From Indigenous Customary Law to Diasporic Cultural Heritage: Reappropriations of Adat Throughout the History of Molucca
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From Indigenous Customary Law to Diasporic Cultural Heritage: Reappropriations of Adat Throughout the History of Moluccan Postcolonial Migration Gerlov van Engelenhoven1 Accepted: 19 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Adat is originally an Arabic term meaning “custom” or “habit”, and was introduced by Islamic merchants in Maluku and throughout the Indonesian archipelago from the 1200s onward. The term was used as a way to refer to indigenous customs that could not be incorporated into Islamic law. Therefore, rather than referring to a particular system of customs or laws, adat denoted Islamic law’s indeterminate opposite: i.e. the wide variety of indigenous practices which, other than this generalizing label of “custom”, remained undefined. Throughout the chapter, I will trace the development of this term from its original usage to its current-day reinterpretation as a form of diasporic cultural heritage by the Moluccan postcolonial migrant community in the Netherlands. As will become clear, the contemporary Moluccan application can be understood as a strategic reappropriation of the term for the construction of their collective identity, which leaves intact the term’s original capacity of having no fixed definition. By placing the Moluccan application of adat within the historical context of their separatist ideology vis-à-vis Indonesia, and their migration to the Netherlands in the early 1950s, I will argue that their reappropriation of adat as a deliberately indefinable form of Moluccan cultural heritage can be understood as a way for them to protect their collective identity as a separatist people from becoming a matter of wider contestation. Keywords Indigenous customary law · Maluku · Dutch colonialism · Diasporic identity · Postcolonial migration
* Gerlov van Engelenhoven gerlov.van‑[email protected]‑giessen.de 1
International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University Gießen, Gießen, Germany
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1 Introduction The Moluccan postcolonial migrant community originated in the Indonesian province of Maluku, and arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1950s. In the aftermath of the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–1949), Moluccans had chosen the side of Dutch colonial rule over Indonesian nationalism, motivated by their, eventually unsuccessful, separatist cause of establishing a Moluccan state, independent from Indonesia. The first generation of the migrant community in the Netherlands consisted of the 12,500 Moluccan soldiers for the Dutch colonial army, and their families. After Indonesia became independent in 1949, these soldiers, due to their separatist ideology, had refused to be demobilized on Indonesian soil. Therefore, in 1951, the Dutch government had brought them to the Netherlands in order to demobilize them there. Their residency in the Netherlands was meant to be temporary, but became prolonged indefinitely due to continuing military conflict between Indonesian nationalists and Moluccan separatists throughou
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