A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism 9789814376174

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I5EA5 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies was established as an autonomou s organizatio n in May 1968. It is a regional research centre for scholars and other specialists concerned with modern Southeast Asia, particularly the multi-faceted problems of stability and security, economic development, and political and social change. The Institute is governed by a twenty-two-member Board of Trustees comprising nominees from the Singapore Government, the National University of Singapore, the various Chambers of Commerce, and professional and civic organizations. A ten-man Executive Committee oversees day-to-day operations; it is chaired by the Director, the Institute's chief academic and administrat ive officer.

The responsibility for facts and opinions expressed in this publication rests exclusively with the author and his interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policy of the Institute or its supporters.

A THEORY OF INDIGENOUS SOUTHEAST ASIAN URBANISM

Richard A. O'Connor

Research Notes and Discussions Paper No. 38 INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES 1983

PublIshed by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Heng Mui Keng Terrace Paslr Panjang Singapore 0511 All rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored In a retrieval system, or transmitted In any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, © 1983 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

ISSN 0129-8828 ISBN 9971-902-61-3

CONTENTS

Page PREFACE

II

Ill

vi

WHAT MAKES THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN CITY WHAT IT IS? -- A THEORY

1

Western Theories and Southeast Asian Cities

1

Indigenous Urbanism

4

Urbanism as Community

5

Urbanism as Hierarchy

7

An Indigenous Division of Labour -- and Power

8

Overview

11

INDIGENOUS SOCIETY AS COMMUNITY

13

Bilateral Kinship

13

The Familial Idiom

15

Ethnic Diversity

23

The Ethnic Idiom

25

INDIANIZATION AS HIERARCHY

28

iii

Page Indianization as an External Idiom

28

Encapsulated Communities

32

Organic Solidarity

33

Indianization and the City

37

IV

ISLAM AND THERAVADA BUDDHISM

39

V

TRADITIONAL SOCIETY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF COMMUNITY

43

Patriarchs and 'Families'

43

Manpower as a Consequence of Community

46

The Persistence of Community

47

TRADITIONAL URBANIZATION

51

Urbanization as Ritual Distinctions

51

The Division of Power

58

TRADITIONAL URBAN VARIATION

61

Ruler, Palace, and City

62

Person versus Place

65

Trading versus Temple Cities

67

THE IMPACT OF COLONIALISM

71

Education as Urban

72

Growth of Urban Power

73

Spread of a Market Economy

74

VI

VII

VIII

iv

Page

IX

X

XI

Clash with Community

75

Singapore as Southeast Asian

77

MODERN URBANISM -- COMMUNITY

82

'Levels' of Modern Community

83

Community as Politics

87

Structural Changes

88

MODERN URBANISM -- HIERARCHY

95

The Plausibility of Modernity

95

The Ideology of Modernity

97

Hierarchy's Institutional Core

102

Hierarchy's Wider Idiom

103

Status and Life-style

106

Hierarchy in Context

111

INDIGENOUS URBANISM

114

Southeast Asian versus Western Paths of Differentiation

114

A Short Cut to Modernity

117

Conclusion

118

BIBLIOGRAPHY

120

V

PREFACE

In the 1950s when C. Wright Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination he called on sociologists to make sense of society,

not just to themselves, but to ordinary people who were caught in social forces they had no way to grasp. Most of us are still waiting, not just for sociology, but for the whole of social science to recapture the vision of the early social theorists. We can take a step in the right direction by asking major questions. Thus Mills' challenge leads us to ask "What makes the Southeast Asian city what it is?" True, our question is hopelessly big, but smaller questions deny the urban social whole we want to understand. And because it is a whole, we must interpret it within its own indigenous framework instead of scrambling it to fit alien jargon, categories, and theories. Studies of Southeast Asian cities often begin and end with alien constructs. Sometimes there are nods to the city's history and its meaning, but these rarely enter into the conclusions drawn from 'hard' data. Such studies can be useful and even enlightening but they are na'ively one-sided. I will not summarize or survey them here because I only want to show the plausibility of the other side. My thesis is that the history and symbolic meanings of the city are as vital today as they were when early cities mirrored the cosmos and Indic rituals ordered the rea 1m. There has been no break, no time when the past was erased and the present became simply 'rational' instead of symbolic. While think this thesis applies widely in Southeast Asia, there are several gaps in my coverage. For lack of sources I do not consider all of the urban peoples of the region. Of those I do consider, none are dealt with completely. Instead, I skip from one to another and only the assumption of regional patterns ties them together. To avoid certain complications I do not consider Vietnam and the Hispanic Philippines or take a vi

specificall y religious perspective . For simplicity I do not note some obvious exceptions -- what I say about Indianizati on does not apply to the Philippines , comments on the countryside and peasants do not apply to modern Singapore, and so on. This paper is a theory in severa 1 senses of the word. It is exploratory and tentative, and so in the popular skeptical sense it is a 'theory' as distinct from the 'facts'. Quite apart from this false fact-theory dichotomy, it is also a theory in the scientific sense of a system of ideas used to explain certain Now within this scientific sense there can be phenomena. competing theories, and I have tried to use the theory which is closest to what I call indigenous theory -- the way the people of a culture order, simplify and explain the world around them. The theory presented in this paper is, I believe, close to a Thai indigenous theory of urbanism. I do not, however, have the field experience to say how we 11 it fits indigenous theories e 1 sewhere in Southeast Asia, and so I have titled this paper for what it is -- a theory of indigenous urbanism -- instead of what I would 1 i ke it to be -- an indigenous theory of urbani sm. Therefore, while my paper reacts against applying Western theories uncriticall y, perhaps I apply a Thai 'theory' --or worse, a Western interpretat ion of a Thai 'theory' -- where it does not fit. If I am only trading one style of intellectua l imperialism for another, I hope the result offers insights into a neglected side of the Southeast Asian city. I would like to thank the many people and institution s that A Fulbright-H ayes Postdoctora l have helped me on this paper. Lee Foundation in Singapore the from grant a Research Fellowship, and a Mellon Summer Stipend from the University of the South have supported my research and writing. I have enjoyed the facilities of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the I have encourageme nt of its Director, Kernial s. Sandhu. benefited from the comments of Wilfredo Arce, James Boon, Oaw Nwe Nwe, Daw Than Nu, Zainal Kling, Perla Makil, A.C. Milner, Jean Miralco, Ng Shui Meng, Jesucita Sodusta, Janice Stargardt and Tan Loong-Hoe. Sharon Siddique convinced me to try such an ambitious Carolyn topic and suggested many improvement s along the way. O'Connor edited the manuscript and Patty Pearson typed it. To a 11 of these peop 1e I offer my sincere thanks and apo 1ogi es for any inadequacie s of what follows.

vii

I WHAT MAKES THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN CITY WHAT IT IS? -- A THEORY

Somewhere between the cosmo l ogi ea l past and the modern present scholars lost the Southeast Asian city and put Chi ea go in its place. Sometimes this miraculous change is written as history-colonialism, it seems, wiped away tradition and unleashed capitalism. Other times it is written into a theory -- the market, some say, rules the city and its social life. Often the change comes by making the city measurab 1e -- births, deaths, costs, and crimes are taken to say what can reliably be said about the city. Always the Southeast Asian city is changed from indigenous to Western, not wilfully but implicitly in the way it is studied and explained. Scholars need not openly deny indigenous meanings and impute Western ones, because their theories and theory-like assumptions do it for them. Thus many warn that Western theories must be adapted to Southeast Asia. This caveat introduces collections (for example, Yeung and Lo 1976; Evers 1980) and concludes articles (for example, McGee 1976, p. 73), but where does it dictate the structure of research? So deep is the assumption that modern Southeast Asian cities are alien growths, the bastard offspring of col oni a1ism and capitalism, that no one wonders if they might be indigenous. To do so would be to face a fundamental question: What makes the city what it is? Instead, most researchers settle for practical puzzles like "How big is the city?" or "Why are there so many hawkers?" Yet posing these proximate questions hinges on accepting ultimate Western answers written into social theory and its practices.

Western Theories and Southeast Asian Cities

Theories, of course, are inevitable, but they need not inevitably be Western theories. Urban peoples have folk or indigenous 1

theories of the city that, like other theories , create an order. Out of numberle ss phenomena, a theory defines some few known phenomena as signific ant and sees the rest as derivati ve or meaning less. In short, a theory creates a meaningf ul reality. Its If it is an indigeno us theory, this is its strength . It is a reality that must be meanings are never wrong. Indeed, to the degree that understo od to understa nd a city. reality is socially construc ted, it is the reality for Thus the phenomena it defines as understa nding the city. because they shape the thoughts ant signific ant become signific and deeds that shape the city. Indigeno us theory is, in a word, Of course other theories are also selfself-ful filling. For example, one can define a city by size or fulfillin g. This makes immigrat ion and fertility density of populati on. signific ant within that theory. When such data is presente d as though its signific ance were self-evi dent, then the circle is complete . Thus, just as indigeno us theory is self-ful filling, this Yet themselv es. among reality a create scholars methodo logical virtue of the indigeno us is the danger of the Unlike the indigeno us, we do not know that the scholarl y. scholarl y is signific ant. One way to establis h the validity of a scholarl y theory Few would be to show that it explains the indigeno us one. 1y inherent as data their take most , 11 a After attempt this. meaning ful, forgettin g that its meaning lies in their own theories . A few do try to explain the indigeno us, although often a vulgar reductio nism only explains it away. Thus it should surprise only the Khmer to discover that what they saw as the glorious city of Angkor was in fact not a 'true' city but a mere non-urba n ceremoni al centre (Coe 1961). Clearly somethin g has been lost here. True, to explain anything you must sacrific e some facets to stress others, yet here the 1oss is far greater Khmer meanings are, because the sacrific e goes unseen apparen tly, meaning less. Yet whether the indigeno us is unseen or seen as superfic ial, it comes down to the same thing: a reality construc ted among scho 1ars is taken to be more 'real ' than an Indeed, perhaps as most Perhaps it is. indigeno us reality. assume there is a universa l human or even natural reality that is as real in Manila as Chicago. Yet if this single underlyi ng reality is there, the only way to find instead of impose it is to begin on the phenome nologica lly real surface of life and follow its indigeno us meanings . My argument then is that while urban life is embedded in indigeno us meanings , urban studies have been embedded in Western meanings , specific ally the belief in a single, fixed and knowable underlyi ng reality. Popularl y this is "the bottom line", or what social scientis ts see as the natural world where self-int erest reigns, the level to which social phenomena can and should be 2

reduced. Especially in the city this reductionism comes to the Indeed, it is not even seen as reduct i oni sm. The modern fore. city, it seems, and not the theorist, reduces men to their natural self-interest. In the city custom, tradition and even 'culture' fall away to leave natural man as the quintessential urbanite. Far-fetched as this seems, this metaphor often governs How else could data be reported and tomes urban research. written without a moment's reflection on the meanings of urban life or the symbols that shape the city? Within this metaphor there are many theories, but I sha 11 focus on the one that is perhaps the most rigorous and pervasive: the market model. In many modern studies it is the market that makes the city what it is. For this to happen, urbanites must lead 1 ives of narrow and unending economic self-interest. Yet they can do this fully only if the traditional ties of kin, community and status are broken down. In many social theories it Here Simmel is the market itself that destroys these ties. (1950, pp. 411, 414) states what most merely assume. The "money economy", he tells us, has always centred in the city where it becomes a state of mind that "reduces a 11 qua 1 i ty and individuality to the question: How much?" It becomes "the most frightful leveler", "the conmon denominator of all values [that] hollows out the core of things, their irreparably individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability". Lost, then, are the roots of "[a]ll intimate emotional relations between persons" and thus, we might add, the higher claims of kin and community. Left in its wake are solitary individuals, monads who know only impersonal ism and their own self-interest. Sinmel saw this urban attitude as learned, yet for many social theorists the loss of traditional values leaves a Hobbesian 'natural' man, a self-interested creature of the market. What the market breaks down, social theorists rebuild into an urban order attuned to the market and this 'natural' economic man. Take central place theory and urban ecology for example. How much things cost determines where peop 1e 1 i ve and what they It even colours what they think and how they feel. The do. city, then, becomes the simple sum of their individual Less consciously, survey research cost-efficiency decisions. presumes this same social levelling and individuation -- how else could one assume that social reality is the sum of individual opinions and lives? While class analysis decries such na'ivete, it too presumes that the market will eventually erode the ties of kin, conmunity and status, and so reveal the social order as a reflection of the economic one. Such approaches end where they begin -- the belief that the market is the natural underlying reality.1 How well do market model theories fit Southeast Asian urban

3

life? Southeast Asians know the market well and can pursue self-interest as earnestly as anyone. But if the market is taken as a deterministic or genera 1 mode 1 of social 1i fe, then it is marred by glaring inconsistencies. Instead of impersonal ism, a fictive kin idiom infects even passing relationships. Instead of solitary individuals, urbanites live in local and city-wide webs of friends and connections. Instead of explicit classes, status thrives in both traditional ethnicity and occupations and modern symbols of prestige. In short, what the market is supposed to do to social life it has not done. Most students of Southeast Asian cities would agree with this. It does not, however, lead them to question whether the Instead, they ask why the market is the underlying reality. market is not working the way it did in the West. Urbanization is not producing economic development. It has not transformed the whole society so much as split it into a modern capitalintensive sector that continues to develop and a traditional labour-intensive sector that falls further behind (Boeke 1966; Some explain the market's failure as urban Geertz 1963a). involution (Armstrong and McGee 1980). Others say the market will work in time. Still others say it never will. Developed capitalism ensures the dependency of the underdeve 1oped so that their cities only extract surplus wealth, never foster useful economic development (Frank 1967). Whoever is right, all are wrong in one way: they seek to explain why market-based development has failed, not how an indigenous system has succeeded. That is, their explanations proceed from the belief that the market is the underlying reality and so they explain away i ncons i stenc i es that appear on the surf ace of 1i fe rather than treat that surface as valid and meaningful in its own right. So inconsistencies cannot, by themselves, challenge the belief that the market makes the city. True believers can argue that they are not inconsistent or that inconsistency will come in time. In any case, the market model does not purport to explain all things, merely the significant ones. The inconsistencies Thus an effective could be peripheral to the urban order. challenge must propose a better theory that can show that the inconsistencies are neither passing nor peripheral, but the stable and essential expressions of the indigenous urban order. This, then, is what a theory of indigenous urbanism can do.

Indigenous UrbaniSII

Such a ~heory begins, not by assuming an underlying reality. but by look1ng at the meaningful surface of life where people live. The surface of life is indigenous. It is always particular to 4

Even within one city it is astoundingl y people and places. It is not, however, without order. People share a diverse. cultural order of symbols and meanings. Symbols are the fabric of social life, whether it is the city or the countryside , the past or the present. Ideally we should study the city through its own symbolic complexes, if only because they tend to create the reality they presume. Whether people believe the city is a dog-eat-dog world or the 'family' of a fatherly king, they act, think and see accordingly and so make their imaginings real. I shall focus on two symbolic complexes common to urban Southeast Asia. Each projects an indigenous theory of the city. Analyticall y I call them community and hierarchy. Each has its own idiom, a coherent way of symbolizing what people think, say, These Each idiom is embodied in institution s. and do. institution s are often the elite and urban centres of society, but the idiom also reaches out to the social and physical Together, as idiom and institution , peripheries of society. community and hierarchy shape the city's meaning and give meaning to urban life. Let me briefly describe them in turn.

Urbanh11 as Coaa.mity

It flourishes on The sphere of community pervades the city. street corners wherever everyone knows everyone else; it is woven into the elite's far-flung web of friends and connections ; and it culminates in the idea that the city and now even the nation is a single community. Corm1unities are set within -- and sometimes against -- other communities . Often they overlap. Frequently they change. They can be unorganized , though they always have the order of a single self-fulfil ling assumption: everyone has some corm1unity just as everyone has a family. Southeast Asian urbanities thus learn that you need friends and connections to get by, and so they turn their energies to building communities . Within this sphere there are many culturally specific In particular shared locality, common idioms of community. ethnicity and a fictive kin familial idiom are especially powerful ways of expressing affinity with others. Let me focus on the familial idiom. It is rooted in the bilateral kinship that pervaded early Southeast Asi a (Brown 1976, p. 61; Wi nzel er 1976; Welters 1980). Unlike unilineal descent that perpetually divides 'blood' kin from 'in-laws', bilateral descent mixes them with each new generation because children are related to both Instead of a discrete and their mother's and father's kin. enduring lineage, bilateral kinship often spawns countless qverlap extend ever outwards, that kindreds ego-centred endlessly, and alter with every birth, death, and marriage. Such 5

fluid boundaries and multiple possibilities lend themselves well Yet if to fictive kinship and even forgetting the fictions. these are its historical and continuing roots, the familial idiom has long had many self-perpetuating institutional expressions. From the neighbourhood to patron-client relations and patriarchal rule, a familial metaphor joins the institutions of community in a single idiom. To follow so fluid an idiom we cannot tie our analysis to a community's can make we but definition, simple single sociological meaning clearer by setting it within social theory. Here Tonni es' (1963) concept of Gemei nschaft captures the Often trans 1ated as Southeast Asian sense of community. personal felt deeply describes Gemeinschaft community, relationships governed by strong traditions. To Ti:innies (1963, p. 192) the family is the archetype of Gemeinschaft, just as in Southeast Asia a familia 1 idiom often expresses community. He sees the master-servant relationship as the prototype of the more open Gemeinschaft association, just as patron-client relationships have long created communities within the Southeast Asian po 1 i ty; and he says that "the idea of authority is, within the Gemeinschaft, most adequately represented by fatherhood ••• ", just as Southeast Asian rulers have long governed as patriarchs (Tonnies 1963, pp. 192, 39}. Yet despite these similarities, Tonnies' Gemeinschaft differs from the way I treat community. While Tonnies fuses culture and society, I build upon their modern distinction {Kroeber and Parsons 1959) to focus on the culture or symbols of community. He wants to describe 'what is'; I describe only 'what is symbolized'. For TCinnies it is critical whether a group is really a community or not, but I use the word idiom precisely to avoid the difficult and secondary question of how far community Of course this states the priorities of my is 'realized'. analysis, not its boundaries. Within the idiom I am concerned I consider like Tonnies, Thus, institutions. its with patron-client relations and patriarchal rule as well as the idiom's unseen consequences such as endemic facti on a 1ism and the In sum, my subject overlaps Tonnies', importance of manpower. but my approach follows from the priority of symbols. also differ from Tonnies on the direction of modern To Hinnies the modern world was moving from family-like Geme1nschaft to the cold and shallow Gesellschaft of contracts, ~he ma~ket ?nd the state. In contrast, I see the persistence of True, many ommun1ty 1n the modern Southeast Asian city. neighbourhoods have been absorbed in the larger city but this has not. destroyed community so much as shifted it from local ~xpress1ons to city-wide status communities, from neighbourhoods 0 networks. Indeed, modern polities and better communication I

chan~e.

6

have opened whole new fields where community flourishes. Of course Gesellschaft, too, has grown. A hard and exploitive impersonal ism often greets those so fool ish or desperate as to venture outside their community. Yet while Gesellschaft does describe a side of urban life, it misses an organizing principle of the Southeast Asian city -- hierarchy.

Urbanism as Hierarchy

Step outside the communities where you are known, and you enter an urban status hierarchy that ranks everyone and every community. What you say and do, how you dress and travel -- all rank you. Your wealth, education, occupation, and ethnicity stand out for even passers-by to see. Unevenly but unerringly, their ranking runs towards a single idiom: the perceived order of the outside 'civilized' world. Today that world is modern, and so everyone is ranked in a hierarchy of modernity. Earlier, when the outside world was Indic, an Indic idiom defined the social hierarchy and its institutions of king, court, and social ranking. Then Indic symbols clothed the top of society while the bottom went nearly naked. The elite were urban and refined while the peasants had only the shadow of civilization. The quest for this superior status drew people to the king and court, making royally awarded Indic honours key media of the political economy. Later, in the nineteenth century, colonialism conquered the Indic. While the Indic fell to being 'custom', the modern took over as hierarchy's highest idiom -- the way of the civilized world. Modernity became just as prestigious, as much the idiom of social hierarchy as the Indic had once been. Being modern was just as reasonab 1e and necessary as the progress it promised and the efficiency it demanded. Modernity took over the old civil and military bureaucracies and created a new educational one. Today an idiom of modernity rules these core institutions that rule society. Of course, as with the familial idiom, I am concerned with symbols and their meanings, not how 'Indic' or 'modern' these idioms have made Southeast Asia. Like community, we can clarify hierarchy by setting it within social theory. What Weber (1958b, pp. 180-95) called status describes hierarchy well. To Weber (1958b, pp. 186-87), a person's "status situation" hinged on a "social estimation of honor" that was usually expressed in "a specific style of life". For Southeast Asia, then, we can say that once an Indic and now a modern life-style convey honour or prestige. While this honour is on the surface of life, as public as dress or bearing, it is hardly superficial. Indeed, political and economic power often flow from honour instead of the other way around (cf. Weber 7

1958b, p. 180). Of course people differ in honour. Taken together these differences define what Weber (1958b, p. lHl) called the social order and we shall call the social hierarchy. Hierarchy thus fits within Weber's concept of status, but the fit is too loose for our analysis. While we shall distinguish hierarchy from conmunity, for Weber (1958b, p. 186) status groups "are normally corrvnunities". If our distinction focuses on hierarchy-comm unity tension, Weber sees its resolution in status corrvnunities. To find a narrower definition of hierarchy we can turn to Dumont's study of the Indian caste system. He defines hierarchy as "the principle by Nhich the elaaents of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole ... " (Dumont 1970, p. 66 [emphasis in original]). In India the principle of hierarchy is tied to purity while in Southeast Asia it revo 1ves around modernity. In both the view of the who 1e is religious, although in Southeast Asia this ultimate order is a world of science and progress that is as real and inescapable as gods and demons once were. Of course modernity is not the only principle of hierarchy, but it is the pre-eminent one that orders all the others. We can conclude, then, that the symbolic complexes of conmunity and hierarchy fit roughly within Hinnies' Gemeinschaft and Weber's status. This translates their indigenous meanings into Western social theory, and yet it offers no single theory. In itself this is all right. After all, there is no one indigenous theory. Instead, community and hierarchy project two d i st i net theories of the city and its society. Of course this dualism need not deter us from formulating a still higher theory that incorporates the two indigenous ones. Indeed, we cannot escape this task because individual lives, cities and societies tend towards an integration that pushes together what the symbols of corrvnuni ty and hierarchy keep apart. Thus the two meet, even if their meetings fall between and beyond the key indigenous symbols that can conceptua 1i ze their re 1at i onshi p. We therefore need a higher 'outside' theory to describe conmunity and hierarchy's interaction. Ideally, this theory would not deny indigenous meanings, but elaborate their unseen and unintended consequences.

An Indigenous Division of Labour -- and Power Durkheim's (1964) division of labour is just such a theory that explains what holds society together. Social solidarity can be mechanical or organic. A mechanical society is made up of many similar segments, each cast in a single mould. Each leads a life 1i ke every other, and so they share conmon be 1 i efs and

8

Yet if this Similitude binds them together. sentiments. uniformity makes unity possible, it also makes competition When each segment wants the same inevitable and fission easy. things, similarity spawns competition; and when each segment contains the whole of social life, it can easily set out on its Mechanical societies thus grow until they collapse under own. their own weight. They usually stay small and simple. All early but some evolved the organic societies were mechanical, Instead of repeating similar solidarity of complex societies. segments, organic societies have "a system of different organs each of which has a special role, and which are themselves formed Solidarity of differentiated parts" (Durkheim 1964, p. 181). 1 ies in interdependence. Each part of society is so specialized that it cannot split off and live alone. Instead of competing, each part plays a specialized role that complements the differing This division of labour ties complex roles of other parts. societies together. Durkheim' s theory describes the rise of modern industrialized society in the West but it can also be applied to Southeast It is the Community rests on mechanical solidarity. Asia. Rich or poor, everyone has family, common social denominator. If each community is unique, all are friends, and connections. Society is made up of many communities loosely of like kind. In their similarity they all compete for the 1 inked together. With no integral followers and resources. same things differences to bind them, communities easily split up. Endemic fissioning and feuding are the essence of politics. Today this mechanical solidarity describes only one facet of Southeast Asia, but we sha 11 argue that once community was the who 1 e of early acting as an idiom of Then Indianization, life. social hierarchy, created the organic solidarity shown in the first Today's modern hierarchy remains organic. cities and states. Modernity differentiates people and groups just as surely as any division of labour. Knowledge and ability decide who does what, Thus from the peasants who farm to the educated who rule. modernity separates the leaders from the led and gives the educated and the bureaucracy governing roles, not as a privilege, If everyone works hard and but in the name of progress. efficiently in their proper tasks, economic development will follow for the good of all. Modernity thus depicts its hierarchy as a natural and necessary division of labour. Overall, then, the symbolic complexes of convnunity and hierarchy correspond to Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity. Of course Durkheim's theory is often interpreted more narrowly, as if "labour" were purely economics (for example, Coe 1961). This is inappropriate for Southeast Asia, but it seems to fit the West where the economy is "a privileged institutional locus ••• whence emanates a classificatory grid imposed upon the 9

total culture" (Sahlins 1976, p. 211). In effect, then, the division of labour often represents a differentiation of the Western cultural category of work, not just as the interdependence of jobs, but as the who 1e interwoven sphere of the nature, ends, and means of work. Over the past few centuries, tasks and techno 1ogy have acted and re- acted on each other, spurring their own differentiation. As they have followed their own logic, society has followed them. But when we turn to Southeast Asia work 1oses its privileged place. Politico-religious power or status takes over as the culture's ruling element. Instead of economic differentiation, society follows a differentiation of power or status. I shall call this a division of power, not to amend Durkheim's theory, but to distinguish this Southeast Asian emphasis from both the Western one and narrowly economic interpretations of the division of labour. Thus Southeast Asian society evolves through a division of power that eo-opts people by giving them a share in a central power. For example, a local leader's mechanical power would be encapsulated and enhanced by a title or position that tied him to an organic urban-centred whole. Instead of economic specialization, such a society grows through the personal political specialization of an intricate bureaucracy and a ramifying patronage network. While the West e 1 aborates 'pract i ea l' d i st i net ions between both tasks and goods (cf. Sahlins 1976), Southeast Asia elaborates power or status distinctions between both people and positions. Of course this is only a difference in cultural dominance. Southeast Asia has an economic division of labour, and yet it seems to follow power's logic, not its own. Thus the legions of petty hawkers and shophome merchants, the very picture of mechanical similarity, follow from power's status distinctions, not labour's economic logic. By the same token, the West has a division of power, and yet it ultimately rests on the simple mechanical similarity of votes. Moreover, voting is often thought to follow lines laid down by the economic division of labour. For each region this secondary sphere is intensely competitive, an arena of concern, while the dominant sphere goes unquestioned as just the 'rational' way of doing things. Yet beneath such overstated polar contrasts within Durkheim' s theory lies a common process. The division of both economic labour and political power create interdependence or organic so 1 i darity. In Southeast Asia people 1 need 1 each other politically the way Westerners depend on each other economically. Both efface the mechanical, which in Southeast Asia means hierarchy grows at the expense of existing, often local communities. In both fragmentation at one level allows for integration at a higher one, so that society's elements are "coordinated and sub-ordinated one to another around the same 10

centra 1 organ ••• " (Durkheim 1964, p. 181) , or what in Southeast Asia has always been the city and its ever urban elite. Thus power divides, not randomly, but in pieces that always point to the city whence comes their meaning. In consequence, urbanization becomes the elaboration of those ritual distinctions The of status that divide power and presume a centre. distinction between royalty and commoners set the symbolic basis for the first cities. Later, royal-noble and centre-periphery Today, status distinctions set one great city above others. modernity sets the capital and its modernized elite above provincial towns and elites and the lot of them above the countryside and traditional peasants. If the first distinctions made cities possible, the last ones make the great primate cities of modern Southeast Asia inevitable. After all, like an economic division of labour, the division of power builds on its prior differentiation. So Bangkok, Rangoon, and Jakarta continue an ancient tradition, not in spite of but through modernity. With less historical continuity but no less power, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Manila also perpetuate a modern, urban-centred division of power.

Overview What makes the Southeast Asian city what it is? It is not the market or population density or even the elite. Though all of them have their say, they work in the shadow of indigenous historically conditioned symbols that I call community and hierarchy. But let me be more specific. Our main question can be divided into three smaller ones: (1) How is the city Community and hierarchy are both the predominant organized? idioms of social relations and the institutional core of the city. (2) What holds the city together? The shared symbols of community and hierarchy create a superficial solidarity. More deeply, a division of politico-religious power or status makes urbanites interdependent parts in an organic whole. (3) How does the city rule the country? People accept that the city is the centre of civilization, the once Indic and now modern way of the world. A person's identity hinges on where he fits in an urbancentred social hierarchy. To rise in prestige, power or wealth he moves towards the city and into its division of power where he gets a stake, however small, in urban rule. To answer these questions in more detail we must turn to the past, yet this is not a work of history. I present the past in a typological and evolutionary order, not a chronological one. Even so, describing and dating the eras will help to clarify my argument. I begin with an indigenous era when bilateral kinship 11

and ethnic diversity kept polities small and mechanical, organized around idioms of community. Growth led to fission, not evolutionary change. In the first few centuries A.O. Indianization's organic idiom of hierarchy fostered the first cities. The ruler, court, and capital became the centres of civilization. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Islam and Theravada Buddhism swept the region. Both religions were eoopted into the urban-centred hierarchy, but they a1so made it possible to be civilized and yet not urban, and thereby helped to sustain an indigenous sense of community. In the traditional polities that followed, we see community's persistence in patriarchal rule, patron-client ties and the importance of manpower, while hierarchy flourished as the formal Indic order of society. The traditional era ended with the high colonialism of the nineteenth century. Colonialism marked the shift from an Indic to a modern idiom of hierarchy that today is embodied in the bureaucracy and the educational system. Community also persists, although many urban 'villages' have dissolved into dispersed status communities and personal webs of friends and connections. Even so, modern expressions of community have historical and symbolic 1inks to the social organization of the indigenous era.

NOTE Is the market •natural' and so universal, or is it merely cultural and Some of its processes may be universa I, but the wider assumptions Western? that make lt the determinant of social lite are thoroughly Western (Sahllns 1976). Consider the idea of the •natural' man itself. Theorists can imagine a •natural' man because they use the Western mind-body distinction. Culture, it seems, can be separated from nature. Of course this is naTve. Whether one takes an epistemological, evolutionary or developmental perspective, without culture or some such set of shared symbols there is nothing -neither man nor market (Geertz 1975, eh. 2). But once the split is made, spirit can be separated from matter and the economy becomes conceptually d i st i net. Stand I ng on thIs cuI tura I ground, a market mode I man Is p la us i bl e because Western socIety has, as SI mme I ( 1950, p. 4 I 4l saId of the urban I te, "completely internal I zed )the) money economy". Thus in the West such theories can work tor the wrong reason -- not because they tit human nature, but because they tit the culture studied. The further assumption that the market breaks down a 11 other va I ues faces the same dIlemma. True, modern Western urban lite often comes down to the market's dictates; yet is this breakdown of other va I ues a dIrect and I nev I tab I e consequence of the market, or Is the market it se It but part of the wider cuI tura I forces of change seen by Weber (1958a), Ourkheim (1964), and Fustel de Coulanges (1960)? Again, market model theories may work tor the wrong reasons. Obviously whether they work tor cultural or natural reasons becomes a crucial question when they are applied to non-Western cultures.

12

II

INDIGENOUS SOCIETY AS COtMJNITY

To understand the urban efflorescence that came with Indianization, we must look at the still earlier indigenous societies that nourished this development. While little is known about pre-Indic society, its bilateral kinship and ethnic diversity seem apparent, and both had clear implications for the rise of cities.

Bilateral Kinship Several scholars believe that bilateral kinship characterized pre-Indic Southeast Asia, especially the lowlands (Brown 1976, p. Unfortunately direct Wolters 1980). 1976; Winzeler 61; The various Filipino peoples historical evidence is sparse. clearly had bilateral kinship at the time of Spanish contact (Arce 1968, p. 14; J ocano 1975, p. 181) , but e 1 sew here we must and later historical state from 'indigenous' infer the contemporary evidence. Thus for early Java, Schrieke (1957, p. 5) found "not a trace of a genealogical organization of society •.• ",which we would expect with bilateral kinship. Contemporary With few major evidence, of course, is far more complete. exceptions (for ex amp 1e, the Vi et name se, Ba 1i ne se, Chams) , bilateral kinship predominates in modern lowland Southeast Asia (cf. Leach's "nonunilineal" [1960]). This alone argues for an indigenous bilateral past, especially among historically related peoples. Thus, when so many Tai peoples with diverse historical and ecological experiences have bilateral descent, we can infer that the proto-Tai were bilateral. The many Malay peoples show a similar predominance of bilateral kinship, although this appears to have developed after dispersion, leaving a non-bilateral pocket in Sumat ra amid a bil at era 1 culture area stretching from the Malay Peninsula to the Philippines (Blust 1980, p. 223). 13

Finally, the presence of other social phenomena associated with bilateral kinship testify to its antiquity and centrality in the lowlands (cf. Kirsch [1976] on the Khmer). Consider, for example, the high incidence of equal inheritance and neolocal residence, and the comparatively high status and independence of women.1 Similarly, the indigenous pattern of no family or clan names fits with a bi 1at era 1 system. Un 1 i ke a unil i ne a 1 system where clearly bounded lineages and clans provide an easily and almost necessarily named generational continuity, bilateral descent produces only a plethora of ego-based kindreds. A kindred reaches outwards from the person at its centre and lasts only as long as he does. Here the personal name of the centre best describes the social reality; family names are hollow if not confusing. Thus we find that the ordinary Khmer (Jacobs 1979, p. 411), Burmans (Aung Thwin 1976, p. 241, f.n. 8), Javanese (Soemardjan 1978, p. 232), Filipinos (Marcos 1976, p. 86), and Thai had no family names until rulers imposed them. In sum, considerable evidence suggests that bilateral kinship pervaded indigenous Southeast Asia. What were the implications of bilateral kinship for the development of cities? Kinship did not directly impede the emergence of cities and states. There were no strong lineages or clans to compete for people's loyalties (Sharp 1962, p. 9, f.n. 9). To emerge, a city did not have to have membership based on "residence rather than kinship" (Childe 1950, p. 16 [emphasis added]), since with bilateral kinship a city could and historically did have both. Nor can we stress the change from "kin-based societies" to "politically organized, territorially defined societies" (Wheat 1ey 1979, pp. 290-91) when early bilateral societies may have already been politically organized and territorially defined, as we shall shortly describe. In short, Southeast Asian kinship was pre-adapted to the city and state. Yet if it did not impede higher order social groupings, bilateral kinship did not directly facilitate such evolutionary change (cf. Winzeler 1976). While corporate lineages and clans could accumulate wealth and power over generations and perhaps rise to rule others, the bilateral kindred was only as strong and enduring as the person at its centre. When he died, it died. Elsewhere early urban forms may have arisen out of conical clans (Wheatley 1971, pp. 375-77), large kin groups in which the line closest to the 'original' ancestor took on class-like superiority over junior lines. Conical clans or such unilineal groupings caul d create an enduring and di st i net centre of authority around which states and cities could arise. In contrast, a bilateral system of kindreds changed continuously, overlapped endlessly, and diffused power thoroughly. As a strictly defined institution, the organizational limits of bilateral kinship were manifold.

14

The Familial Idiom As a loosely defined familial idiom, however, the possibilities of bilateral kinship were infinite. When anyone could be your relative, and given local endogamy probably was or would be, it was a small step to see a leader and his followers, the village, and eventually the city-state as a 'family'. Bilateral kinship made this inclusive familial idiom a possible and meaningful way of seeing and organizing a corrmunity. While a unilineal system wou 1d have collapsed under such blurred boundaries, this same fuzziness let a bilateral system grow as far as imagination and resources allowed.2 The idiom remains meaningful today even as its selffulfilling elaborations ar,· family-within-family inclusiveness elude precise definition -- indeed flourish on ambiguity -- and foster a 'big man' politics wherein a leader rises to power by collecting followers.3 While we can partially document this familial idiom in historical times, we can infer it was indigenous by its native terminology, links to bilateral kinship, and three imperfect cases: the pre-Hispanic Philippines, the early Tai, and Old Java. We see the Philippines through the eyes of the Spanish and later folk traditions. Indigenous society was organized into small corrmunities or baran~ led by 'big men' call datu. We are told that the datu "was at the outset the head of 'a family of parents and children, relations and slaves' who came in a barangay or boat ••• " (Marcos 1976, p. 70). Of course most barangay were too old for this to be more than oral tradition, but this familial origin myth was perpetually relived as small kin groups sp 1 it off to found their own vi 11 ages (Lynch 1963). Defining barangay as a kinship group (Marcos 1976, p. 397) quite accurately describes this core, but a barangay could grow far larger. A successful datu might amass followers and slaves until his barangay had perhaps one hundred houses, and so a kindred in the strict sense had to grow into a kindred in an idiomatic sense. Of course to hold his barangay together and exercise his authority, we can imagine that the datu stressed the continuity between his barangay 'family' and the smaller family that everyone knew and accepted. It seems safe, then, to conclude that "[t]he barangay political system was modeled after the family system ••• " (Jocano 1975, p. 175). Within and beyond the barangay blood pacts and ritual kinship created further basic social ties (Arce 1968, p. 14) in a kin or familial idiom.4 A similar familial idiom flourished in indigenous Tai society where the 'big man' leader was honoured as a 'father' and his followers or subjects were cast as his children (Anuman 1972, pp. 310-13).5 Shortly after the political emergence of the 15

Siamese Tai in lowland Southeast Asia we have King Ramkamhaeng' s inscription (A.D. 1292) describing his paternal rule and honouring him as 'father 1ord' ( phQk.hun). Just as barangay meant both the boat that might have carried a kindred and its extensions to a larger community, the Tai word ban meant both a In house or house compound and a village of many households. both cases a single term describing two levels of social organization reflects the way the sma 11 er kin-based group acted as a model for the larger community. The familial idiom, and the authority of its leader, fed upon this creative ambiguity. The indigenous or pre-Indic Javanese village had tiers of 'families' , set one within another. According to van Naerssen (1976, p. 297) the wanua or village was the original community. Villagers were anak. wanua or 'chi 1dren' of the vi 11 age. Vi 11 age landowners, the upper class, were the anak. thani or 'children' of the cultivated land (Setten van der Meer 1979, p. 55). A council of e 1ders governed the village. Their chief was the rama or 'father' of the village. Above him stood the rak.a or 'older brother' who apparently acted as an older brother to several rama and thereby governed their villages through them (Naerssen 1976, p. 297). From the basic family to the rak.a, at least four levels were joined in a single familial idiom. Overall these few indigenous cases and many later historical ones suggest that a familial idiom pervaded early Southeast Asia. Of course, the 'family' was not identical in every culture, nor even the only idiom of community. Ethnicity was another probable idiom we shall discuss shortly. Here, however, let me use the familial idiom as though it were the only one because it best illustrates an essential feature of community: the mechanical solidarity or symbolic continuity wherein a higher commun.ity was but a magnification of the lesser communities that composed it. What, then, were the implications of this symbolic continuity for indigenous society? Certainly it made familial rhetoric real in the most material ways. When the ordinary family could not separate itself from the everyday economics of food, shelter, and clothing, then the higher 'family' could not be any 1ess of an economic tot a 1 i ty without denying the very sources of social solidarity. Conceivably this led to a redi stri but i ve economy wherein resources from rice to respect, from booty to labour, flowed to the 'father' who used them to care for and enlarge his 'family'. With new families bringing resources to attract still more families, such an economy could have grown enormously. A 'family' could have grown into a city or state, but in practice it grew only to split up. In such a mechanical society segmentation was as inevitable as growth was easy. 16

Simple similarity bound a 'family' together in Ourkheimian Their common experience forged deep mechanical solidarity. though brittle bonds. As 'father', a leader had what we might call mechanical authority: his similarity to the ordinary father legitimated his broad patriarchal powers. Here, Ourkheim (1964, p. 181) tells us, "mechanical solidarity reaches its maximum power, for the action of the common conscience is stranger when it is exercised, not in a diffuse manner, but through the medium Yet such strength could not contain the of a defined organ". competition that also came from similarity. When each 'family' was the image of the others, they wanted the same things -with competed 'Families' families. their and followers Within each But that was not the end of it. 'families'. 'family' cohorts became competitors at every opportunity. With bilateral kinship there were no indissoluble lineal bonds to turn Instead, any competition along off-setting segmentary lines. 'big man' who could attract enough followers could break away Where once from his old 'family' and found a new one.6 similarity had bound him to the old 'family', now it freed him to After all, when "each contains within himself all split off. that social life consists of, he can go and carry it elsewhere" (Ourkheim 1964, p. 151). A 'family' could not be stable or large or urban until it found some way to 1 imit this free and chaotic 'big man' While symbolic continuity held society together, competition. its centrifuga 1 consequences were cri pp 1 i ng. When the 'family' was simply many sma 11 er families. what kept the sma 11 er ones from setting off on their own? When the 'father' was merely a father writ large, what kept any man from enlarging his family until he too was a 'father'? was questions these to answer evo 1 uti onary The discontinuitie s in the idiom, symbols that differentiated a These 'family' from a family and a 'father' from a father. discontinuitie s were a source of organic complementari ty, although to distinguish this era from the more organic Indic one, we shall treat them as constraints on mechanical competition. They 1imited who could compete (for example, by class), where they competed (that is, the arena-- feasting, warfare), and what prestige, and they competed for (for example, followers, especially titles -- chief, paramount chief).7 To work long or well such constraints had to be cultural, not simply decreed. A fiat setting one person or group above others undermined the continuity that gave these superiors their mechani ea 1 authority. In contrast cultural discontinuitie s such as the royalty-commo ner distinction came to seem so natural and inevitable that authority In this could still capitalize on the familial continuity. ritual distinction of status lay the acceptance of a centre, the All of the lowland and coastal beginnings of urbanization. 17

peoples of Southeast Asia evolved this particular discontinuity, but it was set within other constraints on competition that need to be considered individually. Our only indigenous case is the pre-Hispanic Philippines where the 'big man' competition to be a datu was restricted but hardly closed. Some early observers thought that the position of datu was inherited. Certainly this was a tendency and perhaps an ideal, but polygyny and bilateral kinship produced so many candidates that descent was only an asset in the competition, not a guarantee of its outcome. Moreover, any capab 1e 1eader cou 1d rise to become datu. According to San Antonio datus gained their position not "by virtue of their blood, but by their merits; or because some one had more power, more wea 1th, more energy than the others" (quoted in Marcos 1976, p. 75). A rising leader had to choose between the reflected status of being close to an already esteemed datu or the direct status of being a datu himself. Open land made it easy for him and his followers to set out on their own. This hiving off made the leader a datu and his followers earned the status of lllilharlika or freemen in the new community (Lynch 1963). Communities could hive off and new leaders rise to be datus only so long as people were free to change datu. Here too there were constraints on the free flow of manpower, but competition War captives, serfs, and debt bondsmen was never closed off. were not free. Even so, they could be freed by their master, buy their freedom, or be ransomed by someone else. Freemen could change datu readily. A Visayan freeman could leave freely while a married Tagalog had to pay a fine in gold (Marcos 1976, pp. 72-73). A follower who disagreed with his datu could leave to join another community where he had a relative (Jocano 1975, p. 175). Here the endless spread of bilateral ties made closing off the flow of manpower difficult while the familial idiom made it awkward -- how could a datu who claimed familial authority hold a follower who departed under the same idiom? So long as people could move, competition was open and the flow of manpower marked the rise and fall of rulers. For example, Combes noted that the Maguindanao ruler, buttressed by an influx of sea nomad fo 11 owers, had grown in esteem and war powers to surpass his former Buayan lord (Marcos 1976, p. 110). The competition often revolved around warfare, raiding, and feasting. An ambitious datu might attack his rival, or he could use competitive feasting to settle who was "the more powerful and honorable" (Marcos 1976, p. 85). Successful raids often brought slave~ to enlarge the datu's following as well as the booty and prest 1 ge to attract fo 11 owers. Booty a 1 so financed the feasts that a successful datu used to di sp 1ay and enhance his status (Costa 1965, pp. 7-8}. The greater the number and extravagance 18

Feasting showed of his feasts, the higher the datu' s status. that he was maugay, capable of lavishly entertaining not only his barangay but the wider community as well (Marcos 1976, pp. 71, This kept his followers loyal and attracted ·new ones. 77). Indeed, attending a datu' s feasts was one way of joining his barangay (Jocano 1975, p. 177). How did feasting hold and attract followers? Obviously feasts offered resources. That cou 1d attract anyone. But how could resources from a feast hold someone who had provided those resources to begin with? After all, the datu's followers had to furnish enough for themselves as well as guests. Whatever it was, the feast itself and the datu must have added something to his followers' labours because they could always leave if they got less than they offered. While we can only speculate on what this added 'essence' was, looking from the outside we can see some of its facets. Perhaps the feast ritually linked the everyday family with If in the family you worked for your the societal 'family'. father and he cared for you in return, then in the larger society this meant that you served the datu who feasted you in return. With this ritual link, the family and the familial idiom each lent meaning to the other. On the one hand the everyday family was imbued with the power and prestige seen and experienced in the larger society; on the other hand the societal 'family' was made to seem as real and enduring as the biological family (cf. Geertz 1975, eh. 4). The feast, then, may have had the power to make sense of their world. It stressed the symbolic continuities of the familial idiom and made the discontinuitie s natural. Of course if this was their experience, it was hardly articulated this way. We come closer to the attraction of feasting if we see it as a status and religious quest. The feast took materia 1 resources and turned them into We know that the datu sought this added status or prestige. 'essence' and there are clues that his followers shared in it also. Often in patriarchal societies a leader's aura radiates to Among the Visayan, for example, a datu's his close followers. c 1ose re 1at i ves commanded great deference and the 'c 1ass' system incorporated this equation of closeness and status (Marcos 1976, Radiating status also appears in the categorical pp. 71-72). distinction between debt slaves in the master's house and the others who lived and worked outside. The former commonly sold at twice the price of the latter (Jocano 1975, p. 179; Marcos 1976, Finally, to the degree that the barangay was pp. 73-74). identified with its datu, the barangay shared in his status. Of course status is our term. They might have used words closer to power or honour, but they cannot have failed to mention something that today we would call religious.

19

The feast generated or tapped some religious power. A proper feast pleased the spirits (Jocano 1975, p. 183). A Ygolote datu proved his status with feasts called magunito, meaning 'to turn to spiritual beings' (Marcos I976, p. 52). Curing, agricultural and life cycle rituals often required feasts. In short, feasting's religious links are obvious even if their precise meaning is obscure. Perhaps their meaning was similar to present-day feasting in the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia where Kirsch (1973, p. 7) suggests we see society as "oriented to maximizing 'potency', 'fertility', or some such quality". Certainly fertility describes the agricultural productivity that the datu needed to support a feast; and potency readily describes the 1eadershi p and daring that earned booty, enforced trade monopo 1i es and convnanded fo ll ewers' resources to finance a feast. Returning to our earlier question -- How did feasting hold and attract followers? -- we can say that our several answers are part of a single whole. Resources were part and parcel of the familial idiom, equated with status, and symbolized and sought as some charismatic quality such as fertility or potency. The Philippines show the urban potential and the organizational problems of the familial idiom. If a city must be a centre, Filipinos had already checked some centrifugal tendencies and two effective centres had emerg_ed: the datu and feasting. Each centre held people by giving them a stake in its politico-religious power, a process I call the division of power. So far as this fostered interdependence, it was a step towards organic solidarity. The seventh century Khmer as des cri bed by Wo lters (1979) showed a similar 'big man' competition for followers and religious status, but with a key difference -- Indic symbols had already begun to define the centre and counter the centrifugal tendencies of the 'family'. Early Khmer society was split into many petty chiefdoms. Endemic warfare set the stage for a few extraordinary leaders, "men of prowess" in Wo l ters' words, to prove their abilities and thereby rise to be overlords of coalitions of chiefs. Their leadership and prowess were personal and yet religious. Elaborating on Wolters, we might say prowess knew no boundaries; it ruled men as well as events, the spiritual as well as the physical world. Followers were drawn to a man of prowess to share in his power. His royal gifts -- titles, positions, presents, the confirmation of special privileges -carried something special, perhaps superior death status (Wolters 1979, pp. 433-34). Followers made offerings to an overlord's temple (Welters 1979, p. 434), again perhaps to share in his power or death status. Though all of this was couched in Indic, particularly Shivite, terms Wolters (1979, p. 435) suggests that it embodied pre-Indic Khmer assumptions. The early Khmer assumed 20

that gifts from above carried some religious quality that was spiritually effective when the recipient earned the gift. In effect this belief drew competition into a religious arena. Instead of a free- for- all where everyone struggled to be the 1eader, people competed for the leader's favour as shown through his gifts. Beyond this lay the assumption that Wolters (1979, p. describes as the "essence of Pre-Hindu religious 435) experience". Society, seen as the scene for exhibiting various capacities for personal achievement with religious as well as secular significance, would also have been perceived as the scene of relationships between those with different capacities for achievement, enabling the man of superior prowess to proviqe those of 1esser prowess with opportunities for achieving within their capacity. In effect this belief in differing capacities channelled the ambitions of ordinary men through the man of prowess. This centralized and so limited competition while its presumed natural differences restricted the serious competitors for the top. Taken together these Khmer assumptions acted as discontinuities that constrained total competition within the idiom of community and so counteracted its centrifugal tendencies. Or, more simply, they laid a basis for organic solidarity. Several similarities underlie these indigenous Khmer and Filipino politico-religious complexes. Both emphasized achievement, cast it in a religious light, and saw the resulting hierarchy of achievement as the social hierarchy. In both 'big men' flourished by attracting followers in a more or less open manpower economy. Each stressed di sp 1ay, the datu in the feast and the man of prowess in his royal gifts and temples. Feasts and royal gifts had religious qualities that not only centralized competition, but made the leader's gifts more than what his a veritab 1e charter for a fo 11 owers had given hi m Of course feasts and temples also redistributive economy. differed. Feasts lasted only as long as the reputations they built, but temples endured as corporate bodies and eventually led to the more complex social organizations of the later Khmer (Hall 1975a, p. 9), the Javanese (Hall 1980, p. 12), and the Burmese at This evolutionary step came with Pagan (Aung Thwin 1975). Indianization whereby a foreign hierarchy subsumed indigenous community and sustained two sometimes fused centres. Yet this duality was anticipated even in the non-Indic Philippines where the datu and the feast were both effective centres. As the other centre, the 'big man' leader also evolved along with the size of the social grouping he ruled. Again, the 21

organizational problem lay in the symbolic continuity of the idiom of community. If the idiom was familial, then its 'families' were so similar and self-contained that they easily split-off and so 1 imited the political size and complexity of society. One way to grow was through the step-like discontinuity of a hierarchy of 'families' within 'families'. Wherever indigenous society institutionalized such a hierarchy it reached urban or proto-urban proportions. To describe this we can begin at the bottom of society and think of each father as the centre of his own small family. At the second level were the Filipino datu and his barangay, the Javanese rama and his wanua, and the Tai leader and his ban. Each was a centre among centres, a 'family' of families. This initial hierarchical step was culturally recognized and in this sense stable. It was not a question of would there be a datu, but who would be the datu. The third level was a still higher centre of second level centres, a larger 'family' of 'families'. For the Tai this was the 'father of the mt,~ang' ( phQIIIl,lang) ruling the ml}ang. For the Javanese this was the rata who now lived in the palace or kraton (Naerssen 1976, p. 297-98). While the Tai and Javanese recognized this level culturally, the various Filipino peoples had yet to evolve the consistent terminology that marked antiquity and encouraged stability. The archipelago's many burgeoning agglomerations of barangay had no single term to describe them (for example, baley, bayan). Similarly, while clearly there were many paramount datus, the diversity of terms -- maharaja, raja, hari, saripada -- suggests their recent emergence and continuing flux. Yet throughout the region, whenever this third level became inherently royal, its hierarchical superiority set the cultural basis for cities. This third level was urban in a cultural though not necessarily demographic sense. For example, among the upland Tai of Vietnam even a village-sized settlement ruled by a lord (chao, tau) was traditionally a 1111,1ang, the Tai word for city or town (Dang Nghiem Van 1972, p. 179). Similarly, the number of followers gathered in and around a Javanese kraton depended on the power of its ruler, but regardless of population, kraton was still more or less the Javanese equivalent of town or city (Schrieke 1957, p. 459). Clearly, Southeast Asian urbanism had its own pre-Indic or at least non-Indic cultural forms. In sum, then, the familia 1 idiom cou 1d create an urban community once culturally accepted discontinuities limited and focused the ruinous competition that pulled the 'family' apart. This was a step from mechanical towards organic solidarity. Yet this or, leaving the urban lines of their physical

urban whole was still a 'family' of 'families', idiom open, a community of communities. The prestructural cleavage lived on in the city until clarity faded in modern times. In the early 22

Fi 1i pi no aggl omerat ions of barangay each paramount datu had his own barangay, and the same pattern of a ruler's 'family' at the centre of a larger 'family' characterized the whole of the Of course I ndi ani zat ion made the ru 1er's centra 1 region. 'family' the court, but this only made the lines of cleavage Indianization also went along with the creation of clearer. intermediate 'families' -- the city and often a still wider core, both under the king. Even so, at the bottom the city was still made up of many small fictive kin COIMlunities like the Tai ban This structure kept a corrmunity ethos and the Ma 1ay lc.ampong. Yet what kept this family-within-family alive in the city. structure intact in the face of urban integration? After all, in Durkheim' s theory and Western hi story cities grew at the expense of lesser and often family-like groupings (Durkheim 1964, pp. 7-23; Weber 1958c, pp. 100-19). In Southeast Asia, however, the pre-urban idiom of corrmunity was drawn into the urban-centred division of power. Urban integration came by drawing communities together rather than breaking them down. Of course this style of integration was also well-suited to the region's ethnic diversity.

Ethnic Diversity Like bilateral kinship, ethnic diversity characterized early Southeast Asia. Summarizing recent archaeological finds, Smith and Watson (1979, p. 13) cone 1 ude that by the end of the first millennium B.C. Southeast Asia "had begun to take on something of the pattern of diversity which has characterized the whole of its On the mainland we find "increasing diversity" history". (Kennedy 1977, p. 35) as small-scale societies develop side by side as though in isolation (Bronson 1979, p. 320; Carbonnel 1979, p. 225); the Mal ay Peninsula shows "a mosaic of cultures • . • each co-existing in its particular ecological niche" (B. Peacock 1979, p. 202); and in is 1 and Southeast Asia even the emergence of agriculture did not overwhelm earlier cultural adaptations but added inland-coastal distinctions to the existing patchwork of diversity (Glover 1979). What explains this persistent diversity? Hutterer (1976b) argues that the scattered resources of the tropics encourage different cultural adaptations and so promote ethnic diversity. Given this ecological baseline, Kennedy (1977) describes how this diversity could have evoked into and have been perpetuated by higher order systems of exchange. A group that sp 1it off and ventured into a new ecological niche or tried a new technology would have maintained relations with their parent group, initially for security and later for mutual profit if the adaptation proved successful.8 Conceivably, then, early ethnic

23

diversity had strong economic roots. implications for the emergence and cities.

Certainly, it had wide subsequent character of

Ethnic diversity may have impeded the emergence of cities. Let me formulate this as three speculative propositions. First, inter-ethnic exchange was complex and yet dispersed. With no centre, there was no need for a city. Instead, ethnic special izat ion achieved some of the same economic comp 1exity of an urban division of labour. At least initially, then, cities were a less complex adaptation, an evolutionary step backwards. Second, ethnicity clashed with the emergence of classes that elsewhere went with cities. Instead of dividing a group into rulers and ruled, ethnicity stressed internal similarity and unity in opposition to other ethnic groups. Finally, ethnic diversity fragmented the resources and people needed to support a city or state. A 'family' or other mechanical polity grew only unti 1 it met an ethnic boundary where differences denied the bond of similarity. More generally, ethnicity clashed with centralization. A centre had to have a ruler who came from one ethnic group, and why would the others willingly accept their own ethnic subordination? Yet cities and states did develop. When ethnicity denied any one group rule and bade each group follow its own way, then the easiest avenue of centralization was a supra-ethnic idiom that encapsulated ethnic groups. Of course any idiom within the system was coloured by ethnicity, and so to be supra-ethnic and favour no one, it had to come from outside. Historically Indic borrowings provided this external idiom. Under this umbrella polities grew by collecting ethnic groups 1 ike so many building blocks. While we can document this pattern only in historic times, it follows the far earlier pattern identified by Sharp (1962, p. 7) that Kennedy (1977, p. 25} calls change by "accumulation rather than replacement". Hints of its urban beginnings come from the Philippines where Hutterer (1977, p. 192} finds socially differentiated chiefdoms arose by drawing different ethnic groups into higher order economic systems. Apparently large nucleated settlements also grew by attracting diverse peoples (Hutterer 1977, p. 180}. Certainly by historic times the region's cities and states were amalgams that presumed ethnic diversity. Indeed, they often demanded diversity. Through a division of power each group was bound to its own custom and under its own leader who was under the larger polity's ruler. In sum, ethnic diversity possibly impeded the emergence of cities and states, and when they arose it dictated their pattern.

24

The Ethnic Idiom Once polyethnic cities and states arose, ethnicity could act as an idiom of community. An ethnic identity presumed a common bond to every other person with that same identity. While everyone differed and factions flourished, ethnicity marked the similarity of mechanical solidarity. Here the ethnic idiom was structurally identical to the familial one. Also like the familial, ethnic groups could be communities within a larger polity as well as the parts through which one participated in a 1 arger whole. But as ideal types ethnic and familial idioms differed in other ways. Ethnicity probably made custom key. After all, 'custom' readily symbolized both the salient differences between groups and the While the familial encouraged a similarities within them. fictive blurring resolved in allegiance to a 'father', the ethnic favoured clear lines resolved in adherence to custom. In theory, therefore, an ethnic idiom had less need of a 1eader because custom and opposition to outsiders could govern and unite an ethnic group, even though it may have been no more than a The ethnic and the collectivity presumed to be a community. of community, idioms distinct always not two but were familial but all such symbolizations created communities that could fit one within another and so build indigenous cities.9 In sum bilateral kinship and ethnic diversity characterized early Southeast Asia. They permitted and encouraged idioms of Both traits continued to have a direct impact on community. society, although the idioms of community took on lives of their own that reflected the historical conditions of their emergence. within communities of growth step-like the Eventually, communities was written into both the structure of later cities and the distinctions of the social hierarchy. New technologies and political integration did not erase the past and dissolve differences so much as encapsulate and perpetuate them through a defined also society Indigenous power. of division Indianization 's role in the rise of cities and states. The Indic became an external and thus 'neutral' idiom that united many ethnic and other indigenous mechanical communities in a higher organic whole, a hierarchy of communities.

NOTES Kroeber (1919) and Ward (1963, p. 76 ff.) have suggested the connection The present between bilateral kinship and the social equality of women. high status of Southeast Asian women Is all the more remarkable considering the many lndlc, Islamic, and Western borrowings that have lessened their independence (Brown 1976, pp. 58-62).

25

2

Hutterer ( 1976a) has addressed this same problem. In COIMient I ng on Wlnzeler 1 s ( 1976) thesis that Southeast Asia's bilateral kinship prevented prImary urbanIzatIon, he asserts that "Southeast As I an societIes did deve I op mechanisms to overcome the atomlstlc tendencies of cognatic descent", He describes this higher level of social organization as "alliance units" composed of "a nucleus of families related to each other consangulneally and headed by a part I cuI ar I y wea I thy and powerfu I lnd i vI dua 1. Attached to this nuc I eus Is a greater or I esser number of I nd I vi dua Is (and theIr I nrned I ate families) .,, 11 , These groups were "an Important pre-adaptation of bilaterally organized societies to the evolution of the state", This tits our thesis quite well, although Hutterer does not mention the fami I ial and ethnic symbolism that are our primary concerns.

3

The anthropological term 'big man' comes from the study of Melanesia, but it Is quite approprIate to tradItIon a I Southeast As I a, Indeed, beneath the lndlanlzed top of society, some leaders were literally called big men by Ma I ays (CJrang beAr) and Burmans (fllugyl), wh 11 e for the ThaI •to be big' (yall was to be a leader.

4

In Blust•s (1980, pp, 210-11) reconstruction of early Austroneslan society (the parent of later Filipino societies) he found two instances of "the nonllteral extension of certain lexical denotations to the domain of k'nship" that he calls "metaphors of consanguinity". Thus In several Malay languages the word for parallel slbl ing Is extended to refer to al I consangulnes, and the word tor house Is extended to refer to the whole lineage. Whl le this metaphorical usage Is more restricted than our taml llal Idiom, it opens posslbll itles tor wider extensions when the descent groups posited by Biust began to decline In the shift to bilateral kinship. Thus, tor example, In rodern Malay, adak kallak (brothers and sisters; one's near relations) can be extended to non-kin.

5

Of course the chronIc I es that descrIbed thIs ear 11 er I nd lgenous socl ety were

written after lndlanlzation, but non-lndlanlzed upland Tal display a slml lar taml I la I pattern and use native Tal words to describe lt. 6

Some freedom In 'choosing' your kin was unavoidable In a famll ial idiom and Irreducible In bilateral kinship. Endless and overlapping bilateral ties made a rore specific choice of kin not only possible but necessary. Unless there was a more restrictive rule, residence and resources would have

lnt luenced who you recognized as kin, This bilateral element of choice let people shift allegiance and so made manpower a possible medium of politics. This possibility became a reality through the familial idiom and the competition discussed here.

7

These are constraints within the familial idiom, do not consider 'external 1 constraints such as hostile neighbours, an ethnic boundary, or a scarcity of land, although these could have kept people from leaving to found or join another 1 faml ly' and some theorists have used them to explain the emergence of cities and states,

26

8

Kennedy 1 s i nterpre tati on rests on a contemporary ethnographIc ana I ogy from the Phi I ipplnes where Pete~son (1977) found symbiotic exchange between agriculturalists and a group of hunters and gatherers, Their joint economy was more stable and complex than either group could have had alone,

9

Idioms of community were as diverse as the cultures of the region, Locality, for example, could have been an idiom of community, expressing the PI ace-names appear to have been soil dar I ty of those who shared a pI ace. I have particularly significant, perhaps as parts of a larger whole. emphasized the 'big man' or patriarchal expression of the familial Idiom because it cuI mi nates in the king and hIs city, but fraterna I so 11 dar I ty is an equally viable way to symbolize a fami I ial corrmunlty, Solidarity between in elder-junior sibling terms city states was sometimes phrased Tal In pre-lndic Java, while a local leader was a .yangnqngl. 'father' (rima) of the village, the next higher leader of many 'fathers' was called an 'elder brother' (raka) and van Naerssen ( 1976, p. 297) suggests In contrast to the his title describes the way he led the other 'fathers•. ultimate the king's favoured centralization idiom where patriarchal ownershIp of a I I wea I th, a more fraterna I IdIom wou Id fit we 11 with a property-he Id i ng and enduring, meaning Corporate, corporate vi II age.