Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 brill.

nl/ajss

Sawerigading vs. Sharia: Identities and Political

Contestation in Decentralised Indonesia

Kathryn Robinson
The Australian National University

Abstract
Islamist groups are attempting to shape Indonesia’s political landscape post-New Order through
advocating local regulations based on sharia in districts newly empowered by regional autonomy.
In the province of South Sulawesi, which was gripped by a separatist Islamic rebellion in the
1950s and 1960s, the former rebel leader, Kahar Muzakkar, is invoked in a movement to imple-
ment sharia-based local regulations. However, the politics of decentralisation are also associated
with a resurgence of local cultural identities, which embrace non-Islamic traditions. In Muslim
South Sulawesi, these claims have been expressed through the ceremonial re-installation of local
traditional rulers and performance of public ceremonies to care for the sacred regalia that legiti-
mate authority, but also through government-funded seminars that explore distinctive Bugis and
Makassarese cultural traditions. These claims to power can be understood as a reaction to the
taming of cultural difference by the Suharto regime, but they also represent vehicles for local
elites to assume power. Based on an analysis of one of the district cultural seminars and accom-
panying cultural festival, this paper examines the manner in which cultural traditions are strate-
gically mobilised in South Sulawesi, in a rival movement to the Islamist claims to implement
sharia.

Keywords
cultural revival, sharia, Indonesian decentralisation, La Galigo, Luwu

Introduction
Since the onset of the Reform Era in Indonesia, beginning with the fall of
Suharto and the changing laws which allowed for decentralisation and more
autonomy in the regions, there has been a resurgence of traditional practices
and cultural discourse (see especially Davidson and Henley, 2007). In South
Sulawesi, a strongly Islamic region of Eastern Indonesia and home of the well-
known sea-faring people, the Bugis, this ‘revivalism’ has taken two distinct
forms. On the one hand in the post-Suharto period, South Sulawesi has expe-
rienced an outburst of Islamist politics that has invoked memories of (and
derives legitimacy from) the post-independence Darul Islam (DI) rebellion,
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156853111X565896
220 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

whose intention at that time was to make the newly-formed Republic of Indo-
nesia an Islamic state;1 Islamist politics has seen a resurgence in several parts of
Indonesia in the post-New Order Reform Era because of the loosening of the
authoritarian, centralised rule of the Suharto regime. At the same time, in the
district of North Luwu, the subject of this paper, there has been a strong
movement to revive the cultural legacy of the ancient polity of Luwu. Luwu is
said to have been the first Bugis polity to embrace Islam in the early 1600s but
it is also the home of the ancient stories of the semi-divine Sawerigading, the
legendary Buginese cultural hero incarnated in the La Galigo tales. In the
Reform Era, an international conference and associated cultural festival have
been organised in North Luwu to revive and analyse the La Galigo, suppressed
during the Darul Islam rebellion in the 1950s. Not only has La Galigo been
revived in South Sulawesi as the heart of Buginese cultural traditions, but
it has been produced as a musical theatrical production that has toured
internationally.
South Sulawesi has also been an area of Indonesia that has experienced
outbreaks of violence before and after the end of the New Order. The resur-
gence of both Islamic fundamentalism, as well as ancient cultural traditions
needs to be understood against the background of these conflicts. On the one
hand devolving authority from the centre to the district level of government
was an attempt to counter the forced homogenisation of the Suharto era which
was presumed to be triggering violence and separatist tendencies (Aspinall and
Fealy, 2003). At the same time though, these political discourses that draw on
local histories and social connections are being mobilised in contemporary
power struggles. The rapacious nature of the New Order and its commandeer-
ing of local resources led to a ‘backlash’ where local elites now struggle to
capture control of resources and ordinary people turn on migrants who they
see as rivals for resources. Claims for indigenous rights and the public perfor-
mance of these rights is now part of the political landscape. There is also a
popular view that some of the outbreaks of violence after the fall of Suharto
resulted from the breakdown of customary forms of authority that had the
capacity to contain local conflict. Hence, their reinstatement, for some, such
as in the form of the cultural practices associated with ancient kingdoms, such
as Luwu, is believed to be able to stop inter-group violence. At the same time,
Islamic organisations, such as the Congress of South Sulawesi Muslims (Kon-
gres Ummat Islam se-Sulawesi Selatan), proposed the implementation of sharia
law in the province of South Sulawesi and several district governments have
successfully implemented local regulations based on sharia (Asi, 2007; Alimi,
2009). Directly reflecting the heritage of the Darul Islam (DI) rebellion, some

1
Between 1951 and 1965 forces led by the charismatic leader Kahar Muzakkar controlled
large areas of South and South-east Sulawesi (Harvey, 1974).
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 221

champions of a community based on sharia regard it as a direct opponent of

the hierarchical relations of the traditional polities of Sulawesi, and the reli-
gious traditions embedded in the La Galigo tradition that legitimated the old
elite. While proponents of these positions are not in violent conflict as they
were at the time that DI controlled the countryside, they nonetheless repre-
sent two poles of contemporary politics. Both positions assert that they cham-
pion distinctive South Sulawesi values — defined by a distinctive mythic
tradition on the one hand, and a purified Islam on the other.
This paper begins with a discussion of political conflict in North Luwu
post-Reformasi and then describes the cultural seminar and festival held in
North Luwu district in 2003 as one response to the violence; it then provides
more detail on the religio-cultural tradition of the La Galigo and its most
famous protagonist, Sawerigading; and finally discusses some of the history of
the contestation between the distinctive local tradition of Islam which
embraces La Galigo beliefs, and a more formalist-modernist Islam as promoted
by Darul Islam and its successors. Calls for sharia law dominate political com-
mentary in Indonesia but how do such calls resonate with the expression of
local identity in the free-flowing cultural climate since Reformasi?

Violence in North Luwu post-Reformasi

Indonesia experienced an efflorescence of political, religious and cultural
movements following the demise of the New Order regime of President
Suharto. During the 32 years of the New Order, cultural diversity was toler-
ated so long as it was ‘folkloric’ and would not challenge the ideology of the
unitary state (Acciaioli, 1985). Citizens were forced to identify as believers of
one of five authorised world religions and be so identified on their identity
card (KTP). Islam went in and out of favour with the regime, in accord with
its need and ability to harness its political appeal.
Islamism, the utilisation of Islam for political mobilisation, peaked in the
Reform period in Indonesia, with outbreaks of Muslim-Christian fighting,
anti-Christian violence (like church bombings) and anti-Western violence
escalating since 1999. Eleven serious incidents of communal violence took
place between 1995 and 2002 in Luwu, which resulted in deaths, serious
injury and destruction of property (Prabowo and Foead, 2003; ICG, 2004).
The population of North Luwu comprises both Muslims and Christians.
Other districts in South Sulawesi are almost universally Muslim (with Buluku-
mba having the highest proportion of Muslim at over 99%).2 Tana Toraja,
2
Luwu is often subsumed under the Bugis cultural identity, the Bugis being the dominant
cultural identity in South Sulawesi. The other major Muslim group is Makassar. Muslim Mandar
is now in West Sulawesi.
222 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

which borders on Luwu has a majority Christian population. North Luwu

also shares a border with majority-Christian province of Central Sulawesi,
which was marked by some of the worst and most well-known violence of the
post-New Order period between Muslims and Christians in the district of
Poso (Aragon, 2001), the peak of which occurred in 1998−2001 but contin-
ued to resurface for years after (Brown and Diprose, 2009). This border region
has been identified as the location of sites from which Muslim militia were
trained to fight in Poso (ICG, 2004). In this ethnically and religiously diverse
region, there has been fear of ‘contagion’ from Poso especially following the
outbreaks of inter-group violence noted above.
One way of reacting to this heightened identification with religion in the
post-Suharto era, which is partly expressed by this inter-religious violence, has
been the call at the provincial level for implementation of sharia law. A claim
to introduce sharia-based law in South Sulawesi province was brought to the
national parliament by the KPPSI (Komite Persiapan Penegakan Syariat
Islam — Committee for the Preparation for Implementation of Islamic Law),
on 26 April 2001. The committee called for the implementation of sharia in
the province through ‘special autonomy’ (otonomi khusus) status, such as had
been granted to Aceh. Groups involved in the declaration included “student
activists, quasi paramilitary groups from all over South Sulawesi, and roman-
tics from the Kahar Muzakkar era . . . and (h)undreds more . . . from all over
South Sulawesi” (Pradidarma and Junedding, 2002:1), although its essential
membership base was urban university students and academics (ibid.) An
important figure in KPPSI is Abdul Aziz Kahar Muzakkar — one of the many
sons of Kahar Muzakkar, the leader of the Darul Islam movement of the
1950s — who was elected to the national regional Assembly, the DPD. The
move is supported by the Aliansi Muslim Bulukumba (Alliance of Muslims in
Bulukumba, or AMB) — Bulukumba being a district where sharia-based local
regulations have been introduced (Asi, 2007; Alimi, 2009). The demand for
sharia has received notional endorsement from the provincial parliament
which has embarked on ‘study tours’ of other countries with sharia-based legal
regimes (Halim, 2004). This political movement would seem to confirm the
view of the people of South Sulawesi as relatively ‘fanatic’ in their devotion to
Islam (see, for example, Jones, 1980).
However, there have been other ways of reacting to the provincial, as well as
national expressions of religious violence. Both nationally and in the province,
mainstream Muslim organisations, such as Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul
Ulama (and the associated group DDI [Darul Dakwah wal Irshad] in South
Sulawesi), emphasize pluralism and do not support the call for the implemen-
tation of sharia as law, but rather strive to strengthen the Muslim community
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 223

through social and educational programmes (Halim, 2004). A less well-known

socio-political movement has also contested the agenda to introduce sharia.
This movement attempts to reinstate traditional forms of authority and poli-
tics that were — like political Islam — suppressed during the New Order
period. Local elites, such as in Gowa and Tallo, incidentally two of the first
polities to embrace Islam (Pelras, 2001), have recently conducted rituals that
involve public display of ‘traditional’ forms of power, such as the investiture
of rulers or the public washing of sacred regalia.3
One of the supporters of this revival of traditional rituals as a means for
unifying the community and countering inter-religious violence has been the
bupati (district head) of North Luwu. Elected in 1999, by the new district
parliament of North Luwu, Luthfi A. Mutty immediately set out to address
the problem of inter-communal violence; one of his main tactics was the util-
isation of local culture as a basis for social solidarity. He lent support in such
areas as training adat (customary) leaders and sponsoring local traditional
events, such as the ritual cleansing of the regalia of adat rulers (ICG, 2004:28).
The Regional Autonomy Law No. 22 of 1999 enables villages to reflect their
own traditions in institutions of governance and village regulations. Luthfi
saw the adat institutions as “vital for knitting together a fraying social fabric”
(ibid.) In North Luwu, therefore, we can witness the way that regional auton-
omy has provided opportunities to rebuild localised authority structures
destroyed under the Suharto regime. One of the outcomes of this attempt of
Bupati Luthfi to rebuild tradition and ancient authority structures was the
staging of the Galigo Festival and Sawerigading seminar in North Luwu.

The Galigo Festival and Sawerigading Seminar

The Festival Galigo and Seminar International Sawerigading was held by the
district government in December 2003 as a celebration of local traditions and
a proud display of the region’s cultural specificity. A previous international La
Galigo seminar and cultural festival had been hosted by the government of
Barru district, South Sulawesi in March 2002 (Rahman et al., 2003). These
cultural festivals and seminars are a new kind of activity for the autonomous
district governments, many of which aim to engage directly with the interna-
tional sphere, usually in economic terms,4 but in the case of these seminars, as

3
Sacred regalia are objects that concentrate power and are material symbols of the legitimacy
of traditional rulers.
4
District heads are newly empowered to seek direct investment, under the regional autonomy
regulations.
224 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

a ‘player’ in global culture. The whole event consisted of multiple layers of

activities associated with celebrating and displaying local tradition, self-
consciously querying the role of these traditions in contemporary life, as well
as linking these traditions with development projects of the modern state.
The 2003 Galigo Festival comprised nightly cultural performances show-
casing cultural and religious traditions of the diverse cultural groups of North
Luwu, with performances from other regions as well. At the same time, an
adat (customary/traditional) ceremony was conducted over several days in
nearby Malangke, which was the coastal capital of the kingdom of Luwu from
the 14th to the 16th centuries (prior to the conversion of the ruler to Islam
which occurred in the early 17th century) and is the site of a number of royal
graves. The ceremonies followed Luwu adat and culminated in the sanctifica-
tion of a new traditional reception hall known as Baruga. The rituals involved
propitiation of gods associated with the pre-Islamic pantheon and the perfor-
mance of gestures of loyalty by the vassals of the ruler (known as Datu or
Payung), including a procession of rakki (floats) carrying tribute from the
regions considered to be formerly under Luwu’s power. This tribute was con-
sumed in a feast which was proudly announced by the festival organisers as
‘stretching over one kilometre’. This ritual enacted the hierarchical traditions
of the Luwu court, but was proclaimed to also express harmony and mutual
interdependence (Rahman, 2002; Seminar International Sawerigading and
Festival Galigo, 2003).5
The relationship between Islam and these ancient traditions, such as those
showcased at the La Galigo Festival, has not been a smooth one in South
Sulawesi. The La Galigo stories and the associated rituals were banned during
the Darul Islam rebellion in the 1950s and, although there were attempts by
the Luwu elite to reinstate court rituals, including tribute from subjects in the
1980s, these efforts had been controversial with only a portion of the com-
munity complying with their requests. During the Festival, there was an
attempt to include those who represent a more fundamentalist stand towards
Islam. The then Vice-President Hamzah Haz, a member of the Islamic United
Development Party (PPP) that had unsuccessfully proposed a constitutional
amendment to impose sharia on all Indonesian Muslims, made a brief appear-
ance at the ceremony at Malangke. Inaugurating a nearby concrete road, in
addition to the new Baruga hall at the site of Luwu’s ancient royal graves, he
gave a sermon-like speech that attempted to base development in Islamic val-
ues and did not mention the local values being celebrated. His presentation

5
The form of the rituals and the cultural rationale were set out in a booklet which legitimated
and formalised the events as authentic court rituals.
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 225

contrasted with the spirited speech of Bupati Luthfi, who emphasized the
importance of the local traditions being celebrated and how they, in fact, com-
plemented national development. He suggested that the Baruga, the graves
and the associated rituals were ‘taking care of the people’s spiritual needs’,
while the new road, which would allow all weather transport of the farmer’s
cacao crops, was ‘taking care of their material needs’.
The accompanying international Sawerigading seminar was held in a new
government meeting facility in the district capital, Massamba.6 The papers
were given by academics versed in the history and anthropology of South
Sulawesi, invited from Indonesia and overseas. In the festival programme
notes, the aim of the seminar was expressed as a desire to promote the epic
poem, the La Galigo, as a source of integration in the local area and a basis for
integration in the nation. It would ‘increase the understanding of the people
of Luwu concerning their own intellectual traditions; discover and understand
the identity of Luwu as described in the epic; develop a spirit of valuing one’s
own culture and the cultures of others in establishing ethnic pluralism; dis-
cover and understand the system of government of the kingdom of Luwu as a
basis for good and clean government; discover and understand the value of
struggle and the work ethic of Sawerigading; the desire to make local culture
productive once more’ (Seminar International Sawerigading and Festival
Galigo, 2003). Papers argued, inter alia, that La Galigo provides guidance for
moral conduct, is a guide for practices to interact with the sacred, provides a
model for inter-ethnic harmony, and is an expression of indigenous leadership
values. An underlying goal of the conference therefore, was the reinstatement
of shared local cultural values to achieve harmony.7

Who are La Galigo and Sawerigading?

The La Galigo is a collection of stories relating to the origins of the kingdom
of Luwu, identified in the story as the original kingdom in South Sulawesi. It
recounts the wanderings of the semi-divine Sawerigading, the grandson of the
sacred being Batara Guru; Sawerigading’s son La Galigo is also an important
protagonist (Abidin and Macknight, 1979; Koolhoff, 1999). Oral tradition
locates much of the action — especially episodes relating to the descent of

6
The Bupati in his welcoming speech proudly complimented his district — that they had
gone directly to an international seminar, skipping the national seminar phase that one might
have supposed would precede it.
7
Under a new regulation of the autonomous district government teachers are required to
teach the La Galigo as a source of moral values and life principles, as well as local identity. The
2003 Law on the National Education System (Law 20/2003) had established the principle of
local content being taught in the context of the national curriculum.
226 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

Batara Guru to this world, his palace, the palace of Sawerigading and his
wife We Cudai — at locations in what is now North Luwu; hence, the
Luwu district has adopted the epithet ‘Bumi Sawerigading’ (The World of
Sawerigading).
Sawerigading is then South Sulawesi’s most famous cultural hero and the La
Galigo, an epic work of traditional literature, is an important source of the
pre-Islamic sacred beliefs and practices of the Bugis, the dominant ethnic
group in the province. This corpus of indigenous knowledge survives as both
oral tradition and as manuscripts written in the specific Bugis script, known as
aksara lontara (Tol, 1996).8 In South Sulawesi, many manuscripts still have an
active presence as sacred objects and as containers of knowledge relating to
humankind’s relations to the gods and the proper ways of behaving in this
world (Robinson, 1998:2). Christian Pelras, the foremost foreign ethnogra-
pher of the Bugis wrote:

The La Galigo manuscripts, rhythmically segmented texts written in a highly literary

style and archaic language, narrate in detail the destinies over five generations of hun-
dreds of princely characters of divine descent living at an undetermined period in a
number of South Sulawesi kingdoms and on adjacent islands. Until well into the
twentieth century these texts were widely considered to be sacred, and could not be
read without appropriate rites being performed. Many Bugis still believe that the
events described really occurred in a golden age of the past when things were different
from the present and humankind was nearer to the gods. A complete version of the
epic cycle is nowhere to be found; most extant manuscripts, many of which end
abruptly, cover no more than a few, sometimes disconnected, episodes. However,
many Bugis literati and in some areas even ordinary villagers have a good knowledge
of a great part of the whole cycle, acquired through public readings or oral transmis-
sion (Pelras, 1996:32−33).

Pelras argues it is possible to reconstruct the system of pre-Islamic religious

beliefs from the La Galigo and other works (1996:85). These encompass earth,
heaven and underworld, the gods that inhabit these domains and their involve-
ment in the lives of humans — as ancestors of dynasties — who descended to
earth to impose order. Batara Guru, the eldest son of the divine Datu Patoto’E
descends to earth to marry We Nyili’ Timo from the underworld: He is the
archetypal To Manurung (‘people who descend’) — divine beings who give
rise to worldly semi-divine dynasties. These rulers’ divinity, represented sym-
bolically as ‘white blood’, is the source of their charismatic authority over
common people. According to Pelras, this connection to political authority

8
The oral and written traditions are complementary and interdependent in South Sulawesi
(Pelras, 1979).
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 227

and social status explains why the La Galigo corpus has survived the coming of
Islam (1996:87). Other scholars have speculated on the cultural influences
reflected in the tales, which Sirtjo Koolhof (1999) says show transformation
over time in response to the differing historical forces that engaged the Bugis,
including Islam. M. Salim, the contemporary translator of La Galigo, describes
it as a “holy book (kitab) of mythical character that is regarded by the Bugis as
recording real historical events” (2003:44). Pelras endorses the view that many
Muslims in South Sulawesi believe that the events of the La Galigo are real. He
further comments that in spite of the cycle having been composed by numer-
ous authors the overall course of events and the relationships between hun-
dreds of protagonists display a consistency and coherence that are quite
extraordinary (1996:33).
These literary and oral traditions that invoke this golden age of semi-divine
royal beings relate to everyday practices in many areas of life. There are thou-
sands of fragments of manuscripts (including La Galigo stories) held by people
of all social classes all over South Sulawesi and these are regarded as sacred
fetishes and/or read on important events like the night before rice planting or
harvest, or lifecycle rituals. One of the most popular bodies of stories from the
cycle concern Sangiang Serri, the multiform rice goddess (Koolhof, 1999) and
relate to the divine origin of rice; these were the most common La Galigo frag-
ments found in a major collecting project in South Sulawesi in the late 1990s
(Mukhlis dkk., 2003). The most popular story according to M. Salim (pers
comm.) is the wedding of Sawerigading and We Cudai, often read at wed-
dings. The sacred elements are intimately entwined with the ethical under-
standings of how one behaves appropriately towards one’s fellow human
beings.
The La Galigo is, therefore, claimed with pride in South Sulawesi as a major
literary work. It is common to hear the assertion in South Sulawesi, that the
La Galigo is the ‘longest literary work in the world’, even longer than the
Odyssey. In fact, however, what is now regarded as a single work, has been
created through the efforts of scholars, Dutch scholars in the first instance,
who collected many of the manuscripts containing a related body of stories,
and a summary of the story published by Kern (1939). A portion of these
stories were published in Indonesian in 1989, as I La Galigo (Kern, 1989).
Most recently, all of the Leiden collection has been transcribed and translated
into Indonesian by Muhammed Salim and Fachruddin Ambo Enre, but to
date only two of the 12 volumes have been published (in 1995 and 2000). The
historian Leonard Andaya (2003) has commented that it is perhaps more
properly considered as a genre than as a single work.
228 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

Sawerigading stories are found in many parts of the archipelago, for exam-
ple, in the Malay peninsula, Central Sulawesi (Nourse 1998), Gorontalo, Riau
and Malaysia (Andaya, 2003) reflecting the long history of Bugis contacts
with the wider Malay world. Many of the versions found outside South
Sulawesi emphasize Sawerigading’s anti-hero status, as a thief, a trickster and a
man who commits incest. However, it is in South Sulawesi and especially
among the Bugis where people claim to possess the ur story of Sawerigading.
The La Galigo has recently achieved international fame, with the develop-
ment of a stage production directed by Robert Wilson, with a cast of 51 actors,
dancers and musicians, and a musical score by Rahayu Supaggah (an ethno-
musicologist). It opened in Singapore in March 2004 and has toured Europe,
the United States (with a season at the Lincoln Centre in New York in 2005)
and Australia (see Macknight, 2006). Furthermore, it has just been accepted
by UNESCO for listing in The Memory of the World Register.

The Galigo Festival and Cultural Revival

The Galigo Festival comprised five nights of entertainment. Reflecting the
degree of enthusiasm and commitment to reviving traditions, many of the
performing groups had travelled a long way, some even arriving from other
islands and distant provinces.9 Within Sulawesi, a group from Ronkong in the
mountains bordering Tana Toraja had walked for several days in order to par-
ticipate. There was a great diversity of performances, from folk dances10 to
stylised readings of episodes from the La Galigo. A group from Sorowako, the
village near the Inco mine where I have undertaken field work since the 1970s
(Robinson, 1986), performed the Monsado dance, where a small group of old
men played gongs and drums to accompany young women dancing. These
dances had been banned by DI and I had only ever seen small fragments of
Monsado performed by old women in playful moments in their homes, never
in a public performance.
The most amazing performance to the audience was that of the bissu, the
transsexual priests who, in the La Galigo, mediate between heaven and earth/
sacred and profane. Bissu were persecuted during the time of the Darul Islam
rebellion, and the practitioners kept a very low profile during the succeeding
New Order period; therefore, very few bissu remain. The most important
group persists in the district of Segeri and there is another active group associ-

9
A group were invited from the oil-rich district of Kutai Kartanegara in East Kalimantan,
whose kreasi baru (new creation) exhibited befitting confidence for a ‘poster district’ of regional
autonomy in expressing the possibilities of local development under decentralisation.
10
Aragon (1996) describes a similar revival in Central Sulawesi.
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 229

ated with the court of the old kingdom of Bone. There are no longer active
bissu in Luwu. The festival programme had promised the inauguration of 250
bissu (described as ‘olden day priests’ [pendeta kuno in Indonesian] of the
Bugis), but this optimistic promise was not fulfilled. The Bone group appeared
on the first night, performing Maggiri, a dance in which the bissu become pos-
sessed and turn their keris (wavy-bladed daggers) on themselves. If they are
possessed by a powerful spirit, the keris will not penetrate their skin because of
divine protection. The lead bissu of the Bone group was neither a charismatic,
nor elegant performer, and this group added some vaudeville-style antics to
their performance. The audience tittered, not identifying with the performers.
The last night of the festival, however, a group of bissu from Segeri took the
stage. Their lead bissu, Puang Mato Saidi, is a very charismatic performer who
has achieved some international fame as a member of the cast of Wilson’s stage
version of the La Galigo. During the Maggiri, he strode about the stage with
his long hair flying loose as the bissu went into trance and tried to stab them-
selves. When finally he pressed his keris to his chest, the audience was hushed
and attentive, perhaps responding to the eerie feeling of an encounter with
the divine.
Circle dances are common to many of the peoples of the interior of the
island of Sulawesi and had been banned also in the areas under DI control as
they were deemed to violate Islamic practice. Such dances require men and
women to hold hands as they alternate in forming a dance circle and this
physical proximity allowed for flirting, through breaking in to dance next to a
chosen partner of the opposite sex, tickling hands and the improvisation of
flirtatious pantun (verses) sung to the rhythm of a gong. Each night of the
festival, the scheduled performances on the outdoor stage would end with a
spirited Dero (the best-known circle dance) by young men and women
from Pamona in Central Sulawesi,11 who would invite dignitaries from the
audience — including the Bupati and his guests sitting in the front row —
onto the stage to join in. Within a very short time, the circles of dancers broke
off, amoeba-like from the initial group and spread out to cover the fields
behind the stage, and the energetic crowd kept dancing well into the night.
The Dero truly expressed the spirit of North Luwu and its distinctiveness from
the rest of South Sulawesi. Young, old; male, female; Christian, Muslim
(including young women in jilbab) were all joining hands and dancing with
strangers in a joyous celebration of ‘community’.

11
When I began researching in Sorowako in the late 1970s, although the people of the village
had stopped performing the Dero and similar dances, cassette tapes of songs from Pamona with
the distinctive dance beat were very popular.
230 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

Islam, traditional Bugis culture and the Sawerigading ideals

South Sulawesi is regarded as one of the strongly Islamic regions of Indonesia,
but the region was rather late to embrace Islam (in the early 17th century)
relative to other parts of the archipelago (Pelras, 2001; Mappangara and Abbas,
2003). Mappangara and Abbas speculate that the rulers were reluctant to
accept Islam as it would likely challenge their semi-divine status (ibid.). How-
ever, South Sulawesi has subsequently been progressively Islamised since the
first decade of the 17th century when the rulers of Gowa, Tallo and Luwu
made the confession of faith and fought to extend Islam to the other Bugis
polities (Pelras, 2001). The subjects soon followed the rulers, initially more of
a statement of loyalty to the ruler than a strong statement of personal convic-
tion (Mukhlis and Robinson, 1985). Islam was incorporated into — rather
than pushing aside — traditional forms of knowledge and religious practice.
Bugis consider that their cultural core (panggaderreng) consists of five sets of
interlocking principles: including ade’ (customs, traditions), bicara (jurispru-
dence, deliberations of knowledgeable persons), rapang (civil law), wari (rules
of descent and hierarchy), and sara’ (Islamic law and institutions, sharia). For
the Bugis, the cosmopolitan doctrine of Islam and locally-specific beliefs and
practices are not in conflict, but are all fundamental to their mode of being in
the world. Their everyday religious and spiritual practices embrace Islam as a
‘global structure of meaning’ articulated with local ‘spirit cults’ (Gibson,
2000:42).
As with Indonesia in general, Islamisation is still in progress. Some distinc-
tive local groups have famously retained pre-Islamic religious values associated
with the La Galigo traditions as their principle guide to daily action and inter-
actions with the sacred, the best known being the Kajang in Bulukumba
(Rössler, 1990; Tyson, 2009) and To Lotang in Rappang (Ramstedt, 2004).
But aspects of the old tradition permeate lifecycle and agricultural rituals and
everyday life in many Bugis communities, including the explicit invocation of
the culture hero Sawerigading as a prophet. He is associated with a popular
messianic tradition: “. . . unlike the sun, he was engulfed in the east, so he will
rise again in the west, and when his coming is near, the great tree Welenreng
[cut down in order to build a boat to allow him to seek his spouse] will grow
again” (Pelras, 1996:90). According to Pelras, some Bugis say the tree is already
growing again, and they await his return.12

12
Hamdan Juhannis (pers comm.) has commented that Kahar Muzzakar was identified with
the Sawerigading tradition and, hence, the widespread belief that he is still alive and was not
killed by the Indonesian military in 1965, an event which led to the end of the rebellion (Harvey,
1974).
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 231

Sakka’s (2003) paper at the Seminar Sawerigading recounts a story which is

typical of the genre that incorporates Islam within the La Galigo tradition. At
one time, the Prophet Muhammad came to the land of the Bugis to meet
Sawerigading, also referred to in this version of the story as Opuno Ware, a
respectful title for the ruler of Luwu. They met at Padang Loang in Sawitto
(a former small kingdom in what is now Pinrang district) to debate the best
way to ensure the wellbeing of humankind. After seven days and seven nights,
they could not reach an agreement, so they came up with a solution: In certain
matters, people would follow the teaching of Muhammad and in others, the
principles for living according to Sawerigading. They parted on reaching this
agreement. On leaving, Muhammad said, “OK, I’m leaving now and proceed-
ing to the west, so I hope that when humankind seeks peace in the afterlife,
they will follow my direction,” and Sawerigading said, “In that case, I will
leave here journeying to the east and I hope that people seeking satisfaction in
this life will follow my direction.” In popular local traditions, such as those
followed in some villages in Pinrang, people perform their Islamic prayers
(solat) facing west, towards Mecca, but also pray facing to the east, to propiti-
ate Sawerigading and request intercession in worldly matters. This story
exemplifies the fluid exchange between Islam and South Sulawesi cultural
traditions that has resulted ever since the people of South Sulawesi first
embraced Islam.
On the other hand, it is clear that in South Sulawesi, not all those who have
embraced Islam have continued to accept ancient traditions; more militant or
formalist Islam is not new to this part of Indonesia. In South Sulawesi, Islam
provided the ideological banner for the Darul Islam rebellion of the 1950s
that aimed to make the newly post-colonial independent republic of Indone-
sia an Islamic state. Leader Kahar Muzzakar was a minor aristocrat from Luwu
(Harvey, 1974; Gonggong, 2004) and joined with groups in West Java and
Aceh who were promoting the same goal. Between 1950 and 1965, Kahar’s
forces controlled much of the rural area of South Sulawesi and were strong in
the remote northern parts of the province, including Luwu, where many
Christian communities were forced to flee or to convert en masse to Islam
(Robinson, 1986:89). DI today would be called an Islamist movement: In the
area under their military control they implemented sharia as the basis of law
and implemented arbitrary justice, such as cutting the hands of thieves and
stoning women accused of adultery (dirajam). They forced the population to
conform to a stringent Islamic orthodoxy, banning non-Islamic religious and
ritual practices (for example, elaborate feasting at mortuary ceremonies, such
as we still see in Christian Tana Toraja), religious practice regarded as innova-
tion (such as recitation of Barzanji) and social practices seen to be at odds with
232 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

their Muslim Puritanism (such as the free mixing of the sexes in circle dances
that were common in this region mentioned above).
The DI rebels who championed a purified version of Islam were intolerant
of the La Galigo tradition, both oral traditions and the sacred manuscripts.
According sacredness to the manuscripts was regarded as heresy (bidah) and
they banned the associated religious practices. These included the transvestite
priests (bissu), mentioned above, whose sacred authority derives from their
sexual ambiguity, their anomalous status allowing them to mediate with the
divine (Hamonic, 1975). The bissu were persecuted in the period of DI rule
and they almost disappeared, as did many other ritual and social practices
deemed in conflict with Kahar Muzakkar’s radical Islam. Manuscripts (lon-
tara) associated with pre-Islamic beliefs, including the corpus of the La Galigo,
were burned as part of their campaign to cleanse Islamic practices and also to
expunge beliefs and practices associated with hierarchical tradition of the pre-
colonial courts. In status competitive Sulawesi, there was a blurring of reli-
gious and secular values as the old traditions were condemned as both
hierarchical and heretical, but on the other hand, the kind of egalitarianism
espoused by the DI rebels entailed arbitrary justice and a lack of regard for
individual rights.
The commitment to the implementation of sharia as the basis of local law
in the post-Suharto era has been strongest in many areas of Indonesia associ-
ated with DI in the 1950s — in Aceh, West Java and in South Sulawesi (see
Buehler, 2008). As noted above, some groups in South Sulawesi have pro-
moted sharia as the basis of regional regulations; the KPPSI, in particular,
invoke the ideal of Kahar Muzakkar (who some people in South Sulawesi
claim is still alive; Tangke, 2002). KPPSI argue that Bugis customary tradition
(panggadereng) actually incorporates Islam as one of its five constituents (men-
tioned above) and, hence, argue that sharia is synonymous with custom and
with Bugis and Makassarese identities. But this is a simplification of the dis-
tinctive ways in which Islam has been incorporated into everyday life in South
Sulawesi.
The Seminar Sawerigading in North Luwu, on the other hand, made a
claim for the La Galigo, rather than a purified Islam, as a moral basis for ethi-
cal conduct and harmonious social relations, as well as a symbol of local iden-
tity. The seminar promoted discussion of values of the La Galigo relating to the
conduct of worldly affairs. In this view, the La Galigo represents values that
can stand for good government, moral revitalisation of society, respect for dif-
ference and tolerance and social solidarity (albeit achieved through hierarchy).
Sawerigading and his son La Galigo lived peripatetic lives — and this is drawn
upon as a kind of cosmopolitanism and a value in tolerance and the ability to
mix with people who are culturally different.
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 233

But (re)interpretations of cultural traditions have invited counter claims.

For others, the La Galigo tradition serves to close off boundaries. At the Saw-
erigading Seminar, some members of the audience reacted angrily to attempts
to re-evaluate the epic (for example, its historical value) or to the discussions
of Sawerigading stories from outside Sulawesi that presented the cultural hero
in a negative light (as a rapacious pirate, or stories which emphasized his incest
with his sister). La Galigo, too, therefore, has its fundamentalists. At one point,
a man in the audience stood up and said with passion: “Let’s take back Sawer-
igading,” as if this mythic figure was ‘owned’ by the people of Luwu. In reac-
tion to this kind of ‘La Galigo fundamentalism’, a Bugis scholar (not from
Luwu) who attended the seminar expressed the view: “They are too extreme in
their ‘Luwu-ness’.” Another eminent La Galigo scholar commented, critically,
in regards to these conflicting ideas, “Most of these people have not read the
manuscripts. Their knowledge comes from fragments of the oral tradition and
their everyday knowledge.”
One could argue, however, that these intellectual debates about values in
the La Galigo, that were promoted by the conference organisers (Said and
Bakti, 2003), do not necessarily connect with performed identities or the
popular, social and political values held by the common people in a more
unreflective manner. For the majority of Muslims in South Sulawesi, being
Muslim is a form of everyday practice, where they do not differentiate the ‘pre-
Islamic’ practices (such as making offerings, burning incense while they pray,
or propitiating ancestors) from ‘religion’. In a similar vein, the democratic
performance of the Dero circle dance which took place at the festival, allowed
for a more easily engaged and less contested version of authentic local culture,
than the attempt at intellectualising the La Galigo tradition, performed at the
accompanying seminar, or the kind of purified Islam which KPPSI wishes to
instantiate.

Conclusion
The Government of North Luwu has embraced distinctive local practices and
beliefs in an effort to build social solidarity and a unifying local identity. The
elevation of a ‘stripped back’ and puritanical version of Islam promoted under
the Darul Islam rebellion active in the 1950s and 1960s had, for many people
in this part of Indonesia, eliminated part of their historically and culturally
constituted selves. “Local populations in South Sulawesi have been appropri-
ating symbolic practices and discourses from virtually the entire globe for the
past several centuries, but . . . they have not thereby given up their autonomy”
(Gibson, 2000:53). Indeed, the climate of Reformasi and the new localised
234 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237

discourse fostered by regional autonomy holds out the promise of the expres-
sion of these ‘authentic’ culturally located selves. This includes the public
expression of the complex and ‘bumpy’ accommodations of centuries of
encounters with varying cultural/religious traditions and the complex forma-
tion of individuals who embrace a variety of ethical bases for everyday action
and for mediation with the ineffable. The Sawerigading revival is not so much
a new religious movement as a renewed public expression and legitimation of
ethical and spiritual practices which were suppressed by Darul Islam, but also
under the New Order, through the requirement for all citizens to embrace a
world religion.13
While the Reformasi has provided the political climate for Islamism and the
political movement for sharia as the basis of law, it is also enabling the expres-
sion of divergent beliefs and practices. The advocates of sharia as a basis of
community and politics face competition from political agendas that aim to
bring deeply-held locally specific cultural and religious beliefs and practices
into the public sphere. The Festival Galigo, especially the late-night mass Dero
performances expressed and celebrated a truly ‘Luwu’ cultural identity that
differentiates it from ‘Bugis’, an ‘ethnic’ label under which Muslims of Luwu
are often incorporated. The political agenda of the Seminar Sawerigading was
very clear. The ‘prowess’ demonstrated by the successful execution of the sem-
inar was seen by some as something to be parleyed into political ‘clout’. To this
end, participants were asked to sign a petition seeking the creation of a new
province of Luwu Raya, roughly approximate to the inner sphere of influence
of the old Luwu Sultanate (see Roth, 2005).14
Although since 2004, the number of districts seeking to implement sharia
in South Sulawesi has decreased (Bush, 2008), the desire by elites to elevate
‘tradition’ as a source of political authority is continuing, as is the renewed and
diversified expression of distinctive cultural traditions. For Muslims of South
Sulawesi, the Reformasi has enabled the confident expression of their distinc-
tive Muslim identities, rather than being seized as an opportunity to embrace
a politicised agenda of an Islam stripped of its local distinctiveness. Sara — the
Bugis term that identifies Islam as one of five strands of custom or pannga-
dereng — outweighs sharia as embraced by formalist Islam. The charismatic
appeal of Kahar’s descendants, as champions of a purified and politicised Islam

13
This was due to the necessity to not be seen as a ‘communist’ after the 1965 alleged
attempted communist coup and the subsequent efforts to purge the country of communists.
14
In this respect this ‘invention of tradition’ had a very political agenda, just as Hobsbawm
(1983) suggested was the case in the original formulation of this idea. See also Erb et al. (2005),
on the political agendas of a similar festival and conference in Western Flores in the early Post-
Suharto era.
 K. Robinson / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 219–237 235

have not been able to override the appeal of the cultural hero Sawerigading
and the cultural practices linked to the La Galigo cultural complex for many
of the Muslims of South Sulawesi.

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