o - Aceh Books website

850 WANA
very sense of being a "people" came about through exchanges with coastal
populations.
The Wana homeland is located on a peninsula some 80 miles at its widest
point. It is bordered on the north and south by narrow strips of coastal lowland
that are flanked in turn by foothills that soon change into rugged upland terrain.
As inhabitants of the interior, the Wana have been shielded by topography from
total hegemony by outsiders. But ties with lowland communities go back into
the distant past. Before Dutch authorities entered the region in the first decade
of the twentieth century, some Wana were drawn into the spheres of small Islamic
sultanates that once dotted the coasts of Sulawesi. In the last century, Wana in
the southern reaches of the territory paid tribute in the form of beeswax to the
Raja of Bungku, a principality located to the southwest of Wanaland. Likewise
Wana in the north presented tiny bamboo tubes filled with uncooked rice to the
Raja of Tojo, a sultanate to the northwest of the Wana area. Some Wana were
appointed local representatives of these rajas and carried special titles. While
Wana homage no doubt enhanced the stature of local sultans and may have
conferred certain privileges on Wana middlemen, by no means did these demonstrations
of vassalage imply that coastal rulers exercised thoroughgoing suzerainty
over the Wana. Then, as now, Wana had the option of fading back into
the interior forests when threatened or oppressed in their relations with coastal
authorities. For their part, the rajas occupied themselves with issues of status
and prestige at political centers, not with territorial concerns in the hinterlands.
But through contact with these principalities, Wana adopted and reworked for
their own purposes some key political and cosmological concepts basic to the
Islamic sultanates, including the idea of baraka (magical powers associated with
royalty), a tripartite social class system made up of nobles, commoner and slaves
(unrealized in Wana social life, but nonetheless present in their thought) and an
association of cosmic well-being and political order (a model that Indonesia's
Muslim kingdoms had in turn reworked from earlier Hindu-Buddhist constructions).
And Wana, who attribute all power to sources external to their own
society, claim that their legal code was obtained from the Raja of Bungku.
Wana accounts of the pre-colonial past stress political relations. The nature
of economic ties between the Wana and their coastal neighbors before the Dutch
period is unclear. But since the Dutch entered the region in the first decade of
the twentieth century, trade relations between coast and interior have been an
important feature of Wana life. While the Dutch Protestant heritage of the colonialists
did not make itself felt until after the Dutch departure, trade brought
pagan Wana and Islamic traders together. A flourishing resin trade developed
in the Dutch period and continued after World War II in the first decades of the
Indonesian Republic. Wana exchange resin for salt, cloth and metal goods. This
trade encouraged the growth of small coastal communities made up principally
of immigrants from other areas of Sulawesi. Refugees were added to their numbers
during the political and religious turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s. More
recently, with the development of petrochemical substitutes for natural resins
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