An initial issue in this volume is posed most clearly in Thomas Reuter’s paper on ritual domains in the highlands of Bali. The mountain Balinese or Bali Aga organise ritual relations among villages by means of networks known as banua, each of which is centred on a paramount temple (pura banua) whose ancestral deities insure the fertility of the land of the banua. A temple in each of the constituent villages of the banua is linked spiritually within the paramount temple and performs its own rituals for the land and people within bounds. Each banua is a dynamic creation whose core is of considerable antiquity. In his paper and previous publications, Reuter has described in detail precedence among villages in the large banua organised around the regional temple of Pura Pucak Penulisan. The paper raises a historical issue on the extent to which this organisational structure was once more pervasive throughout the whole of Bali. More broadly, the question arises of whether this particular structure reflects a heritage derived from earlier ritual modes in East Java.
Some of the earliest inscriptions in any Austronesian languages refer to the vanua. Thus the early seventh-century Sriwijaya inscriptions—in a form of Old Malay written with an adapted Pallava script—refer to the vanua as a constituent unit within the polity. Indeed, a single line from one of the earliest of the fragmented inscriptions found at Telaga Batu near the town of Palembang can be read as if it were modern Malay. It reads simply: vihara ini di vanua ini: ‘This vihara [monastery] in this vanua’ (Casparis 1956: 15). Various scholarly interpretations have been offered for the meaning of the term vanua in these inscriptions: proposed translations range from that of ‘country’ or ‘kingdom’ to that of the settled ‘semiurban’ area of a particular polity, the centre or nucleus of the realm (see Kulke 1993: 303-308; Manguin 2002: 82-3).
Similarly, some of the oldest surviving Javanese inscriptions refer to the wanua/wanwa as indigenous communities or settlements within a larger polity (Zoetmulder 1982, II: 1384). These communities were presided over by elders known as ‘fathers’ (rama) while all members were considered the ‘children of the wanua’ (anak wanua). Supomo, in an earlier volume in this series, has argued cogently that the three Austronesian terms rama, rake and ratu, all of which carry age connotations (‘father’—‘grandfather’—‘ancestor/ruler’), defined three levels of early Javanese polities. Later inscriptions document the ‘Sanskritisation’ of these polities, as rulers (ratu) began to refer to themselves as rajya and their realms as negara (see Supomo 1995: 295ff.).
Critically for this volume, Graeme MacRae, in his paper, ‘Banua or Negara?: The Culture of Land in South Bali’, poses this contrast as a living reality in the cultural landscape of contemporary Bali. Popular accounts of the history of Bali credit the transformation of the island to ruling elites from the Kingdom of Majapahit on Java, who invaded in the 14th century, bringing with them new ideas of rule and religion; by contrast, the lesser-known but deeply held traditions of the Bali Aga look to the pre-Majapahit kingdoms of Kadiri and Singasari for the origins of their rituals and organisation. Thus the historical transformation that occurred on Java, it could be argued, is still under way in Bali. More generally, however, MacRae asks how the transformation based on this historical heritage can be related to a far more profound transformation that began with Dutch colonial rule and has been followed by Bali’s incorporation as a tourist destination in a global economy.
The early historical references to wanua and the prominence of the wanua as a feature of some Austronesian polities prompts the question of the extent to which the Austronesian (or, more strictly, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian [PMP]) concept of *banua has been—and continues to be—an important organising feature of societies throughout the region. As was originally noted in the first volume in the Comparative Austronesian Studies Project, Inside Austronesian Houses, reflexes of the term *banua are found in most subgroups of Malayo-Polynesian. In a few, the term is applied to house (Toraja: banua; Banggai: bonua; Wolio: banua; Molina: vanua; Wusi-Mana: wanua). More commonly, banua is glossed in general terms as ‘land, country, place, settlement, inhabited territory, village’ (see Fox 1993:12).
Thus, for example, in the first Austronesian volume, Clifford Sather (1993: 64-115) defined and described the menoa rumah as the ‘territorial domain’ of a longhouse among the Iban of Sarawak; while Michael Young interestingly described the situation on Goodenough Island (1993: 180-93), where manua refers to a house but connotes a village in the sense of a ‘dwelling place’. This evidence alone indicates that some common ideas associated with the concept of *banua were part of a social heritage that was transmitted by Austronesian populations in a wide area across the Indonesian Archipelago and into Oceania and that this heritage continues to inform local conceptions to this day.
In one of the initial chapters of the first volume of The Lexicon of Proto-Oceanic, dealing with the ‘architectural forms and settlement patterns’ of ancestral Oceanic society, Roger Green and Andrew Pawley examine the PMP *banua (based on evidence in Blust 1987) and the equivalent construct, *panua, in POc. In reviewing the range of reflexes for these terms, they conclude that ‘PMP *banua and its reflex in POc referred primarily to an inhabited territory; not only to the land but to the human population and dwellings and all plant and animal life and other elements that contribute to the maintenance of the human community—a complex concept with no simple equivalent in European languages’ (Ross et al. 1998: 63).
In a separate paper, Andrew Pawley has focused on the ‘meaning(s)’ of *panua to pose the fundamental question of semantic interpretation of any ‘complex concept’ associated with a particular lexical reconstruction. This is an essential question that underlies virtually all of the discussion associated with the reconstruction of proto-forms and their subsequent interpretation. Blust, for example, expounded the view that ‘the atomistic chaining of glosses in association with PMP *banua suggests an original semantic category for which no English equivalent exists, which has fragmented into various components in almost all daughter languages’ (1987: 96). This view implies a chain of meanings that undergoes a fragmentation as an initial ancestral language divides and diverges: languages would thus preserve (and possibly extend) fragments of a whole while losing others.
By contrast (and in contradistinction to his earlier position), Pawley argues that instead of a single complex meaning, *banua/*panua was ‘genuinely polysemous’ and in some contemporary languages of the Pacific, its current reflex retains this polysemy. He cites the case of Wayan Fijian where vanua has a ‘semantic range’ with at least eight senses, each of which can be shown to contrast by one or another criterion, thus forming ‘a family of lexical units’ with more central or more figurative senses: vanua as (1) ‘land’ as opposed to sea or sky; as (2) ‘territory’ or ‘country’, in which case it requires attributive modifiers; as (3) ‘homeland’, in which case it requires a possessive pronoun; as (4) ‘community’ or ‘land-owning kin-group’ in which case it can ‘occur as the subject or object of a verb that requires this to be human or animate’ (unlike vanua [1]); as (5) ‘place’ or ‘area’, where it is a near synonym of tiki; figuratively (6-8), in reference to the representative of the community, its living conditions and as a political federation of clans. By posing (but by no means answering) this question of the meanings of *panua, Pawley points to the problematic nature of interpretative semantics in linguistic reconstruction. His proposed solution is much like that of the contributors to this volume. Recognising the historical significance of the category, he offers a careful examination of the use of this term in a wide variety of contexts in a single speech community. This knowledge of the category’s usage offers a heuristic indication of its saliency and significance as an organising concept.