history, houses and regional identities

History, Houses and Regional Identities

Kathryn Robinson Anthropology, The Australian National University

The Indonesian government authorises particular modes of representations of the diverse cultural traditions of the archipelago which are subservient to the display of a national culture in the pursuit of national unity. The ‘Tumun Mini Indonesia Induh’ theme park in Jakarta manifests the authorised version of difference, as do regional museums. In the province of South Sulawesi, under the guiding influence of local scholars, the provincial government has developed its own theme park which, in the manner of the Jakarta park, uses house forms as emblems of the cultural diversity found in the province. This paper investigates the historical sensibilities displayed in the park, those of the planners and those of the people who live in and use the park. The planners have tried to avoid the use of ersatz forms, with a stress on cultural ‘authenticity’ in the creation of the displays. They have made the park a showcase for an expression of a regional sensibility about the historical genesis of the place of the province in the modem world, giving their own traditions a centrality which is lacking in expressions of culture authorised by the national government.

Introduction

In contemporary Indonesia, official state doctrine emphasises sanitised and authorised versions of cultural difference subservient to national goals, national unity. Official policy is caught in the contradiction between the desire to stamp out differences which could become the basis of challenges to centralised state power, and the harnessing of those differences in the pursuit of n a t i o n a l h a t e agendas; for example, the promotion of difference in the desire to lift the importance of tourism as a generator of national foreign earnings.

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State museums (of which there are approximately 140) are implicated in the resolution of this conflict. Following what Taylor has termed the nusanturu concept (nusuntura meaning archipelago, often used as a synonym for the nation), in provincial museums:

. . . viewers are first placed in the physical universe [geography] then in the context of local flora and fauna, then presented with cultural artefacts and history of their province. Finally, in the nusantara gallery these local traditions are compared to those elsewhere in Indonesia, with the implication that, for all its variations, Indonesia is one (Taylor 1994:80-81).

Commonly, this difference is represented in displays of male and female dolls in the characteristic wedding costumes of the provinces. The official resolution of these contradictions is also represented in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (hereafter ‘Beautiful Indonesia’) in Jakarta, a ‘theme park’ where the different ‘tribes’ of Indonesia are represented. Miniaturised, ersatz versions of traditional houses are built on islands in an artificial lake, the islands shaped to represent the islands on the archipelago. Displays of artefacts and traditional cultural performances complete the representation (Pemberton 1994).

The province of South Sulawesi has developed its own ‘mini’ theme park. Originally conceptualised as a Taman Mini Sulawesi, with areas set aside for the island’s four provinces, lack of interest from the other three provinces caused South Sulawesi to go ahead and develop the ‘Sulawesi Selatan Dalam Miniatur’ (South Sulawesi in Miniature) park, which features houses representing the four major groups (etnis) of the province of South Sulawesi. In addition to the ‘four etnis’ identified in the original plan, the park also displays houses representing the 23 districts of the province in a similar manner to that in which ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ represents the provinces. The political context for the establishment of the park is the general surge to ‘inventorise’ traditional practices (inventurasasi), in part through a process of rediscovery. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s particularly, under the auspices of the Department of Education and Culture, regions have been listing and codifying traditional beliefs and practices. This leads to authorised versions of what constitutes authentic cultural traditions, an important aspect of which is the differentiation of presumed discrete cultural groups. In South Sulawesi this process of recovering and preserving authentic traditions was termed ‘Lagaligologi’, in reference to the epic poem, the I La Galigo, which describes the heavenly origins of the traditional rulers of the precolonial realms, and which is held to be an authentic description of pre- modern (pre-Islamic and pre-colonial) South Sulawesi, by many local intellectuals. This requires a process of historicising the location of events ‘within an idea . . . of linear time, of a sequence of causes and results’ (Errington 1989b53). For Errington, this rhetorical mode of ‘historical knowledge’ is bound up with the development of the nation-state, whose view of history is the ‘story of the emergence of the State’ (1989b).

Another impetus for the development of the park has been the commodification of culture in the context of tourism. The year 1991 was declared ‘Visit Indonesia Year’ and this has also provided a stimulus for the discovery and elaboration of ‘tradition’. As a prelude to this year of celebration of culture for the tourist gaze, the people of South Sulawesi practised, performed, competed in traditional performances, culminating in July 1990 in a week-long festival, with cultural performances in Ujungpandang’s central square

HISTORY, HOUSES AND REGIONAL IDENTITIES 73

(Karabosi). In this same period (1990-1991) the United States and Indonesian governments sponsored a Festival of Indonesia in the USA, and many performers from South Sulawesi participated for several weeks in cultural displays and performances and in the building of a traditional sailing craft @eruhu) in Washington. This was also the year of the opening of the theme park in South Sulawesi. The original design reflected the influence of ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ in Jakarta, incorporating a central lake with a miniature Sulawesi island in the middle, and plans for a cable car to take visitors around the park, although the realisation has been much more modest. More significantly, the concept behind the design of the park represents a different approach to the issues of cultural ‘authenticity’ and temporality than does ‘Beautiful Indonesia’, although it draws on the same imperative of bringing the old into relation with the new, in the context of the modern nation state. Whereas ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ can be read as exemplifying the centralising strategy of the national government by drawing on Javanese court traditions to fashion legitimacy (see Pemberton 1994), South Sulawesi in Miniature is a view from the periphery.

The principal initiative for the park came from local intellectuals- anthropologists, archaeologists and historians-who have represented in the park particular local perceptions of regional history, in particular local anti-colonial struggles. Their view of history does not conform to the legitimising impulse identified by Pemberton in the logic of ‘Beautiful Indonesia’. Behind an apparent conformity with preoccupations originating from the centre we can read in the park a particularly local construction of history and culture which challenges claims of cultural and even political pre-eminence emanating from the centre.

Miniature South Sulawesi

The park is located in the delta of the Jeneberang river, on the urban fringe of the provincial capital, Ujungpandang (formerly known as Macassar). It is built on the site of a seventeenth century fort, Benteng Somba Opu. The fort formerly guarded the mouth of the Jeneberang river and was the centre of the kingdom of Goa, the principal Macassarese kingdom in the 17th century. Goa had established overlordship of the southern peninsula and was in rivalry with the Dutch for the domination of trade in the Eastern Archipelago. The Dutch conquered Macassar in 1669 with the support of the rulers of the Buginese kingdoms of Bone and Soppeng, to the north. The Benteng Somba Opu, the ‘heavily fortified royal citadel’ (Andaya 1981:l) was the site of one of the last battles. In the subsequent treaty it was allowed to remain, though several others were destroyed. However, after two years of continued resistance by Macassar and its allies, the fort was destroyed.

Writing in 1981, Leonard Andaya noted that these events were still remembered ‘with some bitterness’ by Macassarese people, who argued ‘a truly “Indonesian” empire had been betrayed by another “Indonesian” group, leaving the Dutch, the “colonialists”, as the ultimate victors’ (198 1:2). In the reappraisal of history after Independence, and in the quest for national heroes, ‘Bugis and Makassar alike debated the merits of Goa’s Sultan Hasanuddin and Bone-Soppeng’s Arung Palakka as true “national heroes” of Indonesia’


(Andaya 1981:2). Hasanuddin’s last citadel, the site where he faced defeat, has now been resurrected and restored as the site of the park celebrating the culture and history of contemporary South Sulawesi.

The approach to the archaeological site is interesting. In a very contemporary touch, rather than a reconstruction, as has been the case with many historical sites in Indonesia (most notably the Buddhist monument Borobudur in central Java), the wall of the fort has been excavated and partially restored but whole sections have been left to show the condition in which they were found, in particular to show the damage from Dutch weaponry. The archaeologists restoring the site have taken great care to replicate the variety of construction techniques used by the original builders (see Bulbeck 1996). The fort provides the context for the display of traditional culture, in the form of the houses, and for the interpretation of the past in its relation to the present. It symbolically represents the beginnings of modern South Sulawesi, in the sense of the beginnings of the era in which their integration into the world is no longer on their own terms as active but independent participants in global networks based on trade and commerce. The park also acknowledges the colonial past, however. The museum/administrative centre is an exact replica of a colonial building, the former residence of the Dutch Administrator in the town of Bone, which incorporated indigenous construction techniques. The museum is named after Karaeng Pattingaloang of Tallo, Goa’s principal ally, whose reputation is that of an intellectual with command of several European languages, and who brokered important treaties between Goa and its allies, and foreign powers. The remaining perimeter wall of the fort today forms the boundary of the heartland of the park which contains imposing reconstructions of traditional houses grouped in clusters of the four principal cultural groups (efnis), as well as the Museum Karaeng Pattingaloang and a large meeting hall and performance space (Baruga Somba Opu).

Entrance to the park is by crossing a bridge over the Jeneberang river, which currently marks the extent of the expansion of the residential areas of Ujungpandang. Entering the complex, you pass an exhibition area with little huts (of undistinguished architectural merit) containing displays from government departments, the armed forces, local universities and so on. Here in the outer perimeter are situated the traditional houses built by each of the districts in South Sulawesi (see Robinson 1993). These are designated as representing their region rather than an etnis. All are variations on the characteristic platform house typical of the Islamic areas of South Sulawesi.’ The houses in this section of the park all look uncannily similar, belying the sense of diversity in variations on the common pattern of construction found in the province, and in tension with the real variety seen in the heartland of the park, inside the walls of the fort. The meaning of ‘traditional’ here would seem to be that which is not modern, something which is of the villages, not the modern urban centres, as opposed to the concern with historical authenticity, in the heartland. Beside the houses from the districts, there are three purpose-built art galleries, where the architects have made modern variations on the theme of the platform house, and

1. These are houses constructed around wooden frames, in which ‘the posts are continuous structural members carrying the weight of the roof directly to the ground. The beams supporting the platform [floor] are mortized through the posts and secured by timber wedges’ (Gibbs 1987:20). See also Robinson 1993.


a central square for the staging of cultural performances. Hence this area outside the wall of the fort is popularly referred to as Pasar Seni, or Art Market.

Moving along the road towards the wall of the fort, you pass a row of village houses, modest platform houses of uniform construction, with bamboo walls, wooden facades and thatched roofs. These were funded by the Department of Social Affairs and house the villagers who were moved from inside the perimeter of the fort to make way for the park. The modest scale and style of these houses for ordinary folk provide a foil for the main display of the park, the houses representing the four efnis, which are mostly grand in scale, being reproductions of the houses of rulers and traders.

The inner part of the park is approached by driving along an avenue planted with palm trees, which passes between wet-rice fields still under cultivation. A bridge marks the entry to the area, and a notice board proclaims this as the Kawasan Rumah Adat (Location of Customaryflraditional Houses) representing the four etnis of Sulawesi Selatan: Macassar, Bugis, Mandar and Toraja.

Etnis is a neologism, an adjectival form ‘concerned with a social group or a social or cultural system which has a defined meaning or status on the basis of characteristics such as descent, religion or language’ (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia 1995). In the park it is used as a noun form, meaning a constituted group. That is, it represents what Kahn has identified as the anthropological notion of constituent groups with distinct identities, which can be delineated from each other on the basis of ‘bits of culture’ which can be ‘unambiguously assigned as the property of those particular groups’ (1993: 18). The idea that there are four groups with distinct identities in South Sulawesi has been developing at least since the 1970s. For example, in a 1970s publication of the Department of Education and Culture the groups are referred to as rumpun (like a bamboo plant), implying that they have split off from a common origin and still share a kind of unity, but by 1985, in another publication from the same department, they are referred to as the four suku bangsa utarna, or principle ethnic groups. That is, in the last few decades, the distinctiveness of the four groups has become more defined in official discourse. The official construction of the relations between the four groups is emphasised in the spatial ordering of the representative houses. For example, the Bugis and Toraja are in areas facing one another, stressing their connection. The Mandar are located near the Macassarese, which would seem to represent old political alliances as much as anything, for the Mandar and Macassarese are classified in some sources (see Lebar 1972) as sub-categories of Bugis.

Within the Kawasan Rumah Adat there is a stylistic distinction between the houses of the Toraja, ‘imposing, curving roofs atop an up-swept ridge pole’ (Kis-Jovak et al. 1988:7), and the platform houses with pitched roofs of the Islamic peoples: Bugis, Macassarese and Mandarese (see Plates 1 to 4, pp.76-9).

Whereas ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ is in miniature, gargantuan would be the adjective used to describe the buildings in this park, or at least those in the heartland, the Kawasan Rumah Adat. Commenting on the miniaturisation of ‘Beautiful Indonesia’, Pemberton says it leads to ‘an “as if’ sense of an idealised Indonesia, a perfectly cultural representation viewed by the logic of miniaturisation as if from a distance’ (1994: 153). Stewart has com-


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mented on the use of the miniature in historical reconstruction: ‘For the function of the miniature hereis to bring historical events “to life”, to immediacy, and thereby to erase their history, to lose us within their presentness’ (Stewart 1993:60). In contrast to ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ the houses in the Kawasan Rumah Adat are intended as authentic reproductions of traditional houses, in particular the large houses inhabited in the past by the rulers, nobles and traders. In South Sulawesi, houses were significant markers of differential status, size being one of the critical symbolic elements. Houses of different social levels were also marked by construction features such as the number of poles, and the number of gable flaps, the number of steps or the positioning of extensions (see Robinson 1993). The grand scale of these houses, when compared with the dwelling houses of ordinary people was an important visual representation of hierarchy, which was at the heart of social order in South Sulawesi. The palaces of the highest levels (the rulers) contained the sacred regalia, dating from pre-Islamic times, the sacred symbols of the ancient kingdoms which concentrated spiritual potency. These houses imposed an order to which the body had to accommodate and which ensured the appropriate corporeal expression of honour and respect. For example, the number of steps to ascend to the house were always odd, ensuring that one entered on the respectful right foot. Once inside the house, the visitor sat on the tamping, an internal verandah at a level lower than the floor of the audience room, to which the guest could step up if invited. Hence the body was positioned lower than that of the honoured occupant.

The planning committee comprising academic anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and architects, which was set up by the governor to establish the park, scoured South Sulawesi for examples of fine houses to remove to the park, or to replicate, to stand as exemplars of one of the four etnis. They strove for authenticity in their exemplars of culture, authenticity residing in actual buildings which would be painstakingly replicated in the park. An abstracted typification for each of the etnis did not conform to their concept. However, there were practical problems involved in locating the unambiguously authentic. Between 1950 and 1965, South Sulawesi was in the grip of an Islamic rebellion. Whole villages were razed in the struggle. For the rebels, the large houses of the nobles, were a particular target as they represented a symbol of feudalism and many were burned.

The director of the park (an anthropologisthistorian) tried to buy several dilapidated buildings in order to remove and renovate them. Unable to reach an agreement with the owners, he had architects draw plans to replicate the buildings in every detail. The Wajo house, for example is a beautiful example of a Bugis merchant’s house. The present owner of the original house refused to sell it in spite of its dilapidated and neglected condition, because the house had an occupant, a spirit dog which protected his family. Perhaps in his attitude we can read a counterfoil to the historicising, curatorial impulse behind the development of the museum-park which draws on a modern attitude towards the preservation of the past.

In the original plan for the park, the committee had funds to build four houses (one representing each etnis), the Museum and a large building for meetings and performances (the Baruga). The Macassarese were initially represented by a large house built by


craftsmen from the Kajang2 area. The Wajo merchant’s house referred to above represented the Bugis, and Toraja was represented by a copy of a large house (tongkonan) in Tana Toraja district.

For the region of Mandar, no unique houses were found. This area had been particularly ravaged in the years of the rebellion. The developers of the park found a typically South Sulawesi solution-they went to the Lontara, the palm leaf manuscripts used to keep records by the pre-colonial realms. Amongst other things, these manuscripts validate the genealogies and hence claims to legitimacy of aristocrats. They located a beautiful illustrated manuscript from the Mandar region which contains pictures of houses, from which they chose a ruler’s house.3 This is the largest house built to date. Such palaces represented the stationary centre of a hierarchically ordered social universe, and housed the sacred regalia which concentrated spiritual and cosmic energies. It is common in South Sulawesi for people to rely on these manuscripts for authentication of genealogical connections and other aspects of ‘tradition’; hence this strategy followed precedent in establishing authenticity.

The houses in the Kawusan Rumah Adut were built by artisans from the relevant regions, who used customary construction techniques and carried out appropriate rituals in the course of construction. In a deviation from their customary practices, they worked from blueprints prepared by architects on the basis of existing houses or, in the case of Mandar, the Lontara. By way of contrast, in the reconstruction of the Solo palace in Central Java, which burned down in 1989, the original/authentic (usfi) form ‘was restored with ‘modern technology’ (Pemberton 1994: 185); for example, wooden pillars were replaced with concrete pillars faced with timber. In the South Sulawesi park every effort was made to use authentic building techniques, including the correct ritual practices, encompassing notions of geomancy, appeasement of the spirits of the timber and attention to the ritual attachment of the house’s ‘spirit’ (see Errington 1989a:74-5).

Authenticity: reinventing tradition

The original four houses in the Kuwasan Rumah Adat were built from funds from the provincial government, as were the museum and the meeting hall. Hence the academics who developed the park were able to ensure adherence to their concept. In addition, each district was asked to contribute a house which authentically represented the traditions of their region. A formal request was sent to the district governments in 1990, in a letter bearing the imprimatur of the Governor. By-passing the planning committee, the

2. The Kajang are speakers of a Macassarese dialect, often held to be exemplars of a pre- Islamic past. However, in apparent contradiction to the quest for the ‘authentic’, unlike the most ‘authentic’ houses in the Kajang region, the posts of the frame of the Kajang house in the park are not buried, but elevated on concrete blocks, like the houses of all the other groups. In a footnote to a 1990 paper on ‘Toraja culture and the tourist gaze’, Toby Volkman comments on the plans for the park and ironically enquires: ‘And in Mandar, an area where neither politicians, tourists or anthropologists have yet defined “the Mandar house”, how can one discover it’ (1990:109).

3.


Department of Tourism provided a plan which the regions were instructed to follow for the basic construction of the houses, to which it was intended they would add distinctive decorations. The plan from the Department of Tourism represented a very different sensibility from that of the park’s originators. Reflecting the approach to ‘tradition’ of the national government, the strategy of making the houses all basically the same asserts a common history, a shared past, rather than a celebration of rich diversity.

Faced with a potential sabotage of their concept, which could not be easily solved without political conflict, the park’s organising committee came up with the solution of grouping the ‘unauthentic’ houses in a separate area, the Kawasan Rumah Tradisional (Location for Traditional Houses), located outside the area demarcated by the walls of Benteng Somba Opu. A few districts responded to a call from the committee to deviate from the Department of Tourism plan and submit a new plan, one which was authentic in the sense of reproducing an existing or historically documented house. These were placed in the area inside the fort walls, together with the original four houses representing the etnis. This area was differentiated by the name Kawasan Rumah Adat, or location for adat houses (adat meaning custom or tradition).

In ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ in Jakarta, Rumah Adat refers to the pavilions which are simulacra of the real thing, often in miniature form; in South Sulawesi in Miniature, i t refers to the houses which are most authentic in terms of replicating something which has endured from the past (a real object). Rumah Tradisional, by contrast, refers to something which engages in a general way in the manner of the incursion of the past into the present, but via an official rendering of its most extreme generality (the wooden frame supporting floor and roof, the porch at the front, three windows at the front with wooden shutters). The difference between adat (which means tradition) and tradisional in this schema comes down to the question of the nature of links with the past, about authenticity equated with things of an enduring nature. In the context of the Sulawesi park, the borrowed word tradisional implies a lesser cultural value than adat.

Errington has commented: ‘The invention of the nation-state creates a shift in the relation of a community to its objects and to its past’ (1989b51). Such objects provide a means by which we position ourselves in relation to a past; the life histories of objects, in particular the objects which are incorporated into museums, can incorporate dramatic shifts in meanings, as they are dug up, transported and so on. This can often involve a loss of control of the meanings of objects by the communities who created them (see Errington 1989b:56). The houses in the central area of the park are peculiar kinds of museum objects. Not used for the purpose intended, they nonetheless retain their aura of authenticity (and hence a particular cultural value) because of the conditions under which they were created, by the craftsmen who carried out not only the correct technical procedures but also the right ritual procedures (for houses, in particular the big houses, are objects which have sacred properties). The transportation of the Mandar house across time has particular force: lost to living memory, it retained its identity in a manuscript which had also been long hidden from public view. Once revealed, the house once again took on a material existence, not (as in prior times) as the stationary centre of a former realm, but as an overarching symbol of that modern thing, Mandar identity. The Rumah Mandar does not relocate an object in the present, an object which has endured over time, but rather has


reached across time, beyond historical memory, to recreate an object from the past on the basis of its image. In its construction the artisans gave great attention to ‘authenticity’, faithfully employing all their technical and ritual skills in matters such as the selection of the all important centre post, which anchors spiritual potency in the same manner as the human navel (see Errington 1989a), or in solving the technical problem of erecting the massive posts of the frame.

Pemberton describes the museum at ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ as a way of connecting the past and future in the present by a process of flattening; it contains only new objects (1994:169). In a version of the nusantara concept, it takes us through Indonesia’s geography, then natural history and on to the realm of the social (see Taylor 1994), represented in a large painting which has the bride and groom in Javanese costume, but the guests (identifiable in their difference by their costumes) are from all over the archipelago (Pemberton 1994). The museum in miniature at South Sulawesi by contrast contains only objects excavated at the site: bricks from the fort, many of them decorated with magical formulae and early examples of Macassarese script; everyday items like cooking pots and fish hooks; and also weapons, bullets and cannon balls, reinforcing the memories of violence at the site invoked by the display of war damage in the wall of the fort. A large painting on the ceiling, viewed in a mirror image, is the centrepiece. It is a copy of a Dutch illustration of the fort. Rather than effacing the past, flattening the past, present and future, the museum respects the past and brings it into the present. Overall, the South Sulawesi park invokes a sense of temporality which connects the past to the present. It offers an authentically South Sulawesi history in contrast to the homogenising definitions of the nation state.

The architecture of the meeting hall (Baruga) ‘quotes’ from traditional style in its mode of construction and its gargantuan size redolent of the dimensions of the former palaces. Although the architect’s original drawing continues the reference to palaces by creating five gable flaps under the roofline, the actual building has three which, according to its caretaker, is to ensure that people of all rank feel comfortable coming into the building, to make it more democratic. It is always open, and its huge size makes it a favourite of Indonesian visitors, who pose for souvenir snapshots with the Baruga as background.

The park presents a scholarly view of history which engages with the popular view but cannot efface it. Uniform, homogenising views of history cannot be maintained in the face of competing views, as the story of the establishment of the Kawasan Rumah attests. Even in the Kawasan Rumah Adat, where the park’s founders most coherently expressed their idea of the historical and the cultural, aberrations have crept in. For example, the house representing the district of Luwu replicates not an actual house but the view of an influential Luwu intellectual of what a Luwu palace should be like. It is enormous-the building to date represents only the kitchen, but a model on the porch indicates how it is envisaged. Two very large buildings (the kitchen and the main house) are joined by a walkway which is topped with a decorative structure which could represent an umbrella (the symbol for the rulers of Luwu) or could be a reference to Meru, the legendary Hindu mountain, seat of divine power. The singularity of the proposed house, in relation to those from other areas would seem to express Luwu’s idea of its centrality, as the originary point of distinctive South Sulawesi traditions (which the symbolism labels as Indic). Perhaps


this indicates another source of ‘authenticity’, the legitimating power of the traditional intellectual, with the appropriate spiritual potency, to define what is authentically traditional.

Redefinition of tradition was most evident in the uniformity of houses in the Kawasan Rumah Tradisional, and in the embellishments which imposed their regional distinctiveness on the common plan. I arrived in the park fresh from a trip to the island of Selayar, where I had gone to see some very old houses which had survived the era of the Darul Islam rebellion. However, the Selayar House in the Kawasan Rumah Tradisional bore no resemblance to the houses I had just seen, or to the ‘model house’ built as a museum by the local government on the island. It was built on the standard design, but covered in elaborately patterned strips of bamboo. Inside, the front room was dominated by a square bamboo-covered bar which took up the space in the middle of the room, leaving a corridor about a metre wide between the bar and the wall of the house. In a marvellous example of a tradition in the making, the caretaker assured me that it was the customary manner of dividing off a space for sleeping, rather than the more usual manner of walling of a room. The Director of the park later told me that it was indeed a bar, which had been built by the women’s organisation from Selayar in order to sell food and drinks. The bamboo strips displayed a local handicraft which the government of Selayar are currently promoting as a small industry. The house in the Kawasan Rumah Tradisional was used to display this ‘traditional’ craft production.

Accommodating identity Does the park represent a state sponsored form of ‘otherness’, whose meaning can be

only understood in terms of the broader Indonesian project of contained diversity in the quest for national unity? What is the relation between the form of the park and the ways in which people engage with it?

The Bugis, Macassarese, Mandar and Toraja all present themselves as people for whom hierarchical models of authority are significant. In public life, local elites promote these customary forms of hierarchy and their symbolic expression, in counterpoint to the adoption of Javanese court custom as a defining feature of legitimation of authority under the New Order (see Magenda 1988; Robinson 1993).

Houses, in particular the iconography of house forms, have always been significant in defining that hierarchy. Houses also have a sacred character, being ‘ritual attractors’ (Fox 1993), places for the concentration and attachment of spiritual power. The people who live in the park do not treat the houses as entirely secular objects: for example, they carry out the appropriate ritual practices to ensure harmonious accommodation with the spiritual forces in the house before moving in.

The park is no sterile monument which acquired meaning only in the tourist gaze. It is not a segregated enclave separate from the lives of the local people. The site still bears the marks of its existence as a rural village. The fruit trees in the area were purchased to ensure they were not cut down by the former village residents. Hence the houses shelter amongst mango trees, coconut palms, kapok trees. The Toraja houses sit atop a small


knoll, surrounded by coconut trees and overlooking wet-rice fields which are still being worked; these surroundings contribute to this feeling of a ‘real’ village.

In the Kawasan Rumah Tradisional the houses are crowded together. All of these houses and most in the Kawasan Rumah Adat are permanently inhabited, by people who serve as caretakers. The people who live in the houses behave in ways which both ‘authentically’ replicate and invent cultural traditions. For example, during a cultural festival with nightly performances, in the Kawasan Rumah Tradisional, the show was held up one night by a much more dramatic performance. A man had murdered his sister’s lover in a matter of honour, the shaming of his family by her illicit sexual liaison. The scheduled performance was held up until this other show of culture had been resolved, by the police taking away the man and his sister, who was potentially his next victim.

The park has led to the development of new transport networks. Minibuses now terminate at the bridge. Becak (pedicabs) work in the park, and cars and taxis pass through not infrequently. Vegetable sellers from rural Goa who transport their produce to the city market by bicycle now use the park as a thoroughfare, crossing the river by raft, continuing through the park and then by road into the city. Small food stalls have sprung up under the trees and in the entry porches of some of the houses. Two small hotels catering to tourists have opened up in the suburbs which adjoin the bridge. This part of Ujungpandang is now destined for a major urban development project.

Some of the houses are inhabited by Macassarese performers, who are paid small stipends as security guards, thus giving them time to nurture their skills. The Baruga is used by dance groups for performances and one group rehearses there every Sunday. The park is used for cultural events, including a cultural festival every October.

The park is increasingly popular with domestic tourists. University students from the regions use the houses as sites for seminars on their local cultures. Schoolchildren from the rural areas arrive in busloads on study tours. In January 1996, just at the beginning of the fasting month (Ramadan) the park was full of young students from Islamic schools on Sunday outings. In addition, the park is used by local government officials as a showcase for local culture on official occasions, such as national conferences or visits by high level dignitaries. The park is not yet visited much by foreign tourists, most of whom arrive by plane and head from the airport directly to the district of Tana Toraja in the north.

The park is a socially defined space which is involved in more than an official representation of culture. It is significant in the everyday lives of the people of South Sulawesi, particularly (but not exclusively) those living in its environs. It has very much a place in the present as well as in the constitution of historical discourse.

Competing notions of history

The very concept of the park involves an invocation of a kind of historical memory. Already within the official form of the park there are at least two competing versions of how history is invoked in the ‘authenticity’ of the houses in the Kawasan Rumah Adat as opposed to the common form of the houses in Kawasan Rumah Tradisional which imply a shared history and identity. However, these competing official versions of history are not


the only ways in which the past is brought into play in the present. The park is a site of pilgrimage for Macassarese people who come to propitiate the ancestors purportedly buried here. One of these sites is marked by an old cannon, a relic of the anti-colonial wars which, it is said, emerged by itself from the ground after several centuries of concealment. It is next to a small mausoleum, the grave of a warrior who is, according to some supplicants, the man who used the cannon. The mausoleum contains a bedstead, at which food and drink are left. Its mosquito net is raised and lowered, morning and night, by the keeper of the grave. A similar bedstead, a rather makeshift affair made from bamboo, marks a grave site on the bastion of the fort. Both of these sites attract pilgrims, who bring offerings, burn candles and incense and supplicate the ancestral spirits. The grave on the bastion was ceremonially moved, as was another in the centre of a road, to make way for the new development. I met a large party making a pilgrimage to the grave on the bastion: they described it as being that of their ancestor from the royal lineage of Goa. The archaeologists who excavated the wall say no human remains were found there. It is definitely not a grave in their view, but nonetheless it retains its significance as a site of renewal of memory, of ancestral connections, for people who consider themselves to be descendants of the kings of Goa. The propitiation of ancestors, all of whom are remembered for their connections to anti-colonial struggles in the past, are a folk variant of the more scholarly representation of history provided by the excavation and reconstruction of the walls. The exact historical identities of these personages do not matter for the descendants who still honour their memory and seek to draw on their power.

There are three art galleries in the Kuwasun Rumah Tradisional, all housing a single artist. These artists also invoke historical memories in their work. One paints village scenes, many of activities such as harvest rites which are no longer regularly performed. Another paints stories from the historical manuscripts. The third, Bachtiar Hafid, most directly connects his work to this particular site. He fasts and meditates in order to envision his paintings. In his meditative state he meets up with historical figures, including Sultan Hasanuddin himself. He has created a new image of Sultan Hasanuddin, wearing a songkat (a small cap resembling a fez, associated with Islam) rather than the Macassarese headscarf in which he is usually portrayed. He has also been able to reproduce scenes of the battle which led to the destruction of the fort. There have been many sightings of ghosts which also elaborate the historical connection, the looking to the past. Even though the houses are new and only recently inhabited, the presence of ghosts authenticates them.

The notion of adat carries an implication of culture as immanent. But ‘culture is contested, temporal and emergent’ (Kahn 1993:14). The delineation of ethnic groups in South Sulawesi is drawing its meaning from a discourse of nationalism, from the impetus of the modern rather than from an enduring cultural uniqueness. However, the process of creation of these ethnic groups as ethnographic entities has engaged with the agenda of indigenous anthropologists and historians, for whom these identities are not just a form of otherness but are part of the social being they construct for themselves in the context of contemporary Indonesia It differs from ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ in that the buildings are not ersatz, but are in fact an ‘authentic’ reconstitution of cultural artefacts in the context of the museum park. These scholars who bring their academic habits and inclinations to the delineation of the park’s character have a genuine appreciation of these buildings as


beautiful objects, and a valuing of their own distinctive cultural milieu. In Constituting the Minangkabau, Kahn goes on to argue that ‘the construction of particular cultures in the modern world has to be understood in the broader context of the construction of cultural otherness in general’ (1993: 15). How much more complex the process becomes when the received versions of a culture are constituted in this way by indigenous scholars whose own positions are complexly inflected by the cultural beliefs and practices, but who are also energetically involved in the politics of the constitution of culture in contemporary Indonesia. Who are the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of anthropological discourse in this case?

Conclusion

What does invoking the past in the present mean? What is the significance of notions of preservation or reconstruction in contemporary cultural and political practice? Pemberton (1994) has an answer for Java under the New Order of President Suharto. In his discussion of ‘Beautiful Indonesia’, a similar park with empty houses standing for the constituent ethnic groups of Indonesia, and a museum attached, he makes the point that the museum effaces the past and, rather, celebrates a future, the future being created by the central New Order government. By contrast, the park in South Sulawesi finds the source of contemporary identities and political strength firmly in the past. The present stands in continuity with this re-membered past which is the basis on which the people of South Sulawesi embrace the future. South Sulawesi is strong in asserting its independence in regard to the centre, for example in sustaining successfully that all local positions of power are held by ‘locals’.

This park rejects the specific ahistoricism of the New Order but draws on its framework for historicising the past to construct particular meanings in the present (see Pemberton 1994:234-5). Discussing the wedding of President Suharto’s daughter, held at ‘Beautiful Indonesia’, Pemberton reads it as saying: ‘We can act like kings and queens because some day we, too, will be legendary’ (1994: 180). In Sulawesi the creation of the park lacks the close connection to centralised power: in fact it is tied up with the opposite, the display of an independent tradition. House forms are significant in this: they encapsulate the notion of centredness integral to indigenous political thought, and this in turn is connected to notions of hierarchy, which the grand houses displayed in the park graphically represent. The message here seems to be: ‘We can assert our independence from the centre because we too are the heirs of a civilised imperial tradition’, one which is also characterised by hierarchical forms of authority, on the concentration of spiritual potency, which is a way of bringing the past into the present.

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history, houses and regional identities

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