And the Sun Pursued the Moon : Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority Among the Makassar

Over the course of a thousand years, from 600 to 1600 CE, the Java Sea was dominated by a ring of maritime kingdoms whose rulers engaged in long-distance raiding, trading, and marriage alliances with one another. __And the Sun Pursued the Moon__ explores the economic, political, and symbolic processes by which early Makassar communities were incorporated into this regional system. As successive empires like Srivijaya, Kediri, Majapahit, and Melaka gained hegemony over the region; they introduced different models of kingship in peripheral areas like the Makassar coast of South Sulawesi. As each successive model of royal power gained currency, it became embedded in local myth and ritual. To better understand the relationship between symbolic knowledge and traditional royal authority in Makassar society, Thomas Gibson draws on a wide range of sources and academic disciplines. He shows how myth and ritual link practical forms of knowledge (boat-building, navigation, agriculture, warfare) to basic social categories such as gender and hereditary rank, as well as to environmental, celestial, and cosmological phenomena. He also shows how concrete historical agents have used this symbolic infrastructure to advance their own political and ideological purposes. Gibson concludes by situating this material in relation to Islam and to life-cycle rituals.

Making the Modern Primitive provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as "culturally authentic." In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? Michelle MacCarthy addresses this question by examining four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Drawing on both symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts drawn from economic anthropology, she examines the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture, the ways in which local residents actively represent and enact "Trobriandness," and the ways tourists interpret and narrate their experience. MacCarthy offers an anthropological critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, and cultural commodification, based on long-term fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders and tourists.

These notions, which have particular meanings as analytical concepts in anthropology, are also used and strategically deployed in the discourses of both Trobriand Islanders and tourists. Ideas about primitivity and cultural essentialism, while critiqued by anthropologists, are nonetheless used by both parties in tourism interactions to conceptualize and contextualize difference. MacCarthy demonstrate how such tropes are employed in ways that fit with prevailing metanarratives which each side holds about the other, and how these tropes are reproduced both in individual narratives of both tourists' and Trobrianders' experiences and in their interpretations (often misconstrued) of the lives of cultural Others with whom they interact. She examines the social dimensions of cross-cultural exchange in these four arenas (performance, village life, souvenirs, photography) to argue that cultural commodities are conceived of as singularities, a special category whose commodity status is downplayed in order to generate an increased sense of authenticity and to perpetuate the myth of a "primitive" economy and way of life more generally. In touristic encounters, experience itself is a sort of commodity, but relationships (real or imagined) are central to investing these experiences with meaning and value. This analysis contributes new understandings of the role and significance of authenticity in the anthropology of tourism, and its relationship to exchange; that is, how meaning and value are ascribed to the cultural products produced and consumed in the cultural tourism encounter with reference to ideas about what is and isn't authentic.

"Over the course of a thousand years, from 600 to 1600 C.E., the Java Sea was dominated by a ring of maritime kingdoms whose rulers engaged in long-distance raiding, trading, and marriage alliances with one another. And the Sun Pursued the Moon explores the economic, political, and symbolic processes by which early Makassar communities were incorporated into this regional system." "Gibson uses anthropological, mythological, textual, and historical analysis to show that Makassar symbolic knowledge does not constitute a seamless whole. It is composed of a complex set of competing models, each with a unique historical genealogy and geographic source. His book will appeal to those interested in the established fields of anthropology, folklore, history, and comparative political science; the emerging interdisciplinary fields of cultural, subaltern, and post-colonial studies; and the origins of globalism and transnationalism."--BOOK JACKET. Contents Acknowledgments 1. Introduction to South Sulawesi 2. Toward an Anthropology of Symbolic Knowledge 3. Androgynous Origins: Traces of Srivijaya in the Java Sea 4. Incestuous Twins and Magical Boats: Traces of Kediri in the Gulf of Bone 5. Noble Transgression and Shipwreck: Traces of Luwu’ in Bira 6. The Sea Prince and the Bamboo Maiden: Traces of Majapahit in South Sulawesi 7. The Sea King and the Emperor: The Gunpowder State of Gowa-Tallo’ 8. The Power of the Regalia: Royal Rebellion against the Dutch East India Company 9. The Return of the Kings: The Royal Ancestors under Colonial Rule 10. Knowledge, Power, and Traditional Authority Notes References Index About the Author