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Chronicles of Javanese transition
"Chronicles of Javanese transition", Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 1993, pp. 348-363.
Paul Stange, CSASP, IKIP Malang reviewing:
Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. by BENEDICT R. O'G. ANDERSON. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. 1990. Pp 305. Illustrations, notes, index.
The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History. by ROBERT W. HEFNER. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1990. Pp xx + 278. Illustrations, bibliography, index.
Among recent books on Indonesian, especially Javanese, studies these two deserve special attention. Anderson, a student of politics, treats central lineages of power, especially as embedded in languages extending from the kraton through emergent national elites into contemporary state philosophy. Hefner, an anthropologist, focuses on reformulations of peripheral village economy and community through colonialism and the "green revolution". Anderson is a grand master of Indonesian studies and has defined a mode of discourse within the field. Hefner displays the competence of a new generation, bred on Anderson and Geertz, which finally brings balance to analysis of economic and cultural change.
Notwithstanding contrasts, the bridge between their works does not lie just in synchronicity of publication. Each highlights interplay between cultural and material domains while linking over a century of Javanese transition to global process. In each the ghosts of Max Weber and Karl Marx also dance against images of transformation. Yet these authors illustrate a sophistication surpassing that of the ancestors they invoke; they are sensitive to intervention and modest in claim. Each builds on grounded knowledge of Javanese subjectivities and crosses disciplinary boundaries fruitfully to explore local reformulations in response to encroaching capitalism. In passing both also betray telling hints of an ambivalent preoccupation with the fading of traditions which neither imply ever existed as cohesive or static entities.
I will begin with comments on each excursion in itself; turn to their impact on the subject, the "rebound" of scholarship; and finally reflect on what they together tell us, of Javanese identities and contemporary historical imagination. My aim is not so much to characterise the books as to situate them in their field and note how their production impinges on what they explore. Anderson is at once central to studies of Indonesian political culture and a shadowing presence for the New Order; his voice echoes in local views even when they register objection to it. Hefner's impact, naturally less ramified to date, may nevertheless already be evident locally, within the Tenggerese territory of his research.
Idioms of political consciousness
Anderson is erudite and articulate; an essayist by disposition. His rhetorical skills combine with sensitivity to nuance, grasp of detail and ranging inquiry to make his excursions classics of Indonesian studies. Thus the appearance of this collection, opening them to a wider field, is more than justified. Yet, rather than trumpeting the relevance and cohesion of his works, he invites readers to question how they thread together, indeed whether the book has intelligible shape. His introduction, a synoptic biography of interest in itself, delicately outlines how his life history and professional perspectives have meshed.
Anderson's book groups essays according to focus on power, language and consciousness, but each excursion touches all of those, along with issues such as sexuality and personhood which remain obscure by this framing. Themes should not have overshadowed chronology, as significant trajectories of evolving imagination are clarified by these essays and deserved highlighting. Refigured temporally, for this consideration of them, the sequence of essays range through the imaginative 19th century world of court literature, especially the Centhini and Gatholoco, the awakening of Soetomo's national consciousness, transition to "Indonesian" language, kejawen (Javanist) resonances underpinning Sukarno's notions of power and the colonial roots of the New Order state. Finally essays on the politics of language and social communications delve into contemporary consciousness.
In probing an early 19th century "classic", the Serat Centhini, Anderson notes the absence of reference in it to prominent background realities, including Dutch presence and the ravages of war. Following Ann Kumar Anderson relates this massive project, which he notes has never been printed in full, to the encyclopaedists in France. Refering to Peter Carey's work, on early 19th century Javanese social conditions, he comments on the incapacity of the Javanese nobility to take advantage of disorder as Dutch power grew. Anderson notes that the ruling class is peripheralised in this text and that its authors aimed not to achieve social realism, but to pursue "professional dreams". Though framed as narrative, the text is filled with monotone enumeration, listing spirit beings, medicines, food, technology, sacred sites... indeed anything. To him the text suggests the absence of "heroic spirituality" and universality of pederasty and sodomy in the 19th century. In the least we learn that ways of speaking about sexuality have changed radically since then.
Anderson presents these insights to counterpoint overly romantic images of old Java. Romanticism is a silent opponent in this essay, but implicitly it speaks against stereotyped images which, in his introduction Anderson implies he was captive to in his youth. Here he emphasises that Javanese kingdoms were far from being seamless webs of "esoteric knowledge" and demonstrates that social and material concerns loomed large--even esoteric spiritual skills were deployed for livelihood. This silent target may be a straw man, as it is difficult to imagine who would mount a counter case. At the same time Anderson maintains a problematic distinction in this essay, while discussing conjuring, between "real power" and "real effects". Though this phrasing is doubtless acceptable to most readers, it appears as conjuring itself to this reader.
Moving to discussion of the Serat Gatholoco, Anderson observes that, by the 1860s, the likely time of its composition, earlier syncretism had clearly broken apart. In this text flagrant opposition between the hero, Gatholoco, and various kyai signalled profound disjunction between Javanism and Islam. The hero, an image of the "perfect man", is an undisguised phallus, his partner Dermagandhul a scrotum. Their wandering quest toward union, through what Anderson characterises as a stark imagined moonscape of pesantren, opium dens and sacred sites, depicts a Java stripped of the majestic complexity resonating behind the Centhini. By implication that world had passed. Poetic composition, violence to convention and verbal substance all rubbed against the grain of Javanism so deliberately that, as he suggests, only a master could have produced this classic.
In probing the memoirs of Dr Soetomo Anderson begins with a reference to Ronggowarsito, styled "last" of the pujangga, whose poetry imaged courtly decay. Soetomo, though a guiding light of Budi Utomo, the "first" nationalist movement, hardly mentions political life and wrote with a melancholy tone containing, as Anderson reads it, no sense of progress. Soetomo's sense of justice, in response to his treatment in Dutch schools stemmed from Javanese values animating him in youth. Anderson's treatment of how copying was viewed by Javanese and of nuances of the shift to Indonesian is marvellous. Despite traditional learning, Soetomo did not think of modernisation as imitating. Situating Budi Utomo as pivotal, looking forward as much as backward, Anderson says Soetomo's bequest was that he refound his ancestry in a new form.
In treating the languages of politics Anderson outlines how transitions between languages meant entry to new imaginative worlds, each characterised by distinct constraints. Beginning with the significance of krama and ngoko in Javanese, he explains the pressure to learn Dutch in the colonial context. Contrasting Javanese and Indonesian, he also notes that Indonesian became Javanised through the evolution of hierarchical levels in what began as "revolutionary Malay". Though updated from the original of 1966, this essay still imputes flatness to Islam, a view which is no longer apt. On the other hand this description of how words with meanings dissolved into mantric acronyms is evocative and still relevant, as is outlining of how local uses, of terms such as revolution, democracy and socialism, indigenised them. This essay does not make enough of the fact that Javanese is poly-vocal in itself, through the elaboration of its speech levels. This feature of the language implies that shifts into Indonesian (for that matter into Dutch or English) result in the addition of new levels as supplements to rather than always sharp breaks from indigenous discourses.
The leading essay in the volume, on "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture", is unquestionably the most influential of Anderson's works. Here he argues the momentum and interpretive relevance of indigenous imageries of "power" (kasekten). They are cosmologically rooted and mystical, presenting power as substantive rather than abstract, as an attribute of personhood rather than just a reflection of social positioning. To make the case he probes not only ideology, which he does treat in depth, but also concrete patronage patterns and complex internal politics of the Sukarno era. He certainly establishes that an indigenous logic, one also evident elsewhere in theories of divine kingship, remains a key to grasping social practices in Java.
Even in Anderson's formulation of the ideal within this essay there are limits, especially as he presented the Javanese notion of power as being essentially "amoral". For Javanese their ideas of power were never so divorced from morality. The teja, proof of power, was tested and moral judgements, of the type Anderson elsewhere applies to Suharto, are and were made within this framework too. Anderson does not properly pinpoint the ethics underlying the notion of halus, refined, personhood. Absence of pamrih, of concealed self interest as he puts it, is related in local mystical practices to the "selflessness" implicit in higher spiritual consciousness.
In their consideration of Anderson's essay, Koentjaraningrat and Soemarsaid Moertono both stress the necessity of practically siting Javanese theories. Koentjaraningrat argues that Anderson isolated the concept of power too much from the field of social practices; Moertono faults Anderson for failing to link the notion sufficiently to mystical conceptions and practices which are alluded to within kraton literature. Anderson does tie his vision of Javanese ideas of power to lineages of protest, as he registers the critical potential they contain. However he does not emphasise how such critiques relate to morality. In mystical terms powerful people act through conscious attunement to the collective, ideally as a vehicle for cosmic forces rather than personal will. Anderson cannot quite imagine that a ruler's connection to the will of others may be direct, so he does not register that Javanese once did.
Most western criticisms of this thesis take a different tack, faulting it for seeming to "explain" material issues ideologically. For example, in relation to how notions of power underpin "corruption" we need to site patrimonialism materially. Insofar as the pattern continues it is not only related to notions of power, but to realities of "income" dictated by exchange rather than monetised economies. In rationalised economies jobs are not just retainers, salary may equal income. However, since in Java, even now, "salary" rarely means (sufficient) income, continuing exchange is forced. Discontent usually relates to readings of the essay as idealistic, as claiming to "explain" society and politics exclusively in cultural terms. It is sufficient here to indicate that these debates arise from an imagined dualism, a reification of "material" and "ideological" domains. That polarity, as foundational to modern thought as "God" is to tradition, is no less problematic.
In his reconsideration of the issues, a late addenda to the essay, Anderson situates the notion of "charisma" historically. Interrogating Weber's use of it, as a sociological category, he now follows White in registering it as a "trope". In the end Anderson notes ironically that the devastating consequences of "charisma" are underpinned by the very rational technology Weber counterpointed it to. This inversion may implicitly constitute a warning, one Anderson does not note: that opposition to or obliviousness of this conjunction, may make us all the more subject to its dynamic. This discussion, increasingly abstract, runs the risk of situating concepts only inside other trains of thought, never as though also occurring in heads.
Whereas in the power essay Anderson focussed on links between Guided Democracy and the idioms of syncretic Mataram, in "Old State, New Society" focus is on the growth of the power of the state within society. This traces the emergence of the modern state during the past century. Situating independent Indonesia as "modern" the essay establishes that the nation is especially indebted to its immediate predecessor, the colonial state. Especially highlighting details of Suharto's career within military intelligence, in the succession of Dutch, Japanese and Indonesian states, Anderson indicates why "...the consistent leitmotiv of New Order governance has been the strengthening of the state qua state."
The essay is sewn with insight. For example he indicates that the American decision to side with the army, in 1965, was based on the view that it constituted a necessary integrating device. Sukarno had managed to pronounce the existence of the state, but its maintenance required reactivation of military underpinings such as had been essential within the Dutch framework earlier. Two decades ago Anderson drew special attention to two aspects of military systems in the third world: they gain power because within them tight chains of command master modern communications and because they constitute a prime vehicle for upward social mobility for the lower classes. This social function of the military has not been stressed in his writing, perhaps suggesting decreasing concern with local appropriative agency.
Questioning, in sembah-sumpah, why prominent Javanese, like Pramoedya, write in Indonesian, despite the richness and depth of their own tradition, Anderson finds a variety of explanations. He notes conditioning influences including the currency of Indonesian and the weight of an elite tradition so great that authors have been reluctant to face it. As Javanese literature was sung, he suggests it was not suitable for print. At the same time the "problem of pronouns", especially the absence of a generalised "you", makes it difficult to voice modern sensibilities in Javanese. One response lay in attempts to elevate ngoko, everyday Javanese, but these did not lead on. Beautiful discussions, of Poerbatjaraka picking up Ronggowarsito's mantle in Dutch, of silent Javanese within Pramoedya's Indonesian and of Yudistira's wayang intertextuality, all demonstrate the continuing, but "invisible presence of Javanese".
In speaking of the "impotence" of 19th century rulers, a refrain in these essays, Anderson, quoting a Dutchman, implies that potency is located only in material controls, as westerners habitually imagine. This paradigm slip conflates power with politics, ironically ignoring the very cultural potency of language he treats so well. His imagery, of fossilisation, similar to that stressed in earlier studies of Javanese literature, is tied to focus on the courts and at odds with the vigour of Javanism on other fronts. Javanese newspapers are referred to, but not situated as the counterweight to declining classics they may have been. Non use of classics and the absence of anti Dutch literature may alternatively mean those were no longer focal domains, that vitality centred elsewhere. Perhaps the real issue of local contest after the Java War was Islam, the "unswallowed lump", and not the pre-determined question of Dutch power.
Other kinds of writing and cultural expression, beyond the courts, are not sufficiently acknowledged in this framing of Javanese trends. Anderson implicitly maintains classist orientations: his images of "decline" are consistently in relation to "high traditions" and court power. Thus this essay, produced twelve years after the power essay, reverses its perspective. The earlier essay argued that the power of court idioms extends into the present; this argues their weakness even in the past. A centrist perspective is maintained in both essays as focus is implicitly on the necessity of opposition, as though preoccupation with and direct resistance to Dutch power is required to indicate local agency. Local power has been consistently evident through capacity to construct discourses outside and apart from the issues of subordination Anderson is preoccupied with, but in his eyes such expressions can only appear as powerlessness. Ironically it is precisely Anderson's interest in opposition that produces narratives which are directed by the same central lineages of power he ostensibly wants to elude.
Issues of krama and ngoko arise again when Anderson alludes to the difficulty of grasping recent codes. Following his 1972 glimpse of the New Order, he explores the language and cartoons of the Jakarta press. He notes that foreigners may grasp formal speech, the equivalent of krama, but miss innuendoes locals see. He styles the cartoonist Hidayat as Petruk, a clown/ commoner/ servant in the wayang, but elsewhere stresses discontinuities. Sarcasm tinges his references to constructs of this regime. Even when apt this shift in register, relative to his perspectives on Sukarno, merits comment. Anderson implies that Sukarno had something "real" to return to and Suharto has nothing to celebrate. This view is problematic.
New Order consolidation, of a framework only sketched by Sukarno, comes with military control at the expense of populist impulses. Overshadowing distaste for that aspect of the regime should not lead to neglect of continuities. Yet Anderson concludes "there are no kings, only Petruk", ignoring the rules he himself has outlined. According to those there is no doubt that Suharto, whether approved or not, has substantive wahyu in Javanese terms, as well as all that "real power" means in the west. This is not just an imagined or hollow claim. The monuments of the New Order, Project Mini or Suharto's grave, may appear only as pastiche to some, inside as well as outside the country. But in any case centralising powers are not alone in these endeavours. The creative impulse underlying this style is cultural, part of a shared field which tinges the whole spectrum of social and political positions in Java.
Anderson's reading is a sign of distance from the scene, as his empathy recently lies only with opposition. However the "old" idea of power should not be read only as mimicry just because moral evaluations of its use changes. Anderson's ambivalence stems from a confusion between moral judgments and interpretive frameworks. His angst arises over how, retrospectively, to integrate his wonderful sensitivity to Javanese cultural domains, once intuitively closer, with widening and critical global perspectives on a now distant place. At root the problem may stem from training in theories which set those in opposition unnecessarily.
Evolving consumption communities
Hefner frames Tengger transformations by stages of integration into wider markets and in his book the partnership of ethnography and history bears fine fruit. The wider scope of Hefner's overall project requires note. His first book, Hindu Javanese, treats the anthropology of religion; this one focusses on agricultural economy; and currently he is pursuing religious history, specifically Islamization, an interest foreshadowed in essays. In Hefner's introduction to this book he focuses on Marxist theory to set a stage for consideration of social changes in Tengger. From this stage his analysis of local history is that early development was mercantile rather than capitalist in the narrow sense. For Karl Marx free labour was essential to the latter, so Hefner concludes that Max Weber's sense of early, rather than modern, capitalism more fully illuminates the Javanese case.
At the dawn of the colonial era upland land holdings were small and undifferentiated, there was room to expand. Only in the lowlands did colonial interest, in organising extraction of surplus, lead to special support for communal structures and distinction between classes within villages. Land has became more concentrated recently, but in the highlands discrepancies in farm size remain less than in the lowlands and neither sharecropping nor rental are common. Bengkok lands, village land given to officials, are apparently insignificant in the highlands relative to the lowlands. A coffee revolution occurred, opening highland markets between 1860-1925 and tourism began in Tosari region in the 1920s. The potato blight of the 1930s had more pervasive impact in the mountains than the Depression. On the other hand the Japanese Occupation had devastating impact in the highlands, as tegal (dry field) cultivation was dependent on market economies and less subsistence oriented than sawah.
Along the way Hefner's study provides a rare glimpse into local dynamics during the 1965 coup and the suppression of debate since. He notes multiple causes of violence. Communist Party (PKI) strength was greatest in relatively cosmopolitan upland communities. Information on the Nahdatul Ulama (NU) leads to stress on religious rather than class sources of tension. In opening up a Nationalist Party (PNI) "land scam" he provides a gem of social history. Finally he touches local depths of the event by describing the incidence of mass spirit possession in Ngadiwono, a response to the killing of about forty cadres. He says this marked the "...end of an upland way of life" and comments that subsequent bureaucratic controls impose a struggle over "what sort of person to be".
Javanist or Hindu highlanders felt little identity with Pasuruan lowlanders, as the latter usually identified with Islamic patrons. Accepting Tenggerese self characterisation, Hefner holds that the highlands have been "middle peasant" territory, with haves and have nots but no unbridgeable gap between. He quotes a "poor peasant" saying:
Mountain people care less about rank and whether one becomes rich. What counts is to have something of your own, so you don't have to depend on other's and be ordered around. you want to be able to speak directly and look others right in the face.
Local objectives traditionally focussed on communal standing and autonomy, not identification with class. Mountain farmers continue, he says, to think their identity is tied to independent production and they cite the prevalence of gotong royong to distinguish themselves from lowlanders.
By the late 1970s new roads, bringing pesticides and the crops of the green revolution, brought excitement; people felt they did not have to remain poor. Hefner stresses local initiatives in the process, as farmers adopted a new cabbage strain from India in 1969 and pesticides in the early 1970's unprompted. By 1975 most farmers in Tosari and Ngadiwono had shifted from maize to rotating potatoes and cabbages. In early 1978 only one farmer used chemicals; ten months later one third did; by 1980 all did, in a survey of 142 households. Startup costs for crops such as coffee or cloves have been expensive, mainly a mid-slope development and dependent labour is an engine underpinning the green revolution, so these changes have accentuated class lines. However Tengger employers and workers alike stress personal relations, as even workers still insist they labour for kindness as well as wages.
Due to the lesser resilience of the highlands in contrast with sawah areas, highland history has been one of "ongoing ecological crisis" and new practices brought decreasing sensitivity to the land. Mound planting created deep downhill channels, setting a stage for mud slides and soil degradation. As Hefner puts it:
In a region once legendary for its rich, thick volcanic soil, bare rock and hard yellow clay are visible on steeply inclined fields. After rain showers, streams run thick with topsoil and roar down the mountainside, taking silt to irrigation channels and offshore reefs. What is happening to these hillside fields is nothing less than an environmental disaster... Farmers are well aware of the problem... The short term interests of production again run contrary to those of soil preservation.
With potatoes, triple cropping, deeper hoeing and shorter plant cover all combined to exacerbate problems which remained restricted under the old regime of maize.
Arguing that goods are both "practical" and "culturally expressive" he explores the '"anthropology of consumption". The consumerism of lowland culture brought national currents. In the late 1970s men began wearing watches, regardless of whether they could tell time. Class has been accentuated, through education and new elite aspirations channelled by schools. Ritual selametan used to be the prime channel for a conspicuous consumption which was contained within moral communities. Recently TVs have restructured entertainment. Once rare and semi public, they are now general and private. Now, "rather than suburban anonymity, the Javanese village today has... the feel of a well-disciplined high school."
Early chapters are enriched by excellent culling of secondary sources, but his detailing of local history could have drawn more on oral sources. Excellent treatment of the PNI land scandal is not contextualised by the aksi sepihak, unilateral seizures of land in the early 1960s which highlighted the extent of PNI and NU land holdings generally. Similar processes of local integration, though documented elsewhere, are not brought into view. The Tenggerese, like other once isolated communities, are only now being fully integrated into the state. In this instance Hefner argues the process is attended by vigorous Islamisation, essentially on hold from 1940 to 1970 but revived since with increasing force.
In commenting on his field interactions Hefner notes that by 1985 informants were very much more open, in relation to the events of 1965, than they had been in 1979. His appendix is a balanced statement of his relationship to informants and detailing of the material collected. However more information comes into the text from survey questionaires than from in depth interviews. He refers to Margo Lyon and Rex Mortimer, but does not draw from them for perspective on processes elsewhere in Java. More effort on that front would have helped frame his detailing of events on the road between Tosari and Pasuruan.
Joel Kahn's work on Sumatra is the most significant non Javanese material used and Hefner does not refer to Michael Dove's work on swidden. This may betray a resistance to translating his "mountain versus lowland" axis into the idiom of sawah and ladang (swidden), so altitude overrides ecosystem as his dominant frame. While he refers to works by James Scott and Jan Bremen, on Malay and Javanese peasant resistance, it is usually to enlist them to his cause and rarely to probe details they present. On the other hand, he draws on Michael Peletz to make good substantive comparisons in relation to marriage patterns.
In contrast with his first book, written almost as though only Geertz had previously written an ethnography of Java, in this book Hefner's grounding in relevant literature is excellent. Yet he speaks of mountains without reference to parallel developments around neighbouring Pujon or Jember, on the Dieng Plateau or slopes of Lawu in Central Java, or among the Sundanese or Badui in West Java. Here "mountain Java" means Tengger. Thus Hefner, while endorsing Jay's admonition that we must break apart "the Javanese", globalises himself; his title should read "Political Economy in (not 'of') Mountain Java".
Rebounds of scholarship
The power of texts is as evident in scholarship as in the communities we access through it; images mould apprehension. In counterpointing Ward Keeler's book, Javanese Shadow Puppets, with observation of performances, American undergraduates in Malang ironically concluded they had not seen a "real" wayang kulit. They viewed three wayang performances. However at Gunung Kawi both shadows and the human audience appeared peripheral; at Candi Ceto a village bersih desa performance occurred at midday; and in Malang Enam Suroto, the famous Solonese dalang, joined with the mayor and his brother in one performance--there were three dalang and three kelir (screens) at once. That none of these instances matched standard images is not surprising, but the thrust of their conclusions remains instructive.
Anderson once commented ruefully on the independent life of his essay on power. He is conscious of its use to justify an orthodoxy he does not approve. His text was translated into Indonesian and mimeographed in both Jakarta and Yogyakarta in the late 1970s. Subsequently a translation has been included in M Budiardjo's edited collection. However Indonesian translations have not included the allusions Anderson made to continuities between Guided Democracy and the New Order. As with Geertz's work, Anderson's has became a university "text", a basis for Javanese imagination of themselves. Certainly a disturbing number of Javanese books about Javanese ideology appeal to writings by westerners for inspiration.
At times scholarly production impinges even more directly. One Malang informant recently suggested that the strength of Muhammadiyah in Pare, the site of Geertz's research three decades ago, was due to lessons its members there learned from him. Hefner now researches the ongoing Islamisation of Java; meanwhile Sutrisno, his intimate associate, lives in Ranupani as an agent of Islamisation in Tengger. Sutrisno simultaneously now assists a student of Hefner's who is carrying out research in the mountains between Malang and Pare. My exploration of meditation practices in Solo, in the early 1970s, opened a door to others and two decades on, while a local generation has passed, that scenario scarcely resembles what I encountered. The rebounds of scholarly activity echoe in several directions simultaneously.
Anderson's introductory comments display special sensitivity. They touch his entry to the field, his experience of Java in the early 1960s, and the theoretical frameworks he has engaged since. Biography helps explain evolving perspective. Barred from visiting Indonesia, he entered progressively wider intellectual spheres during the course of producing essays between 1966 and 1989. Since the inception of the New Order, with the prominence given to his analysis of the coup, he has been a nagging critic of it. First, driven by concern for prisoners held without trial, Anderson became active on human rights issues, subsequently he has voiced vigorous opposition to American support for Indonesia's takeover of East Timor.
Anderson is institutionally as well as intellectually a linchpin within the key centre of American Indonesian studies. As Kahin's student he was rooted in grounded empirical work, Cornell's early trademark. But Anderson has actively tracked wider currents and took a lead in bridging between Indonesian studies and new cultural theories. At the same time he maintained extraordinary, considering the bar on visits, contact with Indonesia through continuing exchanges between Ithaca and the critical Indonesian elite. However the specificity of this connection, conditioning both Cornell studies and Indonesian images of them, bears note. Cornell facilitates conjunction between research, publication and employment, it is a patronage centre of Indonesian studies, so Anderson's prominent voice is amplified through that nexus. The Javanese theory of power could be deployed to unravel this nexus, a rebound which has been insufficiently considered.
Whatever ambivalence he may now feel, the power essay has been far and away the most influential of his works. His thesis, published as Java in a Time of Revolution, mainly reached historians of Indonesia. On the other hand the power essay inspired a crop of theses, several of which evolved into important books, including Keeler's Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves and Errington's Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. That essay also became one of only a few works on Indonesia, beyond those by Geertz, to draw note from wider scholarship. Until Anderson's Imagined Communities came out in 1983 it remained the most widely noted of his many works.
In Indonesia several books have focussed on or borrowed from Anderson's power thesis. Essays on the theme, collected by Miriam Budihardjo in Aneka Pemikiran tentang Kuasa dan Wibawa, include contributions by Koentjaraningrat, doyen of Indonesian ethnography, and Soemarsaid Moertono, whose monograph underlay Anderson's initial formulation. Other books, Fachry Ali's Refleksi Paham "Kekuasaan Jawa" dalam Indonesia Modern and Moedjanto's The Concept of Power in Javanese Culture, obviously take their lead from Anderson. Vedi Hadiz has summarised and critiqued Anderson's corpus in an extended assessment, Politik, Budaya dan Perubahan Sosial. He also notes ironically that Anderson, an outstanding student of the New Order, experienced Indonesia deeply only prior to it.
Other ironies abound. Anderson, positioned as radical by the New Order, is read by western theorists as conservative. Because his articulation of Javanese theory was so clear, it is seen as validating absolutism and dubbed "essentialist", due to what is read (incorrectly I believe) as stress on cultural explanation. In counterpoint Robison's book, Indonesia: the Rise of Capital, generated a stir in Indonesia because it contained material, earlier used by David Jenkins in a Sydney Morning Herald article, which disrupted Australian Indonesian relations. Robison, theoretically on the left, provides the sort of information businesses want and, insofar as he is disliked by Indonesian authorities, it is, in accord with Anderson's thesis, due to his exposure of its pamrih.
Because Anderson's works move progressively toward constructionist views over time, he feeds the impression he has 'recanted' from earlier 'idealism'. But the synchronicity between shifts in Anderson's career trajectory, his political sympathies and his interpretive values deserve probing. Continuing contacts would have conditioned perception, making the texture of ongoing and ordinary Indonesian lives accessible. As it is the romance of Sukarno's years, when populist hopes surged, remains his most vivid experiential image.
When projected back his grasp of that vitality fed insights on the revolution. Without renewal, and when this gradually fading intimacy is projected forward, it breeds discontent, as the trajectories of the revolutionary generation hardly match honeymoon hopes. Anderson's earlier works drew most on inspiration from the field; with time sources become increasingly textual and analysis slides from emphasis on the emic to the etic, from focus on local meanings to their global frames. The closer to the present his writing proceeds, the farther back his focus goes in time. Simultaneously distance, from his sources and lived experience of the place, increases. Despite the ambivalence generated by these vectors, with each step of his trajectory a master drives us deeper into Javanese imaginations.
Working along this vein he becomes progressively more convinced that the Javanism he once knew never was. Now he argues that even court poets, those he had imagined as its vessels, pronounced kejawen dead in their time. In an unpublished work he comments: "Both the Netherlands and Indonesia are equally parts of a world history in the continuous making. In this sense both "Europe-" and "Indonesia-" centric perspectives are, it seems to me, either misleading or beside the point." Apparently he wonders whether attempt to imagine local tradition is misguided, whether to erase the image he had grasped as living Javanism. Meanwhile Indonesian realities and Javanese experiences may have changed even more than Anderson's view of them during the same decades.
Time warps and social visions
Hefner's books, which should be read in tandem, negotiate religious and economic ground simultaneously and without the theoretical trauma Anderson has in trying to reconcile those. Partly this may be because he is less politically engaged, but I believe it also reflects a shift of generation. Hefner moves with an assurance which is far from naive to chronicle transformations of local tradition and sits, more easily than Anderson, with what Indonesia is becoming. Where Anderson caught the last enthusiasms of populist revolution; Hefner arrived in the highlands as the waves of Suharto's guided capitalism reached flood, finally taking in the once distant Tengger zone. In 1979 he could glimpse residues of isolated life, but he caught them in the moment of their most dramatic transition.
Even within the period between his initial research and the present changes have been astounding in the Tengger region. In this book, based on research in the mid 1980s, tourism is a distinctly peripheral phenomenon. This may be because Hefner's deepest probing occurred along the route between Pasuruan and Tosari and less around Ngadisari, where tourism has been more prominent. Now, in any event, the influx of outsiders into the region, not just international tourists, but local tourists, Madurese and lowland Javanese, has accelerated dramatically. With this the textures of local social life, including the religious shifts his current research pursues, shift on an ever steeper curve.
In his first book, Hindu Javanese, Hefner focussed on the then consuming and contentious shift from Tengger adat, a version of ancestral Javanism centring on punden shrines, folk Hinduism and distinctive local priestly liturgy, to the New Order and reformation styled Hinduism of the Balinese flavoured Parisada Hindu Dharma, now the "officially" sanctioned version of that "religion". Then the latter seemed dynamic. Now Parisada pura, temples, certainly are prominent. They are decorated with imported Balinese carvings and mimic mosques by electrically amplifying Hindu prayer. The new temples, only sometimes on old sacred sites, overshadow the modest punden shrines of Tengger adat.
But several brief excursions to Tengger during the past year generate the impression that the Hindu reformation movement is already stale. Because it has been translated by the regime into an imposed orthodoxy, this once popular current has lost vitality. At the same time pockets of earlier adat shrink. Conversations with dukun Jamat in Tosari leave him standing out, as though among only a few who still deeply live with the grain of ancient Tengger impulses. In religion, as in economy, overwhelming new currents overtake a world Hefner could still taste at the end of the 1970s.
In the Tengger-wide Kasada Festival of December 1992 local ritual was lost in new frames. The Tenggerese seemed marginal amidst hordes of partying youth, urban Javanese tourists, a sprinkling of foreigners, seeking "authentic" culture, and stalls set up by lowlanders. Even Parisada was marginal to the "real", tourist, event. The primary drama of the all night event came through attempts to keep crowding photographers off the stage of the new pura. A small band of dukun, led by a Parisada authorised priest, were barely visible behind the cameras and spontaneous offerings to Mount Bromo were incidental. The night market festivity of a tent city predominated. During the opening ceremonies at Ngadisari officials from Surabaya dominated. Their speeches highlighted tourist infrastructure and they literally complained that local dukun still set the calendar of events, inconveniencing effort to promote tourism.
Hefner's works have come at exemplary pace; he has produced major books within five years of each extended research visit. Yet time moves so fast even these have been overtaken by events and cannot be read as though simply providing evidence of current practices. All ethnography is subject to the same constraint and must present itself within now extreme warps of time. Several decades ago history and anthropology seemed far apart, tentatively beginning to engage; now they are so enmeshed we cannot approach either independently. Even as social scientists we live in Einstein's universe and can no longer choose to imagine either time or space alone; they are collapsing into one fluid and complex frame. Every discipline must attend increasingly to the sites and frames which shape its vision and ethnographic inquiry becomes historical record within a matter of years.
Some scholars account for changing contexts well. In his Sumatran Politics and Poetics, for instance, John Bowen notes the rapidity of shifts in the narrative style of those whose discourse, only a decade before, he had struggled to grasp. Having registered it, and just as he felt able to articulate it fully, he realised his subjects had moved on. More often scholars ignore such changing realities and new work is positioned as "superceding" what was "wrong" before. Thus a linguist may introduce recent research, on Javanese spoken in the Yogyakarta kraton by suggesting that established scholarly views of speech levels were simply wrong--without considering that the kraton of HB X, her context, is a long way from those detailed in earlier works. No one can speak, though some still do, of static subjects. Anthropology, always implicitly historical documentation, must be positioned, more precisely than is yet conventional, as such.
Both Hefner and Anderson have explored Kejawen (Javanist) worlds "on the wane" and their works produce the impression that this world is virtually dead. As with similar pronouncements about living Amerindians or Aboriginals, such as that "the last Tasmanian" has died, these views are problematic to living subjects. Cultures, everywhere shape changing masters of disguise, live secretly. In modern guise bastardised translation, perversion and simulacra are all that register and in such frames Asian "democracy" may appear primarily parodic, "wrong" in the same way Angkorian rituals may have appeared to be in the eyes of visiting Brahmans. Superseded notions may be pronounced "dead" as those only ever exist in abstract thought. But it is cavalier to slip into believing, as many do, that what was once "imagined" is all that was. Figuratively living people are then buried alive and they will feel pain notwithstanding whether feeling is an issue for interpreters.
No one opened better than Anderson the significance of a generational factor within Indonesian history and his self-consciousness, about his own position, is exemplary. However diagnosis does not free us from disease. In register and tone his version of the present is shadowed by a past he knew and liked better. In early works he showed commitment to discerning impulses hidden from outside eyes; later works, increasingly documentary and historical, produce doubts whether locals views are even an issue. Scholarly generations and theories must be positioned as carefully as revolutionaries, they reflect and find meaning only in their times.
The analytical relevance of the "idea of power", for example, is situational; relevant to some contexts more than others. In the days of Sukarno that theory mattered more than now. Now pragmatic utilitarianism increasingly pervades all systems of power. Captives of the same field, universities change as rapidly as their objects of inquiry. Several decades ago "humanistic ideals" noticeably motivated educational actors and speaking of them had relevance to understanding practice; now "productivity functions" explain more about both institutions and individuals. But such shifts do not make what was pertinent now irrelevant. Shifting attitudes also constitute history, they are integral to the evolution of conscious being, a dimension these two histories especially bring into view. If views of what matters change, that does not mean retroactively that explanatory models are necessarily irrelevant to the past they were sited within.
Scholars question the notion of progress, yet grasp of Indonesia unquestionably deepens: new sources are accessible and richer theory informs reading of them. However conversely intuitive imagination is increasingly insulated, almost hermetically sealed from its field. A habitual reflexivity pulls the carpet from under our feet and we question whether there ever was what once we clearly registered. The lenses modulating vision are as fluid as the environments apprehended, so the past, as other than imaginary shadow, ceases to exist in itself. Unfortunately, with this drift increasing knowledge of it has decreasing relevance to readings of the present.
Time warps within the trajectory of a life. Age widens the span of memory as a base for imagination. As multiples of fifty years replace decades, the widening frame brings the distant past closer. It warps with pace as well. Now in decades we see changes which once threaded through centuries. Tuned increasingly to a collapsing time, the object of gaze recedes as we imagine, grasp and construct narratives of it. Time, far from being a static vector, is now so compressed that in the years required to articulate insight the subjects alluded to are changed beyond belief. Emboldened by this recognition interpretive views should be synchronised with time to validate and extend, rather than erase, imagination of what once was known.
New: 24 October, 2021 | Now: 24 October, 2021
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/paulstange/chronicles.html. The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.