Revelation and Misunderstanding

ABSTRACT

This article considers the millenarian disposition among the Buton of North Seram sub-district, Maluku. Particular focus is paid to how the Buton interpret their inclusion in indigenous cosmologies, given their current precarious and humiliating existence. In Maluku, the Buton have long been regarded as lower-class people, outsiders who are excluded from local cultural schematics and are both socially and legally vulnerable. Instead of simply seeing their aspiration for a new and perfect social order as something springing from their desire to end their predicament, and rather than viewing their belief as something invented for this end, I suggest that the incongruent communication of cosmological tropes is important in the formation of their millenarian framework. The Buton understand the presence of their mythical representations in the indigenous cosmologies as evidence of the original order, which inspires them to believe that the Seram people are concealing the truth and that its revelation will upturn the current oppressive order. For the often referred Seram communities, however, the inclusion of Buton mythical representations is a way of assimilating a powerful, dangerous stranger and perpetuating the wholeness of their cosmology. The emphasis on the productivity of the misunderstanding rather than the creative act of expanding symbolic frameworks helps explain the peculiar relationality which grounds Buton millenarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Buton
• incongruent communication
• intergroup relations
• Maluku
• millenarianism

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my foster family in Parigi for graciously hosting my stay in North Seram. I am also grateful to Muhammad Damm, Ikhtiar Hatta and Muhamad Nuzul for providing me with insights into Seram communities mentioned in this article. I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier version of this article.

Note on contributor

Geger Riyanto is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg University. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 Since the 17th century, the colonial government of Amboina had created divisions among the indigenous Ambonese (negorijlieden or orang negeri), the non-indigenous migrant community (pendatang), and VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) personnel. The migrants and VOC personnel were forbidden from engaging in the cultivation of cloves, reserved for the orang negeri who were obligated to supply the VOC with cloves and labour (Knaap 1995: 229–230). The division between orang negeri and migrants is still intact to this day in Ambon and Seram as well as the rule that prohibits migrants from owning land to cultivate cash crops (Benda-Beckmann 2007). However, it was still possible for North Seram landowners to give or sell their lands to the Buton in the early half of the 20th century, as the rule was not effectively enforced, and the sub-district was the most scarcely populated sub-district in Ambon and Seram.

2 It was noted (Kaseng et al. 1987) that there are 18 languages spoken in the Buton archipelago. Moreover, the Buton tend to differentiate themselves from other Buton according to their island of origin. The Buton with whom I stayed during my fieldwork were from Binongko and Batu Atas, and speak Cia-cia. Their predecessors first arrived in Malaku, an enclave of Buton originating from Tomiya but decided to move to another enclave that was already inhabited by Buton from Binongko.

3 Peripheral islands in the Buton archipelago like Binongko, Tomiya, Batu Atas are notable for their unproductive land (Hamid 2016; Kristanto et al. 1989: 579). During my fieldwork, the Buton of North Seram constantly recalled their origin islands as barren ones that had propelled them to migrate or starve.

4 Interviews with La Abu, 5 July 2015, at Parigi, North Seram, and on 8 July 2015, at Talaga, North Seram.

5 The inhabitants of Parigi, one of the Buton enclaves in Wahai territory, proposed setting up their own administrative village to the Wahai. The proposal, which had been prepared since 2015, was rejected in 2017 by the Wahai. A Wahai village council (saniri) rejected it on the grounds that the Buton are new settlers and should just follow the Wahai. Interview with La Rudiman, the settlement head of Parigi, 17 October 2018, at Parigi.

6 Interview with Bachtiar, the former village head of Malaku, 8 August 2015, at Malaku. Malaku was the settlement whose status as administrative village was revoked by the Wahai in the 1990s but they regained it in 2010.

7 Interview with Bachtiar, the former village head of Malaku, 8 August 2015, at Malaku.

8 The Buton enclaves are separate from Wahai but legally part of its territory and subject to its leadership. In Maluku terms, Wahai is the desa induk whilst the Buton enclaves are designated as its child hamlet (anak dusun).

9 Interview with La Rudiman, the settlement head of Parigi, 17 October 2018, at Parigi. Interview with Bachtiar, the ex-village head of Maluku, 8 August 2015, at Malaku. Also, Wahai’s dismissal of the Buton enclaves was incessantly evoked in everyday conversations while I stayed in Parigi in 2015 and in 2018–2019.

10 Rusdin Umagap’s Facebook post on 13 November 2016. <https://www.facebook.com/dhino.pmii.9/posts/618150588393474>. Interview with Rusdin Umagap, 27 July 2019, at Bula.

11 The term ‘Alifuru’ usually refers to the indigenous people of Maluku. It is a derogatory term in many parts of the region (Ellen 2002) but there are also instances where people proudly associate themselves with the term (Turner 2010). Apparently, the term was used in the declaration in Bula to give a sense that groups who represented themselves as Alifuru are the true people of Seram.

12 Metaphors of siblinghood are common after the 1999–2002 communal hostilities although they had been used earlier (Soselisa 2000). These metaphors are widely pervasive in the aftermath of the conflict to build a sense of rapport between divided communities (see Manuputty et al. 2014).

13 For example in Laos (Sprenger 2017), religion is translated as satsana. The government records and categorises their population according to their satsana. However, for ethnic Jru’ villagers, satsana is not about people but their rituals and institutions. People could have two satsana simultaneously, such as Buddhism and satsana phi (spirit religion). Another comparison is provided by Stasch’s (2014) ethnography of the interaction between the Korowai of Papua and foreign tourists. While for the tourists the payment they give to the Korowai is something regrettable, for to them it signifies that the ‘primitive and pure’ Korowai have been compromised by modernity, for the Korowai the payment is seen as a token of the tourists' fondness for their land.

14 Interview with Kamara, Huaulu’s raja, 22 July 2015, at Kilolima.

Additional information

Funding

The research and writing up for this article was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.