11 - Reshaping Tana Toraja: A Century of Decentralization and Power Politics in the Highlands of South Sulawesi

Summary

The political field in Tana Toraja embraces the traditional village as well as contemporary urban life and includes both ritual performance and regency-level development strategy. In a region where the colonial era spanned merely four decades, where indigenous religion continues to be predominant, and where the prestige and authority of the nobility endure to the present, traditional religious rituals and status relationships color all aspects of contemporary society (Crystal 1974, p. 121).

This quotation of an American anthropologist is referring to the political situation that prevailed at the beginning of the 1970s in Tana Toraja, a regency or district (kabupaten) in the province of South Sulawesi. After a long period of depoliticizing local customs and tradition by the New Order regime, it is not surprising that the Indonesian decentralization laws of 1999 induced a general resurgence of customs and tradition in Tana Toraja. In fact, adat (denoting customs and tradition) became a major factor by the time the national decentralization laws had to be implemented in the Tana Toraja district in 2001. At a village level, the regional parliament of Tana Toraja passed a regulation into law that prescribed the reorganization of territories and government structures, aimed at the re-establishment of the lembang.

The lembang is a political and administrative unit which is larger than the New Order village (desa) and supposedly existed before the Dutch colonial administration re-designed the region. The lembang covers a geographical area of a group of people that since generations have common ancestral origins and share a socio-cultural set of laws and values as well as a traditional form of government organization. The implementation of this far-reaching autonomous unit stirred the traditional elites — who had been marginalized by Law No. 5/1974 and Law No. 5/1979 — into action, as they started to compete for lembang leadership.

In line with the “return to boundaries defined by customs and tradition”, at a higher level, a particular group of Torajans have been striving for the subdivision of the district of Tana Toraja in a northern, southern and western district.3 Again, this division supposedly corresponded to traditional sociopolitical organization that existed before the arrival of the Dutch colonial administration. The political and administrative decentralization policy launched in Tana Toraja by the Indonesian Government in 2001 unfolded into two apparently opposite processes: amalgamation on a village (lembang) level and fragmentation on a district level (Donzelli 2002/2003, p. 35).