Includes bibliographical references (p. 415-426) and index.

Preliminary Material -- Chapter I: The people of Sikka and the Boer and Kondi manuscripts -- Chapter II: Structure and themes of the Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka -- Chapter III: Summary notes and outline of the Hikayat -- Chapter IV: The sovereignty of Sikka’s stranger-kings -- Chapter V: Marriage, sovereignty, and the paths of ivory in Sikka -- Chapter VI: Stranger-kings and myths of xenarchy in the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands -- Chapter VII: The first period: The autochthons and newcomers -- Chapter VIII: The life of Mo’ang Bata Jawa -- Chapter IX: The life of Mo’ang Baga Ngang -- Chapter X: Don Alésu’s journeys to Malacca and through Flores -- Chapter XI: The reigns of Ratu Dona Maria, Mo’ang Samao da Silva, and Ratu Dona Agnes Ines da Silva -- Chapter XII: The second period: The middle rajas: Raja Mbako I Kikir Hiwa, Raja Prispin da Cunha, Raja Thomas Mo’ang Bo I da Silva, and Ornay da Costa -- Chapter XIII: The third period: The rajadom in the early twentieth century -- Epilogue -- Appendices -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

The Stranger-Kings of Sikka is the first monographic study of an origin myth and history of an indigenous eastern Indonesian state and the first contemporary ethnography of the Ata Sikka of Flores. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, ethnologists of Austronesia, historians and political scientists whose interests include Southeast Asia. During the 1920s, in the regency of Sikka on the island of Flores, D.D. Pareira Kondi and A. Boer Pareira, two notable men among the first literate Sikkanese, began writing about the history and culture of their people. Among their many surviving manuscripts are two long works on the origin of the rajas who ruled Sikka until the end of the rajadom in the 1950s. The author of this book uncovered the manuscripts in 1994 and found among them versions of the myth of origin of the Sikkanese rajas, an epic tale of immigrant-kings that was lost to living memory and as oral tradition by the 1970s. Drawing on Boer’s and Kondi's texts and his own field research in the regency of Sikka, Lewis presents an abridged English translation of the origin myth and constructs a history of the Sikkanese rajas and the organization of the society they ruled.

English; some text in Sikka.