SIMBOL, KEKUASAAN, DAN KONTROL SOSIAL: FUNGSI SONGKOK RECCA SEBAGAI PENANDA HIERARKI KEBANGSAWANAN DI KERAJAAN BONE HINGGA 1950

Abstract

The gold-thread width on a Songkok Recca, a woven lontar-fiber cap worn by Bugis men, once told you exactly where a man stood in the social order of the Bone Kingdom: an anak pattola's cap carried a full band, a raja matase's carried half, a commoner's a thinner strip still, and an ata wore none at all. Existing scholarship on the cap has mostly examined its raw-material ethnobotany or its present-day role as cultural identity and livelihood in Desa Paccing, leaving its pre-1950 political-symbolic function, and its entanglement with Dutch colonial policy, comparatively unexamined. This study narrows its locus to the Bone Kingdom and traces the cap's function from the point its wear was formally codified under the 32nd king, La Mappanyukki, through the kingdom's dissolution in 1950, combining the four stages of historical method (heuristics, source criticism, interpretation, historiography) with Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology, reading colonial archives and KITLV Leiden photographs (circa 1910–1938) as texts carrying layered social meaning rather than as plain fact. The findings show the cap functioning as an almost bureaucratic instrument of social control keyed to precise gold-thread proportions; a meaning that was already plural before the modern era, coexisting with the Songko Guru variant worn by religious-intellectual figures; and Dutch officials after 1905 documenting and using the symbol to legitimize indirect rule (zelfbestuur) from 1931 onward. The contribution here is a historical-anthropological reading that joins colonial records with Bugis-Bone oral tradition, and a reminder that before Songkok Recca became the commercial-cultural product it is today, it once functioned as a hierarchy marker regulated with near-bureaucratic precision by the palace.