Bugis-Makassar Studies

Kritik Bentuk adalah teknik kajian teks yang kuat, awalnya disusun oleh para peneliti Injil abad ke 19, tetapi kini diterapkan pada teks-teks naratif dari banyak budaya. Kritik Bentuk dimulai dengan mengidentifikasi genre atau bentuk lazim sebuah teks, lalu menentukan latar sosiologis atau “situasi dalam kehidupan nyata” (Jerman: Sitz im Leben) teks tersebut. Penulis berpendapat bahwa teks-teks historis Bugis, dan sangat mungkin teks naratif historis mana pun dari kepulauan Malayu-Indonesia, tidak dapat dibaca secara naïf, sebab teks tersebut bisa saja memuat beberapa komponen yang sebelumnya berdri sendiri, yang harus dipahami secara terpisah sebelum menimbang penggabungan mereka ke dalam suatu karya. Kritik Bentuk merupakan bagian mendasar dalam menyunting teks semacam itu sebelum dapat digunakan sebagai sumber sejarah.

Since the 1970s, Bugis written literature has been usually classified into two categories, sureq (literature, belles lettres) and lontaraq (prose texts with a more practical orientation, often of a historiographic nature). Although most scholars accept this classification, the Bugis manuscript tradition does not support this dichotomy. In this article, the use of these terms, as well as the term toloq (usually translated as ‘heroic poem’) is analyzed based on the manuscript tradition. This analysis finds no support for the use of these terms for literary genres, but shows instead that they refer to manuscripts as physical objects and that their use to classify genres of literature is artificial.
Key words: Bugis literature, literature genre, manuscripts, South Sulawesi

Sejak tahun 1970-an sastera Bugis tertulis digolongkan ke dalam dua kategori, sureq, iaitu sastera indah dan lontaraq, prosa dengan ciri yang lebih berorientasi praktis, seringkali berupa tulisan sejarah. Walaupun hampir semua penyelidik sastera Bugis mengikut klasifikasi itu, tradisi manuskrip Bugis sendiri tidak mendukung dikotomi sureq-lontaraq ini. Dalam artikel ini, penggunaan istilah ini, bersama istilah toloq, (biasanya diertikan sebagai ‘syair kepahlawanan’), diulang kaji berdasarkan isi manuskrip Bugis dan tradisinya. Berdasarkan tradisi manuskrip itu, dapat disimpulkan bahawa istilah sureq dan lontaraq pada dasarnya tidak mengacu kepada ragam sastera, tetapi kepada manuskrip sebagai benda fizikal dan pemakaian istilah itu untuk jenis sastera merupakan klasifikasi artifisial.
Kata kunci: Sastera Bugis, jenis sastera, manuskrip, Sulawesi Selatan

Elong maliung bettuana is a unique form of riddle (puzzle poem). Unlike other genres of puzzle or poem; élong maliung bettuanna uniquely explore the orthography characteristic of Bugis language which is syllabic alphabetical to hide meaning in multilayer covers. In order to hide meaning élong maliung bettuanna uses two element of linguistic that are the semiotic device through symbolic system which is strongly related to the context of socio-cultural of Bugis people and the semantic property.
The semiotic dimension related to the symbol represents events outside of the language elements; while the semantic side related to the using such kind of semantic property that is ambiguity to hide meaning and distort information of the poem. The ambiguity arise from the homograph of words; it is enabled by the characteristic of the Bugis script which is syllabic alphabetical.
The language game that enables meaning to be hidden in multilayers cover uses those two language element, the semiotic dimension via symbol and semantic property via ambiguity of the homograph words that is enabled by the orthography characteristic of Bugis language.

Key words: permainan bahasa, élong, élong maliung bettuanna, teka-teki, semiotika, semantik, homograf, ortografi, bugis.

Selama tiga ratus tahun, antara 1300-1600, dua kerajaan berpenutur Makassar berkembang di sudut baratdaya provinsi Sulawesi Selatan, kini terletak di Kabupaten Jeneponto. Sekarang wilayah ini menjadi salah satu bagian termiskin dari provinsi ini dan sangat mungkin senantiasa mengalami tantangan klimatologis. Hanya sedikit yang diketahui dari kerajaan-kerajaan yang kurang dikenal dan lumayan kecil ini, namun kami berpendapat bahwa, tanpa penggalian arkeologis berskala besar sekali pun, masih memungkinkan untuk membangun sebuah gambaran mengenai sejarah dua kerajaan tersebut. Di antara sumber-sumber utama yang tersedia adalah lontraq, naskah tulis dalam aksara lokal, kini ditulis di atas kertas, baik dalam Bahasa Bugis maupun Makassar; kunjungan ke tempat-tempat yang disebutkan dalam naskah; tradisi lisan yang masih bertahan di Jeneponto; dan informasi yang utamanya dibeberkan oleh para penjarah kuburan. Seluruh bukti menunjuk pada fakta bahwa pada abad ke 14, permukiman petani yang bertebaran di deretan lembah di tepi empat sungai utama telah bergabung untuk membentuk empat unit pemerintahan kecil. Perkembangan ini terkait dengan persebaran dan intensifikasi pertanian padi basah yang berlangsung secara terorganisir. Pada abad ke 15, unit-unit pemerintahan kecil yang terpusat di Sungai Topa dan Allu bergabung menjadi Kerajaan Bangkala, sedangkan unit-unit pemerintahan di Sungai Tamanroya dan Jeneponto membentuk Kerajaan Binamu.

The period 1200-1600 CE saw a radical transformation from simple chiefdoms to kingdoms (in archaeological terminology, complex chiefdoms) across lowland South Sulawesi, a region that lay outside the ‘classical’ Indicized parts of Southeast Asia. The rise of these kingdoms was stimulated and economically supported by trade in prestige goods with other parts of island Southeast Asia, yet the development of these kingdoms was determined by indigenous, rather than imported, political and cultural precepts. Starting in the thirteenth century, the region experienced a transition from swidden cultivation to wet-rice agriculture; rice was the major product that the lowland kingdoms of South Sulawesi exchanged with archipelagic traders.

Stephen Druce demonstrates this progression to political complexity by combining a range of sources and methods, including oral, textual, archaeological, linguistic and geographical information and analysis as he explores the rise and development of five South Sulawesi kingdoms, known collectively as Ajattappareng (the Lands West of the Lakes).

The author also presents an inquiry into oral traditions of a historical nature in South Sulawesi. He examines their functions, their processes of transmission and transformation, their uses in writing history and their relationship to written texts. He shows that any distinction between oral and written traditions of a historical nature is largely irrelevant, and that the South Sulawesi chronicles, which can be found only for a small number of kingdoms, are not characteristic (as historians have argued) but exceptional in the corpus of indigenous South Sulawesi historical sources.

The book will be of primary interest to scholars of pre-European-contact Southeast Asia, including historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and geographers, and scholars with a broader interest in oral tradition and the relationship between the oral and written registers.

Esai ini akan menelusuri organisasi politik masyarakat Bugis dari abad ke-14 hingga 16. Sumber-sumbernya berasal dari beragam teks historis berbahasa Bugis, yang dituliskan  pada kertas Eropa abad ke-19 dan 20, menggunakan aksara pribumi berakar India, merekam informasi dari sekitar tahun 1300-an.

In this paper, I compare the egalitarian religious images that exist in one of the most hierarchical societies in Island Southeast Asia, the Makassar of coastal South Sulawesi, with the hierarchical religious images that exist in one of the most egalitarian societies, the Buid of highland Mindoro.  This comparison will allow me to cast new light on Woodburn’s argument that the the origin of social inequality in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies may lie in the appropriation of the religious domain by senior men. 
In the first part of the paper, I argue that the Makassar and the Buid formed part of a single regional system in which coastal societies preyed on the members of autonomous tribal societies practicing shifting cultivation in the highlands.  The depredations of the hierarchical coastal societies spawned an ethic in the highlands in which equality, autonomy and communal solidarity were valued above all else.  But even within the coastal societies, the lower orders often developed a set of religious values similar to those of the highlanders, values that rejected the hierarchy, dependency and factionalism of the elite.  This rejection was expressed through popular interpretations of world religions like Islam and Christianity.  Historically, religions promising spiritual salvation from social bondage often arose in the most hierarchical social orders.  I argue that hierarchy and equality, dependency and autonomy, solidarity and factionalism should all be viewed as conceptual oppositions that develop in tandem with one another, much like the concepts of “free gift” and “commodity” (Parry, 1986).

In the second part of the paper, I approach popular ideas of salvation among the Makassar through an analysis of the epic of Datu Museng.  In reciting this epic, Makassar bards simultaneously recall their experience of Dutch colonialism, express a mystical vision of life as a quest to transcend the social order and reunite with God, and rework a pervasive precoccupation of Austronesian mythology, the fate of opposite-sex twins.  They also reveal a profound ambivalence toward the values of equality and hierarchy, autonomy and dependency, solidarity and factionalism. It is only because Makassar society was based on hereditary ranks, slavery and warfare that Makassar religion could develop such a clear ideal of the wandering saint who transcends all worldly spatial, temporal and categorical boundaries. 

In the third part of the paper, I compare the salvation Islamic saints promise the Makassar with the salvation Jesus Christ promises lowland Filipinos.  In both cases, the lower orders in a hierarchical society can appeal to the transcendental values of a global religion to circumscribe the power of the local spirits and political elites.  I contrast this situation with that of the Buid and the immediate-return hunter-gatherers discussed by Woodburn.  In these egalitarian societies, the major threat to society comes not from elites who abuse their power but from individuals who place their own autonomy above the needs of the group.  Religious rituals are used to assert the primacy of communal solidarity over individual autonomy.    The seeds of inequality lie in a widespread tendency to map the opposition between communal and individual interest onto the opposition between male and female, allowing senior men to assert a monopoly of control over collective ritual.

Three political institutions came into being successively in Southeast Asia and co-existed for several centuries: stranger-kingship, cosmopolitan law and bureaucratic rationality. Each was based on a different set of practices, and each served to estrange political authorities from their subjects. Firstly, cosmological rituals placed the stranger-king above the factional loyalties of his subjects. Secondly, cosmopolitan legal codes and mystical practices derived from Islamic scriptures placed the ulama and shaikh above the elders who enforced local customs – and, in times of crisis, even above the local king. Thirdly, impersonal bureaucratic procedures and access to an archive of documents placed the officers of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and of the colonial state above the ‘natives’. This paper argues that all three institutions be seen as a symbolic expression of a general requirement for the existence of ordered social life, namely the need for institutions that can rise above the conflicts and factionalism generated by everyday events. It traces the process by which the traditional authority of stranger-kings in south Sulawesi was complemented and contradicted after 1605 by the charismatic authority of Islamic shaikhs, and by the bureaucratic authority of Dutch officials.

Documents the history of the giant globe the chancellor of Makassar ordered from the Dutch East India Company, and how this history relates to Makassar's activities to obtain western knowledge, technology and know-how, as well as its diplomatic relations to the various European trading companies.
Published in Lodewijk Wagenaar ed., Aan de overkant: ontmoetingen in dienst van de VOC en WIC, 1600-1800 (Leiden 2015).

Para penulis menjelaskan dua arca yang belum pernah dilaporkan sebelumnya, berasal dari abad ke 10 atau 11, ditemukan di Pulau Selayar, Sulawesi Selatan. Kami juga menjelaskan sebuah lonceng kecil yang disebut berasal dari penggalian di pantai selatan provinsi itu. Menurut kami, ketiga benda ini bukan barang impor melainkan dicetak secara lokal dengan meniru model-model dari Jawa yang lebih terperinci. Kami berpendapat bahwa nilai penting tiga benda perunggu ini jauh melampaui makna intrinsiknya, sebab pembuatan benda-benda ini mengisyaratkan adanya sebuah transfer gagasan dan praktik agama dari Jawa Timur pada sekitar tahun 1000 M. Hipotesis seperti ini sesuai dengan peralihan dari penguburan dengan menanggalkan otot dari tulang jenazah menjadi kremasi oleh orang Makassar, yang berlangsung di sekitar masa yang sama.

SG Davies - Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015
Abstract In 2010, La Galigo, a Bugis mythological epic describing the founding of the human
world, was included in UNESCO's Memory of the World register. This accolade again
brought La Galigo into the international spotlight, as had occurred when Robert Wilson's ...

Form Criticism is a powerful technique originally devised by nineteenth-century Biblical scholars but which is today applied to narrative texts from many cultures. Form criticism begins by identifying a text's genre or conventional literary form, and then determines the text’s sociological setting or “situation in life” (German: Sitz im Leben). The author argues that Bugis narrative historical texts, and by extension any narrative historical text from the Malayo-Indonesian archipelago, cannot be read naively, as the text may  contain multiple, formerly independent components that must be understood in their own right before considering their inclusion in the present work. Form Criticism is an essential part of the editing of such a text in order that it may be used as a historical source.

Several accounts by Dutch colonial officials dating to the nineteenth and early twentieth century report on the apparent significance and role of certain objects in Bugis and Makasar society, known as gaukang or kalompoang, that were regarded as supernatural. These reports give the impression that whoever found such objects was made leader of their community but that the ultimate ruler was the gaukang objects themselves. Based largely on these accounts, Leonard Andaya put forward an influential gaukang model theory for the development of complex society in South Sulawesi (The Heritage of Arung Palakka, 1981). In this model, as the population increased, further gaukang communities grew from the original but remained tied and loyal to the germinal community. William Cummings (Making Blood White; Historical Transformations in Early Modern Makassar, 2002) has even claimed that among the Makasar it was not until the advent of writing in the sixteenth century that the ruling elite were able to eclipse the power of the kalompoang and usurp their position as the centre pieces of Makasar society.

In this paper, Andaya’s gaukeng/kalomoang model is analyzed against a body of historical, archaeological and ethnographic data from early South Sulawesi. While I refute the claim that these objects were causal factors for the development of complex society, I note their importance in society and discuss their functions.

Paper presented at the Southeast Asian Studies Symposium 2014, Oxford, At Keble College, University of Oxford