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1. Before and After Religion
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
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í· 1 í· Before and After Religion Nine years ago The [Salvation] Army was unknown in Celebes [now called Sulawesi]—an island of the Dutch East Indies—but now, amid the native grandeur of wild and rugged scenery, the music of flute Bands re-echoes the old Salvation tunes which are so familiar to most persons in the British Isles. The Salvation of Jesus Christ has been received with open hearts by the semibarbaric people who inhabit the island, and numerous Outposts have been established, where the needs of soul and body are supplied by loving, patient, sacrificing European Officers. Salvation Army, “Salvation amid Semi-Barbarism” I n 1909 the Netherlands Indies government awarded the Kulawi District of Central Sulawesi as a mission “field” to the Salvation Army Church (Gereja Bala Keselamatan, Ind., or BK), an offshoot of Methodism created in London during the 1860s. This transfer of authority, and similar parceling of Indies geographical units containing potential Christian souls, was motivated by European ambitions of an integrated religious and behavioral metamorphosis that would legitimate colonial rule. Pagan Asians could and should be altered into modern Christian citizens of the Dutch Empire. This book examines these efforts at human metamorphosis and the complicated aftermath of this Procrustean endeavor. My research, begun in 1984, is based on the words and actions of Central Sulawesi people and the foreign missionaries who have bid highlanders to alter their spiritual ideas and everyday behaviors. I carry out this work as a U.S. anthropologist of European Protestant heritage with irresolute faith in the human institutions of religion. My interest is in how the spirit-“owned” rice fields (bonea, Uma) of Central Sulawesi montagnards became the mission fields of expatriate Europeans (zendingsveld, Dutch) and the targeted fields of development (lapangan pembangunan, Ind.) for consecutive ruling states. 13 One aim of this book is to explore the distinctive theology and “culture of Protestantism” in Central Sulawesi as it developed in counterpoint to colonial teachings and subsequent historical and political contexts. The self-proclaimed “fanatic” Christianity of western Central Sulawesi is based on philosophical premises and ecological realities that are unfamiliar to most Western Protestants. Although by any fair-handed analysis Central Sulawesi Protestantism is equally “Christian” as contemporary Western sects, it is distinguished by several ritual and ideological features. The religion’s conceptual union of deity and humanity within the order of a greater natural world, and its ritual emphasis on efficacious sacrifices and bargains with God, are aspects that disengage it from much contemporary Western Protestant practice. Religions do not exist apart from shifting social and political contexts , so this research examines the cultural patterns that fell by the wayside or were transmuted during and after the initial missionization process. Central Sulawesi settlement designs, founders’ cults, territorial horizons, domestic relations, health care, gender roles, and appraisals of familiar and foreign material goods were transformed radically during the twentieth century. These efforts at “modernization” began during the Dutch era but continued during the succeeding regimes as states aimed to make the “unorganized” peoples of the interior more sedentary and “legible” (Scott 1998, 2); that is, more comprehensible and more easily managed. This study thus also concerns Protestantism in its role as a tool of state intervention, but a tool that could not be fully controlled. Before the century’s end, the Protestant missions and Dutch colonial government were replaced by an independent Indonesian state that worked, still in the name of God, to alter the domestic households and economies of Central Sulawesi highlanders. To borrow Indonesian words employed commonly in the rhetoric of President Suharto’s New Order regime (1965–1998), the topic of my research is the shift from “before religion” (sebelum agama) to “after religion” (sesudah agama) in the western Central Sulawesi high14 í· chapter one [44.202.183.118] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:21 GMT) lands. These Indonesian images of the historical replacement of “no religion” (Europe’s paganism) with a “true religion” (one of five world religions designated by the Indonesian government) originate from colonial definitions of “religion” and the fantasized disjunction between an ancient microcosmic past and the modern macrocosmic present. Indonesia’s postcolonial governments, like the colonial Dutch, locate Central Sulawesi highlanders barely at the doorstep of modern citizenship yet plan to carry them over the threshold as quickly as possible, with religion as the handmaiden of social change. Late nineteenth century Spencerian ideas about social evolution and the march of human progress have been refuted by more recent perspectives in...