The Treaty That Had No Charter

This post is part of a series that explores the many ways human societies have stored, transmitted, and transformed memory across time, beyond the narrow histories centered on books and writing. It approaches archives, documents, and memory systems as historically situated technologies shaped by power, ecology, material conditions, and cultural worldviews, while examining forms of transmission often excluded from dominant narratives of literacy and preservation: oral traditions, woven patterns, musical structures, ritual performances, landscapes, bodies, and other living infrastructures of memory. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Beyond the Written Treaty

Treaties are usually imagined as written objects. They carry dates, signatures, seals, clauses, and the names of the authorities empowered to negotiate them. Their documentary force appears to depend on inscription: the agreement becomes binding because it has been fixed in a form that can be stored, copied, consulted, and produced as evidence. Even when the political relationship later changes, the charter remains as a record of what was promised.

The intervillage alliances known as pela developed in the Central Moluccas, a group of islands in eastern Indonesia. They connected autonomous villages across islands and, in many cases, across religious boundaries. They established obligations of assistance, hospitality, cooperation, and non-marriage. Their authority extended beyond the people who first entered the alliance and was transmitted to later generations. Yet the relationship did not depend on a founding document preserved in an archive.

To call pela a treaty is useful, but only provisionally. It helps identify the political seriousness of the institution, since these were not informal friendships or occasional exchanges. Whole villages entered relationships that imposed durable rights and responsibilities. At the same time, the word "treaty" risks importing assumptions that do not fit the Moluccan case. Pela was not simply an agreement expressed orally rather than in writing. It created a form of collective brotherhood, joined communities through oath and ancestral sanction, and reorganized relations among people who might otherwise have remained politically separate or even hostile.

Its continuity depended on social recognition rather than the survival of a charter. The alliance endured because villages continued to remember its origin, acknowledge its prohibitions, fulfill its obligations, and treat the relationship as binding.

The Village as Political Community

The Central Moluccan world described by authors like Frank L. Cooley and Dieter Bartels includes the islands of Ambon, Haruku, Saparua, and Nusalaut, together with parts of western Seram. Although these islands formed a broader cultural region, political and social life was strongly organized around the village, or negeri. Cooley describes the village as a historically layered institution shaped by Indigenous forms of authority, Islamic and Christian influence, Dutch colonial administration, and later Indonesian government.

A negeri was not merely a settlement. It was a corporate community composed of kin groups, offices, customary law, territorial relations, and forms of ritual authority. Its internal organization included patrilineal houses or mata rumah, grouped into larger divisions known as soa. Village leadership involved offices such as the raja or ruler, the heads of soa, the tuan tanah associated with land and precedence, military and religious functionaries, and the saniri negeri, the village council. Some of these offices remained active, while others survived only partially or in social memory.

Cooley's analysis is important because it prevents pela from being treated as an isolated custom. The alliance connected communities that already possessed their own systems of government, kinship, land tenure, religious affiliation, and customary authority. A pela relationship was therefore not a private bond between two leaders. It joined political collectivities.

The relative autonomy of villages made such alliances especially significant. Bartels notes that intervillage relations could be limited by distance, weak transportation, territorial disputes, and strong loyalty to one's own place of origin. Villages were often economically self-sufficient and could maintain tense relations even with nearby communities. Under these conditions, pela became one of the principal mechanisms for establishing obligations beyond the village.

The alliance did not dissolve village autonomy. Instead, it created a relation across it. Communities remained distinct while becoming responsible for one another in defined ways.

The Forms of Pela

Bartels distinguishes three broad forms of alliance. The first is pela keras, or "hard pela," generally associated with major events such as warfare, the spilling of blood, an unresolved conflict, or extraordinary assistance offered by one village to another. The second is pela gandong or bungso, based on claims that groups in the allied villages share a common origin or ancestry. The third, pela tempat sirih, is a "soft" alliance that may arise from more limited incidents, acts of assistance, reconciliation, or trade.

These categories indicate different historical foundations, but they should not be understood as perfectly fixed classifications. Bartels emphasizes that the stronger forms, particularly pela keras and pela gandong, functioned in similar ways. Both could bind entire villages through a relationship conceived as enduring brotherhood.

The alliances also changed over time. Bartels traces their early forms to warfare, headhunting, defense, and peacemaking. Some pacts prevented further attacks between communities; others allowed villages to combine forces against common enemies. During Portuguese and Dutch expansion, existing alliance structures could be redirected toward resistance. New alliances were also established during periods of colonial conflict, including the Pattimura War of the early nineteenth century. Later, pela could facilitate access to food or resources, especially when poorer villages in Ambon and Lease established ties with sago-producing communities in Seram.

This historical flexibility is central to the institution. Pela did not survive because it preserved a single original function unchanged. It remained relevant because its structure could be applied to war, peace, exchange, mutual assistance, collective construction, religious coexistence, and regional identity.

A written charter often seeks continuity through fixed wording. Pela achieved continuity through the durability of the relationship, even as the circumstances in which that relationship operated changed.

Oath, Blood, and Ancestral Sanction

The strongest pela alliances were established through a solemn oath. Bartels describes a ceremony in which blood taken from the leaders of the participating communities was mixed with palm wine. Weapons and other sharp objects were immersed in the mixture, which was then consumed. The exchange of blood established brotherhood, while the weapons embodied the curse attached to violation. Anyone who broke the alliance risked punishment from the ancestors who had founded it.

The ceremony did more than represent an agreement already reached. It produced a new social condition. After the oath, the members of the allied villages were considered to share one blood. The alliance was inherited by people who had not personally participated in its creation, because it attached to the villages as collective bodies.

This helps explain why marriage between members of allied communities was forbidden. Such a union was treated as incestuous, even when the individuals involved had no traceable genealogical relationship. The oath had created a kinship relation at the level of the village. Symbolic brotherhood generated practical consequences for marriage, hospitality, mobility, and exchange.

The alliance also imposed obligations of assistance. Partner villages were expected to support one another during war, natural disaster, or other crises. They could be called upon to provide labor for major communal projects, including the construction of churches, mosques, and schools. Visitors from a partner village could not be denied food, and they possessed unusual rights of access to agricultural products. In circumstances where the resources of gardens and trees were otherwise protected by customary prohibitions, pela created a recognized exception.

These obligations were not preserved as clauses in a text. They were embedded in customary knowledge and reinforced through ancestral sanction. Their authority rested partly on the fear of illness, misfortune, or death following transgression. This should not be reduced to "superstition" attached to an otherwise political agreement. The ancestral dimension formed part of the institution's enforcement system. Social and cosmological authority operated together.

A modern treaty separates legal obligation from ritual danger more sharply. In pela, the oath, the ancestors, the village, and the relationship belonged to the same field of authority.

An Agreement Distributed Across Practice

Without a charter, the alliance had to be transmitted through other means. Its continuity depended on origin narratives, collective memory, village institutions, ritual knowledge, and repeated conduct. People had to know which communities were partners, why the alliance existed, what obligations followed from it, and which actions would constitute violation.

This knowledge was not concentrated in a single object. It was distributed across people and practices. Village leaders might preserve accounts of the alliance's origin. Families transmitted the prohibition on marriage. Hospitality enacted mutual recognition. Cooperative labor demonstrated that the bond remained effective. Ancestral narratives explained why the relationship carried authority beyond present convenience.

The alliance was therefore neither purely oral nor purely performative. Those terms identify important components, but neither captures the full structure. Pela depended on speech, memory, embodied action, customary institutions, material exchanges, and social expectations. Its documentary force arose from their combination.

This distributed character also meant that the alliance could weaken without any single document being destroyed. A written treaty may remain physically intact even when it is ignored politically. In the Moluccan case, the danger was different. If origin narratives ceased to be transmitted, if partner villages stopped assisting one another, if prohibitions lost their force, or if the communities no longer recognized the relationship, the alliance could become documentary residue without leaving behind a ruined charter.

Continuity required more than remembrance. It required conduct.

The distinction is visible in Bartels's discussion of the Moluccan diaspora in the Netherlands. Village loyalty and pela identity could persist far from the islands, but the alliance now operated in altered social conditions. It no longer depended on the same patterns of land, subsistence, travel, or village government. Its survival involved reinterpretation and selective continuation.

Such transformations reveal the flexibility of a system whose authority was never confined to an original wording. Because pela lived in relations, it could travel with the people who sustained those relations. At the same time, removal from the village world changed what the alliance could do.

Writing Around the Alliance

The absence of a founding charter does not mean that pela existed outside writing. Colonial officers, missionaries, administrators, and anthropologists produced extensive written descriptions of Central Moluccan society. Cooley's work itself reconstructs village government through field research, historical materials, and earlier records. Bartels draws on ethnography and European reports to trace the changing functions of the alliance.

These texts are indispensable for historical study, but they occupy a secondary position in relation to the institution they describe. They record pela from outside or after the fact. They can identify categories, reconstruct rituals, compare villages, and preserve details that may later become difficult to recover. They do not serve as the source from which partner communities derive their obligations.

This difference is important for documentary history. Written evidence may surround a social institution without constituting it. The archive can preserve accounts of authority while remaining external to the process through which that authority is recognized.

Colonial writing also introduced its own transformations. Cooley shows that village government itself became layered through successive external interventions. Indigenous offices were retained, altered, renamed, combined with elected representation, or emptied of their original functions. Dutch and Indonesian administrative structures did not simply replace local institutions, but reorganized the field within which they operated.

A comparable process affected the representation of pela. Once described in administrative or ethnographic terms, the alliance could be classified as a treaty, kinship institution, peace mechanism, exchange system, or remnant of customary law. Each label made some features legible while reducing others.

Writing preserved knowledge about the alliance, but it also translated it into categories designed for different institutional worlds.

The Limits of the Analogy

The title "The Treaty That Had No Charter" captures one part of the documentary problem, but pela was more than a treaty without paper.

A treaty generally establishes relations among political entities while leaving their populations socially distinct. Pela altered the relation between the populations themselves. It created obligations of brotherhood, prohibited marriage, granted rights of hospitality and resource access, and placed the alliance under ancestral protection. Political agreement and kinship classification became inseparable.

The alliance also lacked a single recoverable formulation. There was no definitive text against which later practice could be judged. Its content had to remain recognizable across generations without being stabilized as exact wording. That opened space for variation, reinterpretation, and changing emphasis, but it did not make the institution arbitrary. Social memory, village authority, ritual sanction, and reciprocal expectations constrained what could count as legitimate conduct.

The absence of a charter therefore did not produce an absence of form. The agreement possessed structure, categories, obligations, procedures, and consequences. What it lacked was a self-contained documentary object.

This distinction complicates familiar accounts of institutional development. Writing is often presented as the mechanism that allows obligations to become durable, impersonal, and transmissible. Pela demonstrates that durable obligations can also be organized through collective identities, ritual foundations, and recurrent social recognition.

The system was not less exact because it was not textual. Its precision lay elsewhere.

Documentary Authority Beyond the Charter

The history of the book and the document has often privileged objects that preserve information through material persistence. Charters, treaties, laws, registers, and contracts appear especially important because they turn social decisions into durable records. They create a surface to which institutions can return when memory becomes uncertain or interests diverge.

Pela alliances show another way in which authority can endure. Their obligations were not preserved by separating them from social life and fixing them in a stable text. They were preserved by embedding them within the continuing relationship between communities.

This form of documentary continuity was neither automatic nor permanent. It required transmission, recognition, and repeated enactment. The alliance could survive historical change because it was capable of assuming new functions, but that same dependence on living practice made it vulnerable to social rupture. A preserved charter can outlive the community that produced it. A pela alliance cannot remain fully active without communities willing and able to sustain it.

The distinction should not be turned into a contrast between dead writing and living memory. Written records may remain active, contested, and socially powerful; customary alliances may become weakened, ceremonialized, or detached from earlier functions. The value of the Moluccan case lies in showing that documentary authority can be organized through more than one material and social arrangement.

A charter locates the agreement in an object. Pela located it in a relation among villages, ancestors, obligations, narratives, and repeated acts of recognition. Its continuity depended less on the survival of an original than on the capacity of later generations to inhabit the agreement again.

Bibliography

• Bartels, Dieter (1980). "Alliances Without Marriage: Exogamy, Economic Exchange, and Symbolic Unity among Ambonese Christians and Moslems." Anthropology, 3 (1-2).
• Bartels, Dieter (n.d.). "Pela Alliances in the Central Moluccas and in the Netherlands: A Brief Guide for Beginners." Leiden University.
• Cooley, Frank L. (1966). "Altar and Throne in Central Moluccan Societies." Indonesia, 2 (October), pp. 135-156.
• Cooley, Frank L. (1969). "Village Government in the Central Moluccas." Indonesia, 7 (April), pp. 138-163.