Houses, hierarchy, headhunting and exchange; Rethinking political relations in the Southeast Asian realm of Luwu’

The kingdom of Luwu', the cradle of Bugis civilization, is the acknowledged 'elder sibling' of the other South Sulawesi kingdoms which came to overshadow it. A contemporary of Majapahit, it is mentioned in Javanese court chronicles as early as 1365 and reached its zenith in the sixteenth century (Van Fraassen 1991:3). lts suzerainty stretched across the northern end of the Bay of Bone, and extended far into the highlands of Tana Toraja, Central Sulawesi and Matano. The iron, bark cloth and dammar (an aromatic tree resin) it collected from its tributaries there were widely traded throughout the archipelago. According to Errington (1989), Luwu' is seemingly exemplary of the 'Indic states' or 'negara' which blossomed in the region in status, size and trade before the advent of Dutch colonialism. The political relations of the negara challenge western concepts of power and the state: 'Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state ... was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power' (Geertz 1980:13). This conceptualization of the political form of the negara has assumed a paradigmatic status only to be challenged, in the case of Luwu' and other South Sulawesi kingdoms, by a more refined historical analysis of the origins of these 1 1 would like to thank Shuichi Nagata, Judith Nagata, Tim Babcock and Christian Pelras for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Faults persist despite their helpful advice,