Tanah Barkat.........part one

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

by: Phillip Winn,

Introduction

The Banda Islands in central Maluku have long been a site of historical transformations. As a consequence, human relationships to land and place in the Bandas need to be understood in terms of dynamic processes of culture and history. In the pre-colonial period, the islands formed a key part of extensive trading networks reaching across the archipelago to link Maluku with the northern seaports of Java, the cosmopolitan city-state of Malacca in peninsular Malaysia, and ultimately to the Middle East, China and Europe. By the arrival of the first Europeans, the population of the islands included numbers of resident Malay and Javanese merchants, with significant socio-cultural changes in progress. In particular, autochthonous structures of authority had been transformed through the acceptance of Muslim practices and the burgeoning importance of local trade functionaries.

Military conquest of the Banda Islands in 1621 by the Dutch East India Company or VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) resulted in more radical change: the destruction or displacement of much of the existing population of the islands followed by the imposition of the perkerniersstelsel or ‘nutmeg-planter system’. Among the world’s earliest plantation enterprises, this venture relied on several centuries of importing captive labour—in particular, slaves—from regional and extra-regional sources. The VOC’s decimation of indigenous-language speakers, in combination with the diverse origins of the colonial-era population, can certainly be linked to the emergence of a shared and distinctive Malay language that has been referred to as Banda Malay. It still forms the main contemporary vernacular spoken in the Banda Islands.

It is against this background that representations of the land (tanah) itself is prominent in shaping an ontological topography within which the contemporary significance of locality and the legitimacy of local identification take shape. The current population acknowledge descent from immigrants of diverse origins and generally engage in what Carsten (1997) characterises as a ‘future orientation’, where genealogical reckoning is relatively shallow in historical depth butextremely broad in contemporary reach.

Unlike the island Malay population Carsten describes, contemporary Bandanese valorise traditions of knowledge concerning the past, in particular, those that relate to the Banda Islands. This knowledge (known as adat Banda) represents the islands as possessing profound religious significance—in fact, as a blessed land or tanah berkat. By engaging in collective ritual practice (known as kerja adat), local residents enact obligations to social collectivities that derive their meaningfulness from narratives of place, rather than genealogically based visions of ancient shared relatedness. Participation in collective ritual occasions was understood as communicating and reinforcing the moral commitments and goals of religion alongside idealised visions of sociality. Ritual practices additionally confer legitimacy to contemporary assertions of authentically local identity.
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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