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This article questions how successful neo-traditional law has been in providing access to justice to Kei Islanders of Maluku, Eastern Indonesia during recent political transitions. It describes the prevailing model of justice in which traditional law draws some of its authority from the state but provides its own normative framework for addressing community disputes. After the fall of Suharto's New Order regime, people began to apply neo-traditional law to ethnic and resource conflicts, arguing that it took precedence over state law in these emerging domains. Although the neo-traditionalist revival affirmed the autonomy of traditional legal institutions, actual legal procedures and outcomes depended on the response of state authorities and national publics to newly activated traditional normative frameworks. The politics of legality in post-Suharto Indonesia have produced increasingly state-oriented models of justice, but legal outcomes still determine the choice between different normative frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The topic of this article is the reproduction of tradition among the Bandanese, an Eastern Indonesian people. I analyze the style and rhetoric of songs that tell about ancestral sea voyages. The question I address is what happens to the value of the songs as tradition when they turn from oral performances into circulating texts. I explore several contexts of performance and transmission and argue that the songs can be embedded in lived realities in different ways. By writing the songs down, the Bandanese reorganize their tradition into new genres of text and performance. Their metadiscourse of tradition affirms that these genres represent the exemplary, complete language of the ancestors. Although singers and writers affirm the artistic, textual, and cultural completeness of their arts, they are reluctant to pass on their knowledge in an already integrated form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bandanese are a community with a distinct language and tradition which point to their origin in Banda, an early base of Dutch colonization in Indonesia. Presently focused in two villages in the Kei Islands, the community has been transforming into a regional, urban diaspora since the 1960s. Field research from March until August 2009 focused on the question of how this community distributes itself regionally and to what extent its ethnic relations are informed by its previous history of travel, migration and displacement. The study reveals that urbanized Bandanese occupy political and economic niches marked by a privileged access to fishing and trade, the backbones of the provincial economy. At the same time, their shared ancestry with local land-owning groups legitimizes their presence in new locations. Differential access to maritime wealth and land give new meaning to the classification of immigrant and autochthonous people, ubiquitous in each island society of Maluku, in which the Bandanese are placed in a mediating position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on 'organic' civility: forms of coexistence which arise from a perspective on conflicts, boundaries and differences as outcomes of social life. In the Indonesian cases discussed here, messages about conflicts do not circulate in a disembodied public sphere. Instead, they are addressed to limited, local audiences and affirm their agency in conducting and resolving their issues. Such practices often depend on a broader discourse of culture and specific historical relations through which more universal ideas about human rights and values are interpreted in local terms. The article describes different notions of communal harmony in contemporary Indonesia with an emphasis on performative practices that constitute their audience as social agents. It is argued that efforts to reconcile parties of recent ethnic and political violence owe their success to particularizing the histories of inter-group relations and highlighting the cultural values expressed in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]