Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia

5. Precolonial Cosmology and Christian Consequences

��� 5 ��� Precolonial Cosmology and Christian Consequences T he precolonial religion of the Central Sulawesi highlands not only drew the approbation of Europeans, but puzzled them as well. Local ideas related to spiritual facets of people, animals, places, and things contested European Christian certainties about the divine, personal, and exclusively human soul, as well as commonsense assumptions about property ownership. Europeans even had trouble defining highlanders’ pre-Christian deities in order to place them within or outside the Protestant Trinity. Their makeshift solutions to these classificatory dilemmas often served as justifications for European claims that Central Sulawesi people had no true religion of their own, just misguided superstitions about vaguely known demons from which they should be saved. To ease practical administration and allay concerns about increasing Muslim strength, Dutch colonial officials sought and created for Indies people official boundaries between “religious belief” and “secular” cultural habits. The European comprehension and public manipulation of Central Sulawesi cosmology was a philosophical Procrustean bed with distinctive consequences for contemporary local Christianity. Early missionaries’ skewed representations of local religion swayed Central Sulawesi spiritual ideas and practices as they increasingly were drawn into the Christian armature. Yet from persistent ideas about unseen and often nonpersonified forces of the universe to unflagging concepts of divine justice, 157 Tobaku narratives illustrate local contributions to an indigenized and, for Europeans, somewhat unmanageable Christian theology. This chapter explores a local cosmology, one that becomes refracted through colonial European lenses. Whereas world religions of the past millennia, including Protestantism, elaborately portray the personalities and words of their gods, precolonial Sulawesi cosmology is rather silent on such matters. Thus missionaries pursued a difficult search for analogues to God, even analogues for what they could accept as religion. My aim here is to break apart the cosmological aspects of conversion by delineating the Europeans’ reclassification of Central Sulawesi spiritual ideas, and locals’ appropriation or sometimes refusal of these newly categorized concepts. Adat “Traditions”: Once Unified, Now Fragmented Before the European category of “religion” entered the Indonesian archipelago during the colonial era, it was preceded by another borrowed concept that encompassed precolonial cosmological frameworks and related canons of appropriate behavior: adat, or one of its cognates. The term derives from the Arabic ‘ada, meaning “habit, wont, custom, usage, practice” (Wehr 1976). The word likely entered the Indonesian archipelago when frequent trade with the Middle East commenced between the seventh and thirteenth centuries a.d. The nearly universal adoption of the term throughout the archipelago and the infrequency of indigenous synonyms suggest that centuries of extensive Middle Eastern and Malay trade encounters required a means by which a variety of island peoples could represent and justify their heretofore locally known philosophies and practices to outsiders familiar with the Arabic term. The Tobaku and other Uma speakers of Central Sulawesi use the cognate term “ada’,” which they, like many Indonesians, now distinguish from “religion” (agama, Ind.), with its “world religion” connotations. Early European accounts, developed with a pragmatic eye toward 158 ��� chapter five colonial administration, cast adat as either custom (adat kebiasaan, Ind.) or traditional law (hukum adat). Although the more holistic nature of adat as both cosmology and regional practice was comprehended by both late colonial scholars and Christian missionaries (e.g., Cooley 1962; Schärer 1963), the efforts of administrators to codify traditional law (hukum adat, a gloss of the Dutch adatrecht) and the efforts of Christians to define pre-Christian religion (agama adat) resulted in a new fragmentation of the adat concept not only among foreign scholars, but among local people as well (Whittier 1977, 1978). Through the imposition of colonial regulations, local communities were obliged to accept the segmentation and reification of their formerly more expansive and not necessarily internally consistent category of adat. Scholarship and bureaucratic documentation in President Suharto’s New Order government only increased this fragmenting tendency because regional offices of the Department of Education and Culture (Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, or DEPDIKBUD ) were charged with issuing documents describing the adat, or “traditional culture,” of various Indonesian ethnic groups. These ubiquitous booklets, usually based on descriptions drawn from Dutch colonial texts or from interviews with a few local elders, inevitably codify uncontroversial portions of region-specific adat codes and present them in a laundry-list fashion, as if they represent an entire cultural matrix or definition. In fact, pre-colonial adat systems were open to reinterpretation under changing conditions in a way that is concordant with...