ABSTRACT
There are many understandings of the word adat (custom) in Indonesia and from this it can be suggested that there are also many understandings of its revival. This chapter explores three different ways that adat has been revived in Manggarai district2 in western Flores at different times over the past several decades. These different revivals have to do with different influences that Manggaraians have been reacting to at various time periods. What is called ‘adat’ – customary beliefs, practices, and social institutions – has been responding, in Manggarai, to external influences for many centuries now (Erb 1999; Lawang 1989), but the idea of ‘loss’ of traditional lifeways, and an idea that a ‘revival’ is a positive, even necessary thing, is something more recent. This is especially so since for a considerable period of time adat was seen as something relatively negative. This was true in the context of religion, where it was considered, in earlier decades, by foreign missionaries, as an obstacle to being a ‘true Catholic’, and in the context of national development, during the New Order, when adat was considered to be obstructive to a modern, profit-oriented, and efficient outlook on life. Hence I am arguing that the recent revival of adat has to be explained against a fairly negative orientation towards ‘traditional’ ways of life in most of the twentieth century in Flores, and that this revival, therefore, needs, to some extent, to be traced chronologically. I attempt to do that by dividing ‘adat revival’ into roughly three (albeit overlapping) types and consequently into three roughly distinct time periods when these revivals were initiated.
