Indigenous Religion, Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut, Western Indonesia

Abstract

Recent studies in the anthropology of mobility tend to privilege the cultural imaginaries in which human movements are embedded rather than the actual, physical movements of people through space. This article offers an ethnographic case study in which ‘imagined mobility’ is limited to people who are not mobile, who are immobile or sedentary and thus reflects a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’. The case comes from the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, where government modernisation programs in the second half of the twentieth century focused on relocating clans from their ancestral lands to model, multi-clan villages and on converting people from the indigenous religion to Christianity. Recent changes in the national, regional and local political contexts have led many of the Christians in the villages to reclaim the indigenous religion by invoking the figure of the shaman, whose special skill is the mobility that village dwellers do not have—a mobility that produces and reproduces a spatial, social and cosmological continuity between home and forest. Many people who live on their ancestral land and practice only the indigenous religion argue that the Christians’ hybrid religious practice is not culturally ‘authentic’ because the indigenous religion requires a mobility that is not possible in the government villages. In this view, the shaman is a surrogate, and his ‘substitute mobility’ arises from a sedentarist metaphysics.

Keywords:

• Indigenous Religion
• Christianity
• The State
• Mobility
• Indonesia
• Shamanism
• Authenticity

Notes

[1] The power of mobility as a concept-metaphor is dizzying. Salazar and Smart (2011, i–ii) write:

Among social scientists, it is fashionable these days to study migration, diaspora, and exile; cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; global markets and commodity chains; and global information and communication technologies, media, and popular culture. The literature is replete with metaphorical conceptualizations attempting to describe perceived altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time-space compression or distantiation; the network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; nomadology; and diverse mobilities.

[2] Salazar and Smart (2011, vi) themselves write: ‘If mobility (or transnationalism) is the topic of research, there is a great risk that different interpretations of what is going on will be neglected, or that only patterns that fit the paradigm will be considered, or that only extremes of (hyper)mobility or (im)mobility will be given attention’.

[3] A clan and its ancestral land are normally associated with a particular river, so the mobility that connects clans and longhouses usually entails movement through the forest between river valleys. With clan exogamy and patrilocal residence, a woman who marries leaves her father's longhouse and ancestral land, and moves into her husband's (or her husband's father's). All people who live in longhouses tend to be highly mobile, travelling frequently between the longhouse and the surrounding forest, compared to people who live in government villages.

[4] Italian Catholic missionaries arrived in Siberut around the time of the meeting of the three factions and gained a significant number of converts within a year. Most of the converts were former Protestants. Persoon (2004, 148–149) suggests that there are now more Catholics than Protestants in Siberut, partly because Catholic missionaries are more tolerant toward indigenous religious and cultural practices.

[5] Pedersen notes in her Introduction to this Special Issue that agama refers to the five officially acceptable world religions and is often contrasted with aliran kepercayaan or ‘streams of belief’, a category that includes the multitude of animist religions in Indonesia, which according to the state, are the beliefs of people who do not yet have religion. Adat refers to acceptable cultural practices that are not agama or aliran kepercayaan. See also Davidson and Henley (2007). As Spyer's (1996) study of ‘serial conversion/conversion to seriality’ suggests, none of these categories are fixed; they remain fluid and contested. They are constructions, as Asad (1993, 27–54) argues for the category of religion in general, that emerge from the discursive processes of modernity, which in Indonesia, need not be secular (Rudnyckyj 2009).

[6] Muslim missionary activity did not escalate until the 1980s when Minangkabau residents and officials in Siberut, emboldened by more assertive government programs, joined forces with Islamic organisations in Padang. Their efforts were financed by private sector companies, provincial banks and the Embassy of Saudi Arabia. Mosques, schools and boarding houses were built, but the number of converts never met expectations (see Persoon 2004, 150–152).

[7] The Rheinische Mission was established decades earlier in the Mentawai Islands to the south of Siberut. A missionary was killed in 1909, but conversions began a few years later. Siberut was the last of the Mentawai Islands to be colonised, and even today, the centre of government is in Tuapejat on the island of North Sipora to the south.

[8] The relative lack of large-scale religious violence in Siberut is similar to the other cases described in this Special Issue, such as Muslims and Hindus in Lombok (Telle 2016) and Bali (Pedersen 2016a, 2016b), and Muslims and Christians in Indonesian Timor (Hutagalung 2016) and Maluku (Duncan 2016). Interestingly, the greater inter-religious conflict in Siberut is between Protestants and Catholics.

[9] Once part of the regency (kabupaten) of Padang, the Mentawai Islands became a separate regency in 1999.

[10] The main river in South Siberut is the Rereiket, which enters the Mentawai Strait at the town of Muarasiberut. Moving upriver from Muarasiberut into the interior of the island, the government-built villages include Rogdog, Madobag, Ugai and Matotonan. It was hoped by government officials that the entire population of the Rereiket river valley could be concentrated into these four villages and others closer to the coast. For more detailed descriptions of modernisation programs and their consequences, see Hammons (2010, 2013, 2014).

[11] The commonly accepted point of origin is the village of Simatalu on the northwest coast of Siberut. From there, according to the myths, the Mentawai Islands were generally settled in a southerly direction. The islands to the south of Siberut were the last to be settled; they are geographically and culturally the most distant from the point of origin in Simatalu.

[12] In 1799, the explorer John Crisp (1799, 86) wrote:

The religion of this people, if it can be said that they have any, may truly be called the religion of nature. A belief in the existence of some powers more than human cannot fail to be excited among the most uncultivated of mankind, from the observations of various striking natural phenomena, such as the diurnal revolution of the sun and moon; thunder and lightning; earthquakes, &c. &c. [sic] nor will there ever be wanting among them, some of superior talents and cunning who will acquire an influence over weak minds, by assuming themselves an interest with, or a power of controuling [sic] these superhuman agents; and such notions constitute the religion of the inhabitants of the Poggys.

This sentiment persisted through the colonial period and into the postcolonial period, and only began to change after the Mentawai Islands became a separate regency.

[13] The term that members of the Sakaliou clan used most often to describe the authenticity of their religious practices was asli, an Indonesian word that means original. The concept of authenticity was almost certainly a product of the Sakaliou clan's long experience with foreign tourists. See Hammons (2014).

[14] According to Reeves (2015), the events in a lia ceremony are buka nia, sogi katsaila, aggaret toitet, lia goukgouk, irik, pusikebbukat, kokoman sikebbukat and uroro. See Reeves (2015) and Hammons (2010) for a detailed description of each event, including multiple versions of the ritual phrases and offerings that are part of them.

[15] As Scott (1985) observed long before The Art of Not Being Governed, the ‘weapons of the weak’ in Southeast Asian states can be subtle, but formidable. See also Scott (2008). The Sakaliou clan's ways of dealing with the Indonesian state have always been sophisticated and complex, calling into question the ‘state of culture’ theory (Steedly 1999) that Southeast Asian states are particularly hegemonic. For additional ethnographic examples, see Aragon (2000); Hammons (2014); Jonsson (2005).

[16] A longhouse on ancestral land, mobility between the longhouse and forest, the indigenous religion and the lia ceremony are not the only characteristics of ‘Mentawai culture’ that were identified by members of the Sakaliou clan. Reciprocal exchange in a variety of contexts was also deemed essential. Many of the foreign tourists that the Sakaliou clan hosted came precisely because of the equation of culture and indigenous religion, but were confused by the demand for reciprocal exchange.

[17] The figure of the shaman in Southeast Asia has been studied extensively and in a variety of contexts; see, for example, Arhem & Sprenger 2016; Atkinson 1987, 1992; Federspiel 2007).

[18] This is also the argument made by Taussig (1991) in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. The other forest-dwelling clans are in the areas known as Attabai and Buttui, but these areas are different from the Sakaliou clan's ancestral land, as members of different clans found refuge from the villages on the ancestral land of a single clan.

[19] For a history of the legal proceedings and ongoing developments, see “Edison Saleleubaja Ajukan Peninjauan Kembali” (2015); “Mantan Bupati Mentawai Edison Saleleubaja Ditahan” (2011); Puailigoubbat.com).

[20] See, for example, the Hidupkatolik.com (Catholic Life) article ‘Yudas Sabaggalet: Pemimpin Bumi Sikerei’ [Yudas Sabaggalet: Leader of the Land of the Shaman] (“Yudas Sabaggalet: Pemimpin Bumi Sikerei” (2013)). The Land of the Shaman image is also useful for attracting foreign cultural tourists, many of whom make the trek to Siberut specifically to see shamans. Ironically, the Sakaliou clan hosts more tourists and thus provides more shamans for the tourists to see than any other clan; see Hammons (2010).