12 - The Lord of the Land Relationship in Southeast Asia

Summary

Introduction

This chapter examines the position of a frequently mentioned figure in the ethnographic literature on Southeast Asia who is often called the Lord of the Land, though he is known locally by various titles (cf. Tannenbaum and Kammerer 2003). Although I focus on Southeast Asia and specifically Indonesia, this delimitation is ultimately an artificial one because the patterns I describe are found in a much wider area and, as is clear from discussions by Abalahin (2011), Shaffer (1994), and Sen (2014), the “boundary” between East, Southeast, and South Asia, and ultimately also Austronesia (Sahlins 2008), is an elusive and shifting one. It is, therefore, perhaps better to consider this region as a component of what Mus (1975) characterized as “Monsoon Asia”, especially given the common cultural substratum noted by Mus, and the active participation of regional traders in the commerce that linked East, Southeast, and South Asia to the Middle Eastern Muslim caliphates and ultimately Europe (Shaffer 1994; Sen 2014), and the state and local level cultural exchanges that inevitably resulted from this participation (e.g. Wessing 2011, in press; Sen 2014). I therefore use the term Southeast Asia here as a “convenient geographical indicator” (Fifield 1976, p. 151), rather than as a reference to a “bounded” cultural entity.

While parts of the argument to be presented here have been discussed at length before, e.g. the idea of the Stranger King, much of the data on villagers’ relationship with the spirit world has existed primarily as scattered mentions in the ethnographic literature: locally specific and not seen to form a coherent pattern with other such local traditions, and the relationship of these to ideas such as that of the Stranger King. This chapter, therefore, attempts to demonstrate their mutual interdependence and ultimate unity, and in doing so aims to show the highlighted pattern to be a trans-local cultural motif that, with other such motifs, forms a coherent substratum underlying (traditional) power relations in Southeast Asia, an integrative or centripetal factor in an area increasingly seen as eluding definition.

In spite of its above mentioned frequent appearance, it is not always clear what is meant by the term Lord of the Land, or who the occupant of the position is.