Suva, Cesar
Description
This study is of how local legitimacy anchored and influenced
colonial regimes in the southern Philippine archipelago of Sulu
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
particular, it explores how the internal contest to establish a
native moral order defined the dimensions of Sulu’s
incorporation into the American Empire upon its arrival in 1899.
It also provides further insight into a general pattern of
native-colonial interaction throughout...[Show more] island Southeast Asia: a
region where chiefly rule was often leaned upon by western
empires of the nineteenth century. Through this discussion,
orthodox notions of colonization, conquest, resistance and of the
workings of modern colonial states, are re-examined. Most
importantly, it will reveal how local understandings of
governance and legitimacy, much more than American ones,
profoundly affected the formation of the ‘modern’ order in
Sulu.
Through an examination of correspondence and dialogues with
colonial officials, combined with contemporary and later
twentieth century ethnographies and local oral literature
recording colonial events, this study will venture to make the
following key points: Firstly, The Americans, at their arrival
in Sulu in 1899, slid into a long-established role as the
colonial faction in the lingering contestations between elite
rivals after the death of Sultan Jamalul Alam in 1881. Secondly,
the Tausug, the predominant ethnic group in Sulu, were not
opposed to foreigner rule, as much as they were opposed to what,
in their understanding, was immoral rule. Individual Americans
filled the local role of the stranger king, an institution
produced out of the highly mobile, cosmopolitan Austronesian
world of which Sulu and other insular Southeast Asian societies
form a part. The alien-ness of the stranger king gave them the
objectivity to mediate and bring justice over native faction
leaders, who themselves were too enmeshed in the web of vendettas
and jealousies that fueled conflict. When Americans played this
locally determined role incorrectly however, they could rapidly
lose their legitimacy. Third, what emerged in the first few
years of the twentieth century were two different articulations
of rule in Sulu. One was the rapidly constructed ‘modern’
colonial state found in American annual reports and
correspondence to the metropolises of Manila and Washington. The
other was the state as performed in Sulu by colonial agents for
the local inhabitants, framed in the morality evidenced in the
rituals of rule by local datu. As time went on, the Americans
built the physical and institutional trappings of their modern
state around the Tausug, reifying the cleavage between colonial
and local. What resulted was ambivalence toward the modern state
for its disconnection with the locality, and the persistence of
an unofficial, locally driven parallel state with its
pre-colonial rituals fully functioning in the shadow of the
colonial state. Colonial rule in Sulu was a delicate,
multi-faced and mutually stabilizing balance sustained by local
leaders and colonial officials in keeping these rationalities
complimentary rather than contradictory. A closer look at this
interaction reveals the ways in which human societies in close,
often antagonistic interaction, can rationalize and legitimize
the operation of the state.
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