The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics

The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics The Indonesian term adat means ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, and carries connotations of sedate order and harmony. Yet in recent years it has suddenly become associated with activism, protest and violence. Since the resignation of President Suharto in 1998, diverse indigenous communities and ethnic groups across Indonesia have publicly, vocally, and sometimes violently, demanded the right to implement elements of adat in their home territories. This book investigates the revival of adat in Indonesian politics, identifying its origins, the historical factors that have conditioned it and the reasons for its recent blossoming. The book considers whether the adat revival is a constructive contribution to Indonesia’s new political pluralism or a divisive, dangerous and reactionary force, and examines the implications for the development of democracy, human rights, civility and political stability. It is argued that the current interest in adat is not simply a national offshoot of international discourses on indigenous rights, but also reflects a specifically Indonesian ideological tradition in which land, community and custom provide the normative reference points for political struggles. Whilst campaigns in the name of adat may succeed in redressing injustices with regard to land tenure and helping to preserve local order in troubled times, attempts to create enduring forms of political order based on adat are fraught with dangers. These dangers include the exacerbation of ethnic conflict, the legitimation of social inequality, the denial of individual rights and the diversion of attention away from issues of citizenship, democracy and the rule of law at national level. Overall, this book is a full appraisal of the growing significance of adat in Indonesian politics, and is an important resource for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary Indonesian political landscape. Jamie S. Davidson is Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. He has written on ethnic violence and politics in Indonesia, and now works on the politics of legal reform in the same country. David Henley is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. He has written on diverse aspects of the history and historical geography of Indonesia, and now works on the comparative economic histories of Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series Land Tenure, Conservation and Development in Southeast Asia Peter Eaton The Politics of Tyranny in Singapore and Burma Aristotle and the rhetoric of benevolent despotism The Politics of Indonesia–Malaysia Relations Stephen McCarthy One kin, two nations Ageing in Singapore Joseph Chinyong Liow Service needs and the state Peggy Teo, Kalyani Mehta, Leng Leng Thang and Angelique Chan Governance and Civil Society in Myanmar Education, health and environment Helen James Security and Sustainable Development in Myanmar Helen James Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia Edited by Maribeth Erb, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto and Carole Faucher Expressions of Cambodia The politics of tradition, identity and change Living with Transition in Laos Market integration in Southeast Asia Jonathan Rigg Edited by Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Tim Winter Financial Fragility and Instability in Indonesia Yasuyuki Matsumoto Christianity, Islam and Nationalism in Indonesia Charles E. Farhadian The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics The deployment of adat from colonialism to indigenism Edited by Jamie S. Davidson and David Henley Violent Conflicts in Indonesia Analysis, representation, resolution Edited by Charles A. Coppel Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Ronald Bruce St John The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics The deployment of adat from colonialism to indigenism Edited by Jamie S. Davidson and David Henley First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Editorial selection and matter, Jamie S. Davidson and David Henley; Individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The revival of tradition in Indonesian politics : the deployment of adat from colonialism to indigenism / edited by Jamie S. Davidson and David Henley. p. cm. — (Routledge contemporary Southeast Asia series ; 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-41597-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Political culture—Indonesia. 2. Adat law—Indonesia. 3. Indonesia—Politics and government—1998– I. Davidson, Jamie Seth, 1971– II. Henley, David, 1963– JQ776.R48 2007 306.209598—dc22 2006023115 ISBN 0-203-96549-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-41597-7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-96549-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-41597-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-96549-8 (ebk) To Portia and to Agustina Contents List of illustrations List of contributors ix xi Preface and acknowledgements Abbreviations and glossary xiii xvi 1 Introduction: radical conservatism – the protean politics of adat 1DAVID HENLEY AND JAMIE S. DAVIDSON 2 Colonial dilemma: Van Vollenhoven and the struggle between adat law and Western law in Indonesia C. FASSEUR 50 68 87 3 Custom, that is before all law PETER BURNS 4 Custom and koperasi: the co-operative ideal in Indonesia DAVID HENLEY 5 The romance of adat in the Indonesian political imagination and the current revival DAVID BOURCHIER 113 130 149 170 6 Land, custom, and the state in post-Suharto Indonesia: a foreign lawyer’s perspective DANIEL FITZPATRICK 7 Return of the sultans: the communitarian turn in local politics GERRY VAN KLINKEN 8 Adat in Balinese discourse and practice: locating citizenship and the commonweal CAROL WARREN viii Contents 9 The many roles of adat in West Sumatra 203 224 RENSKE BIEZEVELD 10 Culture and rights in ethnic violence JAMIE S. DAVIDSON 11 Adat revivalism in western Flores: culture, religion, and land MARIBETH ERB 247 275 12 From bumiputera to masyarakat adat: a long and confusing journey SANDRA MONIAGA 13 From customary law to indigenous sovereignty: reconceptualizing masyarakat adat in contemporary Indonesia 295 GREG ACCIAIOLI 14 The masyarakat adat movement in Indonesia: a critical insider’s view 319 337 ARIANTO SANGAJI 15 Adat in Central Sulawesi: contemporary deployments TANIA M. LI Index 371 Illustrations Figures 4.1 Title pages of a 1931 handbook by J.H. Boeke, in Malay (left) and Javanese (right), on the establishment and management of credit co-operatives 8.1 Lembaga Perkreditan Desa (Village Credit Society), Peliatan 8.2 Home destroyed in an adat conflict 10.1 Page of IDRD’s rebuttal in the Kalimantan Review, 2 (1999) 11.1 Playing caci for tourists, Ruteng, Flores, 2004 11.2 Cultural studio head receiving tourists in an adat ceremony, 2002 (photograph by Anita Verhoeven) 11.3 Talking through a chicken during Penti, Tukeq hamlet, 2000 88 180 188 227 253 254 262 13.1 Opening parade at the Second Congress of Archipelagic Indigenous Peoples (KMAN II), Tanjung, Lombok, 19–25 September 2003 13.2 Concluding demonstration at the AMASUTA provincial congress (Palu, 17–19 June 2003) in lead-up to KMAN II 296 297 13.3 West Kalimantan delegate (Nazarius, a founding member of the masyarakat adat movement) addresses the audience <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">during KMAN II </li><li style="flex:1">306 </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">320 </li><li style="flex:1">14.1 Masyarakat adat groups protest in Palu, Central Sulawesi </li></ul>Maps <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">1.1 Indonesia </li><li style="flex:1">xx </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">11.1 Flores, with the original Manggarai district shaded </li><li style="flex:1">250 </li></ul>Tables <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">7.1 Recently revived principalities in Indonesia </li><li style="flex:1">152 </li></ul>xIllustrations 13.1 Communities of indigenous people (komunitas masyarakat adat) that have applied for recognition and have been verified, and their distribution across districts 14.1 Allocation of natural resources in Central Sulawesi, 2004 302 326 Contributors Greg Acciaioli lectures in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. His research interests include development and underdevelopment, environmental anthropology, ethnicity and migration, and the history of anthropological thought. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Sulawesi and Kalimantan. Renske Biezeveld is an Anthropologist and Sociologist. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Erasmus University (Rotterdam) with a dissertation published as Between Individualism and Mutual Help: social security and natural resources in a Minangkabau village (Delft: Eburon, 2002). She currently works as a policy adviser for the Dutch Association of Industry-wide Pension Funds (Vereniging van Bedrijfstakpensioenfondsen). David Bourchier lectures in Asian Studies and Indonesian at the University of Western Australia. He has written widely on politics, law, human rights and the military in Indonesia. His latest book (with Vedi Hadiz) is Indonesian Politics and Society: a reader (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Peter Burns is a retired Australian academic who has studied the history of law in Indonesia. His major work on the subject, The Leiden Legacy: concepts of law in Indonesia, was published in Leiden by the KITLV Press in 2004. He formerly taught Indonesian in the Department of Modern Languages at James Cook University, Queensland. Jamie S. Davidson has been a member of the INDIRA research team of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Development of Leiden University since 2004, and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in comparative politics, ethnic violence, democratization, legal reform, and Southeast Asia. Maribeth Erb is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She is author of The Manggaraians (Singapore: Times Editions, 1999) and co-editor, with Priyambudi Sulistiyanto and xii Contributors Carole Faucher, of Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). She has published articles on tourism and Manggaraian ritual and history in journals and edited collections. C. Fasseur is a legal expert and a well-known historian both of colonial Indonesia and of the Dutch monarchy. Emeritus Professor of History at Leiden University, he is currently also a senior adviser to the Amsterdam District Court. Daniel Fitzpatrick is Reader/Associate Professor in Law at the Australian National University, and part-time research fellow at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development, Leiden University. He has written widely on land law and development in the Third World. David Henley is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. He has written on diverse aspects of the history and historical geography of Indonesia, and now works on the comparative economic histories of Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Gerry van Klinken is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He lived in Indonesia for more than ten years. His recent work has been on communal conflict, human rights, historiography, and local politics. Tania M. Li is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She holds a senior Canada Research Chair in the Political-Economy and Culture of Asia-Pacific. Her research focuses on questions of culture, economy, environment and development in Indonesia’s upland regions. Sandra Moniaga is a Ph.D. candidate at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development of Leiden University, under the auspices of the institute’s INDIRA project on land law in Indonesia. Actively engaged with environmental and human rights movements in Indonesia since 1986, she is a leading proponent of the cause of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples. Arianto Sangaji is a long-time indigenous peoples’ activist and founding member of the indigenous rights organization Yayasan Tanah Merdeka, located in Palu, Central Sulawesi. He has written extensively on related issues in Indonesian publications. Carol Warren is Associate Professor and Research Fellow in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Western Australia. She has carried out field research on local governance and customary law in Indonesia and Malaysia and is author of Adat and Dinas: Balinese communities in the Indonesian state (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993). Preface and acknowledgements This book originated in a convergence, and a complementarity, between the research interests of its editors. David Henley, through his historical work on nationalism in Indonesia, was fascinated by the influence of Dutch colonial ideas about Indonesian tradition on New Order political ideology. Jamie Davidson’s research on ethnic conflicts in Kalimantan had confronted him with the power of a different, but evidently related, ‘politics of tradition’ at regional level in the post-New Order period. The catalyst bringing the project together, as for so many intellectual endeavours in relation to Indonesia, was Tony Reid, director of the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore. Comments by Jamie during an ARI seminar in 2003 reminded Reid of a poolside conversation with David at a Jakarta hotel some years earlier, in which similar issues had been discussed. Reid put the two in touch, asking Jamie to organize an ARI workshop on the politics of adat – tradition – and the promises and pitfalls of today’s adat revival movements. Together with anthropologist Greg Acciaioli, who was studying the indigenous peoples’ movement in Indonesia, Jamie and David penned a thematic outline for the event. Among those invited to participate were adat activists from Indonesia, and interested scholars of diverse disciplines from Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, and Canada. The workshop, entitled ‘Adat revivalism in Indonesia’s democratic transition’, took place on 26 and 27 March 2004 on the island of Batam, Singapore’s Indonesian ‘backyard’. It would not have been possible without the funding generously provided by ARI under Tony Reid’s stewardship, or without the professionalism of ARI administrative staff members Valerie Yeo Ee Lin, Noorhayati Binti Hamsan, Lynn Tan, and Shalini Chauhan. The present volume grew out of the Batam workshop. Except for the editors’ introduction (Chapter 1) and the contribution by Cees Fasseur (Chapter 2), all chapters are based – albeit in some cases at considerable remove – on papers presented in Batam. Also influential in most cases, especially the introduction, were the lively and sometimes heated debates conducted at the workshop, debates sharpened by a group of first-rate discussants including Oetema Dewi, Carole Faucher, Jamil Gunawan, xiv Preface and acknowledgements Paul Hutchcroft, Joel Kahn, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto, Bivitri Susanti, and Tony Reid himself. Papers by Hedar Laudjeng and Erma Ranik, two committed activists at the forefront of adat movements in their respective homelands of Central Sulawesi and West Kalimantan, could not be included in the present volume, but both participants made important contributions to the event. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all those involved in the Batam workshop. In particular we want to thank the contributing authors for meeting our sometimes onerous editorial demands, and for bearing with us when the preparation of the volume for publication took longer than anticipated. The essays went through multiple revisions before reaching the forms published here. Our thanks also go to the University of Leiden’s Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development, which proved an ideal intellectual environment for Jamie in which to co-write the introductory chapter, and which gave us the opportunity to make a public presentation of that introduction. Jan Michiel Otto, Adriaan Bedner, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Gerry Van Klinken, and Peter Burns all gave graciously of their time to offer valuable comments and suggestions on the same piece. Thanks too to Peter Sowden, Barry Clarke and Leong Li Ming of Routledge for their efforts and support in seeing the whole volume through to its publication. Most importantly we thank our families, who have given us their love and patience as we juggled our professional and personal lives to bring this project to fruition. Portia Reyes watched Jamie turn himself into an ‘adat scholar’ over piles of photocopies and cups of tea in a Singaporean café. As the project unfolded, she lent a loving, helping and firm hand during its ups and downs. Jamie remains eternally grateful, all the while perplexed at his good fortune in her stumbling into his life. For Agustina Kusbandini Henley the period in which this book took shape was a momentous one, including the arrival of beloved twins Daniel and Ann, wrenching moves from Leiden to Singapore and back, and David’s not always successful attempts at balancing his own increasingly diverse priorities. When he succeeded at all it was, as always, thanks to her. With this book we have endeavoured to show how its principal themes – marginalization and empowerment of indigenous peoples, (un)civil society, democratization, land rights, identity politics, and legacies of colonialism – relate to global developments beyond Indonesia’s borders. All these topics are of radical importance in today’s world and will strike emotive chords with many readers – as indeed they did with our contributors, who strive for balance but whose biases and commitments are often evident none the less. Whatever their personal reactions to the various arguments presented, we hope that readers, including those involved in adat movements themselves, will come away from the book with fresh insights into the politics of tradition in Indonesia as a historical as well as a contemporary phenomenon. Preface and acknowledgements xv A final word of thanks is due to Berg Publishers for allowing us to republish here, as Chapter 2, C. Fasseur’s ‘Colonial dilemma: Van Vollenhoven and the struggle between adat law and Western law in Indonesia’. This originally appeared in W.J. Mommsen and J.A. de Moor (eds) European Expansion and Law: the encounter of European and indigenous law in 19th- and 20th-century Africa and Asia (Oxford: Berg, 1992). Abbreviations and glossary <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">adat </li><li style="flex:1">custom, tradition </li></ul>adatrecht adatrechtskring ADB customary law ‘customary law area’ Asian Development Bank <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">AMAN </li><li style="flex:1">Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (Alliance </li></ul>of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago) Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Sulawesi Tengah (Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of Central Sulawesi) AMASUTA arisan awig-awig BAL rotating savings and credit association customary charter/regulations (Bali) Basic Agrarian Law (1960) hamlet/ward within village (Bali) community ‘right of avail’ over territory blood and soil banjar beschikkingsrecht Blut und Boden <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">BPD </li><li style="flex:1">Badan Perwakilan Desa (village representative </li></ul>board) <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">BPN </li><li style="flex:1">Badan Pertanahan Nasional (National Land </li></ul>Agency) bumiputera bupati ‘son of the soil’ (indigenous person) district head CIFOR CNWS Centre for International Forestry Research Centre for Non-Western Studies (Leiden University) <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">CSIS </li><li style="flex:1">Centre for Strategic and International Studies </li></ul>(Jakarta) <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">CSO </li><li style="flex:1">civil society organization </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">desa </li><li style="flex:1">village </li></ul>desa pakraman dinas DPR traditional (adat) village (Bali) official (concerned with state administration) Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (national parliament)

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