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Sovereignty in the North Moluccas: Historical Transformations
Abstract
The re-establishment of the Sultanates of Ternate and Tidore (North Moluccas) in the wake of the political decentralization in Indonesia was accompanied in 1999 by violent confrontations of Muslims and Christians, in which the Sultans reactivated their “traditional” sovereign claims on their former overseas dependencies in Halmahera. This article examines the representations and ritual exchanges, in terms of which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards sovereignty used to be conceptualized and enacted in the societies concerned. Focusing on the monetary dimensions of these models of sovereignty and tributary relations, it analyzes the interventions that were implemented successively by the Sultanate of Ternate, the Dutch Colonial Government and missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church. It is argued that these interventions eventually resulted in transformations of the diarchically structured and cosmologically authorized models of sovereignty into religiously grounded claims at universal sovereignty, thus paving the way for inter-religious violence.
... Many scholars have pointed out that in Tidore and elsewhere in North Maluku, certain clans have been associated with the "land" and called the "lords of the land"; they have also explained how the dual leadership of stranger-kings and lords of the land has operated throughout history (Andaya 1993;Baker 1988;Platenkamp 2013;Widjojo 2009). Andaya (1993, pp. ...
This article examines perceptions of jin rituals in Tidore in order to explore how Austronesian perceptions of founders’ cults, arrival-order precedence, and stranger-kingship operate in determining social relations. Tidore origin narratives are significant historical texts that encode the social order and its power relations and so must be explored in greater depth. I analyzed rituals, origin narratives, and public discourse through interviews conducted with locals and particularly with four sowohi, the ritual specialists of jin worship. Additionally, I observed the public aspects of the jin ritual of inauguration of the sultan. The jin are the ancestral spirits and “true owners” of Tidore. Both the jin and sowohi are associated with the land and thus are the autochthonous leaders on the island. The sultan belongs to the stranger-king category, which was formed by later immigrant groups. During jin rituals of worship, the jin bless the sultan through the sowohi, who serve as mediums; this symbolizes the autochthonous flow of blessings to later immigrant groups. The rituals are also a recollection of a more primordial social order of heterogenous groups, which is based on the arrival-order precedence on Tidore.
... Therefore, they argued, the kolano were more respected than the raja, referring to the village heads in South and Central Maluku. According to some fragmented historical records and public memories, the Loloda Kingdom was attacked by Spanish merchants in the early seventeenth century and eventually placed under the suzerainty of Ternate, which emerged as a powerful overlord in northern Halmahera (Platenkamp 2013;Andaya 1993b: 4-98). Sultan Hamzah (1627-1648) of Ternate launched an expansionist policy and drove a massive evacuation of Loloda people to Jailolo, which resulted in a rapid decline in the population (Andaya 1993b:159). ...
This article examines the historical background behind the recent reinstallation of Loloda’s kingship in North Halmahera, Indonesia. This marginalized group of people reignited their mythic narratives to renegotiate their centrality and power as a region, strengthening both their ethnic and cultural identities in the process. Through the narrative of the Kie Romtoha (Five Mountains), the activists placed Loloda alongside the four other mythic centres of Maluku called the Kie Raha (Four Mountains) and promoted the myth of Jou Tolo, a royal ancestor, to conform with the royal origin stories of the Kie Raha states. This article illustrates how the Loloda people were not only able to rise above their societal position by rearticulating these myths, but were also able to utilize these stories to facilitate religious reconciliation in modern times, despite there being a painful history of division between Muslims and Christians within this community.
... THE DEAD GO TO THE MARKET from this particular relationship. The lung is seen as a representation wholeness of the Thai state, a relationship that valorizes the means _C <hn,'" exchanges that reproduce social relations within and beyond that In this sense, the king's sovereignty is partially grounded in the state's ability to transform very diverse exchanges into money (see Aglietta et al. 1998;Platenkamp 2013). On the other hand, the Lao kip has no comparable imagery. ...
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future.
Van Klinken (2007) argued that in Indonesia's autonomy era, sultanship has become the symbol par excellence of local identity. It is considered as part of the communitarian turn in the Indonesian politics after the end of the New Order. This becomes one of the factors that has revived identities at a great rate, especially at the district level. This research aims to investigate how the sultan and sultanship in Ternate are represented by the local media. We used a qualitative approach to capture the representation of sultan by analyzing articles published in Malut Post, a local newspaper in North Maluku. By utilizing a qualitatively processed key analysis with the NVIVO software, we analyzed Saturday's newspaper published in 2012-2017 using some keywords which are semantically related to sultan and sultanship. Moreover, we also analyzed semantically related words such as kolano and jou to figure out its collocation in the corpus data. We used two keywords in this research: sultan and kesultanan. We found out that compared to kesultanan, sultan is represented more dominantly in the media. On one side, the local media captured the role of sultan as a figure and also as a father. On the other side, the media also captured the conflict that happened inside the sultanship, especially that related with the election process of the new Sultan.
This article examines the multiple foundation myths of North Maluku and reveals that they contain Austronesian concepts of origin structures within which diarchic divisions between a stranger-king and autochthonous groups are important. In Ternate, the Jafar Sadek and Nursafa myth, which emphasises stranger-king ancestors, has been adopted by the royal court and serves as a charter of revived rituals and symbols. The late Sultan Mudaffar Sjah, in particular, used the mythic narratives to disseminate a sense of his power, which helped his ascendancy in local politics. While the Tidore royal family has adopted the same myth, it is the autochthonous clan that controls rituals and spiritual matters. Rather than focusing on the sacredness of stranger-kings, the Tidore rituals reflect an interesting array of stranger-kings and autochthons, established in the pre-colonial era.
This article deals with the role of the universe and the spirits in the religious syncretism at the Maluku and North Maluku. In the past, these provinces were the understrong influence of colonialism; however, the power of primaeval beliefs showed that the natives were strongly tied to their own traditions, from which they did not want to resign. Despite conversions, animism is still practised by the residents of Maluku, especially around impenetrable territories. Their image of the world put an emphasis on the role of stars and planets in the rituals because they regulated their cyclicality and played a major role in their myths about cosmology. On the other hand, the spirits represented the immaterial world. The aim of the article is to show the influence of the forces of nature and the incomprehensible phenomena which shaped religious syncretism in Eastern Indonesia.
Drawing on ethnographic observations in Lao markets and bazaars, this article proposes a new and experimental framework for the analysis of multi-ethnic trading. It explores bazaars and trade as sites of the (re-)production of ethnicity through the perspective of gift exchange theory. On markets, transcultural differences can be identified and stabilized through the exchange of goods and money. This draws attention to the role of trade items as foci – and perhaps even as non-human agents – in the emergence of ethnicity and other forms of local identity. The value of items’ specific origins is thus linked to social structure. This helps us to see how the shaping of group identity can be better understood by considering how the goods they bring to market carry with them some features of the gift.
Jos Platenkamp discusses the historical introduction of ‘religion’ in North Moluccan societies. The chapter first describes the significances attributed to this category by Iberian Catholic priests entering the region in the early 1600s and by the Muslim sultans of Ternate and Tidore. It then analyses how the Dutch United East India Company subsequently interacting with the sultans assessed the role of Reformed Protestantism relative to its ideology of Natural Law and Free Trade. Finally, it examines the perceptions by the non-Muslim societies in the region of the ‘religion’ introduced by Dutch Protestant missionaries from the 1860s onwards. The chapter reveals how during the entire period studied Christianity was locally valued for representing foreign sources of authority relative to the autochthonous origins of life.
lowe the present book to the encouragement and guidance of my friends, for which I am moSll: indebted to them. This applies in the first place to Dr. P. Middelkoop, who worked in Timor for more than thirty years as a missionary and bible translator. My gratitude for all the help he has given can hardly be expressed in words, and I can do no more than simply say that this book is to a large extent also his book - the writing of it could not have been accomplished without his valued assistance. He has given up many an evening to the an swering of my countless questions with his inexhaustible knowledge of the language and culture of the Atoni. am also deeply grateful to Professor L. Onvlee, who acted as my I supervisor during the preparation of the D1.lII:ch version of this book for submission as a doctoral thesis (H et Politieke Systeem van de A toni van Timor, Driebergen, 1966, 278 pp.). But for the many stimulating conversations I was able to enjoy with him I would never have acquired the approach to our subject which lies at the basis of this book, namely that the essential point is the study of man in his culture, and that even in the analysis of one particular aspect of a cul.ture we are dealing with the culture as a whole and with man as the bearer of that cuLture.
This article presents a comparative analysis of three myths about the incomplete person, recorded in insular Southeast Asian societies. Rejecting assumptions that this mythical theme represent a universal psychological archetype the analysis focuses on the question, which prototypical social and cosmological relationships need to be established in order for a person to acquire his or her completeness. It is demonstrated how to that end social relations are connected to cosmological relations, a process in which the conversion of component parts of persons into valuable objects plays a key role. By setting the standards for such conversion processes the myths articulate cosmological authorisations of the ritual exchanges leading to the reproduction of complete human and vegetable life forms.
Stranger-king formations in Indonesia and Oceania are set in the larger context of similar polities the world around. Across these societies, the same structures of the potency of alterity appear in a variety of political forms - the experiential archetype of which, it is argued, is the transaction of vitality between consanguinal and affinal kindreds. The conclusion is that elementary forms of kinship and politics are one.
Tracing the confusion surrounding the concept of sovereignty to its complex referent, to epistemological relativism, and to metaphorical uses of the term "sovereignty", this article proposes an interdisciplinary approach as a partial remedy to this problem. As a preliminary step, the article starts with an analysis of the intricate relationship that exists between legal stipulations, descriptive statements and normative theories. This is followed by a six-fold classification of theories of sovereignty on the basis of their unit of analysis and analytical goals. The article concludes with an attempt to identify some of the most important linkages between these classes of theories.
This essay looks at the social, aesthetic, and violent life of fake documents. It suggests that fakes and forgeries, both as a general phenomenon and in the specific context of communal violence, offer a useful analytical site for an investigation into the relationship between empathy, power, and authenticity. Based on an analysis of a series of false letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia, I approach the politics and poetics of forgery by setting the fake letters within a broader political discourse about falsity in Indonesia and beyond. Exploring the dynamics of empathy and intimacy that are necessary for the production and validation of fake documents and letters during conflict, I suggest that, contrary to received wisdom, empathy may be closely associated with violence. I also argue that empathy arises within particular political ontologies and specific forms of cultural intimacy that circulate in and beyond nation-states. An ethnographic enquiry into the social life of fake documents is therefore a useful starting point for an inquiry into the emotional aspects of instigation as well as for a political ethnography of empathy.
From Partial Persons to Completed Societies. — This article presents a comparative analysis of three myths about the incomplete person, recorded in insular Southeast Asian societies. Rejecting assumptions that this mythical theme represent a universal psychological archetype the analysis focuses on the question, which prototypical social and cosmological relationships need to be established in order for a person to acquire his or her completeness. It is demonstrated how to that end social relations are connected to cosmological relations, a process in which the conversion of component parts of persons into valuable objects plays a key role. By setting the standards for such conversion processes the myths articulate cosmological authorisations of the ritual exchanges leading to the reproduction of complete human and vegetable life forms.
- Platenkamp J. D. M.
- Aglietta M.
- Fortgens J.
- Hueting A.
- Hueting A.
- van Baarda M. J.
- Hueting A.
- de Clercq F. S. A.