In 1886, J.G.F. Riedel, a Dutch colonial official based in Manado, in North Sulawesi, published the first ethnographic sketch of Central Sulawesi. The report, based upon information provided by the rulers of the coastal kingdom of Parigi, is noteworthy less for the accuracy of its literary characterization of the ‘Dog Eaters’ of the highlands than for the fanciful map that accompanied it. Carefully circumscribed by mountain chains, a circle was drawn around the ‘heart of darkness’ at the island’s centre. This boundary, shored up by an imaginary geography, marked a colonial lacuna filled only by Orientalist ‘scholarship.’ And as Said...

Fabian argues that space was the fundamental notion underlying colonial linguistic and cultural projects: languages, and hence ‘peoples,’ were treated as ‘strange regions to be explored, as bounded systems to be monographically described, as the possessions of territorially defined groups (so that linguistic, ethnic and geographical labels could become interchangeable)’ (1986, 79). This geographic containment of distinctive differences was easily mapped in time, as the distance from ‘civilizing centres’ was translated into an earlier stage in the master evolutionary schema legitimizing imperialist expansion (Kearney 1996, 29). Whereas Riedel was able to define his unknown ethnographic subjects with a simple circle...

This chapter addresses the apparently incongruous processes of economic development and the preservation of tradition, as outlined in the previous chapters. This central contradiction of the Ethical Policy was the conflicting needs of the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) state to shepherd its wards along the clear, unilinear path to ‘development’ sketched out by early anthropologists such as Wilken and Kruyt, without fostering a pan-archipelagic opposition that might challenge Dutch rule. State policy was thus aimed at fostering the ‘development’ of the variousvolkof the NEI within the confines of traditionaladats. It should come as no surprise, then, that...

The commodification of agriculture has clearly made household production and reproduction dependent upon extra-household kinship ties that provided ‘subsistence insurance’ for the wider kin group; this ‘subsistence insurance,’ viewed as ‘non-calculative’ compassionate sharing, turns out to have specific economically rational (calculable) benefits that lie outside the narrowly defined kinship ‘tradition’ codified in Kruyt’s ethnographies as ‘communalism.’ The provisioning of this not necessarily altruistic subsistence insurance is linked to the establishment of hierarchical patron–client relationships within the extended kin group (santina).

In this chapter, the manner in which these hierarchical kinship ties are ideologically constituted through feasting andposintuwuexchange...

The Netherlands Missionary Society (NZG) was founded as an independent corporation in 1797, shortly after its inspiration, the London Missionary Society. Its independent status was aimed at keeping it free of narrow sectarian ties to particular denominations (Randwijck 1981, 156). This laudable attempt to remain free of church politics soon foundered, however, as more orthodox Calvinists grew increasingly restive with the ‘modernist’ theological leanings of many of the members of the board of directors; these aristocratic followers of the Reveil seceeded, to form the Netherlands Mission Association (Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging) in 1858, and the Utrecht Mission Association (Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging) in 1859...

Kruyt’s model of conversion had explicit evolutionary undertones. The conversion of the To Pamona would lead to the gradual abandonment of animistic ways of thinking, with a concomitant increase in ‘rationalism.’ Kruyt shared Weber’s expectation of a unilinear evolution of ‘traditional religions’ into rational, bureaucratic ‘world religions.’ The end product of this evolutionary progression or rationalization of religion is an interiorized, essentialized religion defined in terms of a rationally applied, abstractly formulated system of beliefs. In this chapter, I argue, in contrast, that the emphasis on the rationalization of systems of belief is misleading and that the priorization of meaning...

The highlands of Central Sulawesi have the reputation of being isolated, inaccessible, and irrelevant to the larger social movements that have troubled Indonesia. To those in urban centres such as Jakarta and Ujung Pandang, Central Sulawesi is a dangerous backwater, a source of such archaic threats as sorcery and headhunting, an area that has made little contribution to the state’s obsessive goal, development (pembangunan). Within the national imagination, Central Sulawesi plays the role of an exotic Other, ideal for anthropological study. And yet, this reputation is ill deserved, a fact drawn home by a short conversation in a small village...