missionization

referred to a distant creator god, again indicates the presence of Muslim influences in the

highlands prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries. The fact that Christian missionaries

did not eliminate the term suggests that it was ensconced in local verbal concepts and

they may have recognized its value in conveying the image of a high god. The Indonesian

cognate, Allah, often is used in the conglomerate phrase that begins many Salvation Army

prayers in the Uma-speaking highlands: "Allah, Bapak kami, Tuhan yang Maha Esa..."

or "God, our Father, God the Great One".

Both colonial era missionaries and those working in Central Sulawesi during recent

decades have portrayed the deified ancestor spirits (anitu) and the domain-owning gods

(pue') merely as demons.42 Missionaries' frequent categorization of anitu as devils may have led some highlanders to dissociate this term from their own revered ancestors.

Colonial era missionaries were able to impose their cosmological vision of extent deities

by re-naming all possible supernatural forces. Nevertheless, the shift of deity labels did

not ensure the elimination of associated concepts of deity behaviours. These were readily

applied to the Christian God, and, indeed, in many cases they were supported by

interpretations of biblical verses.

The foreign missionaries' influence in reassigning the positions of beneficial and

destructive forces in the universe, plus the present confusion about particular pre-Christian

spirit categories, can be considered in light of Bourdieu's proposition that the management of names is one of the symbolic struggles that takes place between more and less powerful

segments of a society.43 With the introduction of the colonial government, mission schools

and locally-trained indigenous ministers in Central Sulawesi, the Salvation Army became

the strongest religious authority within Tobaku society. At the same time, local terms and

missionary meanings appear to be mutually defining, and it may require many generations of consistent external pressure before ambiguities in the newly introduced concepts are

resolved, only possibly in favour of the foreign interpretations.44

40See R. Godfrey Lienhardt, "The Dinka on Catholicism", in Religious Organization and Religious

Experience, ed. J. Davis (London: Academic Press, 1982), p. 90 for a discussion of how very

similar Dinka concepts were used by Catholic missionaries in the Sudan to translate the Christian

idea of "soul". 41

See Adriani and Kruyt, De Bare'e Toradja's, vol. 2, ch. 12, and Weinstock, "Kaharingan", p. 78.

42For example, Kruyt, De West Toradja's, vol. 2, chs. 8, 9. See also Hoskins, "Entering the Bitter

House", p. 151 on the missionaries' blanket categorization of supernatural beings and ancestors as

setan in Sumba.

43Pierre Bourdieu, "The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups", Theory and Society 14

(1985): 731-35. ^Lienhardt, "The Dinka and Catholicism", pp. 90-94.




Cosmological Reinterpretation in Rituals

The reinterpretation of Tobaku deities' and ancestors' roles can be observed in contexts

of ritual practice and in local rationales that explain which good and bad events signify the need for Protestant rituals. In pre-Christian times, Tobaku shamans called toballa

performed rituals to end misfortunes such as illness. The similar Uma verb root bali'

means "to change, to alter", and indeed the shaman's task was to undergo a personal

transformation during the ritual and speak in a supernaturally controlled voice. During these rituals, shamans called upon the anitu ancestor spirits to enter their bodies and

divulge the causes and potential cures of their patients' sicknesses. By contrast,

contemporary family elders and other community members themselves speculate on the

cosmological sources of illness, death, crop failures, or other misfortunes. They then

present their problem to the Salvation Army officer and propose to sponsor a Christian

ritual.

Local Salvation Army officers also are called toballa in Uma, since they lead the

agricultural, life cycle, and curing ceremonies that would have been handled formerly by the pre-Christian shamans. In light of Christian conversion, major violations of moral

behaviour that once would have been punished by the owner gods or deified ancestor

spirits are said to be punished by the Christian God. These transgressions include such

customary crimes as land border violations, inadequate mortuary ritual contributions, heirloom thefts, acts of sorcery, the breaking of oaths, and adultery. Contemporary Tobaku

people may atone for these sins through standardized Christian "thanksgiving" rituals, known in Indonesian as pengucapan syukur ("utterance of thanks"), accompanied by customary fines of slaughtered animals.45

Prior to colonial intervention, animal and human sacrifices (tinuwu ') were carried out

in highland Central Sulawesi by repeatedly stabbing victims with spears or machetes until

they died or fainted. The victims' heads were cut off by a chosen individual and presented to a chief or honoured elder relative. Reportedly, in at least some ceremonies, women

would attend with babies (presumedly only male although the report leaves this unspecified) whose hands were placed on the weapons so that they would become brave warriors like their fathers and uncles.46 The first Western missionaries insisted that these practices stop, and currently even livestock are slaughtered by minimal stabbing in the torso, rapid decapitation, and butchering.

The term "sacrifice", however, still appears appropriate to the situation both because of continuity in linguistic usage and because livestock are only slaughtered for ritual

occasions, never to obtain daily food. The Uma term for "sacrifice" (tinuwu ') is still used to mean the cutting of animals for ritual feasts, especially when the ceremony is held for a third party's benefit. The only socially sanctioned, non-ritual sources of meat are from

trapping and hunting. Occasionally, however, a ceremonial occasion may be arranged when a family has a compelling practical reason to eat meat, for example, when someone

is ill and weak. In some highland regions such as Kulawi proper, Salvation Army officers

complain about the large number of livestock animals killed for life cycle ceremonies.

Nevertheless, the churches have not eliminated the association of specially-cooked meat

45See Aragon, "Revised Rituals", for further discussion about both Protestant and Muslim

substitutes for precolonial rituals.

46Hatcher, "Soul-hunting", p. 25.




and rice feasts with the major agricultural, life cycle, and curing rituals held under

Protestant auspices.

The following three case studies illustrate how Protestant rituals and biblical passages are employed to expiate pre-Christian moral transgressions. In the first case, the parents of an infant afflicted by pneumonia-like symptoms organized a Salvation Army

thanksgiving ritual including the sacrifice of a pig for the ritual meal. The biblical passage read by the Salvation Army officers referred to God's anger against those who take the

land of their brothers. After the Protestant service and ritual meal held for the sick baby, it was mentioned in the village that the parents of the ill child recently had moved their

swidden border markers, thereby effectively stealing land from the wife's siblings who

worked the adjacent plot. Such Christian ceremonies are held to expiate pre-Christian crimes that are thought to

cause misfortunes. In Tobaku moral doctrine, the surreptitious alteration of hereditary swidden land borders is among the most heinous of offenses, one said to cause an

unexpected family death within months and most certainly within a year. The pre-Christian

guardian of ancestral land borders who is responsible for punishing such crimes is the

Owner of Land (Pue' Tana'). Since the Christian God is now claimed to be the owner

of the universe, people expect him to punish land rights violators in the same manner as

the pre-Christian deity. The indigenous Salvation Army officer reported that the mother

of the sick child confessed to the land transgression as soon as her baby became severely ill. Hence the officer's selection of a biblical passage concerning God's anger about a

land theft within a family to illuminate the punishment of an ancestral Tobaku sin in

Christian terms.

On a second occasion, a severely ill Tobaku man who had migrated to another region was carried on a stretcher for three days back to his home village in order to make a

Protestant ritual of thanksgiving. The man's nearest kin helped him sponsor the renovation

of his parent's grave, which was accompanied by an additional Protestant prayer service

at the graveyard. His family believed that his illness was retribution by the ancestors for

the sick man's meagre participation at the funeral of one of his parents, which was held

some years earlier. After the grave was re-cemented and a large pig purchased at the sick

man's expense, the local Salvation Army officer read a Bible passage about the necessity of honouring one's mother and father. The anger of the ancestors over the sick man's

failure to perform pre-Christian ritual duties to his parent was reinterpreted as the anger of the Christian God.

In a third case, a Tobaku village headman requested that the Salvation Army officer

hold a Protestant thanksgiving ritual to cure his gravely ill adult daughter. Beforehand, a sizable pig and a chicken destined for slaughter were tied up for display outside the

headman's house. The ritual meal was introduced by prayers and a reading in Indonesian

of Matthew 8:14-17, describing Jesus' healing of the sick and demon-possessed. The

officer then prayed for Jesus to descend into the midst of the present gathering and heal

the ailing woman. In this case, the pre-Christian curing role of the anitu ancestor spirits was reinterpreted

as akin to the miracles of Jesus as healer.

The cases described above follow a pattern in which the wrath of the pre-Christian

spirits and ancestors concerning Tobaku moral violations is reinterpreted as the wrath of

the Christian God, and the aid granted by the pre-Christian deities is reinterpreted as the

grace of God or Jesus. Feasts that were promised formerly to pre-Christian spirits on the



A traditionally dressed Tobaku woman, Tina Meida, sits among the church congregation

holding a large cucumber that she has brought for a thanksgiving offering to God.




grounds of good fortune such as births, financial windfalls, and so forth also are redirected

to the Christian God. Similarly, periodic planting and harvest feasts that would have

included sacrifices to the Owner of Land are now reinterpreted as necessary Christian

thanksgiving rituals. When men have success in panning for gold, they make a household

thanksgiving ceremony directed to the Christian God instead of sacrificing to the pre Christian Owner of Gold (Pue' Bulawa). Curative intervention, formerly requested from

deified ancestor spirits (anitu) through shamans (tobalia), is now requested from God and

Jesus through Salvation Army officers. In short, the theodicy of the pre-Christian deities

has been revealed as the moral hand of God.

Processes of Reinterpretation

Tobaku reformulations of deities are not so much changes in their expected behaviours, as in their titles and individuality. The Tobaku, like many Indonesian peoples, avoid using

personal names and often employ evasive or replacement titles and taboo words, especially when addressing or referring to powerful spirits or endangered ones, such as newborn

babies and scarce game animals. Thus, the Tobaku and other highland Central Sulawesi

peoples easily substituted Christian for pre-Christian deity terminology through this

sociolinguistic process which was not necessarily recognized by the European missionaries

who promoted it.47

Highland Central Sulawesi groups routinely changed the uttered names of deities,

ancestors, aged elders (who approach the status of ancestors), newborn babies (who are

vulnerable to attacks by spirits), important animals, plants, and so forth. This was done

to prevent eavesdropping spirits from harming the person or valuable possession named.

For example, an extensive replacement vocabulary was used during harvest season in

order to protect the rice crop. For some years, residents of one highland Kaili region never uttered the local word for coffee because an aristocratic village headman had a

similar personal name, which therefore should never be spoken. Central Sulawesi

highlanders thus were easily convinced by missionaries to use new labels for their deities,

whether or not they simultaneously changed their prior concepts of those deities.

Tobaku religious interpretation also involves extrapolation from elements of the pre Christian cosmology into domains that are not specified in Christian concept and practice. Local pre-Christian moral logic fills in many areas that are open or vague in Christian

doctrine, assuming that the Christian God punishes and rewards humans for the same

reasons as the indigenous spirits did, requires sacrificial feasts under the same circum

stances, and so forth.

Christianity, like all religions, is not completely consistent nor does it address and

answer all issues regarding correct behaviour and suffering that concern small-scale

groups such as the Tobaku. Therefore, Tobaku individuals resolve such questions on the

basis of their pre-Christian religious doctrines which focus specifically on human difficulties

as they are locally manifested. Like the Azande of east Africa described by Evans

Pritchard, the Tobaku have customary rationales not only for why a granary building

might collapse, but for why a certain person was sitting under it and was killed when it

47See Christina Toren, "Making the Present, Revealing the Past: The Mutability and Continuity

of Tradition as Process", Man 23,4 (1988): 696-717 for a parallel situation where local traditions

of feasting with chiefs primed certain groups on Fiji to accept particular religious images, such as

the Last Supper, when they were introduced by foreign Protestant missionaries.




fell.48 The moral behaviours resulting in good or bad fortune is a domain of discourse in

which the Tobaku people extensively elaborate on their interpretation of Christianity. In sum, there have been two major patterns of adjustment in Tobaku cosmology as

influenced by missionary teachings. One is the relabelling of deities and their behaviour.

In missionary teachings, most owner spirits (pue'), deified ancestor spirits (anitu), and

lower harmful spirits (seta) are collapsed semantically into the last category of seta, which is equated with the Christian devil. Secondly, the moral reasoning and punishing behaviours of the pre-Christian spirits are transferred to the Christian God. Tobaku

reinterpret their own ritual practices to make them compatible with permissible Christian

rites at the same time as they interpret Christian doctrines to suit their pre-Christian moral

framework. Tobaku interpretations of Protestant canon, which are sometimes unorthodox

in the eyes of foreign missionaries and Indonesian ministers heavily influenced by foreign

teachings, occasionally lead to disagreements over ritual practices.

Aspects of Misunderstanding and Conflict

Christian concepts held by Tobaku individuals and by Western missionaries diverge when Tobaku are faced with metaphysical problems not recognized by the missionaries.

For example, the appearance of kao' spirits of the recently dead upset their living relatives.

The term kao ' or "shadow" refers to a soul element or force that can be associated with

either a newly dead or a still living person. According to pre-Christian conceptions, a

dead person's kao' spirit remains in the village for some days before travelling to the

afterworld (sirowi) following mourning rituals. In Uma-speaking areas, final mortuary rites usually are held nine days after death for a man and ten days after death for a

woman. The local explanation for the difference is that women have one more rib bone

than men, and so are honoured a day longer. Tobaku people say that this indigenous

practice is corroborated by the Genesis story describing how a rib from Adam was given to create Eve. Currently, an additional Christian ritual may be held for prominent persons on the fortieth day after death. This innovation, reportedly introduced by Christian teachers from North Sulawesi, is based on the story of Jesus' ascension to heaven on the fortieth

day after his death. Consequently, now Tobaku people complain of being bothered by kao' spirits for up to forty days following a relative's death.

According to pre-Christian cosmology, animals, plants, and even stones possess varying amounts of kao', and some human illnesses are caused by a wandering kao'.49 This soul

element could be called back by a pre-Christian shaman (tobalia), who caught it in a

ceremonial barkcloth bag. The idea of kao' spirits is opposed by Western missionaries,

yet their insistence that spirits of the dead leave the earth and go immediately to heaven or hell is contradicted by voices and glimpses of the recently dead perceived by Tobaku families.

Another type of doctrinal conflict occurs when a cause of death according to Tobaku

witnesses, such as the violation of food taboos or sorcery, cannot be accepted into the Western Protestant conceptual scheme. In these cases, the cosmological problems or

spirits that local people complain are tormenting them are considered by Western missionaries to be fallacies of the pagan imagination, or worse, as devil worship.

48E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1937), pp. 69-70.

49See Kruyt, Het Animisme.




A myriad of Christian beliefs have been promoted by the various types of Protestant

missionaries working during the past decades in Central Sulawesi, and the devil is one

topic about which missionaries often disagree among themselves. There has been a

resurgence of belief in the personification of evil among North American evangelicals

during this century, and certain publications circulated by the Salvation Army in Indonesia

explore the issue of the devil in daily life.50 On the other hand, some European Protestant

missionaries working in Central Sulawesi have minimized talk about the devil incarnate, and aimed to place responsibility for good and evil within the human individual. In either

case, however, local concepts about the acts of seta usually meet with disbelief or

disapproval from foreign ministers of every persuasion. One source of these conflicts is that most Western missionaries do not recognize the

limitations of biblical Christianity to address and solve all metaphysical questions

concerning evil and suffering. Rather than considering Tobaku ideas and practices in

terms of biblical doctrine per se, they tend to criticize Tobaku religious interpretations on

the grounds of their difference from current Western concepts. For example, Western

missionaries will state that ghosts do not exist, or that baking instead of boiling shrimp near the river mouth cannot cause death. Although they judge Tobaku "superstitions"

according to criteria based on prevailing Western cosmology and science, the missionaries

claim that they are applying Christian criteria.

To give another example, the Bible makes no mention of whether mixing swidden

grown rice and wet-field rice in storage bins will produce sickness, but Tobaku pre Christian tradition traces a certain illness precisely to violation of that taboo. Although it is familiarity with Western science principles that convinces missionaries that mixing two varieties of rice (or even their associated tools) cannot cause illness, they identify

Tobaku concepts as poor Christianity rather than as poor science. On questions where the

canons of science cannot be invoked, such as the difference between Tobaku ideas of

travelling to the afterlife and Western concepts of passage to heaven and hell (neither of

which can be deemed particularly scientific), Tobaku ideas also are judged by missionaries

as deficient Christianity rather than as deficient in terms of Western cultural ideas.

While locals and missionaries do not always agree about the source of an illness, they

may reach concordance regarding a Christian cure. Interpretive unification, or at least

parallelism, is sometimes achieved when both parties agree that Christian prayer or ritual

will rectify an illness or misfortune. One elderly woman, who was convinced that her

extended illness was caused by the sorcery of a jealous person, said she was cured only when her family played cassettes of Christian pop songs around the clock at her hospital bedside. These Christian pop songs are recorded in Manado, North Sulawesi, the original home of many Christian teachers sent to Central Sulawesi. Although Western missionaries

do not readily invoke sorcery as a cause of illness, they look favourably upon the use of

Christian music and prayer in the face of adversity. They also support this religious view

of curing when they warn patients at the Salvation Army clinic that Western medicines

will not cure in the absence of faith and prayer to God.

Some Tobaku people claim that punishments for moral violations still are carried out

by seta. For example, seta are said to cause sickness to a person who takes heirlooms to

50For example, William Orr, Setan, Ada atau Tidak? [translation of Are Demons for Real? 1970,

Scripture Press Publications], trans. M. Inggriani (Bandung: Penerbit Kalam Hidup, 1977).




which he is not entitled. The seta involved, however, are reinterpreted as vassals of the

Christian God rather than of pre-Christian deities. Some locals argue that Salvation Army officers are mistaken in disparaging ancestral techniques of eradicating demons or spirits. They say that it is not a case of taking false gods above the Lord, but rather a matter of

recognizing that the Lord makes the demons (seta) who torture us, and that the ancestors

who lived long ago, heathen though they were, developed some effective methods for

repelling these demons. In such instances, Tobaku people defend pre-Christian empirical solutions to cosmological problems, and their ritual practices may differ, privately at

least, from those that the missionaries prescribe.

Although the moral logic of Tobaku cosmology is largely intact, many pre-Christian rituals have been eradicated, such as those related to headhunting, female puberty, and

teeth-filing. Moreover, certain aspects of mythology and cosmology reported in early Dutch sources, such as the nine layers of the universe, now seem to be unknown.51

Similarly, precolonial nature taboos such as those restricting hunting or gardening activities

during certain lunar phases apparently have been abandoned in favour of the churches' taboo against working or travelling on Sundays.52 Despite the elimination of many specific

practices at the missionaries' urging, there continue to be both public and tacit negotiations over acceptable Christian behaviour.

Incomplete Conversion versus Active Interpretation

In the cosmology of contemporary Tobaku people there is a dichotomy between

"ideology as explicit discourse and as lived experience".53 The explicit discourse is the

foreign-introduced Christian doctrines, which are assumed by Tobaku to be isomorphic with their current religious practices. The lived experience is an evolving Tobaku

interpretation and practice of one version of Western Christianity. Scholars studying the

adoption of world religions by non-Western ethnic minorities have made various assessments of this type of dichotomy. Based on Weberian notions of religious types, some have viewed it as the result of a partial "rationalization" or incomplete conversion to world religion.54 Others have considered it as a manifestation of minority resistance in the face of an externally imposed religious ideology.55 Still others have attributed it to the inevitable historical tension and synthesis between temporally bound human ideals and ongoing practice.56 I argue that the first approach is logically problematic while the

51Kruyt, De West Toradja's, vol. 2, p. 451.

52See Kruyt, De West Toradja's, vol. 4, pp. 57-62 on the Central Sulawesi lunar calendar. 53Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1985), p. 5.

54See Geertz, "Internal Conversion", pp. 171-75; Hoskins, "Entering the Bitter House", pp. 159-60.

55Comaroff, Body of Power, Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A

Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michael Lambek, "Rationalization or Resistance? Examples from Rural Africa", Paper presented at the Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 17 Nov. 1989.

56Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1981); William Roff, "Islam Obscured? Some Reflections on Studies of Islam and Society in Southeast Asia", Archipel 29,1 (1985): 8; John R. Bowen, Muslims through

Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).




second two are more productive if they include the examination of changing political, economic and ethnic relationships as well as the competing conceptual and behavioral

schemes involved.57

While continued pressure by foreign missionaries could make Tobaku Christianity more "Western", an analysis of their situation as merely incomplete conversion is not

supported by evidence regarding the multitude of Christian sects that have existed in

history. Against whom should the Tobaku be measured for orthodoxy in terms of either

abstract religious formulations or concrete practice: a sample of current U.S. Methodists or nineteenth-century British Salvationists? What if they were compared to early biblical

Christians, Medieval Catholics, or modern Evangelical Protestants for whom the casting out of satans from the ill would be nothing strange? In many instances the Tobaku

peasant's world is far closer to biblical experiences than the modern Westerner's world.

As an Evangelical American missionary in Central Sulawesi once put the matter, "It is a lot easier to believe in ghosts here than it was back in Leaven worth, Kansas". The

Bible, like any document, is subject to multiple interpretations, and Tobaku interpretations often only fall short when measured against some particular Western interpretations rather

than against the biblical canon itself.

Given Central Sulawesi's colonial history of missionization and the New Order

government's pressure for affiliation with world religions, an interpretation of subordinate

discourse and resistance, albeit tacit, has merits. The Salvation Army enforces the use of

Indonesian to promote pan-ethnic Christian and national identity yet highland groups

cling tenaciously to their local languages. Restless spirits of the deceased, diseases that

cannot be cured by Western medicines because they are brought on by ancestral crimes,

spirits that require animal sacrifice rather than mere prayer to dispel them, all belie

Tobaku people's acquiescence to official doctrine. These kinds of evidence make their

enthusiastic fanaticism for Christianity seem not only an interesting spiritual position, but

perhaps a protective and subtly assertive political one as well. A general hypothesis of

tacit resistance, however, offers little specific illumination regarding which aspects of

Tobaku cosmology have been perpetuated, or how the reinterpretation process is carried

out by groups who are reorganizing religious ideas imposed from outside.

Many writings on the adoption of world religion by ethnic minorities outside of

Central Sulawesi have stressed the cognitive as well as practical political purposes of

local interpretations of world religions. These interpretations are viewed by the writers

neither as amorphous fusions of world religion and animism nor as unmalleable aspects of animism and ethnic identity erupting through a veneer of world religion.58 Rather,

57See also Susan Russell, "Ritual Persistence and the Ancestral Cult among the Ibaloi of the

Luzon Highlands", in Changing Lives, Changing Rites: Ritual and Social Dynamics in Philippine and Indonesian Uplands, ed. Susan D. Russell and Clark E. Cunningham (Michigan Studies of

South and Southeast Asia No. 1, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 17.

58See Lehman, "Burmese Religion"; Toren, "Making the Present"; John Watanabe, "From Saints

to Shibboleths: Image, Structure, and Identity in Maya Religious Syncretism", American Ethnologist

17,1 (1990): 131-50; Kammerer, "Customs and Christian Conversion"; Bowen, Muslims Through

Discourse; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity,

Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1991); Rita Smith Kipp, "Conversion by Affiliation: the History of the Karo Batak Protestant

Church", American Ethnologist 22,4 (1995): 868-82.




ethnic minorities are recognized as developing their own legitimate variant of world

religious practices and ideology within the constraints of local conceptual, social, and

political contexts.

Just like Tobaku pre-Christian oral cosmology, most Protestant doctrines and sacred

texts are "not precise prescriptions of practice or belief; they are richly redundant,

demanding interpretation".59 Therefore, much pre-Christian moral logic can be retained

in conjunction with Tobaku peoples' renaming of deities and rituals, and their Christianity can approach metaphysical and social problems not fully addressed by Western

Protestantism. Thus, Tobaku Christians may discern proximate causes of local problems

differently than the foreign missionaries and local ministers with whom they identify

religiously for both historical and political reasons.

Ethnohistorians and anthropologists now recognize that "indigenous traditions" are

changing sets of concepts which, despite proclamations of their historic immutability, are

usually somewhat flexible.60 When it is accepted that similar principles of variation apply to world religious traditions, the common assumption that peripheral religious communities are apt to practise skewed or deficient versions of world religions can be laid to rest.

Increasingly scholars from anthropology, history, religious studies, sociology, and theology are probing the negotiations and tensions between local and global aspects of world

religions.61 Universal religions necessarily take on new lives outside their time and region of origin, and the future of both their legitimized doctrine and its interpretations resides as much or more on the youthful geographic and cultural peripheries as it does on

potentially shifting centres of orthodoxy.

59J. Davis, "Introduction", in Religious Organization and Religious Experience, ed. J. Davis

(London: Academic Press, 1982), p. 5.

60See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1983); J.D.Y. Peel, "Making History: The Past in the Ijesha Present", Man 19,1 (1984): 111-32; Toren, "Making the Present", p. 713.

61 See Robert Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); John Barker (ed.),

Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives (Association for Anthropology in Oceania

Monograph no. 12, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990); Charles Keyes, "Christianity as an Indigenous Religion", Social Compass 38,2 (1991): 177-85; Mark Woodward, Islam in Java:

Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta (Tucson: University of Arizona

Press, 1989); Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse.



filsafat-budaya- protestan central sulawesi

Documents

christian pop songs

deified ancestor spirits

christian moral logic

de west toradja

christian supernatural beings

salvation army officers

highland central sulawesi

southeast asian studies