Thomas Gibson

In this paper I address the relationship between symbolic knowledge, defined as the largely unconscious or preconscious network of metaphors and metonymies embedded in myth and ritual; and ideology, defined as the conscious manipulation of aspects of symbolic knowledge for explicit political ends.  I use examples both from my fieldwork among the Makassar of South Sulawesi and from the secondary literature on Suharto's New Order regime, showing how local symbolic and ideological systems are linked to the national level, and beyond that to the global systems of Islam and western capitalism.  Like many other symbolic systems found around the shores of the Indian Ocean, the Makassar system draws on a complex mix of rituals, myths and scriptures derived from local (Austronesian), regional (Indic) and global (Islamic) sources.  Political rulers have drawn on this reservoir of symbolic knowledge over the past thousand years to construct ideal models legitimating a number of different kinds of state.  Many of these models remain available to actors today, who use them to advocate radically divergent courses of action at times of political crisis.  Whether or not ordinary people find these models persuasive or not depends in part on the nature and extent of their own unconscious symbolic knowledge and of their conscious understanding of their own political and economic interests.  Opportunistic political leaders like Suharto who employ multiple, and increasingly inconsistent models over their careers, gradually lose their plausibility as moral and political leaders.

Shaikh Yusuf was perhaps the most famous Islamic Saint ever born in South Sulawesi.  He was, however, only one of many Bugis and Makassarese who set sail across the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century in search of the source of ilmu, esoteric Islamic knowledge.  In this paper I will treat his life as a prototype for this whole class of adventurers, and the kinds of Sufi knowledge he acquired as typical of the Islam that was implanted in the villages of South Sulawesi in the seventeenth century.  The cosmopolitan consciousness induced by these trans-oceanic intellectual links remains in force to this day.

In this paper, I describe an example of ‘resistance’ by a ‘sisterhood’ to the ‘hegemonic values’ of a ‘brotherhood’ in a village in Indonesia.  This resistance takes the form of the dogged performance of rituals in which the leader of the women is possessed by the spirits of her grandmother and their remote royal ancestors.  This is despite more than half a century of vigorous repression by village leaders who denounce the cult as satanic and its practitioners as witches.  Paradoxically, the values implicit in the spirit cult are those of ascribed social hierarchy, the priority of the past over the present, and the dependence of individuals on elders.  The explicit values of the current ‘hegemony’ stress equality of opportunity to achieve higher wealth and status, the priority of the future over the present, and individual autonomy in thought and practice. 
Today’s resistance was yesterday’s hegemony, however:  between 1860 and 1910 the spirit cults were a central feature of a feudal social order that Dutch liberals viewed as a barrier to capitalist progress.  And today’s hegemony was yesterday’s resistance:  between 1910 and 1950 the Dutch colonial state changed sides and encouraged local custom and hereditary chiefs as a bulwark against socialist, nationalist and Islamic agitators.  Between 1950 and 1965 new provincial and national elites led an all-out attack on reactionary local practices, recalling the Dutch liberal policy of the previous century.  But after 1965, the national state changed sides again and began encouraging local ‘culture’ as a bulwark against socialist and Islamic ‘agitators’. 
While policy at the national level has oscillated between radicalism and conservatism, at the local level the hereditary feudal outlook has been steadily losing ground to the achievement oriented democratic outlook.  It has now become the last refuge of those for whom the competitive individualism of the modern political economy holds least promise of security:  village noble women who were at the center of the old system and are at the margins of the new.
In conclusion, I will argue that what counts as ‘resistance’ depends on one’s point of view, and must be determined anew for each time and place.  Further, I will recall Levi-Strauss’s caution in the epigraph that the political motivations of those acting in other times and places are likely to appear obscure to us.  Our own intuitions are a poor guide to diagnosing political struggles in which we are not directly involved.

In this paper I outline an analysis of the turbulent political history of one district in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, from 1890 to 1990.  I will argue that two forms of political action must be distinguished to understand this history, ordinary and revolutionary politics. In ordinary politics, actors may be compared to people playing a game according to a shared set of rules.  In revolutionary politics one group attempts to establish a new paradigm or model.  This distinction deliberately parallels that made by Kuhn between ordinary and revolutionary science (Kuhn 1962).

In this paper I argue that traditional authority is anchored in very basic metaphors of body, sex and age.  This anchoring is brought about through rituals, particularly those associated with the 'life cycle' such as birth, initiation, marriage and death.  Ritual is thus the very foundation of 'traditional authority'.  In these rituals, a particular image of the moral and political order is built up and 'naturalised' in a way that makes social hierarchy and political authority seem compelling to the ordinary person. 
Attempts to institute a new political order will fail unless these rituals are restructured.  This is what happened in South Sulawesi, Indonesia between 1950 and 1965, when a radically modernist Islamic insurgency tried to suppress both what it regarded as unIslamic and what it regarded as 'feudal' in traditional religion and society.  In the subsequent period, however, the traditional ritual forms have gradually reasserted themselves, as has a measure of the old ranking system.  The ethnography will be taken from Ara, a village in South Sulawesi that has undergone great political upheavals in the last century.  In this paper, I am only be able to discuss the role of ritual in the colonial or 'feudal' period prior to 1950 in any detail.  I allude to the post-colonial insurgency and restoration at the end.

This essay has two complementary objectives. It seeks, first, to rethink the dominant theoretical approaches to the study of certain hunting and gathering societies, suggesting a fundamental alteration of perspective.  Second, it subjects these same approaches to a more general critique, drawing on different traditions within anthropological theory as a whole.  As a means to these ends, I deal in the first section with the theoretical analysis of the Mbuti Pygmies carred out by the Marxists Meillasoux and Godelier, and of the !Kung Bushmen carried out by the cultural ecologist Rrchard Lee.  The second section places the Marxist and ecologist approaches within the context of cultural theory deriving from the school of Mauss and including Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins and Dumont.  The third section is a comparative analysis of eight Afro-asian hunting and gathering societies based on the conclusions of the second section.  Finally, in the conclusion, I draw these strands together and attempt some tentative generalizations on the specificity of the societies with which I deal.