From Tribal Hut to Royal Palace: The Dialectic of Equality and Hierarchy in Austronesian Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I will compare and contrast the Austronesian symbolic elements of the two social formations within which I have conducted extensive ethnographic and archival research, that of the highly egalitarian Buid of Mindoro, Philippines and that of the equally hierarchical Makassar of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. I will demonstrate both that their cosmological structures are built out of common symbolic elements and that these structures could be used to legitimate vastly different political systems. The common symbolic elements included a gendered cosmos inhabited by a series of parallel societies composed of animal, human and spirit subjects; the conceptualisation of human sociality as generated by shared experience within a nested series of bounded spaces; and the ability of certain agents to move between these spaces by way of specialised training, vehicles and portals.

KEYWORDS:

• Philippines
• Indonesia
• animism
• shamanism
• spirit possession

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Pace Arhem, there are many groups in Southeast Asia whose ritual specialists do engage in shamanic journeys, including both the Buid discussed in this paper and the Wana of central Sulawesi (Atkinson 1989).

2 The Makassar have a long history of literacy, conversion to a scriptural religion, and formal education (Gibson 2005, 2007). They were thus able to give me explicit exegeses of many ritual practices and to confirm or contest interpretations I came up with on my own. The situation was very different with the Buid, who had no previous experience with trying to explain the meaning of their practices to outsiders. My interpretations of these practices were pieced together through participant observation in a series of rituals, identifying parallels and oppositions, and testing my generalisations with a few informants who had more interactions with the lowland world than most. It is difficult to compress this sort of process in a journal article. The interested reader is referred to Gibson (1986).

3 Recent research by Christian Erni among the Buhid of the Fay valley attributes a more central role to the labang taw and the authority of the ancestors. According to Erni, the numerous prohibitions that traditionally prevented the Buhid from interacting too intensively with lowland migrants were thought of as having been originally imposed and subsequently enforced by the ancestors (Erni 2008, 322).