Making Blood White: Historical Transformations in Early Modern Makassar

6. Historical Literacy and Makassarese Culture

Makassarese today are clear about what constitutes the core elements of their culture. Foremost and first mentioned among these fundamental values are honor and its obverse concomitant, shame (both encompassed by siriq). Closely aligned with these is the conscious emphasis placed on social solidarity (pacce), for honor and shame are felt and defended by social groups as much as by individuals. Makassarese who lose their sense of siriq and pacce are social and cultural exiles, adrift and severed from their fellows. Pressed for further information, Makassarese explain that their culture rests on five pillars: first, adat (adaq): the customary norms and arrangements that tie people together; second, legal agreements (rapang): prohibitions that protect people and property from harm; third, laws (bicara): decisions made by rulers to protect the community; fourth, social class arrangements (wari): guidelines about behavior appropriate to members of different social classes. With conversion to Islam, Makassarese report, a fifth pillar was added to these four: shari’a (saraq) or Islamic law.1 As a body of values and beliefs these five pillars naturally contain much that is ambiguous, contradictory, and capable of being interpreted in many different ways depending on the situation. They formed during a period in which Makassarese interaction with Malays, Bugis, and other groups deepened, and these relationships probably did much to spur self-definition among Makassarese. Moreover, their elaboration today takes place in a context where “Bugis-Makassarese culture” is held to be a single coherent entity, and one whose traditions naturally lend themselves to harmonious incorporation into the discourse of Indonesian national culture. Nevertheless, it is to this body of sayings, stoh 6 h Historical Literacy and Makassarese Culture ries, and guidelines that Makassarese will refer when asked to account for, measure, and judge behavior both good and bad. Fascinating in itself, neither this body of what Makassarese today consider their core cultural values, their compass (pedomang), nor contemporary constructions of “culture” (kebudayaan) in Indonesia are the focus of this chapter. Instead, we focus on the fact that Makassarese refer to this collection, and on the historical developments that led to this practice. I argue that writing enabled Makassarese to first conceive of their culture as having a core to which they could refer, as being something against which behavior could be measured, and that this mental shift was one of the most profound changes taking place in early modern Makassar. This chapter describes the corpus of written guidelines for behavior, the effects of committing these guidelines to paper, and some of the social changes to which the creation of these five pillars contributed. Written Texts and the Idea of “Culture” “Culture,” like “society” or “ritual,” is a mental construct that allows scholars to examine something that has no objective existence as if it were firm and self-evident.2 This is not to say there are no cultures, societies , or rituals, but simply to acknowledge that these eminently useful constructions were conceived of at a particular time; they are historical products that allow us to define and find evidence for what previously was not envisioned in such abstract terms. There is, for example, no good reason to assume that early modern Southeast Asians conceptualized the world around them in terms of cultures and societies or that they understood their religious activities as rituals in the sense modern scholars intend. To argue in this chapter, as I do, that Makassarese first explicitly conceptualized of and then codified their beliefs and values after the advent of literacy is not to say that before this period Makassarese had nothing we can call culture. It is simply that they did not call it culture. There is, of course, a dilemma here. How can we, who are so accustomed to seeing the world in terms of societies, cultures, rituals, and more, possibly expect to understand how the world might look without these concepts? Cast in a more immediate form, how can we literates gain a sense of how customs, values, and beliefs were perceived and preserved in oral communities? As members of a literate society we cannot h Literacy and Makassarese Culture h 165 simply peel away the mental processes of how we think that have been fundamentally shaped by literacy. As Walter Ong noted, “Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. . . . That is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover...