A. McWilliam From lord of the earth to village head; Adapting to the nation-state in West Timor In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155 (1999), no: 1, Leiden, 121-144 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:45:10AM via free access ANDREW R. McWILLIAM From Lord of the Earth to Village Head Adapting to the Nation-State in West Timor Introduction To date the success of the New Order government in Indonesia since the 1960's has been founded in part upon the implementation of a universal sys- tem of administration integrating a myriad of local-level social formations within formally structured tiers of national government. Although the pat- terning of administrative arrangements is everywhere more or less the same, their expression at the local level is modified to varying degrees by the influ- ence of indigenous social forms and practice: what might be broadly charac- terized by the Indonesian term adat. This is perhaps no more clearly appar- ent than at the village or desa level of administration. In eastern Indonesia, where the concept and institution of the desa represent a comparatively recent development that has taken place over the past thirty years1, the exist- ence and continuing significance of parallel indigenous political formations and sensibilities is particularly evident. These formations might be described in terms of the politics of local domains which predate the creation of the vil- lage organization and strongly influence the marmer of its implementation. This interaction and the ways individuals and groups have come to terms with the dynamic and sometimes competing demands of desa and domain authority inform the following paper. 1 The present formal make-up of the village (desa) derives from the national Village Law No. 5 (Undang Undang No.5 Tahun 1979 tentang Pemerintahan Desa) (MacAndrews 1986:38). However, the creation of the various administrative structural elements which comprise the contemporary village is the outcome of an extended developmental history (see, for example, N. Schulte Nordholt 1987, Quarles van Ufford 1987). For much of West Timor, I would argue, the relevant changes tended to lag behind implementation elsewhere, and to a significant degree existed more at the terminological level than as actual practical reforms. ANDREW McWILLIAM took his PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra and is cur- rently an Honorary Fellow at the Northern Territory University and a Research Anthropologist with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority. His publications include 'Case studies in Dual Classification as Process; Childbirth, Headhunting and Circumcision in West Timor', Oceania 1994:57-74, and 'Severed Heads that Germinate the State; History, Politics and Headhunting in South West Timor', in: J. Hoskins (ed.), Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, pp. 127-66, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Dr. McWilliam may be contacted at 12 Sanders St., Jingili, NT 0810, Australia. BKI 155-1 (1999) Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:45:10AM via free access 122 Andrew R. McWilliam In reflecting upon those two characteristic manifestations of socio-polit- ical organization in Indonesia, the desa and the domain, it is tempting to view them as a pair of complementary category oppositions. Being neither whol- ly opposed nor neatly complementary, the terms for village (desa) and domain (which, for want of a better term might be designated by the Indonesian wilayah adat) nevertheless may be viewed as iconic references to that complex interplay of local-level political relations and national ideolo- gical structures that provide the contemporary backdrop to much of present- day local politics in Indonesia. From one perspective the term desa, as referring to the local unit of formal government, can be said to connote a pervasive set of ideological prescrip- tions and administrative powers extending across the country through the apparatus of the modern Indonesian state (MacAndrews 1986; Hoadley and Gunnarsson 1996). Conversely, the term domain incorporates something of that equally significant semantic field relating to inherited forms of localized Indonesian politico-ritual experience and cultural history. In the rhetoric of the contemporary Indonesian formal administration the dichotomy of desa and domain is frequently defined idiomatically in terms of a distinction between modernity and tradition. In the modernity camp is the desa as the primary vehicle for the hegemonie penetration of the nation-state ideology with its special emphasis on (economie) 'development' (pembangunan). lts counterpart, the domain, in many Indonesian minds at least, evokes a world view centred upon 'traditional practice' (adat) which, depending on one's political outlook, is associated with a range of inherent qualities connected with backwardness, feudalism and economie inertia on the one hand, and social order, moral consensus, practical knowledge and familial security on the other. In reality, of course, the apparent duality of desa and domain, modernity and tradition, or the distinction between modernist administrative systems and some essentialized traditional politico-religious order, is to a significant degree an ideological construction of the state apparatus and its official spokespeople. It forms part of a continuing struggle for legitimacy by the national government over against what is perceived as the manifestation of the atomistic and divergent qualities of customary law and its attendant moral codes.2 The differences between the two kinds of political authority are real, but the interaction between them is a subtle dialectic realized in and through practice. Critical to this process in West Timor, I would argue, is the 2 I would note that this is not a new development in Indonesia but is the contemporary expression of a historical tension and conflict, from Dutch Colonial times, between the imposi- tion of Western legal systems and the preservation of codified so-called customary law systems (adatrecht) (Geertz 1983:208-11; Warren 1993). Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:45:10AM via free access From Lord of the Earth to Village Head 123 position and the role of the village head (kepala desa), who, in the context of weakly developed village administrative institutions, stands as a powerful local mediator between the two spheres of practice. In this sense, village heads in Timor are synaptic leaders (Moerman 1969) and provide a critical focus for the perpetuation and reproduction of the state and its authority in the context of historically embedded patterns of political alliance at local levels. The Desa in West Timor The modern Indonesian administrative system based on the hierarchical model of the province, kabupaten, kecamatan and desa was introduced in West Timor in the 1960's. The introduction of this system of political authority and administration heralded the official demise of the former system of indig- enous rule focused around central rajas (Swapraja). The latter system of rule was a legacy from the Dutch colonial period, which in turn represented a modified twentieth-century version of earlier indigenous domain allegi- ances. Outward symbols of the authority of the raja, including office bearers, ritual specialists, harvest tribute and courtly customs, were swept away in the process. In its place a more secular, wholly new form of government apparatus was officially introduced. In an assessment of the impact of the desa system in West Timor and, more specifically for the purposes of this paper, in the region known as Amanuban (South Central Timor), it becomes apparent that the desa model has come to be increasingly important in defining local-level political processes in the region. As a vehicle for the dissemination of national and regional govern- ment policy, and as the official instrument for the implementation of this pol- icy, the village as a system of legitimate local authority has to a significant degree displaced older patterns of local political and ritual authority. Although clearly no two desa in West Timor are identical, most exhibit a range of similarities which make possible some general statements. The con- cept and reality of the desa in Timor differ in a number of important ways from the more mainstream desa concept and its realization in Bali and Java. Principal among these differences is the relatively large size of many West Timorese villages. In the district (kabupaten) of South Central Timor (Timor Tengah Selatan), villages covering an area of up to fifty square kilometres are not unusual. These larger areas often include tracts of thinly populated savanna woodland and open secondary forest. Village areas are to a signific- ant degree determined by population size (2,000 inhabitants representing the optimum population), rather than by the historical boundaries of political communities, although attempts have been made to retain older boundaries, Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:45:10AM via free access 124 Andrew R. McWilliam especially where local political tensions remain high.3 In these general respects, villages in Timor are markedly different from their typical Javanese counterparts, but have considerably more in cofnmon with those in other regions in the outer islands of Indonesia. A second significant feature of Timorese villages is the absence of a focal centre and the generally dispersed residential pattern. The costs and con- straints of the administration