The Bugis and La Galigo

Heavenly deities, ocean-dwelling rulers and androgynous beings permeate the mythological past of Bugis South Sulawesi. Stories tell of great trees refusing to be chopped down, deities moving between upper and lower worlds, love-making, and epic battles won by bissu whose weaponry is invincible. Bissu are an order of androgynous shamans, conceptualised as being half-female and half-male, who first descended to earth during mythological Bugis times. Bissu occupied key roles within Bugis royal courts for many generations, advising rulers about such things as when to go to war and with whom to trade. To this day bissu continue to play a (limited) spiritual role within Bugis society and have close links to the Bugis origin narrative La Galigo (see Fig. 2). Bissu are seen as entwined with La Galigo both because they are mentioned in the narratives and because many bissu are in possession of La Galigo manuscripts that they can fluently read.

Figure 2.

Bissu dressed in their regalia, with Puang Matoa Saidi centre. (Photo taken by author)

La Galigo is so named after one of its main protagonists, I La Galigo. According to Sirtjo Koolhof, La Galigo:

Mattulada refers to La Galigo as ‘a reference book dealing with the social and cultural background of South Sulawesi people’.Footnote ⁷ For Northrop Frye, narratives such as those contained in La Galigo tell a society what things are important for people to know, ‘whether about its gods, its history, its laws, or its class structure’.Footnote ⁸ La Galigo might then be regarded as what Eric HavelockFootnote ⁹ calls a ‘tribal encyclopaedia’ that ‘provided a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopaedia of ethics, politics, history and technology’.Footnote ¹⁰ Koolhof remarks, however, that La Galigo does more than contain knowledge, ‘it portrays the very origin of their ancestors and their ancestral customs. Regardless of whether this is a realistic depiction of the situation in the past, for [many] Bugis it is at least how it should have been, and in many respects still should be’.Footnote ¹¹ The historical reality of the period referred to in La Galigo, though, has been trenchantly deconstructed through historical and archaeological fieldwork.Footnote ¹²

Whether from memory or from reading manuscripts, the recounting of La Galigo narratives serves a number of purposes. First and foremost, its recitation constitutes a form of entertainment. I remember early on in my fieldwork in the late 1990s, falling asleep in a bed I shared with my host-sisters listening to grand tales of Bugis characters undertaking heroic challenges. One story I clearly remember concerned princess Wé Cudai' preparing herself to meet her future husband by spending hours brushing her hair and making sure her baju bodo (long silk blouse) was perfectly arranged. Second, the telling of such narratives is a way of providing continuity to contemporary life by providing a link with the past. For instance, my host-sisters and I were applauded when we acted in ways considered ma lebbi (demure) and compared with princess Wé Cudai' and her sister-in-law Wé Ténriabéng. Providing such links may give people a sense of place and a feeling of pride about their origins, sentiments that are promoted not just by individuals, but also by local and state governments keen to encourage a sense of community. Third, recitations are pedagogical. For example, ideals of male assertiveness and bravery are reinforced through narratives where the central protagonists travel far away to make their fortune.Footnote ¹³ Fourth, narratives are recalled in various ways to speak to contemporary issues, such as on matters related to gender.Footnote ¹⁴ For instance, one recorded narrative that forms part of the La Galigo collection tells of the first time the parents of I La Galigo, Wé Cudai' and her husband Sawérigading, make love face-to-face, suggesting, in this version at least, that women be sexually assertive:

A surprising abundance of La Galigo manuscripts survive scattered throughout Sulawesi and elsewhere. While there is no single author of La Galigo, and as Campbell Macknight astutely points out, it is misconceived to talk about the ‘length’ of La Galigo as it was never envisaged as a collective work,Footnote ¹⁶ if all scattered episodes were compiled they would consist of 300,000 lines, longer even than the Mahabharata.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed Jennifer Lindsay notes that the phrase ‘longer than the Mahabharata’ has become a mantra, part of the vocabulary of La Galigo itself.Footnote ¹⁸

Rudolph A. Kern laid down the basis for analysing this material, publishing over 1,356 pages of summaries of some 31,500 pages from 113 manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁹ Numerous other scholars have also made contributions to the collection, transcription, translation, analysis and dissemination of segments from La Galigo.Footnote ²⁰ There has also been work on the visual design of La Galigo (Fig. 3).Footnote ²¹

Figure 3.

Text written in Bugis script. (Permission to use kindly granted by Wikipedia Commons)

While La Galigo was never ‘composed’, various dates have been suggested for when it began to take shape. Ambo Enre and Christian Pelras argue that La Galigo began orally around the mid-fourteenth century.Footnote ²² Johan Nyompa suggests the ninth or tenth century, a date similar to that of the Old Javanese Ramayana, as the time of its conception.Footnote ²³ Koolhof, however, asserts, ‘The manuscripts extant today are no older than approximately two centuries, and the majority of them are no older than 100–150 years. The oldest dateable La Galigo manuscript is kept in the Stads-of Athenaeumbibliotheek, Deventer and was obtained in 1784.’Footnote ²⁴ Macknight also doubts that much was written down before 1700 and comments that most manuscript texts are probably newer.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, some of the episodes involve the hero Sawérigading going to MeccaFootnote ²⁶ and the dead being buried rather than cremated,Footnote ²⁷ both of which suggest that Islam was already influential in Sulawesi (the earliest evidence of Islam in Sulawesi is the early seventeenth century).

There is a long tradition of writing in South Sulawesi, however, predating the coming of Islam. Writing was adopted in South Sulawesi as early as the fifteenth century,Footnote ²⁸ with Noorduyn noting that indigenous documents indicate that substantive writing began sometime within three decades after the year 1511.Footnote ²⁹ Thomas Hunter suggests, though, that the Bugis script might have already been in use by the tenth century.Footnote ³⁰ Macknight and Cummings examine the process of moving from an oral form of expression to writing extensive compositions within the context of South Sulawesi.Footnote ³¹ As William Cummings notes, there was no clear transition from orality to literacy, but rather there was continual overlap, symbiosis and exchanges that characterised the boundary between these forms of information.Footnote ³² Some texts were composed orally while others were preserved or performed orally, or a mix of all of these. Often there was no direct relationship between oral and written histories and they ‘addressed each other from a careful distance, held in tension through an ongoing counterplay of assertion and denial as each sought the upper hand’.Footnote ³³ Cummings further observes that a power play existed between those who controlled the production and dissemination of history and those who did not.Footnote ³⁴ Historical narratives thus gained meaning and exerted an influence on the shape of events as desired by those in power. As a result, discourses about the past are imbricated in all manner of contested social relationships, hierarchies and rivalries, resulting in the past being used to respond to present social tensions. Indeed, Koolhof shows how elites modified Bugis manuscripts such as La Galigo to suit contemporary needs, rather than vice versa.Footnote ³⁵

Bugis manuscripts are often stored in the homes of high-ranking nobles. Puang Petta Bala Sari, who was the highest-ranking woman in the Bugis regency of Wajo', compiled a large collection of manuscripts that she kept stored under lock and key in a metal filing cabinet at the back of her house compound. These manuscripts were rarely accessed though, and since her passing in 2003 relatives I spoke with said the material has been scattered throughout Sulawesi. Not only are there relatively few people who can fluently read the Bugis script in which such manuscripts are written, but the scripts themselves are considered by many sacred items. Puang Sari's possession of these manuscripts was a potent symbol of her status; to affirm their sacristy she would only let people see the manuscripts after prayers were recited and incense was lit. All of the manuscripts were originally written only in Bugis script and her ability to fluently read them, combined with the ritual of reading, added a sense of mystique to her possession of them. A number of microfilms are also stored outside Sulawesi, namely in Jakarta, Canberra and Leiden, largely the result of a project jointly funded by Hassanudin University in Makassar and the Ford Foundation. At present, Leiden in the Netherlands holds the longest coherent fragment of these manuscripts, with 12 parts constituting the initial sequence of the Bugis creation myth.

Discourses of Robert Wilson's I La Galigo

While in South Sulawesi in the late 1990s filming a documentary about bissu shamans, Rhoda Grauer heard numerous tales recounted from the La Galigo epic and was inspired to conceive of a theatrical production based on these narratives.Footnote ³⁶ Grauer, who was living in Bali, discussed her ideas with Restu I. Kusumaningrum, director of the Bali Purnati Center for the Arts. Both Grauer and Kusumaningrum admired the work of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson and were thrilled when he agreed to become involved in the project. Kusumaningrum had worked with Wilson previously. Through their collaboration, and in consultation with Bugis cultural experts and Indonesian musicians, artists, and dancers, a three-and-a-half hour stage production was developed. Interestingly, though, while the website of Change Performing Arts (an independent production company based in Milan under whose auspices the production was funded) includes a long list of production credits, not one of the cultural experts or Bugis contributors are mentioned.

In discussing his ambitions for the production, Wilson spoke of enjoying working with

Wilson's desire to provide a concrete translation and capture the secrets of the oral tradition of La Galigo suggest a desire to authentically recreate and perform the past in the present.

An entire discourse has developed around La Galigo since Wilson's stage production. Lindsay outlines many of the key themes of this discourse stressed in both pre-production publicity and in subsequent reviews.Footnote ³⁸ These themes include: the length of La Galigo (it is longer even than the Mahabharata); its antiquity (it is a pre-Islamic epic that relates to the sacred world of ancient Bugis rituals); notions of loss, obscurity and threat (the epic and the world of bissu were almost lost and forgotten); and discovery and salvation (the epic was rediscovered and brought to the world's attention by foreigners who recognised the true value of the epic).

Since its 2004 debut in Singapore, the I La Galigo production has received no less than 25 reviews and scholarly responses.Footnote ³⁹ The production received much critical acclaim, but it also met with disapproval and opposition.Footnote ⁴⁰ On a national level, Indonesian embassy personnel abroad felt sidelined as they were not ‘formally contacted to facilitate the tour as a “cultural mission” from Indonesia’.Footnote ⁴¹ Indonesia's Intellectual Property Society questioned the legality of the production as Indonesian copyright law dictates that reproductions of cultural material outside Indonesia require official state permission.Footnote ⁴² While copyright and ownership are not necessarily concepts compatible with La Galigo material,Footnote ⁴³ this appropriation shows how intangible cultural expressions are re-scripted as national intellectual and cultural property.Footnote ⁴⁴ During a research trip to South Sulawesi in 2007 people I spoke with complained that Bugis people were not properly consulted; they also believed that any Bugis consultants who were hired were underpaid for their efforts.

A persistent central concern of reviews and commentary, though, is the degree to which the production authentically represented Bugis culture and history. Such concern assumes, of course, that there is an authentic Bugis culture, history, and even an authentic Bugis person. This is of concern for Indonesians (including Bugis) and Westerners alike, although all in diverse ways. In one cutting review by Una Chaudhuri, Professor of Drama at New York University, the play was devoid of any ‘authentic performance of Bugis tradition’ and came ‘perilously close to the ethnographic floor shows presented at Bali's tourist resorts’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The length of the article did not provide space to explore why ethnographic floor shows are undesirable. The following review by New York Times columnist Edward Rothstein, posits that there was an authentic Bugis culture, but that it is now near-vanished even though the people who created it remain prominent:

While this reviewer might be forgiven for claiming that South Sulawesi is an island, whereas in fact it is a province on the island of Sulawesi, the claims that firstly, contemporary Bugis culture is in some way easily definable and distinct from past Bugis culture and, secondly, that the latter is ‘near-vanished’, are harder to forgive. Yet Rothstein is not alone in making sensationalist claims about lost Bugis culture. For instance, also writing for the New York Times, Wayne Arnold suggests that Bugis culture is subjugated and nearly forgotten; one is left wondering by whom:

Helen Shaw, contributor to the New York Sun, also notes this imminent vanishing:

The framing of Bugis culture, including La Galigo and bissu, as ‘near-vanished’ and ‘nearly forgotten’ leads into another theme of the reviews, the (re)discovery of Bugis culture, including for Carla Bianpoen, correspondent for the Jakarta Post, an exploration of ‘music that had almost disappeared’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, in the review by Rothstein the production is explicitly framed as an effort at exhumation:

The person largely attributed with the resurrection is Rhoda Grauer, who for Arnold is ‘the American documentary filmmaker who more or less rediscovered Galigo’:

Indeed Grauer's documentary on bissu is entitled The Last Bissu: Sacred transvestites of Sureq Galigo,Footnote ⁵² reinforcing the idea that bissu are near extinction and thus in need of a saviour, a role Grauer is presented as playing:

It is unclear where this statistic of 100 readers (or the earlier 50) of Bugis script comes from, especially as the script and language are taught in schools in South Sulawesi, but the number is reproduced in other reviews:

Presenting La Galigo as being rediscovered seeks to affirm that the production was based on an original and uncontaminated source. La Galigo's seclusion is understood to have preserved its purity. This purity is linked with the idea of authenticity: the source was unadulterated and because Wilson took a hands-off approach and allowed indigenous performers (who are inherently authentic) to sculpt the production in a way that faithfully resembles an original, authenticity was achieved. Lindsay, a leading scholar of Indonesian culture, performing arts, and literature, writes that audience members noted that they were expecting to see an authentic recreation of La Galigo; what they wanted was a production that was purely Bugis; a production with only Bugis actors, musicians, and music.Footnote ⁵⁵ So the first way in which reviews engage with the trope of authenticity is by presenting I La Galigo as based on an uncontaminated Bugis epic that was rediscovered in its pure, authentic, form by a foreign other.

While many reviews present Grauer in the role of saviour, reviews are also at pains to stress local involvement in the production, constituting the second way in which reviews employ the trope of authenticity. For instance, Shaw presents Wilson as being very hands-off:

In Shaw's review the authenticity of the production is achieved precisely because Wilson is hands-off and thus enables the Indonesian artists who, by virtue of being Indonesian, imbue the production with a tangible, creative heritage. Indeed, Grauer was adamant that the cast be composed of Indonesians, suggesting that foreign actors would detract from the authenticity of the production:

While there is stress here on having an Indonesian cast, even above having a Bugis cast, actors are rarely named in reviews. For instance, while a reader of any review will learn the names of Robert Wilson, Rhoda Grauer, Restu Kusumaningrum and Rahayu Supanggah, only one review mentions the name of any actors: Kadek Tegeh Okta WM who plays the leading male role of Sawérigading and Coppong Daeng Rannu who plays the Rice Goddess.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, no performers are interviewed in-depth on their experiences of being part of the production. Such omissions suggest that the idea of an authentic production lies in representation of the ethnic identity of the cast as Indonesian (or even Bugis), rather than in enabling the cast to be visible commentators.

While for many having an Indonesian cast, Indonesian-made cloth, and Indonesian make-up (or even more precisely Bugis ones) were deemed vital to ensuring the authenticity of the production, those in the audience who could comment upon this were unfortunately not average Indonesians (as only the wealthy could afford tickets) or people from Sulawesi (at least not until the play debuted in Makassar in 2011):

The fact that a wealthy, non-Sulawesi audience is presented as demanding a silenced Indonesian cast to ensure production authenticity speaks to larger issues raised in postcolonial theory, as does the review above by Daniel Ziv, a columnist for the Jakarta Post, noting that Indonesians are charged to view ‘a piece of their own culture’. Indeed, the processes and dynamics inherent in adapting a local product for global consumption provides an intriguing site for interrogating postcoloniality and modernities.Footnote ⁶⁰ The work of Edward Said is relevant here both in terms of showing the inseparability of power and knowledge and the silencing of the Other. In the pertinent quote below we can read West in a worlding frame, where Asia becomes Westernised as it is rendered into English:

The framing of a people viewing a ‘piece of their own culture’ reifies ethnicity and culture; the positioning of the Other (Bugis/Indonesian) as in continual need of re/naming, re/defining, and controlling, works to silence the indigenous voice. Reviews focus on the composition of the cast, but neither cast nor Bugis cultural advisors were allowed a voice to articulate their views of the production structure and re/creation.

It is not just the composition of the cast that is assessed in terms of authenticity, but also what the cast did. According to scholar of Indonesian theatre Matthew Cohen, for some audience members the production achieved a feeling of authenticity in large part by bravely refusing to exploit the theatrical appeal of seeing the leader of the bissu community, Puang Matoa Saidi, perform actual bissu rites.Footnote ⁶² Rather, in this framing Puang Matoa Saidi sat impassively on stage and in so doing played ‘a crucial role in making I La Galigo a more than profane production’ (Fig. 4).Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, Puang Matoa Saidi's presence ‘as chanter infused the production with sacred energy, but the sanctity of religious tradition is guarded from degradation by mass consumption’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Through passivity, Cohen notes that cast members imbued the production with a sense of authenticity — passivity was read as enabling the original and pure heritage of La Galigo to come through, bypassing a performer's interpretation. Passivity thus forms a third way in which reviews frame authenticity.

Figure 4.

Still photo of the I La Galigo stage play, with Bissu Puang Matoa Saidi sitting in yellow, front left. (Permission to use kindly granted by The Bali Purnati Center for the Arts and Change Performing Art)

A fourth way in which reviews frame the production through the trope of authenticity is through assessment of the musicians, music (both the composition and the selection of instruments), and dance. Lindsay reveals that audiences expected to see a genuine Bugis performance, but when the ‘Javanese’ composer and music director, Supanggah, was asked at a public forum where the musicians came from, the audience felt a sense of ‘reduced authenticity’ when it was revealed that the musicians came from all over Indonesia, not just Bugis South Sulawesi.Footnote ⁶⁵ The production also included music and dances taken from across Sulawesi and the Malay world, such as the Makassar pakarena dance, leading some audience members ‘regretfully’ feeling that the production borrowed cross-cultural elements and was therefore less Bugis than Indonesian, or even Asian.Footnote ⁶⁶ There did not seem, then, to be so much a critique of the music as a critique of whether it was authentic or not.

Even where reviews positively acknowledged the incorporation of a variety of musical influences, many reframed this incorporation to reinforce the authenticity of the production. For instance, Bianpoen notes that, ‘Their music sounds traditional, but has actually been composed for the production by the Javanese composer Rahayu Supanggah after intensive research in South Sulawesi.’ This intensive research enabled Supanggah to distance himself ‘from his Javanese roots’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, the inclusion of ‘instruments originating from other areas’, rather than reduce the authenticity of the production, in fact enabled Supanggah to ‘achieve the typical archaic sounds associated with the ancient epic, colored by moods in the spirit of the various regions in South Sulawesi’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Many reviews thus assessed musical components in terms of achievement of authentic sound and imagery.

A fifth way in which authenticity was evoked in reviews was in terms of the content of the production. Through ‘respecting belief’ and making sure that the production was not sacrilegious (in part by not interrupting the production with an intermission), some reviewers noted that the production gives a religious experience, sentiments presented to again reinforce the authentic reproduction of the epic:

Authenticity was further achieved through content management for some reviewers by leaving elements out of the production. For example, some reviews noted that the inclusion of Islamic elements would have reduced the authenticity of the production. As Bianpoen notes, Supanggah ‘had to watch out for Islamic influences, since the epic stems from the pre-Islamic period’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, in its attempts to present imagined cultural purity and signal Bugis authenticity, Lindsay notes that all Islamic elements were purged from the production.Footnote ⁷¹ In Rothstein's review Islam is presented as literally destructive in respect to La Galigo (unfortunately no evidence is provided in the review to ascertain whether Islamic fundamentalists have actively destroyed La Galigo manuscripts):

While for some reviewers the purging of elements seen as modifying original Bugis culture such as Islam reinforced the authenticity of the production, in other reviews, this cleansing was considered to undermine the production's authenticity by not acknowledging cross-cultural influences. As Lindsay notes, Bugis culture and identity were artificially homogenised in the production and any dynamics inherent within these groupings were unfortunately ignored.Footnote ⁷³ For Rothstein, ‘It is impossible, though, to say just how much of the original spirit of the epic remains.’Footnote ⁷⁴ We see the assumption here that there was an original spirit, a sentiment that goes against the nature of La Galigo which through its oral dissemination and political deployment has always changed and adapted.

During fieldwork in South Sulawesi in 2007, I discussed with people their thoughts on the production of I La Galigo. While like me, no one had seen the production, people had picked up on the disseminated themes of the reviews. There were mixed responses. Some people felt renewed pride (bangga) in the international fame that I La Galigo had received, and felt a real sense of belonging to a group with a rich cultural heritage. Others, however, expressed a great deal of resentment about the manner and content of the production. For instance, one of the most frequently articulated concerns was that the production was a jumbled conflation of Javanese, Balinese and other elements and that any quintessential Bugis elements were lost. People thus lamented that the production was no longer a Bugis production but that it was an Indonesian or even an Asian production. Indeed one person asserted that Wilson has modified La Galigo so much that his production is a betrayal (khianat) of the original Bugis epic. Other informants specifically voiced concern over Wilson's choices, declaring that Wilson had no right to produce and present such a culturally and ethnically mixed (gado-gado) performance. One individual stated that ‘La Galigo is an original and authentic Bugis commodity, not one that can or should be mixed up by someone who does not even appreciate what La Galigo really is.’ These collective and various critiques create a semiotic community whereby through language and knowledge people assert a shared Bugis identity, showing how authenticity is a significant concept in debates of ethnicity in Indonesia, and for Indonesians overseas.Footnote ⁷⁵

As we can see, comments and reviews predominantly focused their critique on the achievement of authenticity through five aspects: an uncontaminated epic, local involvement, cast passivity, music and dance assemblage, and production content. Reviews then judged the production accordingly. There are different notions of what authenticity entails. For instance, some people saw the use of Javanese musical instruments as reducing the authenticity of the production, while others asserted that the use of the instruments enabled the creation of an authentic Bugis sound. Furthermore, some people saw the purging of Islamic elements as producing an authentic Bugis narrative, while others saw the denial of Islamic influence as eroding the production's authenticity. But what the aforementioned reviews presuppose is a singular, pure, Bugis identity and its authentic re/creation was the site for judging the success or otherwise of the play. But there were some key narrators who acknowledged and celebrated cultural fusion, and for them, authenticity came from acknowledgement of hybridity.

Some commentators, notably Indonesian ones, implied the impossibility and indeed irrelevance of achieving authenticity and therefore did not frame a singular authenticity as the central trope upon which to judge production success. For instance, while many people critiqued the authenticity of the production through cast and music assemblages, Restu I. Kusumaningrum, who had a directorial role in the production, permitted innovation, albeit within ‘authentic’ parameters:

While Restu affirmed the importance of players being Indonesian, unlike most commentators she was pleased that the outcome was far from ‘traditional’. In a similar vein, Muhammad Salim, a Bugis cultural expert and advisor to the production, notes:

Salim, too, firmly grounds the production as something with deep, undeniably ancient Bugis roots, but he acknowledges flux and celebrates the production's contemporary flavour.

In respect to music, we also see Indonesian commentators noting, in response to questions about whether the music should have been more representative of Bugis culture, that the music had to be from the present because the production was from the present.Footnote ⁷⁸ Sarah Weiss, an ethnomusicologist attached to Yale-NUS in Singapore, reveals that the musicians felt that ‘their own musical experience, and those of musicians in previous generations, was already mixed: Makassar, Selayar, Mandar, Bugis, Indonesian, global’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, the composer, Supanggah, encouraged musicians to use collective creativity and ‘discover new possibilities for synergistic fusion’:Footnote ⁸⁰

Sop Konro is of course positioned in Indonesia as a Makassar (a neighbouring ethnic group to Bugis) delicacy, not a Bugis one, and so Supanggah's comments here serve to further highlight hybridity.

There does then appear somewhat of a chasm between Indonesians directly involved with the production and other commentators in terms of the centrality of authenticity in determining the production's success. While reviewers (both foreign and Indonesian) often were at great pains to affirm the authenticity of the production (achieved, for instance, through actor passivity), or to critique the production for its lack of authenticity (determined, for instance, through the use of Indonesian dancers rather than Bugis dancers), for some observers Bugis culture and La Galigo itself have always been products of fusion. Indeed, for some, this celebration of fusion is what made the production authentic. The dominant theme, then, in formal and informal reviews of I La Galigo is authenticity, particularly authenticity as applied to ethnicity. Clues to the importance of ethnicity can be seen when looking at the construction of the Indonesian nation.

Being authentic

Reviews of I La Galigo reference authenticity as a key site for evaluation, and claims on authenticity often distil down to issues of identity, particularly authentic ethnic identity. Martin Sökefeld notes that, ‘In contemporary texts on identity, the concept seems not to exist in the singular. Whereas it was once defined by sameness and unity, both qualities have given way to difference and plurality.’Footnote ⁸² Indeed, James Clifford has shown that it is exceedingly difficult to attach identity, meaning, or authenticity to a coherent culture or language.Footnote ⁸³ As such, identity is no longer seen in academic circles in the way Erik Erikson earlier proposed: ‘The term “identity” expresses such a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (selfsameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential characteristics with others.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet while postmodern approaches link identity to concepts such as hybridity and multiplicity, individuals tend to experience identity as a unitary entity. Indeed, many I La Galigo reviews are predicated on the supposed existence of a singular, unitary Bugis identity; authentic recreation of this equates to production success while going beyond the limits of ‘Bugis-ness’ renders the production inauthentic and a failure. The I La Galigo reviews thus speak to the importance for viewers of a definable and presentable Bugis identity. The antecedents of the need for a tangible Bugis identity can be seen in rhetorics of colonialism and nation-building, as we see below.

In the Predicament of culture, Clifford discusses the positioning of colonised peoples into discrete and knowable categories (such as the ‘Third World’).Footnote ⁸⁵ This containment of the colonised is in turn interpolated by Western narratives of identity. Yet Clifford alerts us to improvisatory cultural responses where authenticity is relational, identities no longer stable, and where self–other relations engage power, rhetoric and discourse, rather than be entrenched in a cultural essence. For Clifford, a ‘new global culture’ challenges static ways of viewing culture, and embraces hybrid amalgamations — and we do see this flexible account of authenticity in some comments on I La Galigo, for instance in celebratory comments by Suppangah, the musical director, on the production being Sop Konro mixed with Coca Cola. In acknowledging the transformative potential of such readings of authenticity, Anne Maxwell notes that ‘the colonised have more to gain from histories that challenge the concept of identity, than from histories that sustain the illusion of a unified subject’.Footnote ⁸⁶ While for Supanggah, an authentic production acknowledged fusion, for many others, authenticity could only be produced through some notion of purity, for instance eliminating all Islamic elements. Discourses of colonialism and reification of ethnic identities cooperate with notions of nation-building to dictate conceptions of authenticity.

While Indonesia is certainly not alone in seeking to establish national belonging through solidifying cultural identity referenced to a limited number of timeless signifiers such as dress, food, and language, it does make a particularly fascinating and transparent case.Footnote ⁸⁷ Moreover, in Indonesia we can clearly see the inequities associated with instigating national belonging. For instance, since decentralisation began in the early 2000s, Indonesia has become increasingly characterised by putra-daerahism, the notion that status and privilege are accorded to people born in particular areas.Footnote ⁸⁸

The idea that Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) should be the singular national language of a united Indonesia was first formally stated as part of the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge) declared in Batavia (Jakarta) in October 1928. Following this declaration, Indonesia's National Awakening movement (Kebangkitan Nasional Indonesia) fostered in people across the archipelago a feeling that they were all Indonesian. While prior to Dutch and Japanese colonialism people across the archipelago had not thought of themselves as sharing a coherent political identity, Dutch authority in particular left a legacy of both a territorial boundary that would become the modern Indonesian nation-state, and an educated elite passionate about creating an independent country. This educated elite forcefully argued that a national language was needed to unify people with diverse cultural backgrounds. Indonesian, a derivative of Malay, was declared the national language at the same time as the Proclamation of Independence in 1945. Also at this time, Indonesia adopted the guiding philosophy of Unity in Diversity (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) to foster in citizens a feeling that they were part of the nation-state, while acknowledging cultural and language differences.

The reification of ethnic difference in Indonesia, and its forced alignment with provincial units (and sub-units in some cases) occurred most forcefully during Suharto's New Order period (1965–98). Each ethnic group was clearly defined, allocated ‘traditional’ dress and represented in miniature in places such as Taman Mini Park in Jakarta, the latter being the brainchild of Ibu Tien Suharto, President Suharto's wife. Indonesia is now imagined to comprise distinct ethnic groups who are geographically located in a specific space, referred to by Tom Boellstorff as ethnolocality (Fig. 5).Footnote ⁸⁹

Figure 5.

Reification of ethnic dress, in this case a Bugis wedding couple flanked by calabai' Indo' Boting, male-to-female wedding planners. (Photo taken by author)

Indonesia's strategy of unity-in-diversity has had varying degrees of success. Ethnicity has become reified, but the notion of a pan-Indonesian-ness is continually refuted. In particular, groups in Papua and Aceh persevere in asserting independence claims, and movements for regional autonomy persist in places such as South Sulawesi.Footnote ⁹⁰ Expatriate Indonesians also convey assertions of specific ethnic belonging through semantic play.Footnote ⁹¹ One example of unintended creation of Indonesian subjecthood is the emergence of a ‘gay archipelago’, where gay and lesbian individuals feel a sense of belonging at the national, rather than local, level.Footnote ⁹²

Within reviews of I La Galigo, notions of identity, ethnicity and nation are asserted in various ways. Supporting advertisements promoted I La Galigo variously as a Bugis, Sulawesi, Indonesian, Malay, or Asian production. There were attempts to ‘localise’ the production as being Malay by virtue of its inclusion of wayang kulit shadow puppeteers from the Malaysian state of Kedah.Footnote ⁹³ Conversely, advertising material frequently promoted the event as bringing an Asian repertoire to an international public.Footnote ⁹⁴ In particular, Singaporean advertisements tended to downplay any cultural specificity in favour of explicitly conveying an ‘international’ rather than an ‘ethnic’ image.Footnote ⁹⁵ For some commentators, this Singaporean appropriation was read as a powerful nation exploiting a less powerful entity. As a result of such framing, many Bugis felt that ‘quintessential’ Bugis elements were lost and they lamented that it was no longer authentically a Bugis, but an Indonesian or even an Asian, production. As Macknight, a prominent scholar of South Sulawesi, including its literature, wonders, ‘How far can expression of Bugis culture and identity be Indonesianized? And does it matter?’Footnote ⁹⁶

The deployment of authenticity in respect to ethnicity links to Gayatri Spivak's notion of strategic essentialism, where a unitary identity can be a useful way to assert cultural legitimacy.Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed, asserting legitimacy in the postcolonial world must often necessarily be affirmed through unbroken traditional and historical connection.Footnote ⁹⁸ But while some reviewers sought to uncover an authentic essence, others acknowledged cultural flux and the influence of globalisation, where globalisation itself was seen not as a homogenising agent, but rather as reinforcing, indeed even creating, localised identities. Moreover, in a regional/local respect, Michael Bodden's work on identity and theatre in South Sulawesi shows how ‘regional cultural identity is part of a process of the changing relations between centre and region within a national culture, and is also intertwined with the relationship of regional cultural workers to their local audiences as well as to each other’.Footnote ⁹⁹ This ‘doubleness’ of identity politics, that is, the desire to ‘claim a particular, distinctive identity while at the same time wishing to critique and relinquish any claims to a fixed, stable notion of self’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ fosters insight into the competing paradoxes of contemporary identity formation.

Through the global commodification of cultural identity politics, commodities such as I La Galigo can be positioned to affirm a sense of Bugis cultural uniqueness.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, deployment of authenticity claims in relation to I La Galigo can contribute to community building; indeed authenticity negotiations re/politicise ethnicity.Footnote ¹⁰² But some Indonesian regional artists do not view local knowledge and practices as property subject to exclusive claims by individuals or corporate groups, including the state.Footnote ¹⁰³ Rather, they view I La Galigo as something to be used and enjoyed by all, with some acknowledgement of origins, and authenticity is thus not found in a singular unadulterated form. This reimagining of authenticity powerfully extends thinking on identity, as we see in the final section.

Authentic is as authentic does

It is perhaps the pervasiveness of the notion of authenticity that enables it to elude singular definition; or it may also be due to its longevity — debates around authenticity have attracted Western philosophers since Aristotle. Charles Lindholm provides extensive discussion of notions of authenticity,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ but for our purposes it might suffice to say that it has overlapping meanings including: sincere, true, honest, absolute, basic, essential, genuine, ideal, natural, original, perfect, pure, real, and right.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Oxford English Dictionary also provides a useful definition, describing authenticity as something that is ‘made or done in the traditional or original way, or in a way that faithfully resembles an original’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Much early thinking on authenticity continues to resonate today. For instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's eighteenth-century observation of ‘savages’ being necessarily closer to a pure state of nature, and that the authentic self only existed among primitives, peasants, innocent children, and, for some, by communing with the soul,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ has influenced generations of anthropologists and other seekers of the exotic.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Indeed many of the reviews examined here position Bugis (or Indonesian) subjects as an indigenous community most able to present an authentic rendition of I La Galigo. A contemporary of Rousseau, the philosopher and cultural theorist Johann Herder saw a purity of origin coinciding with an innate capacity for authentic feeling and aesthetic creation, which existed among members of a primal collective, untainted by civilised manners.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Herder thus located authenticity in specific locations for specific groups — which is one of the strands of authenticity discourse revealed in the reviews discussed in this article.Footnote ¹¹¹ Only cultural purity is considered to give a nation its specific originary character, saving it from being lost in the melange of modernity.Footnote ¹¹² As Lindholm notes, Herder's vision of the authentic integrity of cultures continues to influence romantic nationalists proud of claims to a primordial origin — a claim that runs contrary to the academic preference for recognition of cultural hybridity and pluralism.Footnote ¹¹³ We see such former notions raised, for instance, when Indonesia's Intellectual Property Society argued that reproductions of cultural material outside Indonesia violated copyright laws.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre also commented on authenticity by presenting a ‘romantic idealisation of the exotic, oppressed and marginal’, showing nostalgia for the authenticity of ‘primitive’ tribes and ethnic groups.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Romantic readings presuppose that authenticity will be discovered somewhere far away, and can only be obtained after overcoming numerous obstacles and undergoing rites of passage that allow infiltration into the backstage realms of social life.Footnote ¹¹⁵ That authenticity is hidden underscores a specific Western ontology imagining authenticity as something denigrated by contact — other ontologies suggest that the authentic is revealed on the surface; mischievousness is hidden below.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As Theodossopoulos shows, this vision has given rise to the exoticised version of authenticity that predominates today, articulated in contradistinction with modernity.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Indeed, the framing of Grauer as heading off to far away Sulawesi to discover the lost and forgotten La Galigo epic speaks directly to this discourse. Moreover, the presentation of I La Galigo as something preserved unadulterated is deployed to frame the production's authenticity.

In attempting to understand meanings of authenticity in a more contemporary setting, Lionel Trilling contrasted the somewhat overlapping concept of sincerity.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Trilling argued that in the daily enterprise of ‘putting ourselves on the social stage’, sincerity ‘plays a curiously compromised part’: it tempts us to ‘play the role of being ourselves’, to ‘sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that is not authentic’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In other words, as Müller notes, it is possible to be sincere in acting one's sincerity, ‘but it is impossible to be authentic in acting one's authenticity’.Footnote ¹²⁰ In this reading, the notion of authenticity must be beyond sincere, beyond acting, and beyond mere performance. Indeed Sartre noted that by seeking authenticity one is immediately lacking authenticity.Footnote ¹²¹ In this reading, merely by seeking to recreate an authentic version of the La Galigo narrative, any potential authenticity was lost.

For Charles Taylor, authenticity is loosely defined as being true to one's inner voice.Footnote ¹²² Yet, as one's inner voice is accessible only as distinct from the outer voice, ‘it can be heard only when there is a social environment from whose demands one can then break free in order to assert one's trueness to oneself’.Footnote ¹²³ As such, assessing authenticity appears an impossible undertaking. This impossibility has led to more postmodern interpretations of authenticity that suggest, in contrast to Trilling for instance, that rather than be beyond performance, authenticity is in fact a performative act. Indeed Judith Butler's analysis of camp, and queer theory in general, shatters any allusion that authenticity is a plausible quality.Footnote ¹²⁴ As Andy Ruddock argues in respect to media representations, ‘Authenticity is presented as a phenomenon with a necessarily performed and therefore mediated dimension’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Such a performed and mediated dimension suggests that there is no essence to authenticity, but rather that our belief in whether something is real, true and pure is subjective. The implausibility of an essential authenticity does not, however, reduce the concept's powerful cultural pull or quell desire to performatively resituate one's own authenticities in the place of the reputed original.Footnote ¹²⁶Authenticity's valence is wholly positive;Footnote ¹²⁷ it is revered and sought without ambivalence. As Lindholm notes, the range of self-help books on display in any bookshop shows the very real desire for authentic self-discovery.Footnote ¹²⁸ This desire makes me wonder if anyone or anything can ever be too authentic.

In a recent special edition of Anthropological Quarterly focused on authenticity, Theodossopoulos argues for ‘a perspective on the study of authenticity that acknowledges the simultaneous co-existence of more than one parallel manifestation of authenticity in any given negotiation of the authentic’.Footnote ¹²⁹ In acknowledging that there is no unitary, fixed, all-embracing definition of authenticity, multidimensional authenticities lead to new ways of seeing the concept. As such, authenticity can provide local actors with tactical advantage and an opportunity to apply their own specific meanings. With this framework, we can also look at the contradictions and dilemmas that authenticity generates and assess the multiple claims made on the work authenticity undertakes. Simultaneous authenticities liberate analysts from assessing ‘real’ authenticity and instead allow acknowledgement of process, facilitating a view of authenticity as expressive, instrumental, and nominal, which I outline below.

In extending thinking around the potential dynamics of authenticity, Marcus Banks encourages us to see authenticity as a strategic process.Footnote ¹³⁰ In doing this, he extends Dennis Dutton's view of authenticity, which involved nominal authenticity (provenance) and expressive authenticity (verified by the thing itself).Footnote ¹³¹ To this mix, Banks adds instrumental authenticity, which is deployed to achieve some material or otherwise clearly identifiable benefit. In reviews of I La Galigo we can see claims of nominal authenticity (the epic was rediscovered in a pure form), and expressive authenticity (having Bugis actors, especially bissu, on stage, showed authenticity). But there were also instrumental claims. For some reviewers who wanted to showcase Bugis modernity and globality, there were comments about it being ‘based on tradition, but far from traditional’ and being ‘enjoyed by a global audience’. Through this reading we see authenticity as a process, rather than a static quality, deployed instrumentally and asserted, negotiated, performed, and rejected through social and political interaction. We see authenticity as context-dependent and its associated processes attached to, or recognised in, objects and social action.Footnote ¹³² Assessments can be made around who has the power to define authenticity and we can seek understanding of the strategic deployment of authenticity to reach certain aims (e.g. promotion of I La Galigo as an Asian, rather than Bugis, production to sell tickets in Singapore). An examination of I La Galigo provides a case study of the ways in which collective authenticity is framed, providing concrete circumstances of how authenticity is pursued.Footnote ¹³³I La Galigo also allows us to see how reframing invention with inventiveness permits acknowledgement of authenticity as continually recreated through spontaneous and agentic local transformations.Footnote ¹³⁴