As successive empires like Srivijaya, Kediri, Majapahit, and Melaka gained hegemony over the region, they introduced different models of kingship in peripheral areas like the Makassar coast of South Sulawesi. As each successive model of royal power gained currency, it became embedded in local myth and ritual. By the time the kings of South Sulawesi converted to Islam at the beginning of the seventeenth century, at least six such models were present in the area. Islam introduced a whole new set of competing religious and political models, adding to the symbolic complexity of the area.
To better understand the relationship between symbolic knowledge and traditional royal authority in Makassar society, Thomas Gibson draws on a wide range of sources and academic disciplines. He shows how myth and ritual link practical forms of knowledge (boat-building, navigation, agriculture, warfare) to basic social categories such as gender and hereditary rank, as well as to environmental, celestial, and cosmological phenomena. He also shows how concrete historical agents have used this symbolic infrastructure to advance their own political and ideological purposes. Gibson concludes by situating this material in relation to Islam and to life-cycle rituals.
Gibson uses anthropological, mythological, textual, and historical analysis to show that Makassar symbolic knowledge does not constitute a seamless whole. It is composed of a complex set of competing models, each with a unique historical genealogy and geographic source. His book will appeal to those interested in the established fields of anthropology, folklore, history, and comparative political science; the emerging interdisciplinary fields of cultural, subaltern, and post-colonial studies; and the origins of globalism and transnationalism.
