This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the joint meetings of the American Ethnological Society and the Canadian Anthropological Association, 7–10 May 1998, in Toronto. The fieldwork was conducted during the summers of 1995 and 1997. Special thanks are given to the Department of Anthropology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Social Science Research Council, the Keller Research Fund, and the Center for Pacific and East Asian Studies at the University of Illinois for funding my research in Indonesia. I would like to thank the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI) for arranging my research visa and Sriwijaya University for providing the required institutional affiliation. I would also like to thank F.K. Lehman, Arlene Torres, Janet Keller and Clark Cunningham for reading various drafts of this paper and offering suggestions for its improvement.

¹ Geertz, Clifford, Social History of an Indonesian Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

² Geertz, Clifford, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example”, in his The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (BasicBooks, 1973), pp. 142–69Google Scholar.

³ See Volkman, Toby A., “The Periphery and the Past: Identity in Tana Toraja”, in Southeast Asian Tribal Groups and Ethnic Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival Inc., 1987), p. 103Google Scholar. See also Picard, Michel, Bali, Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1996), p. 43Google Scholar.

⁴ Douglas, Steve, “Indonesia's State Ideology, the Pancasila” (Paper, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁵ Lansing, Stephen J., The Balinese (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995), p. 117Google Scholar.

⁶ Toby A. Volkman, “The Periphery and the Past” and Michel Picard, Bali, Cultural Tourism. See also Cunningham, Clark, “The Interaction of Cultural Performances, Tourism, and Ethnicity: An Introduction”, Journal of Musicological Research 17 (1998): 81–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14Google Scholar.

⁸ Hobsbawm, Eric, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914”, in Hobsbawm, and Ranger, , ed., The Invention of Tradition, p. 262Google Scholar. See also Wright, Susan, “‘Heritage’ and Critical History in the Reinvention of a Mining Festival in North-east England”, in Revitalizing European Rituals, ed. Boissevain, Jeremy (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 20–42Google Scholar.

⁹ See Hanson, Allan, “The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic”, American Anthropologist 91 (1989): 890–902CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Linnekin, Jocelyn, “Cultural Invention and the Dilemma of Authenticity”, American Anthropologist 93 (1991): 444—49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Poerragard, Karsten, “Imagining a Place in the Andes: In the Borderland of Lived, Invented, and Analyzed Culture”, in Siting Culture, ed. Olwig, Karen Fog and Harstrup, Kirsten (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39–58Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Strauss, Claudia, “What Makes Tony Run? Schemas as Motives Reconsidered”, in Human Motives and Cultural Models, ed. D' Andrade, Roy G. and Strauss, Claudia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar, describes schemata as “packets of knowledge” stored in memory as “conceptual abstractions that mediate between stimuli received by the sense organs and behavioral responses”. As demonstrated in Agar, Michael, “Stories, Background Knowledge and Themes: Problems in the Analysis of Life History Narrative” (American Ethnologist 7,2 [1980]: 223–38)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Agar, Michael and Hobbs, J., “How to Grow Schemata out of Interviews” (in Directions in Cognitive Anthropology, ed. Dougherty, Janet [Urbana: University of Illinois Press], pp. 413–31)Google Scholar, it is schemata which give coherence to discourse as they bundle together disparate segments of expression. Lehman, F.K., in his “Cognitive Science Research Notes” (Papers, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar, stresses descriptive rigor and makes the distinction between schemata (relatively specific, detail-rich representations frequently stored somewhere in memory) and models (which lack rich detail and are often constructed, at least partially, in practice as heuristic devices). Claudia Strauss, “What Makes Tony Run?”, demonstrates that schemata may be internalized in different ways and that these different “ways of knowing” may directly influence the way they motivate behavior. My analysis in this paper stems from a domain-specific theoretical perspective presented by Hirschfeld, Laurence and Gelman, Susan's “Overview”, in Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, ed. Gelman, Hirschfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. They view schemata of identity as knowledge of a social relational domain used to identify and interpret certain attributes of human beings and to produce classificatory and evaluative schemes of social identities. The domain of social relations constructs categories of social identity, associating and assigning role-functions and statuses with social identities; see discussion of diagrams later in this paper. Sands, Robert R. and Lehman, F.K. in their paper “The Nature of Social Identity and Identity Relationships” (University of Illinois, Urbana, 1995)Google Scholar, correcting Keesings' and Parsons' conflation of identities and behavioral expectations, use clear conceptual distinctions between slots and fillers and between positions and individuals to demonstrate the abstract relational quality of social identities and behavioral and knowledge expectations of role-functions. Similarly, status is the regard or value the slot or position holds. They state (p. 22), “it is the lower levels (or facets) that refer to function and status which combine to form social identities”. A social identity may have several role-functions and these may change over time. More broadly, knowledge structures that organize and constrain the domain of social relations generate a limited number of categories of identity as well as many role-functions.

¹¹ Evans, David B. and Hasibuan, Nurimansjah, “South Sumatra: Dualism and Export Orientation”, in Unity and Diversity: Regional Economic Development in Indonesia since 1970, ed. Hill, Hal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 455–72Google Scholar.

¹² Wolters, O.W., The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, shows the importance of Malay maritime empires' links to the China trade. The strength and prosperity of the Sriwijaya and Melayu Jambi kingdoms fluctuated with the waxing and waning of economic ties with China, and with world trade patterns spanning oceans and seas, from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. Wolters argues that the shift of the Malay capital from Palembang to Jambi during the Eleventh Century, and the Fourteenth Century move from Southeast Sumatra to the Malay Peninsula must be seen as evidence of the powerful influences China trade had upon local dynamics.

¹³ Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”, p. 1Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Local civil servants claim that Festival Sriwijaya grew out of the Bachelor-Bachelorette Palembang pageant which made its debut in 1988 and was staged for its tenth year in 1997. The form and process are similar to the Prince and Princess of Sriwijaya pageant, which has been a part of the Festival Sriwijaya since its inception in 1991.

¹⁵ The provincial festival cycle includes Musi Festival, held on 17 August in connection with National Independence Day celebrations; Lake Ranau Festival, held to celebrate the New Year from December 27–31; and Traditional Raft Races held in Lahat on the Lematang River on 6 August.

¹⁶ Regencies are territorial units developed during the period of Dutch colonial rule and continued by the Republic of Indonesia after political independence in 1949. Dutch colonial administrators used these territorial units to extend indirect colonial rule through bupati, or regents, to areas of Netherlands East Indies outside the realm of direct control. The Dutch words for these places, such as landschap (region), stress geographical space rather than territories associated with the identities of its inhabitants. For usage of landschap in Dutch records, see Resink, G.J., Indonesia's History Between the Myths, Essays in Legal History and Historical Theory (The Hague: W. van Hoeve Publishers Ltd, 1968), p. 433Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Dangdut is a form of Indonesian popular upbeat music which exhibits strong Indie influence in its rhythms and instrumentation. Although many middle and upper-class and Islamic revivalist sectors frown upon this musical form, it is highly televised and popular amongst the Indonesian masses and is frequently used as entertainment in Palembang wedding receptions.

¹⁸ “Proto” is used before the name of languages to refer to linguistic reconstructions of “parent” languages of a family of structurally related languages. In contemporary historical linguistics, language, culture and phenotypic characteristics are distinct and only considered to be interwoven through historical processes. However, in the local elite discourse discussed in this paper, “Proto-Malay” is a cultural construct which conflates language, culture and biology.

¹⁹ Sands and Lehman, in “The Nature of Social Identity and Identity Relationships”, draw an important distinction between “maximal identities” and “particular functional identities”. Maximal identities refer to conceptions and constructions of “one's total social persona” and are conveniently assumed to represent “a whole culture, or way of life”. For instance, ethnicity, race, and nationality often comprise maximal identities. Particular functional identities are specific social positions such as secretary, student, civil servant, and so on, that entail a more limited conception of social persona and a less broad range of knowledge structures. Sands and Lehman demonstrate that maximal identities influence the performance or role-behavior of particular functional identities; sprinters behave differently as sprinters based upon whether they think of themselves as “Black” or “middleclass” American.

²⁰ ”Festival Sriwijaya VII Pilar Kebudayaan Nasional”, Sumatera Ekspres, 19 06 1997Google Scholar.

²¹ Anderson, Benedict R. O'G., Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar, uses the concept “imagined communities” to characterize nations as cultural entities conceived by their members as a non-hierarchical collectivity in which they are connected in an abstract, non-face-to-face and non-kinship-based fashion. This attempt to distinguish nations from previous political communities is problematic in its assumption that members of polities prior to the emergence of nations thought primarily in “particularistic” style, while members of nations think primarily in an abstract fashion. On the contrary, ethnographic research indicates that people in even small hunter-gatherer or horticultural groups think of themselves not only as being related to particular people but also as being members of abstract social units such as domestic groups, lineages and clans. Furthermore, Benedict Anderson's usage of “imagined community” is rooted in the false premise that kinship is a system based on the relations between particular persons rather than an abstract rule-based system. In this paper, I use the notion of “imagined communities” in a broad fashion to refer to culturally constructed collectivities which persons conceive themselves as belonging to or being a part of. This notion of community is closely related to identity; just as one may have multiple identities, one may also belong to multiple imagined communities. As for the Indonesian national community, it tends to be imagined as a “vertical” rather than a “horizontal comradeship”. Moreover, the broad usage I deploy in this paper leaves open the possibility of answering the important “who”, “what” and “where” questions that Clark Cunningham suggests we put to such cultural constructions. For a discussion of the latter, see Sarkissian, Margaret, “Cultural Chameleons: Portuguese Eurasian Strategies for Survival in Post-Colonial Malaysia”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28,2 (1997): 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Finally, as F.K. Lehman has pointed out (personal communication, 15 June 1998), Anderson's limited notion of “imagined communities” fails to account for the widespread use of religion by pre-industrial states to unite diverse social groups into a single political realm. For a historical description of how the first ruler of Burma, Anawrahta, used Buddhism to organize several “tribes” into a single polity (Pagan), see Aung, Maung Htin, A History of Burma (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 36–37Google Scholar.

²² “Festival Sriwijaya VII”.

²³ See F.K. Lehman, “Cognitive Science Research Notes”.

²⁴ See Bruner, Edward M., “Batak Ethnic Associations in Three Indonesian Cities”, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 28,3 (1972): 207–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the same author's “The Expression of Ethnicity in Indonesia”, in Urban Ethnicity, ed. Cohen, Abner (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974), pp. 251–80Google Scholar.

²⁵ For a broad discussion of elite and middle classes and their relationships to the state in New Order Indonesia, see Robison, Richard, “The Middle Class and Bourgeoisie in Indonesia”, in The New Rich in Asia, ed. Robison, Richard and Goodman, David S.G. (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 79–104Google Scholar.

²⁶ In Ogan Komering Ulu regency, the term “Haji” is used to refer to a particular group of people, as distinct from a person who has made the Hajj to Mecca.

²⁷ See Lehman, F.K., The Relevance of the Founder's Cult for Understanding the Political Systems of the Peoples of Northern South-East Asia and its Chinese Borderlands (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asian Studies Series, in press)Google Scholar, for a full discussion of this cultural phenomenon in mainland Southeast Asia. This paper suggests that the phenomenon of “founder's cults” is relevant to the study of insular Southeast Asia as well, particularly in regard to coastal Malay political systems. Aragon, Lorraine V., “Twisting the Gift: Translating Precolonial into Colonial Exchanges in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia”, American Ethnologist 23,1 (1996): 43–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also demonstrates mat founder's cults were present in the highlands of Central Sulawesi.

²⁸ Dakwah is derived from the Arabic term da'wah, which is a complex concept rooted in Islamic texts and refers to the Muslim responsibility to call people to the Islamic faith and to take actions against ideas and practices deemed contrary to Islamic principles. For a discussion of Islamic revivalist movements in nineteenth-century Java, see Kartodirdjo, Sartono, Protest Movements in Rural Java (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. On dakwah movements during the first half of the twentieth century in Indonesia, see Noer, Delia, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900–1942 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. For an examination of Islamic revivalist groups in post-independence Malaysia, see Nagata, Judith, “Religious Ideology and Social Change: The Islamic Revival in Malaysia”, Pacific Affairs 53 (1980): 405–439CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hidayatullah 10 (Apr. 1998) and 11 (May 1998) discuss the involvement of student dakwah groups in the massive demonstrations of 1998 which culminated in the resignation of President Suharto on 21 May 1998.

²⁹ Rosaldo, Renato, “Border Crossings”, in his Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 217Google Scholar.