Title | : | Ritual, Identity and Modernity: Redefinition of Aluk Todolo Community’s Belief in Tana Toraja of Sulawesi |
Author | : | Idaman (CRCS, 2004) |
Keywords | : | redefinition, contextualization, Aluk Todolo community, local genius |
Abstract | ||
The Purpose of the research tries to describe and identify the process of redefinition, together with the struggle of Aluk Todolo community in Tana Toraja maintaining theirs believe to the ancestors. The hypotheses that proposed here are: a) the process of redefinition that is constructed by other system of beliefs, the official religion of the state, try to construct terms of religious contextualization. The standardization of religious rituals of Aluk Todolo, however, is attained in terms of “colonizing” such a religion over the others. b) Impact of these processes is blurred sacred values within each ritual believes and understandings of Aluk Todolo’s tradition. Subject of thesis research is Aluk Todolo community in Tana Toraja of Sulawesi.The research of this community is related with the ability of the community maintaining the ritual proceedings to their ancestors. The way to maintain the originality and the existent of ritual believes of ancestral could be in types of accommodation and resistance as well. The collecting data is attained by using observing participants, both in the way of getting the information through texts and documents, taking the in depth interview to such a person, scholars, and certain respondent who have any relation to the topic being researched. Later on, the data, which collected through field research and library research, are then analyzed descriptively, interpretively, and critically as well.The result of research indicates that Aluk Todolo community face off and experienced the process of redefinition for the principal teaching and ritual of the then Aluk Todolo. Such process are done by the Indonesian government through tourism agents, official religious leaders in the name of contextualization, and ironically it also happens within the Aluk Todolo adherents in terms of scrupulous sacred values that practiced and understood by its adherents. They, then, attempted to maintain the ancestral teaching in context of social changing that widely occur in way of resistance and accommodation. The two kinds of behavior considered as the ability of AT community to develop their mode of surviving existence. This thesis convinced that in that way AT would be a model of local geniuses maintaining their existence. |