Tanah Barkat (Blessed Land): The Source of the Local in the
Banda Islands, Central Maluku, 1)

by: Phillip Winn, 2)


The Negeri Adat

If the keramat themselves testify to the claim that the islands are blessed ground, then the practices occurring at these sites actively enact this perspective and provide a concrete expression of connection to place. Keramat played a central part in the context of regular (though infrequent) collective ritual action involving the residents of particular settlements. Concentrations of important local keramat offer legitimation and focus within such collective practice, providing evidence of the existence of a pre-colonial polity known as negeri adat occupying the same location as contemporary settlements. These negeri adat in turn provide the social boundaries of ritual participation, in addition to providing a source of more specific communal identification within the embracing notion of orang Banda (being orang Lonthoir or orang Hatta, for example).

The expression negeri is likely an archaic one. The Hikayat Tanah Hitu, an indigenous narrative chronicle concerning the Muslim polity of Tanah Hitu on the north coast of Ambon, uses the terms negeri and tanah interchangeably in referring to the Banda Islands—‘Tanah Bandan’ and ‘Negeri Bandan’ (Manusama 1977: 193). Geertz (1980: 4) posits the term negeri as a variation of negara, a loan word derived from the Sanskrit nagara, originally meaning ‘town’ or ‘city’. The Indonesian terms negara, nagari and negeri developed to encompass such diverse ideas as ‘palace’, ‘capital’, ‘state’ and ‘realm’ in addition to ‘town’ (Wisseman-Christie 1986: 67). Reflecting on the Malay use of negeri, Milner (1982: 123) suggests: ‘[It] denotes a fairly large community … an entrepot for foreign merchants, with some political influence over the surrounding territory.’

Certainly the Banda Islands were an important trading entrepot in Central Maluku, perhaps the most important in a local network of trade that included the island groups of Aru and Kei and the small archipelagic chain off eastern Seram (Ellen 1987). Early European traders recorded dealing with several distinct polities located throughout the islands, many of which directly paralleled the locations of named negeri adat in the contemporary Bandas. Geertz (1980: 121) also notes, however, that negara ‘catches up a various field of meanings, but a different field than state, leading to the usual misconnections of intercultural translation when it is thus rendered’. As a case in point, Geertz notes the existence in Bali of a ‘custom community’ or ‘negara adat’, which he depicts in part as:

a stretch of sacred space ... all those living within its bounds, and therefore benefiting from its energies, were collectively responsible for meeting the ritual and moral obligations those energies entailed. (Geertz 1980: 128-9)


Traube (1986: 13) makes the Durkheimian-inspired observation that ritual obligations may be viewed as synonymous with social obligations—not simply an adjunct to relationships but rather constituting them as meaningful social forms. There are areas of important congruence here with local perspectives in the Banda Islands concerning adat obligations to the negeri adat and its datu-datu. These obligations were rarely expressed in the idiom of ‘life’ itself or couched in the idioms of derivation involving biological substance, as is widespread in eastern Indonesia. 16 As noted, the datu-datu were not envisaged as ancestors, and neither did social groupings (such as ‘houses’) defined by systems of marriage exchange have a presence in the contemporary Banda Islands. But ancestry and marriage exchange are far from being the only form ideas of relatedness might take. In the Bandas, concerns of social derivation tended to emphasise instead
the source of productive social relations, the physical and moral conditions understood as underpinning and enabling community existence.

In this respect, informants regularly interpreted the cooperation and mutual assistance inherent in adat practice as providing a model for contemporary life: ‘following the example of the negeri people from the past’(‘mengikuti jejak daripada orang negeri dari dulu’[Waer]) or ‘similar to the way people behaved in the distant past, doing what is good, what is right’(‘semacam orang dulu-dulu punya cara, bikin baik, bikin bersih’[Lonthoir]). 17 Despite the absence of social groups defined in relation to apical ancestors, the Banda negeri adat can nevertheless be viewed as constituting origin groups of a kind, but one that emphasises concerns with the origins of community itself and the sustaining
characters of communal life rather than personal derivation. This is reflected vividly in the greater local salience of moral metaphors linked to religious ideals—particularly bersih and kotor (clean-pure vs. soiled-impure)—rather than biological or botanical idioms of (e.g. blood or roots-tips).

My research showed that the depth of an individual’s personal genealogical knowledge usually comprised two or, more rarely, three prior generations. Very few individuals could recall genealogical detail of any kind beyond this. The origin of ancestors who came to the Bandas from elsewhere tended to be conceived in extremely general terms, such as ‘Java’, rather than involving specific locations. 18 Many people simply stated that they did not know the geographic origins of personal forebears, and little systematic attempt was made to maintain the memories of distant ancestors. Carsten (1997: 271) describes a similar situation among an island-coastal community of Malay immigrants and stresses that this should not be interpreted solely in terms of the loss of important knowledge, as implied, for example, in descriptions such as ‘structural amnesia’.

Instead, the absence of genealogical knowledge may play a critical positive role in the production of sociality among populations comprising a high level of impoverished immigrants. In this reading, analytical focus is given to the downward or forward-looking kinship practices that do exist as a productive orientation to social relations which work to integrate and cohere an otherwise diverse group: ‘it may be more important to create kinship out of new ties than to remember ancestors whose identity has become largely irrelevant’ (Carsten 1997: 270). It is unsurprising then that traditions associated with multiple points of ancestral origin should disappear over time, particularly as low-status groups or commoners regularly form the most mobile segments of a population. Under such conditions, ‘kinship—or a sense of connectedness to place and people—is not derived from past ties but must be created in the future’ (Carsten 1997: 272).

This kind of kinship orientation appears likely to have arisen also in the Bandas, where the bulk of colonial era immigrants were slaves, convicts and indentured labourers. As with Carsten’s Malay-based study, Bandanese kinship is cognatic and tends to be ‘wide’ rather than ‘deep’: ‘it stretches outwards, following degrees of siblingship, rather than backwards into the past’ (Carsten 1997: 272). 19 She notes also that the long-term process of creating relatedness under such circumstances might rely on strongly asserted elisions of difference: ‘the emphasis is on absorbing and blending, rather than maintaining regional and cultural difference’(Carsten 1997: 270). In the Bandas, this insight also appears applicable. Social differentiation based on issues of origin within negeri adat was considered impossible because the entire population was described as the descendants of immigrants, a perspective often put with some insistence: ‘we are [all] immigrants, there are no truly autochthonous [people] left ... where can you find them? They are gone ... [people of] truly autochthonous origins – there are none’(‘katorang pendatang, asli betul su tarada lai ... mo dapat orang asli di mana? Su habis ... asal asli betul—tarada’ [Lonthoir]). A general principle of equality of origin appears almost axiomatic: all are pendatang (immigrants) and campur (mixed).

For the bulk of contemporary Bandanese, this overt rejection of social differentiation based on personal derivation has not eliminated the possibility of valorising the past. In emphasising the narratives of Banda as tanah berkat, the theme of incorporation and inclusion is given greater productive possibilities than the mere absence of ancestral detail. It facilitated a resiling from the kind of ethnic, religious and status differentiations that characterised colonial social life in the Banda plantations. In the post-colonial era, earlier distinctions that are still part of living memory between longer-term residents residing in hamlets outside the walled plantation compounds and more recent immigrants (many of whom were indentured labourers) who formed the bulk of the plantation workforce have fallen away, as a legacy of revolutionary-era nationalist sentiment and intermarriage. 20 In this context, the negeri adat emerged as an embracing ritual entity and a moral community, capable of cutting across religion and providing a vehicle of commonality rather than differentiation.

At the same time, informants suggested that their immigrant ancestors were obligated to become members of the negeri where they took up residence (‘musti masuk warga negeri’[Lonthoir]), an act that involved adapting themselves to the adat tanah (‘sesuai diri dengan adat tanah’[Lonthoir]) and, in so doing, joined the ritual activities associated with the existence of the negeri (‘ikut keadaan, kerja negeri’[Selamon]). This principle remained predominant in thinking about negeri membership and identification. Local birth and local residence were the primary factors in allowing participation in the important ritual practices of the negeri adat, which in turn conferred and substantiated claims of local identification, being of the negeri—a negeri person (orang negeri).

An important enabling factor was undoubtedly an absence of social stratification based upon landownership. Negeri adat in the Banda Islands clearly express a mode of territorial ordering in the existence of the frontiers seen as separating different negeri. The significance of negeri membership for access to local resources was considerable, in particular for tree crops such as nutmeg and kenari nut, and also in some instances to marine biota (see, for example, Winn 2002). But the relation of the negeri to landownership was slight. A general recognition existed that much of the land was officially owned by the Government (tanah negara), a consequence of being formerly part of colonial plantation holdings. Nonetheless, a perspective I encountered frequently among ritual specialists suggested that no formal agreement existed between the Bandanese and the Dutch that involved passing ownership of the land to the latter, rather the use of the land only. In this view, the Indonesian Government has misconstrued what occurred historically and therefore, in taking possession of Dutch property in the 1950s, erroneously included areas of extant traditional holdings within its general declaration of the plantation areas as tanah negara. There was a persistent hope that former plantation land currently used for individual residences, garden cultivation and tree-planting would at some future point be converted officially into individual hak paki (exclusive right of use), if not hak milik (exclusive right of property).

Nonetheless, state law did not determine local practices of landholding. While taking account of the regulatory regimes of the State (or, at least, local conceptions of what these might involve), landholding practices were less involved with normative concepts of property consisting of ‘jural typification’ and much more concerned with constellations of social relationships and the distribution of property among living people (von Benda-Beckmann and Taale 1996: 39-40). A general area of emphasis involved the recognition of effort, in particular clearing and planting. These acts set in motion a constellation of local views akin to those described as ‘perusah’ (von Benda-Beckmann and Taale 1996: 45) and customary ‘pioneer’s rights’ (White 1999: 244), established in the first instance by a person's efforts in clearing and cultivating or house-building. Ownership of trees and use-rights to gardens was viewed locally as constituting part of an individual’s estate (warisan or pusaka), passed on to their heirs after death. This was in turn shaped by varied interpretations of Islamic inheritance law, the most prevalent being that sons should receive twice the portion of daughters. People often noted that in practice the land had been used and passed on to descendants over many years without interference from the Government, a situation they hoped would continue.
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1) In T. Reuter (ed.) 2006: Sharing the Earth, Dividing the Land,
dimuat atas kebaikan hati Dr. Phillip Winn
2)
School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Faculty of Arts,
Australian National University

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