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This chapter correlates religious pluralism to the concept of animism by framing it as a parallel category to Indonesia's six official religions. Indonesia's national ideology of Pancasila is potentially challenged by the 2017 decision's implication that traditional and other minority sect beliefs should be legally recognized on national identity cards along with Buddhism, Catholicism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Protestantism. The chapter notes the conflicting constitutional debates on religious freedom and religious intolerance. Additionally, the 2016–17 blasphemy prosecution suggests the rising new forms of legalized intolerance. The historic framework of religious pluralism denied the political legitimacy and cosmological challenges of indigenous faiths in postcolonial Indonesia.

Selama pendudukan dalam Perang Dunia II di Indonesia, tentara Jepang memaksa penduduk desa di dataran tinggi Sulawesi Tengah untuk mengolah tambang mika yang terletak di dekat desa Towulu' di bagian selatan kecamatan Kulawi. Penduduk dataran tinggi masih menyimpan ingatan-ingatan yang kuat tentang kesulitan-kesulitan pendudukan. Namun, mereka bingung mengapa tentara Jepang memper-budak mereka untuk mengekstraksi mineral mengkilap yang hanya digunakan penduduk setempat pada acara- acara ritual untuk menghias blus-blus dari kulit kayu. Pertanyaan-pertanyaan tentang minat pemerintah Jepang pada tambang di dekat desa Towulu diklarifikasi dengan sebuah pengujian tentang penggunaan-penggunaan industri mika untuk komponen-komponen elektronik dan produk-produk perang strategis lainnya. Gabungan antara peng-gunaan-penggunaan mika yang penting untuk tujuan-tujuan militer selama Perang Dunia II, pembatasan Sekutu terhadap impor mika ke Jepang, dan keharusan-keharusan kerja yang ketat dalam ekstraksi mika menempatkan tambang Towulu dan pen-duduk tawanannya yang gesit menjadi penting bagi kepentingan perang Jepang.

Protestant highlanders in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, engage in a symbolic struggle over small gods. Although missionaries reclassified their spirit “owners” and ancestor spirits as satans, devout locals resist the reframing. This chapter explores why many Southeast Asians still view their indigenous deities within God’s cosmic plan. What do local deities do that the Christian God cannot? My fieldwork data on small gods as local resource owners in Sulawesi suggest comparative cases concerning land ownership, revivals of tradition, and copyright law. Together they show how small gods serve small peoples as intellectual resources for contemporary moral engagement and creative local politics.

In our digital age when most movies viewed at home carry Interpol warnings that copyright piracy is a crime, yet patented medicines are unaffordable for millions, ethical debates about intellectual property rights and freedom of information are becoming widespread. But a less noticed topic in these debates is the recent international effort to expand and implement Euro-American models of intellectual property law among peoples whose daily activities previously have not been covered by formal intellectual property laws (primarily copyright, patent, and trademark regulations). This essay considers how this trend is unfolding in post-Suharto Indonesia, particularly the tension between national efforts to create legal property rights over cultural resources and the fact that most ordinary Indonesians do not view their cultural knowledge and aesthetic or ritual activities as property to be claimed in an exclusive way by their ethnic group or government. Plans to legalize the cultural ownership of regional arts...

This article analyzes how intangible cultural expressions are re-scripted as national intellectual and cultural property in postcolonial nations such as Indonesia. The mixing of intellectual and cultural property paradigms to frame folkloric art practices as national possessions, termed “intangible property nationalism,” is assessed through consideration of Indonesia's 2002 copyright law, UNESCO heritage discourse, and the tutoring of ASEAN officials to use intellectual and cultural property rhetoric to defend national cultural resources. The article considers how legal assumptions are rebuffed by Indonesian regional artists and artisans who do not view their local knowledge and practices as property subject to exclusive claims by individuals or corporate groups, including the state. Producers' limited claims on authority over cultural expressions such as music, drama, puppetry, mythology, dance, and textiles contrast with Indonesian officials' anxieties over cultural theft by foreigners, especially in Malaysia. The case suggests new nationalist uses for heritage claims in postcolonial states.

Production commons require social maintenance or stewardship. Stewardship practices, meaning patterns of valuing and caring for cultural resources, often restrict or foster access to knowledge within or beyond a self-defined group. I term these two protective but seemingly oppositional strategies as “sequestration” and “circulation,” respectively. How can we account for individual and group differences in the willingness to share knowledge and techniques for producing cultural expressions? To answer this question, I employ ethnographic narratives, mainly drawn from producers of Indonesian textiles (with comparisons to carvers, musicians, dramatists, and dancers), to construct typologies of informal stewardship rationales and techniques. Examples of circulation and sequestration strategies provide contextual data about what sways artisans' cooperative or competitive behaviors in “split economies.” This term refers to industries where expressive cultural productions serve both internal, embedded social purposes, contributing local cultural value mainly through delayed economic reciprocity, and external commodity markets. Untangling the economic, sociological, and identity boundary aspects of “value” helps clarify conundrums about when producers want to circulate versus sequester information. Sequestration strategies often protect inherited privileges or commercial market share of technically vulnerable industries. Yet, the classificatory divide between community and market economy realms is shown to be subject to considerable slippage.

International and national agendas are redesigning the terms of intellectual-property (IP) laws to create cultural property for developing nations. Debates over IP and cultural-property “rights” or legal needs for “protection” are critical to anthropology's effort to reflect on how the production of knowledge, even culture itself, is variously construed to originate with, or “belong to,” particular individuals, ethnic communities, or nation-states. We explore the implications of two Indonesian legal documents to show the disjunction between discourses of regional artists who describe the ritual exchanges, relationships, and transgenerational messages their arts shape and (inter)nationalist legal initiatives that bypass artists' concepts of process, access, and authority in an effort to disembed and control ritual-based expressions as products with exclusive owners. [intellectual property, cultural property, law, art, tradition, globalization, Indonesia]

Burial, the ritual interment of the dead, is guided by cultural ideas and traditions concerning the “afterlife” and continued relationships of the living with ancestors. Mortuary rituals of several stages woven into lengthy ritual cycles are often practiced by societies in which kinship is the principal means of social organization and the sponsorship of feasts advances kin group status. We compare ethnographic examples from Indonesia with archaeological examples from the southeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States in order to reconsider some interpretations concerning the meaning of different burial formats and what they indicate about social stratification and religious ritual. Archaeologists should keep in mind that excavated burial formats are only a “snapshot” that may represent an intermediate moment in the mortuary process or “death cycle” rather than a final conclusion. These cycles are what keep the spaces and places of death in motion rather than fixed and final. Spaces of death also warrant more recognition for their often shifting claims about the status of the bereaved, rather than only the status of the deceased. By examining mortuary processes from several areas in Indonesia, where ethnographically documented death rituals are designed to move the recently deceased and their living descendants into a better afterlife location or status, we suggest further possibilities for interpreting Native American mortuary spaces used by people for whom death likely was more a process than a single event.

Sulawesi Tengah acapkali digambarkan sebagai wilayah yang secara agamawi 'mudahtersulut', yang terletak secara geografis dan sosial di antara propinsi Sulawesi Selatan yang mayoritas Islam dengan propinsi Sulawesi Utara yang mayoritas Kristen. Bahkan, sejak awal abad keduapuluh, kolonial Belanda telah memilah penduduk dataran tinggi yang animis dan potensial untuk menjadi pemeluk agama Kristen dari penduduk dataran rendah beragama Islam. Sesudah Perang Dunia II, wilayah itu mengalami arus pemberontakan Kahar Muzakar dan Permesta dari arah selatan dan utara Sulawesi yang berkerangka keagamaan...[...] Berdasarkan temuannya bahwa persaingan-persaingan religi tidaklah terlalu penting, bahkan ada toleransi serta perkawinan campuran, dan kompetisi untuk perolehan sumberdayalah yang terjadi di antarapenduduk lama dengan pendatang baru di kota atau daerah transmigrasi, maka ia mempertanyakan sejauh manakah konflik yang terjadi merupakan konflik agama atau bahkan 'etnis'? Kemiripan dalam sejumlah aspek agama Kristen dan Islam, toleransi timbal balik ,dan kesamaan sejarah sosial-ekonomi yang umumnya kurang dinilai penting, dikaji penulisnya sebagai usaha awal untuk memahami konflik, dan sebagai sumbang saran untuk meningkatkan keharmonisan dan kesejahteraan sosial di Sulawesi Tengah di masa datang.

Indonesian regional textiles that formerly circulated locally for practical and ritual purposes were identified by New Order government authorities for wider marketing to serve the purposes of economic and national development. This article, based primarily on data from a 1996 Indonesian government‐sponsored textile symposium, explores the transformation and representation of particular regional textile genres, as well as the equation by Indonesian developers of idealist aesthetics and marketing success through national guidance. With examples of textiles from Jambi, Sumatra and highland Central Sulawesi, I argue that some Indonesian developers and fashion designers formulated a hierarchical code of aesthetics that was based on commercial markets and homogenizing nationalist goals. In certain respects, this code of aesthetics runs contrary to the financial and symbolic interests of local textile producers and foreign specialists who are offended by what they consider the denigration and pirating ...

Indonesia’s development strategies since independence after World War II have varied across the archipelago, unevenly affecting local intergroup cooperation and conflict. This chapter concerns Central Sulawesi, a province on one of the large “outer islands,” where communal violence emerged after the resignation of President Suharto in 1998.1 Although the Poso district hostilities had complex local, national, and international political dimensions that have been discussed elsewhere (Aragon 2001, 2005, 2011, 37–54; Sidel 2006; Van Klinken 2007), the focus here is how regional development policies, particularly transmigration and the intensive mono-cropping of cacao, contributed to dramatic and violence-provoking changes in Poso’s demography, land tenure, and political dominance. The Central Sulawesi case provides a cautionary tale of how violence, displacement, and religious territorialization can follow as unintended side effects of regional development policies whose structural inequities intersect tragically with transregional stresses; in this case, the Southeast Asian fiscal crisis, national regime transition, global economy price shifts, and transnational Muslim-Christian distrust. This chapter begins with a chronological description of three periods of Central Sulawesi religious change and development, which are followed by an outline of Poso conflict dynamics, and results of the author’s interviews with people who experienced the Poso district hostilities.

Converted by Salvation Army missionaries in the 1920s, Tobaku people in western Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, have made Protestantism indigenous by re-classifying deities and interpreting biblical texts and teachings to support local political, moral, and spiritual expectations. This article discusses twentieth-century changes in deity concepts and ritual practice among the Tobaku.

In modern warfare, mica is truly indispensable. Coordination of combatant units necessitates maintenance of intricate communication equipment, in the construction of which high-grade mica is essential.(1) Introduction During the World War II occupation of Indonesia, Japanese soldiers forced villagers in highland Central Sulawesi to operate a mica mine located near the village of Towulu' in the southern Kulawi district [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The highlanders retain vivid memories of occupation hardships yet they are puzzled why Japanese soldiers enslaved them to extract a shiny mineral that locals used only on ritual occasions to decorate barkcloth blouses [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Questions about the Japanese government's interest in the mine near Towulu' village are clarified by an examination of mica's industrial uses for electronics components and other strategic wartime products. The essential military uses of mica during World War II, the Allies' restriction of mica imports to Japan, and the stringent labour requirements of mica extraction all combined to make the Towulu' mine and its captive, nimble-fingered population important to the Japanese war effort. Japanese military documents on the Indonesian occupation were destroyed in the interval between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of the Allies.(2) Japanese descriptions of the occupation which remain include memoirs such as those by Okada Fumihide, the senior Japanese administrator in Sulawesi, whose claims of native enthusiasm for the Japanese cotton production drive directly contradict statements by local eyewitnesses.(3) Central Sulawesi highlanders report that they loathed these and other Japanese-imposed changes to their farming activities. Therefore, in the absence of extensive or unmotivated European and Japanese reports, indigenous narratives represent a unique source of historical data on the wartime occupation of eastern Indonesia. Eyewitness accounts of Central Sulawesi highlanders, however, do more than simply document Indonesian perceptions of specific occupation events in obscure locations. They also illuminate a process of fundamental identity change among a group of Indonesian ethnic minorities that have spent much of the twentieth century under foreign political, religious, and cultural domination. Villagers' narratives about the Japanese occupation disclose how the collapsing boundaries of colonialism during World War II reoriented a series of encounters between indigenous people and dominant outsiders. Although the occupation was a watershed that raised doubts about the invincibility of Europeans and their God, Kulawi highlanders emerged from the occupation with a greater allegiance to Western Protestantism. Villagers' intensely negative reactions to their wartime experiences contribute to explaining the Protestant focus of their post-war religious and ethnic identities. When discussing the past, Central Sulawesi highlanders classify their local history into a sequence of political time periods. Twentieth-century periods generally are characterized by the names of foreigners who dominated the highlanders.(4) World War II, or the "Japanese time" looms prominently in this progression of foreign sovereignties as the first period when Kulawi district populations were held hostage at gunpoint and forced to drastically alter their farming routines to produce goods for foreign rulers. Oppressive wartime experiences under Japanese dominion catalyzed the religious and ethnic identities of interior Central Sulawesi groups who increasingly turned to Christian devotions and Protestant allegiances following the occupation. The Ethnographic Inquiry In the late 1980s I conducted research on Protestant missionization and conversion in the western Central Sulawesi highlands. I often found that what villagers called the "Japanese time" was discussed more readily than events from the earlier colonial "Dutch time". …

In this article I reexamine the relationship between gift giving and hierarchy using data about early-20th-century colonial contacts in western Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Dutch colonial officials and European missionaries disrupted prior community and regional exchange patterns and initiated strategic policies of asymmetric interethnic gift giving that elevated European missionaries and officials as political and spiritual sources of power.

(1991). Revised rituals in central Sulawesi: The maintenance of traditional cosmological concepts in the face of allegiance to world religion. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 371-384.

This chapter explores how rent seeking at the district level and social discrimination interacted with competitive elections and decentralization in Central Sulawesi. It discusses the rise and transformations of some ethno-religious groups seeking to control the Poso District. Ethnic identities, consolidated through Dutch influences and publicly fossilized during the New Order, moved in flux with political opportunities linked to the global market, regional bureaucracy, and informal economy. The chapter describes how the Suharto family's precedent of korupsi , kolusi , dan nepotisme (KKN, corruption, collusion, and nepotism) was realized in Poso. The focus is on district heads, their business links, and popular reactions to their activities. It documents how Poso's violence became a catalyst for regime change at the district level from an ethnic Tojo network to a Bungku network. The chapter examines how successful district heads pursue pemekaran to counteract transfers of power at the end of their terms. Keywords: Bungku network; Central Sulawesi; competitive elections; Dutch; ethno-religious groups; pemekaran ; Poso District; Suharto family; Tojo network

"When the Bones are Left":. Study of the Material Culture of Central Sulawesi. Eija-Maija Kotilainen. Transactions of The Finnish Anthropological Society No. 31. Helsinki: The Finnish Anthropological Society, 1992. 297 pp. maps, 114 halftones, appendix, bibliography, index.

In July 2000, I traveled on a crowded bus south from Central Sulawesi's Muslimmajority capital, Palu, to the Protestant-majority highlands. Protestant and Muslim passengers around me, previously strangers, chatted about the reprehensibility of the violence occurring just two hundred kilometers east in Poso. A Muslim elder on the bus concluded the conversation by saying, "In Palu people eat fish, but in Poso fish eat people" ("Di Palu orang makan ikan tapi di Poso ikan makan orang"). Afterwards, my Protestant companions discussed the phrase. In Palu, things were still good, with people eating the best of all foods, fish. In Poso, things were reversed and unnatural: the corpses of victims had been tossed in the river, their fate to be a meal for fish. It was said that fisherman, while gutting fish from the Gulf of Tomini, north of Poso, had discovered severed hands wearing golden rings.

L'examen des strategies de suppression puis, recemment, de renouveau des chansons et danses raego' dans le Sulawesi central illustre leur signification dans la bataille politique pour le controle par les communautes locales des formes d'expression religieuse, de la recherche de temps de loisir, des pratiques de seduction et des performances esthetiques. L'A. analyse les changements au niveau des relations d'autorite, la performance rituelle et le discours religieux dans le Sulawesi central en comparant des donnees sur les textes des chants raego' datant de l'epoque coloniale et des enregistrements avec des recits oraux recents et des observations sur les performances raego modifiees dans les regions cotieres musulmanes et chretiennes des hautes terres