ABSTRACT
Tomohon is a remote mountainous quasi-urbanized municipality, which is one of the Minahasa regions in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. This chapter examines the multilayered contexts of the Tomohonese, thereby identifying how these contexts have influenced the contested identities between different Tomohonese communities. It aims to explore the multilayered contexts of the internal differentiation between different ‘imagined’ indigenous territories or different villages or different sub-ethnic group of origin. The Tomohonese have a nostalgic attachment to an eternal motherland ‘Minahasa’ through a creation myth, ‘To’ar dan Lumimu’ut’. This establishes a common origin of the Minahasan people. The Tomohonese have wide access to modern media, such as television, video/VCD and parabola, which has enabled them to sensitize themselves discursively to the ‘more modernized and thus curious’ worlds outside. The Tomohonese area has undergone successive processes of spatial changes from the ‘indigenous’ to the ‘modern’, and the socio-cultural identities of the Tomohonese has noticeably changed from the ‘ethno-cognitive’ to the ‘spatial’.
