Colonial 'Reformation' in the Highlands of Central Sulawesi Indonesia,1892-1995

The Miser's Store: Property and Traditional Law in the Governance of the 'Native' Economy

“…The end result of these processes is to reduce a large part of the village population to dependent status, their subsistence ensured, but willing to engage in wage work to help meet household expenses that cannot be paid for in any other way. As is discussed in more detail elsewhere [Schrauwers, 2000], historically merchants had a great deal of difficulty acquiring labour to work their holdings, since villagers preferred to work on their own fields; the green revolution has thus been a double boon for the merchants, allowing them to extract peasant surpluses on the one hand, and in so doing, creating a cheap pool of labour for their own capitalist rice production on the other. Capitalist production by these merchants is thus embedded in the peasant sphere.…”

Shifting from Head-Hunting to Cash Crops: The Journey of People in Routa, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia

“…Grubauer [3] encountered two 'victory poles' (Figures 1-3) located in a field not far from Wiwirano which displayed a number of heads collected by successful warriors from Routa. From other studies in Sulawesi, we know that headhunting was a feature of inland (To Bela) 3 and coastal relations [4][5][6][7].…”

“…Although the Dutch laid claim to Sulawesi in 1667, marked by the Bongaya treaty, they managed to reach as far as the highlands of the interior of Central Sulawesi only in 1906 [4,5,7,8]. In this highland area of Sulawesi, before 1906 can be considered the pre-colonial period, headhunting and tribal wars preceded reciprocal peaceful relations between the people on the coast and those of upland Central Sulawesi [4][5][6]8,9].…”

Renegotiating Boundaries

“…23 In many parts of the archipelago the Dutch administered these ethnic groups and adat 22 Burns 2004;Van Klinken 2003b;Lev 1985;Stoler 1995. 23 Kingston 1991;Kipp 1993;Laksono 2002;Schrauwers 2000;H. Schulte Nordholt 1994. communities, through local aristocracies.…”

“…What appeared in their place, especially following John Pemberton's book (1994) on 'Java', was a view of ethnicity as artificially constructed by the discourse of state power apparatuses. For Central Sulawesi, Albert Schrauwers (2000) makes this argument about the Pamona, who are a post-colonial amalgam of scattered pre-colonial highland communities around Lake Poso.…”