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Indonesia Weyewa
The Weyewa inhabit the western highlands of Sumba, Nusa
Tenggara Timur Province, where they cultivate rice, corn,
and
cassava using slash-and-burn farming methods as well
continuous
irrigation of padi fields. They supplement this income
through the
sale of livestock, coffee, and their distinctive brightly
colored
textiles.
Until the 1970s, there had been relatively few
challenges to
the Weyewa notions of political and religious identity.
Because
Sumba is a rather dry and infertile island, located away
from the
ports of call of the spice trade, it was comparatively
insulated
from the Hindu, Muslim, and later Dutch influences, each
of which
helped to shape the character of Indonesia's cultures. In
the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Sumba was
periodically
raided for slaves by Muslim traders, the local inhabitants
responded by building and living in fortified hilltop
villages.
Patrilineages, which structured these groups, became
powerful units
of politically motivated marriage alliances in which women
were the
currency of exchange. Each lineage was headed by a
self-appointed
raja, or "big man," who, in return for loyalty,
cattle,
women, and children, offered protection and guarded the
sanctity of
tradition.
These powerful lineages, symbolized by the spirits of
deceased
ancestors, remained the focus of Weyewa religious practice
and
political identity until the 1970s, despite the Dutch
military
conquest of the island in 1906 and nearly a century of
Protestant
missionary efforts. In exchange for the fertility of
crops, the
orderly flow of irrigation water, freedom from misfortune,
and
continued prosperity, descendants promised to offer ritual
sacrifices of cattle, chickens, pigs, and rice. These
promises were
made in a form of ritual speech.
The Weyewa system of production and exchange began to
undergo
major shifts in the 1970s, which resulted in a gradual
weakening of
the authority of lineages. One event that illustrates this
process
was the construction of an irrigation system and
hydroelectric dam
at the site of a sacred gushing spring at Waikelo in
central-west
Sumba in the mid-1960s. Throughout much of the 1960s, this
spring
watered some 300 hectares of rice fields, whose cycles of
cultivation and fallowing were regulated by certain
lineage elders
carrying out the "words" of the ancestors. By the early
1970s, more
than 1,500 hectares were available for continuous
irrigation. Not
only were traditional leaders unprepared to oversee and
control
this increase in the scale of production, but government
officials
took the initiative by encouraging farmers to abandon the
ritual
schedule of planting and harvest and to plant new
high-yield,
hardy, and fast-growing varieties of rice. These new
varieties
permitted two or more plantings per year. According to
oral
accounts of witnesses, the ownership of the new and
ambiguous
categories of land that emerged from irrigation was often
assigned
to individuals, not lineages. When disputes arose,
government
officials, such as police officers, judges, or district
heads,
rather than the raja, increasingly mediated the
disputes and
enforced the settlements. As a result, when asked to
participate
younger farmers were increasingly reluctant to invest in
largescale and expensive ritual feasts honoring the spirits,
because the
government had more control over their lives than did the
spirits.
Meanwhile, government officials put increasing pressure
on
traditional leaders to give up ritual feasting practices
as
"wasteful" and "backward." Furthermore, as with the
Kaharingan
adherents of central Kalimantan, failure to affiliate with
an
approved religion was regarded as potentially treasonous.
Unlike
Toraja and the peoples of central Kalimantan, however, the
Weyewa
and other Sumbanese were not politically organized for the
preservation of their native religion. Most people simply
converted
to Christianity as a symbolic gesture of participation in
the
nation state. Indeed, whole villages in the late 1980s and
early
1990s conducted feasts in which residents settled their
debts with
ancestral spirits and became Christians. The number of
Weyewa
professing affiliation with the Christian religion (either
Roman
Catholic or Calvinist Protestant) jumped from
approximately 20
percent in 1978 to more than 60 percent in 1990.
Data as of November 1992
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