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Tanah Barkat...part three

Tanah Barkat (Blessed Land): The Source of the Local in the
Banda Islands, Central Maluku, 1)

by: Phillip Winn, 2)


The Negeri Adat

If the keramat themselves testify to the claim that the islands are blessed ground, then the practices occurring at these sites actively enact this perspective and provide a concrete expression of connection to place. Keramat played a central part in the context of regular (though infrequent) collective ritual action involving the residents of particular settlements. Concentrations of important local keramat offer legitimation and focus within such collective practice, providing evidence of the existence of a pre-colonial polity known as negeri adat occupying the same location as contemporary settlements. These negeri adat in turn provide the social boundaries of ritual participation, in addition to providing a source of more specific communal identification within the embracing notion of orang Banda (being orang Lonthoir or orang Hatta, for example).

The expression negeri is likely an archaic one. The Hikayat Tanah Hitu, an indigenous narrative chronicle concerning the Muslim polity of Tanah Hitu on the north coast of Ambon, uses the terms negeri and tanah interchangeably in referring to the Banda Islands—‘Tanah Bandan’ and ‘Negeri Bandan’ (Manusama 1977: 193). Geertz (1980: 4) posits the term negeri as a variation of negara, a loan word derived from the Sanskrit nagara, originally meaning ‘town’ or ‘city’. The Indonesian terms negara, nagari and negeri developed to encompass such diverse ideas as ‘palace’, ‘capital’, ‘state’ and ‘realm’ in addition to ‘town’ (Wisseman-Christie 1986: 67). Reflecting on the Malay use of negeri, Milner (1982: 123) suggests: ‘[It] denotes a fairly large community … an entrepot for foreign merchants, with some political influence over the...

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