The Bissu and a Broken Transmission

Bissu are ritual specialists of the Bugis courts, drawn from a fifth gender category alongside men, women, calabai and calalai in traditional Bugis reckoning, who kept and cared for royal regalia and gave blessings at weddings, at harvest, and for travelers including pilgrims departing for the hajj. Their standing rested on being neither fully male nor fully female, a state read within the tradition as uniting qualities the ordinary genders hold separately and so fitting them to mediate between the human world and the spirits of Boting Langi and Peretiwi.

The bissu priesthood survived the seventeenth century arrival of Islam and centuries of Dutch colonial rule largely intact, attached to South Sulawesi's surviving royal courts into the twentieth century. What did not survive was the Indonesian state's campaigns of forced religious and social conformity in the 1950s and 1960s, when bissu were targeted for both their pre-Islamic ritual role and their gender status; many were killed or forced to abandon the priesthood, and the courts that had sustained them lost most of their remaining authority in the same period. Sharyn Graham Davies's ethnographic study of Bugis gender categories documents a priesthood reduced from an order that once served every Bugis kingdom to a small number of surviving practitioners, its transmission to a new generation now uncertain. What is described here follows the published ethnographic record; no ritual formula or regalia practice is reproduced.