Borneo and Sulawesi

Indigenous Peoples, Empires and Area Studies

Ooi Keat Gin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138365667
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429773464
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This book presents a great deal of new research findings on the history of Borneo, the history of Sulawesi and the interrelationship between the two islands. Some specific chapters focus on empires and colonizers, including the activities of James Brooke in Sulawesi, of Chinese mining communities in Borneo and of the the quisling issue in immediate post-war Sarawak. Other chapters consider indigenous peoples and how different regimes have handled them. The book is published in honour of Victor T. King, a leading scholar in the field of Southeast Asian studies, and a final chapter discusses his contribution to scholarship, in particular his views on how area studies should be approached, and the implications of this for future research.

1 ‘Contested’ identities of ‘Orang Tomohon’, Minahasa, North Sulawesi

Yekyoum Kim

The setting

Tomohon is a remote mountainous quasi-urbanized municipality (kotamadya), which is one of the Minahasa regions in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Tomohon was a kecamatan (sub-regency) until it was raised to the status of a kotamadya on 4 August 2003 under the influence of regional autonomy and decentralization in post-New Order Minahasa. Tomohon is geographically located on the north-eastern tip of the long northern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi, just to the north of the equator (Map 1.1).

Minahasa is divided into eight linguistic-territorial groupings, and Tomohon is geographically situated within Tombulu (people of bamboo; Tom [people] + Bulu [bamboo]) territory.¹ Unlike most other Indonesian regions, in which Islam is dominant, the major cultural marker of Minahasa regions including Tomohon is Christianity and, according to official statistics, over 90 per cent of the population in Tomohon are Christians.²

After the Portuguese first visited the Tomohonese in the 1520s, the Tomohonese had intermittent contacts with Europeans such as the Spanish and Dutch, and periodic missionary activities.³ However, it was not until the head of Tomohon walak,⁴ Mangangantung II (Ngantung-Palar), was baptized in 1843 by a NZG (Nederlandsche Zendeling Genootschap; Dutch Missionary Society) missionary, Reverend Nicolaas Philip Wilken (1813–1878), that the Tomohonese area actively accommodated Christianity and European cultures and underwent fundamental changes. After Mangangantung II was baptized in 1843, Christian conversion spread rapidly. This is well seen in Wallace’s observation of June 1859:

Just opposite my abode in Rurukan [a village in Tomohon] was the school-house. […] School was held every morning for about three hours, and twice a week in the evening there was catechising and preaching. There was also a service on Sunday morning. […] They always wound up with singing, and it was very pleasing to hear many of our old-psalm-tunes in these remote mountains, sung with Malay words. Singing is one of the real blessings which Missionaries introduce among savage nations, whose native chants are almost always monotonous and melancholy.⁵

Map 1.1 The location of Minahasa/Tomohon.

Source: www.minahasa.net Accessed 20 June 2014.

After the walak head had become a Christian, the conversion of the Tomohonese area dramatically increased in pace. In 1847, 959 out of 15,000 souls had already become Christians. By 1869, there were 20 congregations and 8,584 Christians in the Tomohonese area.⁶ Since then, the Tomohonese area has been the centre of Minahasan Christianity and socio-cultural expressions of Minahasan traditions have almost always taken place within a framework of Christianity.⁷ In spite of the far-reaching penetration of non-indigenous elements such as Christianity, however, the socio-cultural identity of the Tomohonese is still embedded largely in cognitive ethnic linkages to indigenous traditions and culture as ‘memory traces’ which enshrine local value systems deeply in the minds of the Tomohonese.⁸ At the same time, there has long been an attempt to reflect indigenous elements in Minahasan Christianity.⁹

During my fieldwork¹⁰ in remote rural areas in Tomohon, I observed that when young people went to the town centre of Tomohon, they very often said, “Kita mo pigi ka terminal” [I’m going to the terminal].¹¹ This confused me at the beginning of the fieldwork. I wondered why the middle-aged and elderly said “Nyaku mange ti Tomohon” or “Cita mange ang Tomohon” [I’m going to ‘Tomohon’ (virtually from Tomohon)]¹² while young people referred to it as ‘terminal’ when they went to the same place. As I will later discuss in detail, this was an ongoing symptom of contested identities. Between different ‘imagined’ indigenous territories or their villages or different sub-ethnic group of origin, they have different ideas about belonging or different ideas of connectedness to the place in which they live. As a matter of fact, there exist some encompassing nomenclatures to represent the Tomohonese such as orang Tomohon [Tomohonese], orang Tombulu [Tombulu people], orang Minahasa [Minahasan], or even orang Kristen [Christian]. However, as we shall see later, these are not necessarily applied in a straightforward manner, and the Tomohonese have contested socio-cultural identities between their villages or different ‘imagined’ indigenous territories due to the former indigenous boundary of ‘walak’ or different sub-ethnic group of origin. Therefore, the primary aim of this chapter is to examine the multilayered contexts of the Tomohonese, thereby identifying how these contexts have influenced the contested identities between different Tomohonese communities.

On socio-cultural identities

Socio-cultural identification matters because it is the basic cognitive mechanism that people use to represent themselves, individually and collectively.¹³ Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969),¹⁴ edited by Fredrik Barth, was the major pioneering work to examine the cognitive mechanism in terms of what has now become known as ‘constructivism’, which claims that socio-cultural identity is “the product of a social process rather than a cultural given”, chosen depending on socio-cultural contexts and situations rather than ascribed through birth.¹⁵ However, it should also be noted that the view of Fredrik Barth and his adherents has also led to a neglect of the investigation of the intertwined relationship between socio-cultural identities and primordial bonds and between socio-cultural identities and territorial boundaries.¹⁶ As we shall see later in the cases of Minahasa and Tomohon, primordial cultural bonds and territorial boundaries are also flexible and dynamic cultural contexts in which socio-cultural identities are constructed.

In nature, socio-cultural identities are nested in multilayered contexts and consciously or unconsciously contested or contesting in a contextual way. Another nature of socio-cultural identities is that they are percipi, a being-perceived and functioning concept. As an ongoing sense, they can thus be buoyant or blurred depending on context; they have been, and will be, debated, modified, presented, or represented in accordance with the perception and consciousness of people.¹⁷ In this regard, a number of scholars claim that socio-cultural identity is defined by the socio-cultural characteristics of the group people consider themselves to belong to and normally understood in a contextual or reflexive rather than in a stereotypical way.¹⁸ King (1985: 31)¹⁹ and Wadley (2000)²⁰ pointed out that socio-cultural identity depends significantly on the level of contrast which people wish to make and on the context within which they are claiming a particular identity. Nagata (1974)²¹ observed that the socio-cultural identity of people in George Town, Penang, oscillated at both social and personal levels according to particular situational factors. Similarly, Barlocco (2013)²² examined the collective identification of the Kadazans of Sabah, East Malaysia, in a constructivist perspective, and found that the socio-cultural identities of the Kadazans were dependent on contextual lived experiences and everyday practices. Based on an ethnographic study of khon Isan [Isan People] in Northeast Thailand, McCargo and Hongladarom (2004)²³ also revealed that “identity is not fixed” and is “consciously or unconsciously defined and constructed by groups and individuals, primarily by means of discursive strategies”. In Tomohon, what is distinct from Wadley’s, King’s, Nagata’s, and Barlocco’s cases is that the Tomohonese have contested socio-cultural identities between different ‘imagined’ indigenous territories or their own villages due to the former indigenous boundary of ‘walak’ or different sub-ethnic group of origin. In fact, McCargo and Hongladarom (2004) briefly mentioned similar contested self-identification based on ethnic and language differences when they discussed the internal differentiation of the Isan people.²⁴ However, they did not go further in the debate over the multilayered contexts of the internal differentiation of Isan people in detail. In this chapter, I shall pay detailed attention to the multilayered contexts of the internal differentiation between different ‘imagined’ indigenous territories or different villages or different sub-ethnic group of origin.

Furthermore, some scholars attempt to appreciate the ethnic identity of the Minahasans in terms of a unified and homogenous regional context of Minahasa as a whole. For Henley (1996),²⁵ the ethnic identity of the Minahasans is based on the unified Minahasan community perceived as “a territorial unit”, “a social category”, or “a political cause”. For Jacobsen (2002)²⁶ and Elson (2005),²⁷ the ethnic identity of the Minahasan, to a remarkable extent, constitutes “a kind of umbrella concept that covers all the various identity markers and particular aspects of Minahasa identities”. Similarly, I will also take the broad regional contexts of Minahasa into consideration to some extent in relation to a unified and homogeneous regional context of the contested identities of the Tomohonese. As we shall see later, the sub-regional territory-based identity of Tomohon has become apparent since the Tomohonese area officially became a kotamadya on 4 August 2003, which is administratively discrete from other Minahasa regions. In fact, sub-regional disparities are already becoming more marked and widespread in post-New Order Minahasa under the influence of regional autonomy and decentralization. For the purpose of this chapter, therefore, I shall basically consider the sub-regional contexts of the contested identities between the Tomohonese communities and not go in for the dense debate over the broader regionalist and nationalist contexts of Minahasan identity.

Primordial identity within an ‘imagined’ historicity of Minahasa

I will first attempt to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• Victor T. King: scholar par excellence, ethnicity and identity to heritage, and many things in between
• Victor T. King: opinions, thoughts, and reflections
• 1 ‘Contested’ identities of ‘Orang Tomohon’, Minahasa, North Sulawesi
• 2 Of native concerns: Brooke, the Bugis, and Borneo
• 3 ‘Escape control’ and/or ‘out of control’: Chinese mining communities (kongsi) in West Borneo, 1780s–1850s
• 4 Of killing filthy dogs and Japanese pets: military administration in Sarawak, the quisling issue, and inter-ethnic relations (September 1945 to April 1946)
• 5 Revisiting the question of rank and egalitarianism in Borneo: the ways in which hierarchy is expressed, maintained, and lost amongst the Bhuket of Sarawak
• 6 Dayak: moving forward
• 7 Jobbing as methodology: Victor T. King’s involvement with area studies and some implications for Japanese studies and beyond
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index