As katherine verdery notes, dead bodies have had political lives in virtually every civilization since antiquity. They frequently emerge as powerful metaphors of change, especially after a time of crisis when the meaning of political symbols is redefined. This is vividly exemplified by what happened to the exhumed bodies of various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia (Verdery 1999, 1–22). Postwar discourse is another site in which dead bodies frequently emerge as metaphors. Some of the most unforgettable sights concerning World War II are pictures of huge piles of exhumed human bodies from the mass graves of Jews. We know that these are not skeletons of those who have died natural deaths because these images have often been shown along with the pictures of inmates of the concentration and death camps, emaciated to the point of nonrecognition as living human beings. Through this process, the pictures have acquired an independent status as encoded language: they signify unbelievable evil committed against humanity, and they display the moral weakness of the rest of humanity that failed to resist and end such atrocities.

For architects of citizenship and nationhood, there is no shortage of conflicts and wars from which to build modern myths about submerging individual suffering and loss to greater causes. The grief, anger, and despair of individuals can be integrated over time into collectively shared assumptions about the indebtedness of the living to their heroic compatriots and ancestors. To remember these conflicts and those who (depending on the political context) either “lost” or “gave” their lives has been throughout recent history a vital act of citizenship, both “affirming the community at large and asserting its moral character” (Winter 1995, 85). Certainly from an American perspective, national identity remains “inexorably intertwined with the commemoration and memory of past wars” (Piehler 1995, 3). This observation applies even more intensely elsewhere in the world (e.g., Russia, China, France, Japan) where the loss of combatant and civilian life has been far greater.

When the philippines returned to democratic rule in 1986, two images emerged of the new democracy that were vastly different and often hard to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, many observers commented on the great extent to which the new democracy appeared merely to restore the country's previous democratic regime from between 1946 and the establishment of martial law in 1972 (Anderson 1988; McCoy 1994, 19; Wurfel 1988, 323). In this earlier democratic period, traditional political clans dominated the country's policy-making institutions and successfully blocked equity-enhancing reforms. Over the course of these decades, elite-dominated parties mastered the politics of clientelism, in which local power brokers delivered vote blocs to national politicians in exchange for the granting of particularistic favors and the blocking of progressive legislation. Fears of a restoration in the mid-1980s appeared well founded, both in the significant presence in the reopened legislature of the country's most powerful economic elites and in the resistance to agrarian and other reforms by the new president, Corazon Aquino, herself a member of a prominent land-owning family. In many respects, democratization in the 1980s marked the return to power of traditional politicians, or trapos, as they are popularly called, a word that also means “dishrag” in the Tagalog language.

The communis opinio of historians is that early modern, or precolonial, states in Southeast Asia tended to lead precarious existences. The states were volatile in the sense that the size of individual states changed quickly, a ruler forced by circumstances moved his state capital, the death of a ruler was followed by a dynastic struggle, or a local subordinate head either ignored or took over the central state power; in short, states went through short cycles of rise and decline. Perhaps nobody has helped establish this opinion more than Clifford Geertz (1980) with his powerful metaphor of the “theatre state.” Many scholars have preceded and followed him in their assessment of the shakiness of the state (see, for example, Andaya 1992, 419; Bentley 1986, 292; Bronson 1977, 51; Hagesteijn 1986, 106; Milner 1982, 7; Nagtegaal 1996, 35, 51; Reid 1993, 202; Ricklefs 1991, 17; Schulte Nordholt 1996, 143–48). The instability itself was an enduring phenomenon. Most polities existed in a state of flux, oscillating between integration and disintegration, a phenomenon which was first analyzed for mainland Southeast Asia by Edmund Leach (1954) in his seminal work on the Kachin chiefdoms. This alternation of state formation and the breaking up of kingdoms has been called the “ebb and flow of power” and the “rhythm” of Malay history (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 35). In this article, I will probe into the causes of the volatility of the Southeast Asian states, using material from Sumatra to make my case.

In the sixteenth century, Makassarese in the South Sulawesi courts of Gowa and Talloq began to write. What they chose to write were historical texts that chronicled their origins and preserved the words of their ancestors. Scholars once knew how to make sense of such an event: it could not be but a watershed, a fundamental change or turning point of the first magnitude. Such is the nature of what we liked to call the “transition from orality to literacy,” yet more careful examinations have suggested that this confidence in the very idea of a shift from orality to literacy was misplaced. Literacy and orality are not states of being that are simply manifested in places like Makassar. This article extends the efforts of scholars to grapple with the considerable overlap, symbiosis, and exchange that seem to characterize a boundary once believed to demarcate firmly orality and literacy. Considerable work has gone into documenting the inadequacy of trying to delineate what formal characteristics mark oral and literate productions. For example, Wendy Doniger notes that it is only when we distinguish among texts that were composed orally, preserved orally, or performed orally “that we begin to glimpse the complexity of the problem” (1991, 31). Similarly, what should we do about traditions such as Javanese wayang in which oral performances are based on stories in texts, even though few puppeteers own, consult, or have even seen the written texts (Sears 1996)?