In discussions of political life and of health practices in Luwu, certain words kept recurring. One of the most reiterated was the termpusatin Indonesian (Bug.posik), a word that refers not only to the human navel but to all sorts of vital centers.

“But whypusat,” I asked in the middle of a discussion in which the word was prominent. “Why not justtengah[middle]? What’s the difference?” Clearly, I needed a language lesson, and to that end my “sibling” Andi Anthon put three objects in a row on the table. Pointing to the one in the middle,...

In an illuminating and now classic explication of traditional Javanese political thought, Benedict Anderson has argued that the “idea of power in Javanese culture” contrasts at almost every point with the ideas about secular political power that have been prominent in Occidental political thought since the seventeenth century. In Java, he points out,

Power exists, independent of its possible users. It is not a theoretical postulate but an existential reality. Power is that intangible, mysterious, and divine energy which animates the universe. . . . In Javanese traditional thinking there is no sharp division between organic and inorganic matter, for...

The human body is the talle’ (tangible) aspect of sumange’ (intangible potency) gathered or centered at its navel. The body is talle’, but then, so is everything else in this world that is encountered through the senses. Everything tangible has the ontological status of being a sign, visible evidence that can be read by those who are alert to its meaning. A shorthand and abstract way to put this is to say that virtually everything perceptible stands, to use Peirce’s well-known term, as an indexical sign; e.g., smoke is an indexical sign of fire, dark clouds are indexical signs of...

A division of the polity into three ranked categories was common in hierarchical Southeast Asian Indic States, a visible demarcation of gross differences in the degrees of potency embodied in the people of each category. In Luwu, the three gross divisions were theToMalebbi’ (literally the “big” or “better” people, including the ruler and the nobles of the center); theToSama(the level or same people, who included the regional nobles with posts outside the center as well as the non-noble “freemen,” as they are often called in commentary on other Southeast Asian polities); and the ata (the so-called “slaves”)....

In the socio-political geography sketched so far, everything apprehensible by the senses—everything that can be seen, or heard, or touched, or smelled, or tasted—is, to a greater or lesser degree, a physical support or location for sumange’. In this ontology, the basic distinction is not constituted by a set of animate and inanimate items, hierarchized by degrees of consciousness and movement into human, animal, vegetable, and mineral, like the scheme articulated by Aristotle and modified and promulgated by Linnaeus and Darwin. The fundamental distinction in Luwu, as in many parts of Southeast Asia, is constituted by the contrast...

The intent of Part I was to show that the center of whatever political level is in question—the individual’s own spiritual center at the navel, the protecting spirit of the house, the leader of the kapolo, the Datu and arajang whose presence defines the center of the largest realm—has a spiritual and metaphysicalraison d’etre. In the view of ToLuwu, striving to attain centeredness is ultimately moral as well as practical and beneficial, for to be close to the center is to be close to the ancestral potency that brings peace, fertility, safety, and effectiveness to the world....

When I first arrived in South Sulawesi, I stayed in Ujung Pandang, in the household of very high nobles from a Bugis former kingdom to the south of Luwu. The following excerpt from my fieldnotes describes my initial puzzlement:

I thought I should practice doing fieldwork as well as doing language so I decided to find out who lives around us. To get the lay of the land, I asked one of the noble cousins of the household to come with me. We got to the first house and I said, “Who lives there?” “Kapolo,” she said, pleased. At the...

Although it is conducted at the level of etiquette and implicates the processes we might want to call “psychological,” the competition between peers in Luwu is not a private matter but a public activity. It gives form to social life, and the politics of the former states were shaped by it. In this chapter I want to explore some of the consequences for the meaning and conduct of the pre-Independence polities of South Sulawesi by comparing the stance of siri’ among several other insular Southeast Asian societies.

“Commoners” in Luwu and in other hierarchical polities of South Sulawesi are all...

In Part III discussed the meaning and implications of siri’, the stance of demonstrating social place that informs Luwu’s ethos and its local psychology. In Part III I turn to white blood, the great differentiator, the element that makes vertical relations both possible and (in theory) stable in Luwu. White blood was institutionalized in such a way as to allow those who had it to exhibit and perpetuate it. The exhibition and perpetuation were by no means automatic; they required effort, and Part III is about those efforts.

For a fight to be over before it has begun, the difference...

Lévi-Strauss has observed that “some societies jealously watch over their names and make them last practically forever, others squander them and destroy them at the end of every individual existence” (1962: 199). The example of Luwu gives us not two societies but two parts of a single society with radically different policies regarding the names of their respective members: the one erases and forgets what the other cherishes and preserves. Teknonymy, the naming system of commoners, has the effect of erasing and forgetting; the naming system of nobles has the effect of recollecting and storing names in genealogies, using them...

Most humans do not use timepieces or have a notion of cumulative, linear chronological time. But it is probably sufficiently un prejudicial to say that all humans do have ways of thinking about “the past,” about the people and the events that occurred before them. I use the terms “the past” and “duration” in preference to “history” and “time” in order to denote, vaguely and neutrally, that which happened prior to the present and the medium in which events occur, without prejudging their structure or their relation to the present.

In any given society, “the past” is given a culturally...

In “A Study of Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali,” Jane Belo addresses a puzzling question. When Balinese commoners gave birth to opposite-sex twins (in the 1930s), the parents and twins were banished from the village for a period, their house was dismantled, and a ritual of purification of the village was performed after the untoward event. (Unless noted, by “twins” I mean opposite-sex ones in this chapter.) The birth of twins to high nobles, by contrast, was greeted with joy. The difference between high-and lower-status people in reception of twins rested on the belief “that the twins had had...

The Ancestor is immobile, static, potent, without disturbance. The aim of political life, an aim always defeated—by the incest tabu, by human turpitude, by the stance of siri’, which all guarantee movement—is to reach perfect stasis, perfect unity. The aim of politics is to transcend politics. The paradox, as I have outlined in many ways already, is that all politics, life, events, are disturbance. Here I want to summarize and recapitulate some insights concerning the shape of “space” in Luwu and other Southeast Asian realms, its centering and de-centering, in order to take political processes one step further,...

“Navel of the world or “head of state”? These phrases can be regarded as mere figures of speech, mere cultural idioms whose apparent contrast conceals an underlying uniformity in human motivations and political processes. Or they can be regarded, as I have viewed them in this book, as significant points of entrance into vastly different worlds.

As it is conceptualized, pursued, and accumulated in Luwu and the other former Indic States of insular Southeast Asia, potency invents a world in which peripheral matter is oriented around a common central point. The importance of location and placement generally in these areas,...

Potency is real for the people who have constructed their social worlds around it. It exists; it is neither good nor bad. It stands, in their lives, more like the law of gravity than like the Ten Commandments in Euro-American cosmology. A Euro-American who wants to survive and prosper treats gravity with respect. In a world that operates within the law of gravity, common sense, more than ethics, suggests that stepping off high buildings would be foolish. In the same way, in many parts of Southeast Asia, common sense suggests that it is foolhardy to treat an extremely potent place,...