People/paulstange/voices/8.html

Ancestral Voices in Island Asia

by Paul Stange

chapter seven
RESONANCES IN THE PRESENT

Time no longer appears as a constant as we near the present. It accelerates on the same dramatic curve as technological innovation or population growth and thus recent changes do not seem incremental, as they do in vision of early history. Overview perspective is also naturally easier to attain for early and distant appropriations of religion, writing, or organization. Insofar as we can achieve such perspective on the present it marks a distinct phase of evolution, a change more profound than the emergence of states and made more dramatic by the compression of time. With high colonialism industrial capitalism and globalisation begin to mark local process; undercurrents of indigenous voice become less obvious as political-economic realities dominate increasingly. At the same time even in the contemporary context foregrounding of cultural and religious history highlights local volition more than social history.
As early societies adapted writing people now produce unique versions of modernity even when pressures of social dislocation and international intervention are intense. Religious changes in this context are not simply a matter of shifting objects of belief or ideology, of altered allegiance to designated organisations or even of changes in the degree to which people are spiritual in orientation. Religion, as we understand increasingly, is a matter of what we experience as real, of how we know truth, indeed whether we can believe there is such a thing and equally how our ways of knowing influence our interactions. Mediation through industrial technology at once enlarges and constrains access to what people of our era may know or believe as real--with new media the relationship between experience, cultural structures and social life is changed.
Change has been channeled through metropoles which exemplify the trends they mediate. In premodern capitals, such as Mandalay, Chieng Mai, Surakarta or Klungkung traditional arts and ethos may be maintained as a residue, but these centres are like the eye of a cyclone. New capital cities provide the paradigm for wider changes and their early centres were superceded by expansion in the late colonial period. Each has been transformed repeatedly. The bursts of construction in the 1950s seemed dramatic then but appear hesitant in retrospect. Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta saw such profound expansion in the 1970s and 1980s that their origins have been overwhelmed. Where there were canals and tree lined avenues in 1950 we see cement in Bangkok; skyscrappers and multilaned highways reshape Jakarta so that suburbs like Kebayoran, created in the 1950s, are unrecognisable. Though restructuring is concentrated in these metropoles it reaches from them to reshape the ambiance of hinterlands; changes at the centre signal the depth and pace of wider transformation.
Radio and TV do not produce only western syles of culture. Imported patterns intrude through these media, but even modern art forms--films, TV programs and music--also carry creative local cultures. Postwar governments have been sensitive to westernisation and, especially in early decades of independence, restrict media culture. Initially local contributions through modern media may have been stronger than they now are. The new media have been a vehicle to convey traditional arts, making people aware of diverse styles within their country as well as producing homogeneity. In many areas traditional music is more prominent through radio and still fills the atmosphere of local nights.

secularism, revivalism, syncretism and magical undercurrents
Every transformation in Southeast Asia has been attended by changes in religion, most pioneered by emissaries of new faiths. While most people still pursue folk traditions, syncretic religion or other styles of religion formed in earlier periods, distinctive new currents of postwar religious practice are now products of electronic as well as print media. Extending from urban areas, and reflecting the outlook of those educated in print textuality we can identify many variants of scriptural modernism. Generally arguing at once for adjustment to modernity and return to original canons, these rationalising reformists emerged within every community as well as sometimes reflecting the activity of missions from beyond the region. However there can be little doubt that pragmatic utilitarianism is the most powerful missionary force in the region today. It vies with equally militant literalisms in both Muslim and Christian idiom and these latter styles of conviction are, like secularism, distinctive products of the post industrial era.
The emergence of secularism within the urban middle classes and among industrial workers and itinerant traders has been significant. For the first time in regional history there is a vigorously growing sphere of agnosticism. However even in radically modern frames traditional practices are reformed rather than dropped--factory women in Kuala Lumpur still experience spirit possession. Modernity appears to streamline beliefs even if not leading to secularisation. Changes are not confined to shifts of membership from one religion to another, or from being religious to becoming agnostic or atheistic. Such shifts are significant and allegiances have been fluid, but at the same time notable internal transformations have occurred within every community of belief. The breakdown of communal structures has brought a variety of responses: fundamental revivalisms, purism and internal conversion are especially apparent in the Islamic sphere but have analogues in every community. The groundswell of revivalist religion undercuts the assumptions of many, within and beyond the region, who assumed that modernisation and urban life would decrease the role of religion. Though the nexus between cultural and spiritual life has weakened overall this has led more to restructured belief than to secular disbelief.

Islamic modernism has not been just a new wave of old styled revivalist purism. Nationalism went hand in hand with renewal of religion and since independence Malay ethnicity, for instance, has been identified increasingly with Islam, adding force to purism and influencing the complexion of practices on the ground. In one sense recent trends simply continue the longstanding process of 'masuk Melayu', becoming Malay. Whether in Kalimantan or Malaysia as minority groups came increasingly into contact with urban currents they adopted Malay-Indonesian language and Islam simultaneously. Modern movements in this respect extend a longstanding pattern, if now usually combined with direct movement to purist forms of Islam. Islamisation has been a continuing process but it has also involved continual reformulation of what constitutes Islam in local practice.
In Malaysia the dakwah movements are less concerned with external missionising than with internal conversion. Notable groups include Darul Arqam, centring on a commune near Kuala Lumpur; Jemaat Tabligh, an international movement originating in India; and, most importantly, ABIM. Like Muhammadiyah in Indonesia or the Dhammayut sect in Thailand, the Darul Arqam has power beyond its numbers due to tight organisation and the high profile of its schools and clinics, in both drawing from traditional practices. Jemaat Tabligh came to the peninsula in the 1950s and exists throughout the country, but with little formal organisation. ABIM, the Muslim Youth League of Malaysia, was founded in 1971 and has a membership over 35,000. It sponsors rallies, is organised throughout the school and university systems and has been strongly connected with international revivalism in Iran and the Arab Middle East, raising consciousness of those areas locally. Its young and well educated membership, under the leadership of Anwar Ibrahim, continues to emphasise internal purification. In new waves of purification and intensification modern media produce increasingly stark postmodern variants of Islam, they are not simply continuations of prewar modernism.
In Malaysia during the 1970s and 1980s explicit and publicly indicated adherence to Islamic practices was on the upswing in the Malay community and, while conflation of Malay ethnic and Muslim religious identity has been longstanding, it is only recently this has been constantly invoced. Muslim holidays have become definitively national, civil servants dress conservatively, moving away from British conventions, and religious issues converge with ethnic conflict to an uncomfortable degree. As Malays moved into urban environments, facilitated by patronage through the bureaucracy and movement into factory labour and away from farms, they confronted Chinese domination of the economy and conflict with western values directly. This sharpened, rather than blurred, adherence to purist versions of local value. Local movements were powerfully influenced by post oil boom increase in self confidence throughout the Islamic world which also increased local interaction with world wide Islamic rejection of philosophical baggage which goes hand in hand with westernisation. The strength of economies throughout the Islamic world provided an underpinning for revival which extends to include intellectual movements, Said among them, which are among the strongest sources of challenge to western theorising.

Indonesian dakwah movements increased in strength from the early 1970s. The government promoted renewal and reemphasis on Islam in spite of itself, as significant elements of national leadership were privately otherwise inclined. Contributions from Suharto's discretionary funds to pesantren and mosque building have been high from the late 1970s and, though intended to neutralize opposition, swung the thrust of government policy toward Islam. The Ministry of Religion, preponderantly Muslim, leads some missionary activities, produces publications, and coordinates legal and educational offices which encourage purism. Government thus ironically has pushed farther than some it is presumably catering to want--all government buildings now have a prayer room to cater to Muslims and the consequence is pressure to use facilities. Muhammadiyah continues to be active through its many schools and hospitals and, while relatively moderate by the standards of many groups, contributes to continuing Islamisation. The Dewan Da'wah Islamiyah Indonesia has been under the leadership of Muhammed Natsir, former Masyumi leader and one time Prime Minister.
The previously apparently conservative Nahdatul Ulama has been reinvigorated since the 1970s and the roots of local Islam have been nourished by cross fertilisation with international education. The most local versions of Islam, previously impermiable to outsiders, who could related better to the modernism of Muhammadiyah, has its own voice. A dynamic new generation of activists, including Abdurahman Wahid and Nurcholish Madjid, products at once of highly charged pesantren and modern western education, present it with a radically new image. Pesantren networks have been revitalised and the tarekats, linked strongly to them earlier, have regained legitimacy. Modernist disdain for mysticism, dominant in the prewar era, once drove those so inclined to distance themselves from Islam to associate with independent and explicitly syncretic movements, but that pressure has been released. Generally since the 1970s the sophistication of Indonesian Islam has increased its sensitivity.
While government has made gestures to neutralise fundamentalism, within the Islamic community dissatisfactions remain strong. There have been few public demonstrations, but incidents which come to the surface attract a great deal of publicity. The Kommando Jihad movement was banned in the late 1970s through association with movements to overthrow the government. In 1978 the Gerakan Pemuda Islam (Islamic Youth Movement) was banned. Libyans were associated with movements in Aceh, in 1981 another group was accused of having support from the Ayatollah Khomeini, a Bandung group commandeered a plane in 1980 and in 1985 the bombing of Borobudur was blamed on Muslim extremists. One indication of the government's attitude is that Libya and Iran have been listed along with Israel and China as among the countries citizens may not enter.
In gaining recognition Indic organisations were pressed into scripturalist styles. The organisations of world religions in Indonesia are modernist and exclusive in structure, emphasising ritual, text, and doctrine rather than mysticism; each community had to redefine itself in scriptural terms. In the late 1960s hundreds of thousand converted to Christianity but at the same time Hindu, Buddhist, and mystical movements were injected with vitality through the same pressures. Conversion to Christianity has been more widespread but some small, previously urban, Buddhist movements also found village followings. Modern Buddhism has roots among Chinese and within priyayi circles which identified with it through the Theosophical Society in the late colonial era, but only in since the 1950s has it reformed on modern lines. Hindus have also experienced reformation. Balinese Hinduism, as folk practice, is complemented by a nationally administered orthodoxy. Hindus were forced to redefine practices during the 1950s and established contact with India in order to gain recognition from the Ministry of Religion. Modernism can even be identified within mystical sects. Some recent movements are defined by revealed texts and their practices, as in the large and well established Pangestu movement for instance, are intellectual rather than meditative, resembling Protestant, Muhammadiyah or Dhammayut in the texture of their practice.

Reformism has appeared in every religious community. Vietnamese Buddhism had been a syncretic blend of spirit beliefs and Confucianism but was reshaped during the 1920s and 1930s. In the most dynamic phase of the postwar period for Buddhists there, a Vietnamese Buddhist Reunification Congress took place, in the week of the New Year of 1964 at Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon. The congress aimed to unite the South's Mahayana and Theravada followers through a new modern structure, but only perhaps a million joined the resulting United Buddhist Association. Six regional groups of monks and two million estimated Theravada followers, mainly from along the Cambodian border, remained unconnected to the federation, and traditional syncretic Buddhism remained strongest at the local level. Movements such as the Arya Samaj, allowing non Indians to convert, have been present in Malaysia. One leading modern Indian teacher with a world wide second generation following, Swami Sivananda, worked as a medical doctor in the Malay peninsula early in this century. Revivals of Vedantic philosophy such as his now complement Tamil trance rituals such as Thaipusam.

Southeast Asia remains a site of encounter between deeply held and widely divergent worldviews. A rich tapestry of ancient traditions is sustained with remarkable force and significant communities derive practices from all of the world faiths in many of their forms. These diverse experiences of reality, shaped by magical animism, esoteric mysticism, traditional piety, scriptural literalism and modern scepticism, intersect routinely in villages, markets and offices. At the same time, because most people still feel their religion is substantive and significant, contention over spiritual convictions is, as we have seen, foregrounded in politics.
Landon stressed that up to World War II imported religions were subordinated to ancestral spirit cults grounded in relatively autonomous villages, that even elites adapted modernity to a worldview shaped by tradition. In the same breath he suggested that the middle of this century marked a turning point, that colonialism and the disruptions of war had definitively shaken the foundations of local life. Most people still live in villages but urban populations have mushroomed. An increasing majority have grown up in a world dominated by modern states rather than ethnicity, by education in schools rather than village ritual religion, and by monetarised economies rather than communal cooperation.
The settled rice farming grandparents of today's Southeast Asians bowed to Indic or Chinese styled royalty even in colonial contexts. Now cosmopolitan white collar workers in glass and concrete office blocks, Javanese transmigrants to Kalimantan or Sulawesi, factory women in Malaysia or Thailand, Visayan street people in Manila or prostitutes from the Northeast in Bangkok can hardly imagine cosmological realities or relate to ultimate meanings in the way their grandparents did. The realms of the gods become distant and their connections with people loosen as miracle rice and chemical fertilisers move in--some even say that only older strains of rice are connected to spirits.

Spirits are also less central to social life, as customary and religious law is being replaced rapidly with rationalised and centrally administered justice. Formerly village heads and councils interpreted custom to resolve disputes, theoretically in an atmosphere guided by sensitivity to local spiritual atmospheres. Religious law though significant, especially in Muslim Malaysia, is also marginalised as decisions are coded by Parliaments and interpreted through bureaucratic representatives down to the village level. The spiritual beliefs and practices which are rooted in regional prehistory are unquestionably now declining.
Everywhere old cultures are at risk and spiritual sensibilities die with them. In extreme cases, as in Pol Pot's Kampuchea, minorities such as the Muslim Chams face genocidal policies. At the same time even the apparently benign intrusions of mass tourism have similar and even wider effect, also jeopardising the identities of what were earlier isolated minorities. Changes are also coming through the ways in which previously distinct communities are being tied together and through shifts in generational, class and gender relations. The radical transitions of mid-century ensured that the generation which came of age during and after World War II has dominated socio-political institutions through most of the region since then and they have set the tones of cultural evolution right into the 1980s through most of the region. Nevertheless the diversity, vitality and depth of religious commitments within Southeast Asia combine so that it remains a rich laboratory for the exploration of religion.
Vibrant ritual enactments embody almost the full spectrum of earlier historical practices, even sacrificial animism remains cohesive in some communities. In Hindu Bali people routinely enter altered states through ritualised trance, as also in Malaysia's annual Thaipusam festival and the jatilan and reok dancing of Java. They touch realms of consciousness, even when performances are televised, remote from people in industrialised societies but common in the widely dispersed ceremonies of primal peoples, such as the Sakkudei of the Mentawi islands. Meditation practices of Javanese syncretic mystics and Theravada forest monasteries counterpoint traditional orthodox Islam and ritual Buddhism even while the latter are balanced by rationalising modernisms. Vigorous reborn Christianity contrasts with centuries old Catholic and Protestant communities and the syncretism of Philippine faith healers.
In village societies the maintenance of traditional beliefs is still associated with continuing agricultural and life cycle rituals. Continuities within ritual life can be remarkable: even in Bali, long innundated by tourism, ritual practices still mirror those of the prewar era. In the Philippines fiestas celebrate not only holy days and national holidays but also harvests and life-cycle events. Patron saints, as elsewhere in the Catholic world, occupy a position similar to that of guardian spirits in other parts of Southeast Asia. Even among Southeast Asia's widespread Chinese migrant population the cohesion of spirit medium cults remains. In Java village life still centres on communal rituals even though they have begun to become expensive to maintain. Financial stresses have not stopped villagers in Kalimantan (Borneo), Bali or Burma from competing to outdo each other in funeral or initiation ceremonies and often these now lead hosts into severe debt. While orthodox Muslims in Indonesia or Malaysia are less likely to overextend in this fashion, some of the same impulse is displaced among them into excesses of giving with Hari Raya, at the end the fast month of Ramadan.
The syncretic traditional religions, notably local versions of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, blended with these undercurrents of local culture and still remain the largest formal communities of believers. Within rural Malay and Indonesian societies traditional syncretic Muslims still far outnumber adherents to the urban based modernisms which extend among them. According to Gourou the central social focus in every village of the Red River Delta was never the Buddhist temple, but the dinh, a house for ritual and communal meetings to harmonise with the deities who were the patron spirits of the village. This housed the major agricultural and other minor rituals. For the populace in general ancestral spirits have continued to appear as unquestionably real. Buddhist monks were usually present but not central to village communities.

The resilience of village beliefs in Vietnam was evident in the 1970s when, even after several decades of communist rule, "...village elders were found to be restoring the old ritual processions to the dinh, the village communal house, whose mystique--and the politics associated with it--had supposedly been transformed and transposed with the downfall of colonialism." Local Vietnamese rituals combine Buddhism and Confucianism with spiritualist seances, and other elements of animism. About ten percent of the population in Southern Vietnam were Catholic in the early 1960s, an estimated 35-40% were considered strong believers in Mahayana Buddhism, the remained were gauged nominal, meaning that they adhered to a mixture of animism, Taoism and Confucianism.
Throughout the village societies of the lowland Theravada Buddhist regions, including the Lao, Burmese, Khmer and Thai, villagers maintain animistic as well as Buddhist beliefs. Students like Spiro have seen animism and Buddhism as though they are separate systems interacting, but most now analysts now concur with Tambiah, who presented them as sub-complexes within one system. Rites oriented toward summoning and ensuring the presence of the "vital essence" of life, leipya in Burmese, khwan in Tai, and pralu'n in Khmer, represent the presence of ongoing animistic conceptions. Respect for village guardian spirits and interest in the sacred power of places and amulets or ritual objects still combine with indigenous systems of astrology, tattoeing and sexual magic and those with systems of merit making, monastic schooling and the doctrine of karma. These are most elaborated in the nat cults of Burma, but everywhere through the region practices of spirit possession and healing which are linked to beliefs in life essence remain powerful at the village level.
Observers of lowland villages uniformly note that the village wat remains the prime socially integrating institution of rural Thai society. Some argue that the boundaries of villages in central Thailand are defined by participation in wat communities. Everywhere participation involves rites associated with agricultural cycles and normative Buddhist celebrations. Village monks commonly involve themselves in labour projects as well as with spiritual or secular teaching. While they may now help build roads or advise local military officers, the religious respect villagers and officials alike demonstrate is still strong. Villagers view monks as a separate class despite the fact that most men have briefly been ordained. The vast majority of Theravada monks still do not teach, or for that matter even practice, meditation and only a minority of urban lay people who have taken it up on a regular basis. At the same time increasing numbers of monks are actively concerned with trying to reconcile their practices with modernising life. Even many of those who may be influenced by aspiration to move upward socially, also show every indication of seriousness in their meditation practices.

For Javanists religious identification has not been an exclusive matter. Among the traditionalist Muslims, those associated with the Nahdatul Ulama, their Islam is woven into involvement with spirit beliefs. These are embedded within the rituals of marriage and the protective ceremonies marking birth. They are also related to patterns of pilgrimage and spiritual quest which urban and village Muslims regularly make to sacred sites, some of those now being the graves of Muslim saints. Even when converting in the modern period they maintain syncretic tendencies. Hinduism, Hindu Dharma in Indonesia, was exclusively Balinese until 1965, when scattered villages, especially in the mountainous regions of East and Central Java, chose to identify themselves as Hindu. In opting for Hinduism or Buddhism, villagers in Java have done so out of conviction that, among the alternatives presented, the Indic religions are closer to the reality of ongoing traditional practices than modernist Islam.
Within the Hindu and Buddhist spheres there have even been rebels who created new organisations rather than joining the increasingly modernist Hindu or Buddhist heirarchies. Javanists preserve versions of the Indic harking back to syncretic Majapahit, to mysticism rather than scriptural modernism. In the 1970s the Surakarta based Sadhar Mapan advanced Javanist Hindu yogic rather than Balinese ritual practice as contained in the mainstream Parisada Hindu Dharma and Kasogatan, a small tantric styled group, also looked to the Majapahit text Sanghyang Kamahayanikan rather than to the purism of many modern Buddhists. In Indonesia even migrant Chinese Buddhism, the only visible Buddhism of the prewar period, has generally been so emphatically syncretic that it was officially called 'Tridharma', meaning the three teachings and referring to Lao-tzu, Confucius and the Buddha. Temples invoked all three while generally emphasising one, at the same time housing spirit medium practices related to folk ancestral cults.

Many tribal and village cultures preserve their commitment to rituals and respect for the spirits of sacred sites. Spiritually linked healing practices remain widespread, as are possession cults and magical undercurrents within urban populations. Ordinary people still use amulets and folk medicines; students visit the graves of grandparents to contact spirits, now perhaps as an aid to success in examinations; and rituals at sacred springs still help others find lovers. In the cities it is clear that even those who participate in the most modern sectors of the economy still actively seek and emply magic whether when dealing with their health or in aiming to increase their wealth. As an undercurrent of local practice interest in magic remains powerful among a large percentage of those associated also with formal religious systems.
At the same time national governments also most actively suppress the most obviously magical and millenarian elements of local religion. They do so partly for ideological reasons, relating to the low status such practices hold within modernising scientism, but also because such movements are instrumentally and power oriented, meaning they can become sources of challenge to those in power. In effect governments favour formalised orthodoxies, which they can manipulate more easily and consistently make attempts to promote superstructures, umbrella associations, even for the mystical movements which are not linked to formal religions. In socialist Vietnam, for example, there has been willingness to compromise with Buddhism, allowing it a central committee and extending to the establishment of a High Level School of Vietnamese Buddhist studies. On the other hand the government is actively hostile to popular millenarianism, which it sees as a throwback to outdated superstitions.
Alongside traditional religions there have been substantial new sectarian movements everywhere in Southeast Asia. These too take new form in the modern era, adopting organisational patterns which characterise other spheres of social life, even while aiming to preserve or reformulate older styles of syncretic and mystical religion. Spontaneous local and unregulated practices, especially those related to healing and growing initially from shamanic cultures, are easy to ignore in focusing on institutionalised syncretic mysticism. The faith healers of the Philippines, blend animism with Catholicism and use imagery of medical operation as a shamanic ploy to facilitate healing, are but one example of a widespread pattern. At the local level everywhere there are innumerable individual practitioners who self consciously work with spiritual powers to heal. These healers and those who seek help from them represent a much larger percentage of local populations than those who join formal organisations.

However the numbers of those involved in syncretic mystical sects have been substantial. In Vietnam the Hoa Hao sect, founded in 1939, claimed a membership of 450,000 in 1964 in the Province of Ang Giang alone and two million overall. It has been essentially a local form of Buddhism, but with emphasis on traditional folk practices rather than the more scriptural style of the Thien (Zen) revivalist monks, who began to gain strength from the 1930s onward. Teachings included not only a strong element of millenarianism but also emphasis on moral reform. In 1966 the Cao Dai, founded in 1925, was estimated to have between one and two million members. It recognised the revelations received by the prophets of all the major world religions, somewhat in the fashion of Ba'hai, presenting them all as vehicles of God's purpose in the world in the past.
In Cao Dai the presence of belief in the one God stands above notions of karma and reincarnation, as is also the case in many Javanese movements. Syncretism , in the context of most of these modern movements, has meant that they have adopted significant new elements of thought, not only from Christianity, but also from modern science, into frameworks which prioritise personal experiential religion. In Burma large numbers of Chin followed a syncretic movement which, like other millenarian movements since the late 19th century, adopted aspects of Christianity. The Pau Chin Hau, can be interpreted as a movement which adopted elements of Christianity as an indigenous democratisation movement which countered both traditional chiefly authority and the intensification of Burmese control.

Lay practices of vipassana, of insight meditation, previously the domain of monks, have been especially prominent in Burma since early in the century and they are represented in the postwar period through teachings such as those of U Ba Kin and Mahasi Sayadaw. The growth of new styles of and the extension of contexts for insight (vipassana) meditation had roots early in the century, but after 1950 was formally encouraged, particularly by state sponsorship of meditation centres. These were recognised in varying grades and then registered and granted subsidies. From an early stage these centres catered to foreign students of Buddhism. Since the 1950s small groups of foreign students have always been present and in this sector Burma has never been completely closed. Within that sphere Mahasi Sayadaw occupies a special place, due especially to the patronage provided to him during the 1950s by the U Nu government.
In Thailand the most internationally known exponent of modern Buddhist mediation has been Bhikkhu Buddhadasa, who has presided over the forest hermitage of Suan Mokh in the South. While doctrinally orthodox and borrowing from Zen he presents a view of Buddhism grounded in this worldly action, relevant not cosmologically as though in some future life, but in terms of its relation to continually evolving living situations, that states of samsara and nirvana are interiorised conditions in the here and now. He set himself early on against the notion that Buddhism was fatalistic and in relation to the teachings of all religions argued for emphasis on practical realisation. In the political context his teachings can be styled a form of Buddhist socialism, one which rejected both communist and capitalist materialisms. He has been able to speak to many of the younger more educated Buddhists who are trying to reconcile their traditional faith with modern civic action.
There have been several other equally significant schools of vipassana practice extending from the sangha to Thai laity and even overseas. In the early 20th century the meditation master Achaan Mun, who spent most of his career in the Northeast of Thailand, revived the longstanding tradition of forest monastic disciplines. His disciples are now scattered throughout the country, having founded their own schools of meditation for both monks and laity. His most noted follower, Achaan Chaa of Wat Pah Pong in Ubon Province, attracted continuous patronage from Bangkok and has sent disciples to establish forest meditation centres in England and Australia.
The prominence of vipassana movements draws our attention to internal and non political aspects of modernising mystical religion. In them we can see that religious styles are self consciously adapted to changing urban lifestyles and modern education. The overall effect of modernising meditative practices is a new strength of emphasis on the possibility of contributing postively through social action by being more tuned and egoless--thus in contemporary Buddhism there is a positive evaluation of social actions. The gap between monk and laity, at least with respect to spiritual practices, is also being reformed and in some respects closed. There can be no doubt that the meditation movements, in and out of the sangha, represent an active repositioning as well as a continuation of commitment to spiritual realisation.

Within Indonesia changes in the relationship between politics and religion have altered the context and internal structures of mysticism. Sukarno's voice had joined others in warnings against black magic, a recurrent issue throughout the 1960s. Recognised movements have had to abjure interest in political power, as only apolitical movements have legitimacy. The modern context of religious plurality, Islamic strength, and secular government pressures Javanists into organisations defined as purely mystical, separating mysticism from the magical and millennial elements to which it was bound by tradition. The term 'kejawen' refers to traditional styles within which spirit relations, magic powers, and millennial expectations were fundamental. Such movements remain as a substratum of popular outlook and cultic movement. At the same time new forms of mysticism have risen out of Javanist orientations.
Repression of millennial movements has been recurrent. In 1967 the Mbah Suro movement was suppressed after it spread rumours of radical change from its centre near Ngawi; in 1968 the Java wide Manunggal movement was outlawed after a public trial. Tens of thousands of members, some highly placed military and civilian officials paid homage to their guru, Romo Semana. The government felt this evoked a competing court, defenders argued that it was ordinary respect for an elder. The government announced it had uncovered an attempted coup in September 1976. It centred on Sawito, who had visited power points and claimed to have been given authority previously held by Semar. He gathered elite signatures to a document criticising the moral fibre of Suharto. Former Vice-President Hatta and national religious leaders, whose signatures appeared on the document, denied having known what was in it, but it was taken seriously. From outside Sawito's threat seemed trivial, but the magnitude of Suharto's response demonstrated vulnerability, special fear of mystical claims that he lacked the wahyu, the divine sanction on which power rests.
Mysticism refers to the inner, spiritual and esoteric dimension within all religion and also to beliefs, practices and movements defined by focus on realisation. There are hundreds of movements. Subagya listed 288 in 1973; an inventory in 1980 registered 160; but there is no definitive listing. Many groups are small, local and ephemeral, some so informal they never merit note. Tarekats, the Sufi movements, are mystical, but because their affiliation with Islam is intrinsic they are not bracketed with independent movements. Several dozen movements have Java wide or genuinely Indonesian membership. These include Pangestu, Subud, Sapta Darma, Ilmu Sejati, Sumarah and Hardopusoro. A few claim memberships over one hundred thousand but most of them have at best several thousand core members.
Such movements existed within the colonial framework but were often secretive. They came into view during the revolutionary fighting of the late 1940s. Then, parallelling the organising process of the 1950s through all sectors of society, major movements adopted formal patterns with elected officers, minutes, conferences and all. This process was in part spontaneous, in part a response to the new demand for records of membership and meetings on the part of government agencies. Members use Javanese in daily life and group meetings, but Indonesian is used for organisational matters. Traditional cults focused on charismatic guru, modern movements have semi-rationalised structures. Leaders are distinguished from spiritual teachers and if the patronage model remains strong in practice theory no longer places it at the heart of organisation.
Organisations adopt the administrative hierarchy common to all national organisations, but growing care in the keeping of membership lists is often mainly to facilitate relations with supervising bodies. In the early 1950s a number of movements argued that they deserved recognition as separate religions, suggesting that in the context of national independence it would be an anomaly if only 'imported' religions received government approval. Sapta Darma, maintained that argument into the 1970s, but most accepted early on that they were unlikely to get recognition as religions because the violent response that would have brought from Muslims precluded it.
Major sects are relatively open in structure and streamlined in practice, esoteric tendencies decline with emphasis on instrumental magic, ancestral spirits, and occult powers. Healing plays a major role in sects such as Subud and Sapto Darmo, but is balanced by emphasis on God's responsiblity for effecting cures. Monotheistic emphasis is reflected in often puritanical distaste for the possession cults characteristic of tradition. Similarly, movements speak of meditation as sujud (surrender) or panembah (prayer) rather than semadi. The Indic resonance of the latter renders it suspect to Islam, which sees semadi as entry into a Godless void because it usually comes without the notion of personalised divinity.
Popular association of mysticism with occultism, no less than analytical association of mystical gnosis with instrumental effects, represent confusion of forms for essence. The major national movements disassociate themselves from occultism, emphasising consciousness of God rather than culturally rooted symbols and spirits. This shift of emphasis is not simply a response to the politicised context of Javanese mysticism. The polarity is rooted within early Indic culture and it also represents penetration of Semitic monotheism into the Javanist world. Javanist tradition prioritised tantric styled identification of consciousness and powers, but also contained Buddhist emphasis on the void as a counter to that. Tantric patterns continue implicitly to have strength in village practices, the danhyang cults, and in movements such as Sadhar Mapan and Manunggal. But the Buddhist tradition and mystical separation of consciousness from any visible effects is also rooted in a tradition extending back over a millennium, one which has dovetailed with modern pressures to produce more exclusive emphasis on consciousness.
Mystical movements in Indonesia are mainly Javanese in origin and composition and see their practices as rooted in ageless indigenous wisdom. The movements are not equivalent to Sufism, which is integrally tied to a 'world religion', but rather to culturally based traditions such as Taoism or Shinto. Sufism and Zen place emphasis on lineages connecting living masters to Mohammed and the Buddha. In Javanism such lineage is denied not just as a counter to Islamic claims that it is derivative, but also as an assertion that religious knowledge comes direct from God, in short assertion that these 'faith' movements are mystical in the fundamental sense of the term.
There has been a clear trajectory within the religious sphere in postwar Southeast Asia and it has been a major area of domestic concern. The dominant trajectory has been that of increasing scripturalism, increasing force to outlooks associated with the west but reflected locally in a range of unique local adaptations. Colonial students of Theravada or of Islam suggested that the Thai or Javanese were not 'really' Buddhist or Muslim. Their view derived from a textual sense of religion and, in the face of animistic practices, they could only see claims to membership in world religions as a facade. The traditional syncretism of Southeast Asians did not mean that they did not belong within the sphere of the world religions they associated with, it meant that the religions themselves were syncretic.
Now everywhere clearer demarcation of religious communities has paralleled the modern establishment of national boundaries mediated initially by colonialism. Syncretic styles of religion had not focused on boundaries, but on courts or monasteries. Those had existed in a hierarchical world conceived as requiring progress through layers of knowledge, guided by apprenticeships analogous to those in other domains of traditional learning, to a mystically conceived centre. Scripturalism redefined individual experience as literal and social identification as exclusive, thus tensions increased, intersecting also in new ways with political process. Buddhists felt their conviction as an element of revolution in Burma and many Muslims held that their revolutions should lead to an Islamic state.
Paradoxically the strength of adherence to exclusivism undermined its realisation in a context crosscut by social and religious pluralism. The nature of tensions between communities was transformed through the growth of the scripturalist community. Scripturalism has meant that religion has been defined in increasingly concrete terms. Scriptures, rituals, and doctrines are definable; the mystical is not. Modern structures have meant that definition and distinction have been of increasing importance. This has highlighted differences and increased tensions by sharpening the lines of contrast. Within the traditional religious world there was a layered cosmos, a hierarchical structure in nature and within consciousness. Indianised states were defined cosmologically by their centres; now states are defined geographically by their borders.
The same shift has taken place within religious communities, as modernity has flattened local senses of spiritual space. Religious communities tend now to be closed and with clear boundaries, not open ended and fluid, boundaries have arisen in precisely the same way that political boundaries have and as a result of the same forces. Even in the new meditation movements boundaries sharpen and earlier styles of mystical, millenarian and syncretic spiritual practice, however strong as a substratum throughout the region, are giving way. These currents are now also counterpointed by vigorous secularism and equally modern fundamentalism. The spirit realms, once central to local maintenance of balanced relations with ancestral culture and the physical environment, now appear to be receeding along with the forests as a developmental world view advances.

Radical though the changes of the postwar period have been, spiritual values and issues remain pervasively and surprisingly prominant. It is instructive, for example, that even in the secular state of Vietnam self conscious appeal to spirituality remains. Vietnamese communist literary critics commented in 1970 on the American Susan Sontag's critique of the Tale of Kieu, their classic poetic novel of the early 1800s. They observed without reservation that she was deeply socialised into the individualistic consciousness of the modern west and unable to grasp the 'limitless richness' of the Vietnamese soul or, with that, the value and emphasis within its culture on communal sharing. Spiritual values can thus appear to remain prominent even within cultures which adhere to what most westerners identify as a materialistic ideology.
New art forms recast the social rituals of everyday life in urban contexts. In them we see both traces of earlier forms and radical steps into new worlds. Peacock's study of the ludruk theatre in the early 1960s, a proletarian drama still popular in parts of Java, if less than it used to be, presented it as a 'rite of modernisation'. The themes and dramatic form invoked for urban vision, in a way that local film production has since taken over, ritual visions of access to material progress. Even the modes of presentation replicated traditional drama, in the nature of concentration displayed by actors, as they virtually unconsciously drew on bodily modes of learning and dance resonating with tradition. Ludruk has taught some urban publics in the postwar era in the same way earlier wayang spoke, and still also speaks, to traditional audiences.
In the development of tourist industries there is an ironic rebound affecting local cultures. Apart from the fact that tourism is itself a powerful instrument of new culture, urban and internationally oriented Southeast Asians are themselves increasingly positioned as tourists in relation to communities who retain what are now packaged, for tourist purposes, as 'indigenous' and authentic culture. In areas particularly geared to tourism, such as Bali or Toraja in Indonesia, production of art is separated in new ways from the ritual context it previously sat within. This has an affect also, however inadvertently nevertheless profound, on those engaged in the artistic productions at issue. They imagine themselves and even become the museumised specimen the commodification of their culture, though packaging of tourism as a national industry, aims to turn them into.
Within elite sectors many people now profess the view that tradition inhibits development. This belief, a common borrowing from scientism, applies most emphatically among modernising medical workers who contest earlier healing practices. Apart from the self confidence evident in radical religious and mystical circles, there is little confidence that western systems of knowledge can be challenged on their own grounds. But even many of those who profess modernity do so strictly in rhetoric. In their public life within modern institutions educated people in the region believe they have to play roles expected by logics modernity represents. Some Indonesian lecturers in psychology or politics thus teach only western theories while remaining privately most motivated by traditional visions. Tambiah argues that commitment to Buddhism has not declined even though expression in organisations, as in numbers in the monkhood, may have dropped. It is most likely that the extent and depth of religiosity has not changed so much as the way it is socially articulated and publicly expressed.
Modernist commitments have implications for experience. Traditions emphasised intuitive aspects of religion; modern styles prioritise the intellectual. Each modernism disentangles what it presents as the essence of religion from ritual, mythic, and intuitive aspects. Education in wat or madrasah was defined by attunement through sacred language and significance lay in the act of chanting, emphasis was on experience as such, not on understanding of or abstraction about it. Within modernism emphasis falls on written words everybody has access to and the defining features of belief are outside and apart from experience--emphasis on rational apprehension is a corollary. As community is defined increasingly through literally seen and logically understand forms, there has been a shift of emphasis from the heart to the head, from the intuition to the intellect. People are now more likely to have faith in religion rather than accepting it implicitly as a system everyone belongs to.

The pervasiveness of concern with spirituality in Southeast Asia remains despite materially directed ideologies from above and social stresses from below. The most significant changes have been not in allegiances, but in the ways symbols mediate access to what Southeast Asians in this era are able to know or believe as real. The most obvious change has been in the nature of adherence to beliefs, in the tendency to hold convictions as ideological systems. In earlier periods people breathed their religion, as an integral and multidimensional part of a given social atmosphere. Within the now more pluralistic world, religions assume increasingly distinct conceptual and institutional forms. In this era of globalisation and encounter no culture or religion, indeed no system of symbols, appears able to claim the exclusive grip it used to. But beyond formal systems and in everyday transactions there are pervasive and subtle ways in which earlier modes of awareness are maintained tacitly. These, along with the surface changes of modern life, still deserve notice if we are to register the cultural world of Southeast Asians today.

silences in Solonese dance production
At Parangritis, south of Yogya, there is a nicely crafted new pendopo on the limestone cliffs at the eastern end of the beach. As the hills ringing this sacred beach were once marked with spirit shrines my first guess on seeing this pavilion was that it was a New Order Javanist monument. There are many conspicuous examples of that genre, including new sites such as Suharto's grave, at Mangateg east of Solo, and reconstructions of old temples like Candi Ceto, on the northern slopes of Lawu. However this complex turned out to be a hotel; it invoked only the spirits which come in tourist bodies; it spoke to the market rather than the land and even its creator was foreign, a Dutchman. Along the road that winds toward Gua Langsih, a cave still spiritually charged enough to draw meditators with assorted (usually material) purposes, two other new pendopos appear. The first, at the peak of the highest cliffs, turns out to be a rest pavilion for the Yogya hang-gliding club; the second, by the side of the road, was described by locals as a performance site catering to tourists. Recent inscriptions on the once sacred landscapes of Java clearly require new paradigms--old codes scarcely inform us of current meanings.
Radical though recent reshaping may be, current cultural creativity does not necessarily arise from secular world views. Interpreters easily conflate 'spirituality' with 'tradition' and position both as belonging to an imaginary past we can never engage directly. When traditional arts are ostensibly central we now tend to read them first as icons of 'nativism', as so thoroughly reworked by advertising that even locals are repositioned as tourists in relation to their own traditions. Focus on contemporary popular practices, on urban contexts and new electronic media, is a welcome corrective to emphasis on 'classical' styles, as those have been the possession of court elites even when present in village practices. But if it leads to suggestion that spirituality, in any event hardly imaginable in recently idioms, has merely fading and residual relevance, then we may be misguided.
In this context my aim is simple and limited: to highlight the presence of local spiritual concerns even within creative, experimental and clearly modern artistic practices. My suggestions will come mainly through notes on the careers of Sardono Kusuma and Suprapto Suryodarma, both Solonese dancers. Both experience movement as outward expression of impulses arising through inner feelings which are a window to the spirit; each self consciously frames practice in these terms. I will also comment on a multicultural meeting which aimed to coordinate the production of what was to be an 'Indonesian' theatrical event. In this instance we notice that in working toward production, as well as in performance, intuitive consciousness is prominent. Each illustration shows the prominence of spirituality within performance, implicates wider Indonesian and international spheres and contains threads which run to the animistic roots of local culture.

The diverse and highly evolved dance traditions of the Javanese express all of the influences which have shaped the culture generally. In villages trance dancing remains widespread. These dances, performed by troupes organised as clubs and associated with the use of a plaited bamboo horse (kuda kepang), are widely dispersed through the archipelago. Legends of the transition from Hinduism to Islam are ostensibly the frame for most such performances but they clearly grow from earlier practices of spirit possession; parallels with the ritual dancing of the Sakuddei of the Mentawi islands or the fire dances of Bali are self-evident. Possession may be through animal spirits, of horses, birds, tigers or bulls, but in any event the spiritual significance of the dance is explicit through ritual context. When a Ponorogo troupe came to Perth in 1991, to cement exchange agreements between Western Australia and its East Javanese sister province, efforts were made to contact local shaman. Apparently when the same group had visited Brisbane they found that local spirits caused trouble and that the leader of the troupe could not control them in the absence of local expertise. In any event in this instance performance was not viewed as mechanical even when displaced radically from its roots and when presented as a government sponsored tourist event. Their subsequent performance, in the open air of Murdoch University's Bush Court, demonstrated a power with considerable tangible impact on the students who witnessed it.
Central Javanese dance is most associated by outsiders with the court (kraton) cultures of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. There dance traditions express senses of self, especially of refinement and meditative balance, such as also still glimmer beneath the surfaces of everyday life on the streets. In these contexts the spiritual resonances of performance have been explicit. Meditative disciplines underpinned dancing, which also carried within it resonances of local martial arts (pencak silat). The framing of presention through stories from the Indian epics always also brought religious overtones close to the surface within each performance. Traditional court dances, such as the renowned bedoyo ketawang, are even more directly magical, as they are framed by ritual invocation of the connections between Solonese rulers and the goddess of the South Sea. The most charged dances were originally performed only for royalty, but gradually distinguished visitors to the courts gained access and now some tourists are admitted even during ceremonial performances. Ritual functions have thus been both reformed and subverted, but even in the attenuated form these rituals now take, a sense of the sacred is still consistently affirmed within the world of kraton practices.
When Sriwedari was founded in Solo in the 1920s, under Sunan Pakubuwana X's sponsorship, it represented a reformulation of court arts for popular consumption, taking what had been court arts into public view. There performances of dance drama (wayang wong) invoke an age of magical Indic kingdoms. Evocative painted backdrops, influenced by the painting style of the 19th century romantic landscape painter Raden Saleh, depict forest scenes on the periphery of ancient courts as they are now imagined to have been. Splendid costumes and staging suggest the drama is as ancient as the epics and there is a strong sense that even these plays, like most newer ketoprak stories, tell local history. However in their current form these dramatic structures are recent, essentially a product of the past century.
In both Yogya and Solo court dances have been reaching out to the wider society and the interplay between court and village traditions has always been an active two-way exchange. Rough village versions of court dances exist and refined productions, associated with court ritual, often have roots in earlier folk, as well as imported Indic, aesthetic codes. At the same time spiritual concerns, if configured differently in each context, were focal within both elite and popular conceptions of the arts. Such concerns remain present in new ways within modern practices, even intersecting self consciously with the work of contemporary Yogyanese batik artists who cater mainly to a tourist market. While many recent interpreters consistently qualify the term 'tradition' with quotation marks, indicating their sense that in current forms it constitutes a construction of modern political culture, in this context my aim is to suggest that there are also continuities which genuinely tie current reformulations to earlier sensibilities. The wide range of actively cultivated dance forms is far from being the possession of the courts. Now that range includes experimental modern dance.

In Siegel's treatment of theatre, within his excursion into recent Solonese culture, he began with mention of wayang kulit, the shadow theatre, and acknowledged its centrality within tradition. He then went on to suggest that Srimulat, a low-brow drama akin to ludruk, was more popular and in tune with this era of Solonese urban culture. It may have been prominent around 1980, when Siegel's research took place, but it is not now. During five months in Solo in late 1991 Srimulat was absent, though wayang wong and ketroprak remained present and popular. The latter performed to respectable crowds, at the southern square (alun-alun), nightly for about ten weeks during my residence nearby. The sound of wayang kulit still echoes through the night air, if not as pervasively as it did in Solo in the early 1970s, when I lived there longest. The radio is one modern instrument, like loudspeakers on mosques, which amplifies sounds we associate with the past. Now we hear gamelan on compact disk. However Siegel is no doubt correct in suggesting that wayang is not the central focus of culture it has been. Instead the now cemented kampung laneways are filled with the sound of TVs and the liveliest night spots are movie theatres presenting American fare.
Recent Sriwedari productions of wayang wong, the dance drama, are depressing to viewers who know what it once was. Audiences are now sparce, despite the fact that tickets remain cheap. Until very recently the troupe still included performers, notably Rusman and Darsi, who were famous in the 1960s. Now performers are demoralized by low pay and presentations are attenuated. In the early 1970s I went to Sriwedari weekly for two years. Then weekday productions were actively supported and Saturdays were sell out nights. The seats were poor and the walls of wire mesh, but the mesh allowed non-paying spectators to listen while clinging to the outside and the seats did not bother a boisterous audience. When Rusman sang the atmosphere was electric and the power of his feet produced moments of sharp suspension matching those of court dancers.
Prior to the 1971 election wayang wong was sufficiently prominent so that Surono, the actor playing Petruk, was arrested after a production of 'Petruk dadi Ratu'. Petruk, one of the punakawan, or clown like servant figures, becomes king in that story, and the plot suggested that all is not right when a servant forgets himself and behaves like a ruler. In the performance there were comments to the effect that the banyan (bringin) tree might crush rather than shelter Petruk. In context this read as statement that Suharto might find that Golkar, the government functional group, not incidentally symbolised by the bringin, could backfire on him. Nothing like this resonance attaches to wayang wong performances now, though the same impulse may have transferred to other dramatic forms.
'Traditional' theatre still draws crowds in the right context. At Ki Timbul Hadi Prayitno's performance of the lakon 'Duryodono Gugur', on August 10th 1991 at the Sasono Hinggil in Yogya, there must have been well over three thousand spectators. Many were young and all thoroughly enjoyed what was obviously a good RRI (Radio Republik Indonesia) performance. Timbul, one of the most popular dalang in Yogya, is known to be continually studying despite advanced age and standing. His ontowacana, the depth of difference in the voices he deployed, did seem remarkable. In the gara gara, the humourous interlude, his jokes and commentary centred on Petruk's journeys to Jakarta and brought especially raucous response, suggesting that in some minds Suharto may still, as in 1971, be seen as Petruk. At the same time the gara gara was not tied to the lakon, and my distinct impression, comparing half a dozen performances in 1991 to several dozen in the early 1970s, is that jokes, including political commentary, and plot stand apart in ways they never used to.
Related disjunction became most obvious in a wayang kulit performance by Subono, at the Taman Budaya Jateng (Central Javanese Cultural Centre) in December 1991 in Solo. The story (lakon) treated dispute between Sutejo, Krishna's son, and Bima's son Ontorejo (standing in for Gatotcaca) as to who would be Senopati, war chief of the Pandawas. Subono, also a dalang of standing, nevertheless introduced a huge range of weird, newly created, 'punakawan' in the gara gara and without any effort to connect them to the plot or other characters. Drift toward emphasis on extravagent and humorous episodes clearly counterpoints a distinct decline in emphasis on the philosophical depths of wayang.
Similar extravagent and disjunctive innovation are also apparent in the 'Ramayana Ballet' at Prambanan--Ceclie B DeMille would have been proud. Many more dancers are involved now, but only a few are of genuine quality. Performance are far more elaborate than they used to be. The staging is beautiful and the new format works well as a tourist event, but the drama has moved a long way from its origins through repackaging with tourists as prime audience. The reconfiguring of local culture as tourist object, directed toward foreign exchange earnings, is profound. By 1983 Borobudur fell under the jurisdiction of the departments of archaeology and tourism and had been declared off limits for routine Buddhist rituals. A Javanese Buddhist leader commented to me at that time, with wry humour, that this was unlikely to happen to the Demak mosque.
Tourism clearly overshadowed local ritual during the celebration of Kasada in December 1992. In that annual ritual the still (mainly) Hindu Tengger people of East Java make offerings to Mount Bromo. But initial ceremonial was dominated by new national government rituals and within those provincial tourism officers virtually complained at the fact that Tenggerese priests continue to control the timing of the event. They implied this made it harder to orchestrate the event for tourist consumption and in other respects their speeches stressed development infrastructure, roads and tourist facilities, rather than the religious nature of the event. Local tourists, mainly young people from lowland cities, were far more evident than Tenggerese in the large crowd which gathered for the offerings. Even the tent city, of stalls which catered to the crowd on the sand sea at the foot of the volcanoe, were imports to the region, mainly Muslim sellers from Probolinggo. The most dramatic moments of the evening centred on efforts to keep photographers, who crowed onto the temple platform, from blocking the view other tourists had of the small group of priests who theoretically were at the core of the ceremony.
Among the forces working to reframe even the ostensibly traditional theatres we would count not only the twists on performance context that come with tourism, but also the rationalizing process which relates to new art schools. Music, dance and shadow theatre have all been affected by new schools, structures of transmission which have been replacing the personalized apprenticeships which predominated until the recent past. Humardani, the founding director of ASKI (now STSI, or Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia) in Solo, emphasized technique of dance even to the extent of aiming to eliminate its spiritual resonances. In this he had little support from dancers, but the styles he advanced looked to attainment of what he saw as 'perfect form', to qualities which can be graded by a jury as Olympic events are. There can be no doubt that in recent changes there are powerful forces at work which undermine and refigure earlier priority on ritual and spiritual aspects of Javanese performance. In this context practices such as those of Sardono and Prapto, which I focus on here, may have to be viewed as splinters, as movements of resistance in a context of secular and capitalistic impulses. Yet the forms of artistic expression they advance are significant and do indeed illustrate that among the thrusts of 'modernizing art' in the Indonesian context there are still attempts to recoup and reform underlying spiritual concerns, clearly related to past practices.

Connections between European and Asian performance traditions are also expanding in every context and these currents are felt directly, even in places like Solo which are associated with 'classical' arts. Theatre students speak of movements of 'East-West' fusion. So Peter Brook's production of the Mahabharata, for example, represents an instance of cross fertilization. Delightful as Brook's staging may have been, his claims to originality were offensive. They illustrate one aspect of the change which occurs with modernity, a claim to copyright such as also became an issue in the incident I will turn to shortly. The playbill loudly touted Brook's authorship to 'comprehensive' performance of the Mahabharata in an international context. Implicitly this suggested that the absence of private claims to authorship in Asian productions made them non events. South and Southeast Asian performers have for centuries been presenting night long fragments, running in some Indian contexts for several weeks in a row and every bit as complex as Brook's production. Even packagings such as Brook's have been presented before.
In October 1971 I attended the UNESCO sponsored International Ramayana Festival, held at Pandaan in East Java, and was treated to an illustration of how Asia wide epic performance traditions were being repackaged then. In that context each tradition of performance was reduced to a synoptic plot summary of the epic, in the same way that Brook's (longer) synopsis repackaged the Mahabharata. As early as the 1930s a similar repackaging took place in Bali, where the German artist Walter Spies helped create the kecak performance, within which the Ramayana is presented in synoptic form. Appropriation and claims to authorship constitute cultural imperialism, insofar as individual European 'initiators' in music, dance and theatre, claim private and individual credit for what they learn from and represent of usually anonomous Asian performers.
In September 1991 the 'One Extra Company' presented a finely blended synthesis, 'Dancing Demons (Sinta Disitu)' at the STSI pendopo in Solo. The performers, of Balinese and Australian origin and Sydney based, beautifully recontextualized the Ramayana to evoke movement across time zones and cultures--between ancient forest and modern electronic ecosystems. A full audience, comprised mainly of arts students in Solo, received it happily and with interest. Counterpointing synthesis based on Asian plots, Shakespeare has been presented in Bali at least twice in the past several years. David George took an innovative Murdoch student production of 'The Tempest' to perform for bemused Balinese villagers. Similarly Marcel Robert, from Geneva, and dalang Sija, from Bona in Bali, collaborated to present 'Macbeth'. The initiative in fusion projects comes from both east and west. Within this process of reforming dramas Asian initiatives are active and often spiritually motivated even when becoming commercial.

In the Solonese context the career of Sardono Kusuma is particularly illustrative. Sardono is a leading dancer, impresario and choreographer of the Jakarta Arts Centre, where he has worked since the early 1970s. He has often been called to organize international exibitions of Indonesian dance. In 1986, for example, he led his national troupe at the Vancoever Expo, staying there for several months before also performing in Montreal, New York and Paris. He has been entrusted with similar tasks repeatedly in part because it is known in Indonesia that his interests extend beyond Javanese traditional styles. This has meant that he could be counted on, by government sponsors, to work toward genuinely 'national' rather than narrowly regional performance events.
Sardono began his career as an especially powerful traditional Solonese dancer but moved beyond that frame early. He began dancing very young, as his mother ran a dance school in Solo and most of her children learned to dance within it. Many of the teachers within her school were from the kraton and worked at her school on the side. While Sardono was still in junior high school (SMP) in the early 1960s he began performing in the Ramayana dance group at Prambanan, so he was among the founding members of that tourist oriented tradition. He began by dancing as Hanuman, the white monkey allay of Rama, but become increasingly prominent, moving to more refined and powerful roles as his skill developed. Sardono began a degree in economics, first at Gadjah Mada University in Yogya and then, in 1966 and briefly, at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. When he dropped out of those studies it caused a severe rupture with his grandmother, who believed strongly in modern education. Sardono then went, on his own initiative, to New York, where he studied at the Martha Graham dance school. However this bold move into the modern art world of the West did not mark the end of his interest in traditional dance.
The power of Sardono's dancing caught my untutored eye instantly. I first saw him perform in Madison Wisconsin in 1969. He went to the US then as part of a tour organized by Suryabrata, the Dutch-Indonesian student of gamelan who was dean of the Arts Faculty at the Universitas Nasional in Jakarta. The second time I saw him, before we met or I connected the two performances, I was even more impressed. Sardono danced the part of Laksmana, Rama's brother, in the Solonese performance at the Ramayana Festival at Pandaan in 1971. In that context, of superb dancing from across South and Southeast Asia, his evocative power, especially in creating a magical circle around Sinta, stood out so strongly that I still recall the moment clearly. In those movements controlled refinement, especially his capacity to go from flowing movement into a totality of suspension, produced moments of 'absence of movement', a depth of silence, such as especially characterizes the best of Solonese dance.
The next time I saw him, a year later, he was by contrast performing his version of French mime on a Yogyanese stage, but also brilliantly. The same powerful moments of suspension, of 'silence of movement', came through in his French styled performance. His interests continue to bridge between traditional Solonese dance, wider Indonesian practices and avante garde European styles. Recently he arranged a performance called 'Lima Minut di Borobudur' (five minutes at Borobudur) at STSI in Solo. This was described as verging on human sculpture--gold painted bodies were presented, modelled on the figures present in stone sculpted relief at Borobudur. He has also been inspired, through the experience of travelling with Asmat and Dani dancers to Western venues, to create Irian styled modern dress, going so far as to organize a fashion show of 'modern' Irian styled clothing. In 1991 Sardono danced in another fusion project, the 'Maha Buta', commissioned by Americans but performed in Java.
This latter production was linked to his work with Marcel Robert, a Geneva based theatre director and a long associate. They workshopped together at Parangtritis in 1975 and have been involved in joint productions periodically since. Marcel referred to his own work as aiming to connect voice to different parts of the body. He related this conjunction to the elements (water, air, earth, wood and metal) and to the symbolism in the Mahabharata. He spoke of how his, often Bali based, work involved fusion of music, sound and movement. For him the activation of centres in the body could take place 'without reference'. Insofar as I grasped his point, this meant without being embedded in formal codings, as they are within the traditions related to Hindu tantra. Marcel's collaborative work thus aims to activate what esoteric traditions had mapped as cakras, but without the overlay of interpretation and culturally embedded coding associated with them in traditional contexts.
During Sardono's brief visit to Perth in February 1990 I was able to spend a day exploring how spirituality connected with his performance work. His primary interest in our time together was to taste the atmosphere of aboriginal Australian sacred sites and our conversation thus took place on sacred rocks in the forested hills above Perth. He placed emphasis on what he has been learning, not just of performance but of nature. Through 'walking', which he described as a high art, in the forests of Kalimantan with the Dayak and through the totemic dancing of the Asmat he had learned deep respect for traditions which most Javanese view as crude and 'primitive'. As an organizer he was led to especially engage those traditions, among the many in the archipelago, but his interests as well as his experience are global.
Now he views bodily movement as connecting internal consciousness to the natural realms in a way that is consistent with ancient Indic notions that there is a correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. He did not 'discover' these connections through traditional teachings, although these notions are present within his family environment. His uncle, Suwondo, has long been a leading guide within Sumarah, a modern meditation movement in Solo, and in that context these relationships are foundational. He explicitly connects his work to development of an ecological consciousness, to his sense of the urgency of preserving primal forests, to the necessity of countering the destructive thrust of contemporary developmentalism. Animistic consciousness of nature, even more perhaps than court philosophies, have become increasingly prominent in his consciousness as he bridges between tribal Indonesian, elite Javanese and postmodern European performances.

Sardono began with a strong base in Solonese classical dance and has looked both to the west and to varied cultures within Indonesia for inspiration. Suprapto Suryodarmo's movement practice, which he does not call 'dance', is connected to Europe as well. In his case the connection is through his European following. His orientation emerged from a variety of spiritually directed Solonese practices, not so much from traditional dance. His lifestyle and aims are more localized than Sardono's, as is his public profile, but there are many points of resonance between the two. Prapto was born in February 1945 and describes his family as having traditional interests. His father took him regularly to the countryside outside Solo, to visit healers (dukun) and he had preliminary training in local martial arts (pencak silat). Though his family did have status and wealth, elite ties are distant for him, as his ties with his parents weakened in the 1960s. He lived very modestly indeed during the 1970s, when I came to know him. In the late 1960s he was already involved with local experimental theatre but his strongest ties to theatre came later, through work as secretary-treasurer to Humardani at ASKI during the 1970s. Prapto stresses that he himself was not trained in classical dance, though he did enjoy it as a spectator.
Prapto provided an eloquent exposition of his grounding orientations when introducing his work to my students from Malang in March 1993. The session opened with a performance by English and Javanese students, one which nature literally greeted with a thundercap. In the following discussion Prapto acknowledged that there were spiritual aspects of kraton dance he appreciated and saw as related to his practice. However he views the refined styles of the courts as having only the beauty of birds in guilded cages and aims himself rather to learn from the wildness of nature on its own terms. As a modern shaman he takes lessons directly from the elements, prioritizing those sources rather than the way natural forces have been articulated, formalized and constrained within dances of the courts. He declared that his knowledge came from nature and through a commitment to openness and spontaneity he had learned from Sudarno, his meditation teacher, rather than through formal performance practices.
I met Prapto in December 1971, while staying in Baluwarti, the kraton neighborhood where Sasana Mulyo, then ASKI's home, was also located. In early meetings I recall exploring theories of how local experience of wayang kulit was changing, as mental theorization overtook intuitive experience. At first we met through common pleasure at the performances sponsored by ASKI, but soon Prapto joined the same meditation sessions, with the Buddhist Sumarah guide Sudarno Ong, with whom I also practiced what Pak Darno called simply 'relaxed meditation'. Prapto's already formed Buddhist orientation meant that he felt at home in meditation with Sudarno more easily than with the Muslim oriented Sumarah mainstream. But eventually he also practiced automatic movement (karogo), not only under Sudarno's guidance, but also through contact with Sri Sampoerno, then the leader of Sumarah in Solo. In the 1980s, especially after Sudarno's death in 1982, he began to attend sessions with Suwondo, Sardono's uncle, another prominent guide (pamong). Connection to Sumarah meditation, especially through karogo and Sudarno, were never exclusive activities for Prapto. He grew especially close to Pak Kemi Darmasaputra, an active Theravada Buddhist priest (not a bhikkhu) in Solo. In 1974 he attended a vipassana retreat, though in doing so he risked his job, as he did it without Humardani's approval for leave from ASKI. Around the same time he practiced kungfu under the guidance of Pak Tan, now called Wahyudi, an accupuncturist who teaches tai chi. Tan, an activist and leader within the Tridharma form of 'Buddhism' (as it is nationally registered that way), considered Prapto his disciple for some time. But insofar as Prapto adopted anyone as his guru it was Sudarno.
In 1975 he created and performed in what he called wayang buda, which he presented first during Waisak, the annual Buddhist celebration commemorating the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and passing at Candi Mendut, near Borobudur. I saw it performed at Sasana Mulyo, the pendopo of ASKI, in July 1976. Pak Kemi burned incense and chanted Buddhist prayers while Prapto performed free movement dance, wearing flowing white, in front of a moving screen. Elements of traditional dance resonate within his movements, but his style was and remains spontaneous and individual. Shadows from a wildly burning torch created swirling movement, enlivened images, through the pendopo. In conversation during 1987 Prapto mentioned having revived and presented the wayang buda, in his view even more successfully, in Koeln Germany in 1985.
During the early 1980s Prapto bought a dry hilltop property near Wonogiri, thirty kilometers south of Solo, overlooking the large and beautiful lake which resulted from the damming of the Solo River there. He planted trees, including a cutting descended from the original Bodhi tree of Bodgaya, established a small shrine and built a rudimentary bamboo and tile hut. During 1983, to facilitate relations with the spirits of that place, he sponsored a ruwatan, an especially Javanized and exorcistic wayang performance. Later, after European pupils began coming in numbers, he was able to begin developing a property at Mojosongo, on the northern outskirts of Solo, where he now lives and also holds his workshop/courses. In late 1982, through Marcel Robert, who he has worked with since the mid 1970s, he was invited to give demonstrations in Geneva. This invitation opened a distinct new phase of his career, as afterwards he was immediately sought after by European, especially German, students.
Christian Bohringer and Christina Stelzer were among his first students. They were already established professionals in Germany, involved with work which bridged therapy, theatre and dance. Thus with their enthusiastic interest the network Prapto stepped into produced rapid response. They had finished their degrees in the late 1970s, he in medicine she in psychology, then gravitated through alternative communities into movement therapy and theatre. After they came into contact with Prapto, during his 1982 trip to Geneva, both went to Solo in 1984. Initially they intended to stay only for a two month course; they stayed over a year. For the next several years Prapto went annually to run workshops in Germany. Since 1984 he has received groups of about a dozen pupils several times each year for two and three month courses in Solo, where his practice continues to centre.
In late l986, then again in late 1991, I was able to observe sessions. In 1986 the sessions I joined were held in the large pendopo at Joyokusuman, the guest house in the city where most of Prapto's pupils stay. Since then the seminars have been based at Prapto's Mojosongo property. It is bordered by a stream and contains: a rough pendopo, earthmounds, a walkway, a Catholic grotto, a Buddhist shrine, a bamboo rest hut, a Balinese styled tower, an octagonal paved performance platform and a grassy square. Prapto sees each part of this physical mosaic as activating different specific energies. The students work at different times in different places. Sessions generally begin at 8 am and end in the mid afternoon. Students work individually, in pairs, with Prapto or as a group at different times and talks and discussions punctuate the day sessions. In addition to workshopping at Mojosongo groups are taken to other sites for periods of several days. Usually the sites include: Parangtritis, Candi Sukuh (a 14th century tantric Hindu temple on Mount Lawu, east of Solo), Prapto's Wonogiri property, and more recently also Borobudur. In each context movement meditation is practiced so that individuals learn to respond to the energies of nature, as received in their bodies after being refracted through the sacred structures Javanese have inscribed on the land. Usually each student follows a different rythm, 'listening' to the powers they feel within their body in the places they move through.
It is not easy to discursively characterize the guidance which takes place in these environments. Prapto calls his method, both of guidance and movement, 'reading'. He directs people to attune to the 'inner movement' in the body and to distinguish it from 'thought'. One student described Prapto as functioning like a mirror, one in which students see themselves more clearly. In the four day workshop I witnessed at Candi Sukuh the focus of his guidance was especially on awakening what he called the sense of 'bowing', of humility and deference to nature. Generally he takes students through sequences of walking, stopping, crawling and lying, testing and aiming to extend ability to relax in different positions. In Prapto's terms "...it is simple, the simple is the best... if it is more simple, we can see what the tension is or how much tension there is in our body and then just let go.... the problem is how we can have a good condition in being... we practice with life energy, not with emotional energy." Practice is meant to lead to a 'stripping away' and repetitive exercise of simple tasks brings emotions, including reluctance, frustration, and overeagerness to the surface of consciousness.
Quotations from students suggest the direction of effort and something of what they find they have gained through the effort. Helen Poynor described Prapto's framework in these terms:

The body is seen as the central point where the verticle and horizontal planes meet. The verticle axis represents spirituality, our relationship to God, the cosmos and the underworld. The horizontal axis represents daily life and communication....we are reminded to keep connection with this central point, with our body on the earth in the here and now....This work has no form in the sense that Tai chi, ballet or the highly stylised classical Javanese dance has form. How you do something, the quality of your presence and authenticity in a movement is more important than the form of the movement.

Christina Stelzer found that movement is

....a medium for growth... in attitude. It means to move towards relaxed position and expression under any condition in life...this movement method does not focus on one center (in the body). Instead it is a method of self-regulation of the whole human organism, so that balance and centering are a constant shifting in relation to the inside process and outside necessities... Stillness is the capacity to be receptive to impulses from the inside being, from the outside world; movement is the capacity to express impulses arising from inside, to respond to ouside impulse. Stillness is then not boredom or collapsing, movement not automatic or exhausting. We are studying and teaching this process of balance, finding our own rythm and feeling the pulse of motion.

His students often position Prapto as an esoteric guru. Amongst themselves they pass on stories, built on tidbits of information through conversations with him, of the way he acquired his sensitivity and skills, especially through guidance by Sudarno. In doing so they do generate a wall of mystification, one which accentuates distinction between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. Han Thalgoott, a longtime student from Hamburg described Prapto as feeling that, just prior to Darno's death, he had received the latter's validation. For years Prapto had always been told by Sudarno that what he did was 'not quite right', but in this final instance, not long before Sudarno's death, he was affirmed. Pupils tend to read this affirmation as representing a 'passing of the mantle', though in the context of Sudarno's guidance as I experienced it, confirmation of this sort did not have that implication.
Prapto does refer comfortably to Sudarno as having been his guru, using that term in a way that is not standard within Sumarah. However he does not make spiritual claims of the sort critics have levelled at him. He was intrigued when I mentioned that Sudarno had said he was an incarnation of Empu Bharada, the legendary East Javanese sage of the eleventh century. Prapto said he independently felt an affinity for the ancient sage since 1968, when he had used his name as an acronym for the theatre group he was involved with then. If attitudes toward Prapto within Solonese spiritual and artistic circles are mixed, they are usually in response to Prapto's following and the income he gets through it, due to the normal conjunction of jealousies and suspicions which surround many spiritual practices. While this aspect of the development of his practice is intrinsically interesting, it is a marginal issue in this context.
Connections periodically redevelop between Prapto's group and Sumarah practice. His followers often also attend guided meditation sessions with Suwondo and Laura Romano and Prapto himself joins them periodically. Prapto certainly makes clear that he views many others as spiritually senior and does not put on airs, call himself a spiritual teacher or depreciate others who do. Though his work is spiritually charged, it is perhaps best viewed as therapy and he is not the centre of a 'spiritual cult' as that term is normally understood. From my perspective Prapto's movement practice is analogous to teaching work. Each is a context for what Sumarah calls 'daily meditation'. One expression is primarily physical and the other mental in focus, but meditative consciousness may pervade either, in Sumarah terms, when consciousness is open to other forces present in the same moment.
In the stories Prapto shares with his pupils, on the margins of the movement practice, he passes on wider interests and insights. When I arrived at Candi Sukuh, to observe the workshop in September 1991, the group had already settled in and Prapto was in the midst of a lengthy evening discourse. Having just told the group the Dewaruci story, a famous and especially mystical Javanese tale from the wayang, he explained its significance along the lines Sudarno had to both of us. Then he continued working on mythic themes, relating the story of Siva and Uma, of how she became Durga while his sperm fell into the ocean to produce Kala. He went on to characterise Javanism, from its megalithic base through tantra, as a spirituality of the body, one linking landscapes to sacred sites and cakras.
It is interesting to note that while he consistently introduces students to Candi Sukuh, he does not offer them a formal discursive decoding of it. Students were surprised when I outlined the correspondence of Candi Sukuh's design to the cakra system. In this he appears to have the same preference Marcel Robert expressed, in relation to conscious body work without 'reference'. Prapto does explicitly clarify that as he sees it the power practices of earlier Java related especially to the body and automatic movement. He also holds that the feeling centres, associated with the heart, are usually more important in Java than the upper centers associated with the head.

Toward the end of my 1991 visit a further dimension of artistic and spiritual conjunction surfaced. The Katsura-Kan group of Butoh performers from Kyoto visited and workshopped with Prapto's group. This was described on the formal invitations as a collaborative session with the 'padhepokan lemah putih seminar', the formal name of Prapto's centre, and led up to a Butoh performance, at the Taman Budaya Jateng Solo, called 'Amaracordo' (Kenangan Saya) on November 18th. The Butoh group presents itself as the 'water associates', within a thirty year old style of performance. At the end of the Butoh performance a joint session was presented with Prapto's group, a collaboration which was by no means as smooth as it might have been, but which produced powerful effects nevertheless.
In the question and answer session after the performance Katsuro Kan, the leader of the Butoh group, spoke of how his practice traced to a gymnastics theorist and teacher in Japan who spoke of the human body as fundamentally composed of 'water with skin that is mobilized to movement by the will'. Katsuro Kan's own body was a marvellous anatomy lesson, a wonderful demonstration of the philosophy he alluded to--especially when, for instance, he performed as a foetus. He spoke of links between his practice and Tai Chi and self-consciously looked for connections to deeply rooted spiritual traditions he sees as especially vibrant in Korea, Japan and Java. Nothwithstanding the overlays, and he used these terms, of a modernity which he described as thin, in those contexts he considers that local traditions provide 'a rainbow of hope' for the future.
Commenting on the history of Butoh, he explained that they had been looking since World War II to reconnect to roots which were neither classical, linked to China, nor European, but nevertheless modern. In an early visit to Java in 1983 he registered very strong links with Prapto's practice and that is why his group came for a working session with Prapto in 1991. He saw links between Japan and Java as embodied in their respective work and as related to deep common origins via the Pacific. When asked about symbolic meanings within performance, by a Solonese art student who expected formal interpretive codes such as apply in classical Indian dance, he responded as a perfect postmodernist, saying that 'meaning is constructed by the viewer' and not hidden in the patterns of performance by self consciously formed codes. In elaborating he suggested that his purpose was to find a deeper creative meaning than even the actor knows, a 'beauty pointing beyond the known'.

So far I have alluded in general terms to peformance movements and careers. At this stage I want to turn to probe a concrete incident which illustrates a commitment to spiritual attunement, one resonant in the efforts of Sardono and Prapto, as an underpinning to the performance culture they operate within. The incident especially how the logic of interaction, even the process of collaborating to generate a 'modern' performance, follows channels embedded within local spiritualized culture. Not incidentally, the case also provides a commentary on contrasts between European and Javanese modes of operation, the workings of principles rooted in animism and their persistent relevance in contemporary praxis. Indonesians and Westerners are habituated to construe silences differently, cultures predispose people to attend to different levels of transaction. Within this incident there was also revelation of difference amongst regional Indonesian cultures, but those surfaced as modulations within a common perception of social process, one which generally directs attention to the feeling domain (rasa) of transaction.
The incident occurred in December 1988. This summary is based on journal notes, taken the following day, supplemented by conversations with participants during subsequent visits to Solo, especially during 1991. The meeting which provoked these reflections was an evening session attended by roughly thirty artists, patrons, and organisers. They met with the intention of workshopping a multicultural event with the theme of 'awakening' (kebangkitan). I was drawn into the event inadvertently, through visiting the Berkeley musicologist Jody Diamond, then resident in Solo. Her neighbor Sulistiyo, a noted classical dancer based in Jakarta, spontaneously invited us to attend what he called 'a rehearsal' at the home of Suprapto. As Prapto happened to be an old friend of mine I joined without hesitation, though uninvited, and not realising the relative formality, or as it transpired explosiveness, of the event.
The Indonesians present were for the most part at once deeply immersed in traditional arts and cosmopolitan in experience and orientation. Most were Javanese from Solo, but there were Acehnese, Balinese, Javanese and Jakartans present of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian religious orientations. If combined presence implied diversity, focus was on generating 'modern Indonesian culture'. For those there this implied neither preserving discrete traditions nor putting together a pastiche of fragments. Apart from those mentioned already, notable participants included the Lukmans, an Acehnese business couple from Jakarta, the patrons of the proposed production; Setia Rahardjo, then coordinator of Indonesian Subud (an international spiritual association); Ariefin, a German trained Sumatran architect, with a business in Jakarta and a home in Solo; Manuel Lutgenhorst, a German with connections in New York; and a distinguished assembly of musicians, dancers, and artists. Solonese artists, including luminaries of STSI, the academy of the arts, predominated but there were notable Jakartan and Balinese representatives.
After guests had collected and chatted over tea we walked across the road to open with a Buddhist prayer and an essentially 'non-denominational' meditation on a performance platform Prapto had constructed. Apart from the host few were Buddhists, but all joined in naturally, as most Indonesians will on formal occasions. In this case Prapto's spiritual interests meant that meditation was significant rather than perfunctory, as would often be the case. After the ceremony everyone walked through light drizzle along the torch lit path to the house, where we settled on mats for informal ritualized sharing of food, in other words a Javanese slametan. Afterwards the meeting began with what were supposed to be brief preliminaries prior to work-shopping toward the production. Serious problems arose as soon as formalities were initiated.
I learned later, through Jody and Sulistiyo, Manuel initiated the project and had previously produced parallel events in Korea, Thailand and India, each celebrating emergent cultures as this was meant to. He had laid groundwork during several years in which, among other things, he explored Indonesian arts, met artists and studied their works. After conceiving a theme and general design he, I guessed through Ariefin, obtained the sponsorship of Lukman and mobilized artists. This was their second general meeting, the first having taken place at Bona in Bali several months previously, at the home of I Made Sija, the renown Balinese mask (topeng) dancer and dalang who was a vital presence in this instance as well.
The first three day workshop in Bona was held in early October. According to Mark Parlett, a witness, there was a great deal of talking and though the group tried improvisation they did not cohere successfully. Sija apparently could not relate easily to Prapto's style, which in his terms involved concentrating so heavily on the inside, on internal space, that it did not work for audiences, sacrificing consciousness of collective to private preoccupation. When they worked together Sija felt he could only walk and never truly dance. Conversely Mark commented Prapto seemed disturbed by the way Sija walked. Despite differing, Sija apparently acknowledged the charged space he felt around Prapto's work; others failed to even tune in, chatting while Prapto moved. Differences in approach to performance were clearly problematic amongst artists involved.
Manuel Lutgenhorst, from Munich, had been based in New York for some time. Though he had produced sketches, a script and plans for the event there were tensions between Lukman, the producer, and Manuel, even at the first workshop. Lukman had stayed in Sanur and once Mark had gone with Manuel to meet him there but was not received. As Mark explained, near the end of the workshop everyone had a chance to speak before Sija summarized conclusions. Sija opened by stating 'this is what I feel' (saya rasa begitu) and there was a long silence after his wrap up. Most nodded heads and Mark's flet there was a general sense of 'let us start there', that participants felt 'okay' even if problems were apparent. At the time Mark noticed Manuel remained noncommital and silent.
Wayan Sadra, a Balinese musician/composer who teaches at STSI in Solo, was present in both sessions. His sense of the first event was there was no leader who could hold it together and this was a critical gap as, even in new styles of performance, there is need to connect, to know each other before performing together. To illustrate he commented that in Boston he had once joined an odd collection of performers he had never met and found it unsatisfying. But on his report Sija is an extremely innovative performer who has not hesitated to experiment. When Wayan and Sija were in Korea, they demonstrated without a gamelan--Wayan using a soap crate for a drum. He credited Sija with producing Macbeth in Bali, I deduce through collaboration with Marcel Robert. Wayan said Sija puts his trust in the process of creativity which is awakened when people simply connect in feeling and, even at the performance level, this connection had been missing in the Bona workshop.

In the Solo followup meeting I attended, severe disagreement became apparent in the context of reviewing what had presumably been agreed at Bona. Dispute erupted after Prapto's welcome, as he summarizied formalization of roles agreed at the earlier meeting. There was minor dispute even when it was noted Lukman was to be head, Ariefin secretary, another treasurer, and Prapto, Sija, and Sulistiyo respectively coordinators of the Solonese, Balinese, and Jakartan contributing groups. Lukman agreed he was 'patron' and that formal organization was crucial, but clarified while he was designated 'head' (ketua) he was not the artistic 'producer'. Prapto was corrected by the group when, in typical Javanese deference to the seniority of other Solonese present, he sidestep his designation as organizer of this session by terming himself 'spokesperson' (penyambung lidah).
Then Sija immediately questioned Manuel's role, saying he understood that Manuel was there as an 'adviser' (penasehat). Manuel responded he had never agreed to that and wanted only to continue as 'observer', to aid artistic production, but could not function as part of the organization. Explicit exposure of difference of perspective meant the meeting proceeded in charged and awkward debate until one in the morning. There were many significant, revealing and crosscutting undercurrents, but most are incidental here and there is no reason to attempt exhaustive recapitulation of the incident. The central protagonists were Sija and Manuel; Prapto and Ariefin played active roles; most others were attentively engaged and amazed observers. Manuel pressed me into an interpreting role, one made awkward by the intensity of exchange, by my ignorance of the background and context of discussion, and especially by the offense implied to Ariefin, whose English and German is fluent. For me dependence on English with a German and Indonesian with a Balinese, neither entirely at home in those languages, compounded difficulty marginally, but their respective perspectives became quite clear.
Sija, though chewing betel and composed, overtly expressed angered distress at Manuel's unwillingness to concur with his understanding of the previously agreed basis for proceeding. Dogedly he expressed certainty they had reached a compact (kesepakatan) which involved Manuel's concurrence (kesanggupan) at Bona--in Sija's home with Sija himself articulating consensus. Consequently he said, explicitly and repeately, it was as though Manuel was 'hitting him' and 'insulting his house' by seeming to change his position. Sija obviously felt his honour was on the line and success of the project at stake. The depth of his feeling was reflected not only in intensity of expression, which floored Javanese present, but also in the fact failure to resolve the issue left Sija's associate, quietly at his side throughout the evening, ill for the next several days.
Manuel, though subdued and restrained, stood ground with insistence he had never agreed to what Indonesians saw as his role. He emphasized that at Bona only a few spoke against his authorship of the play or his projected role as artistic director. In his view most had said nothing, no vote had been taken, and he never verbalized assent. He indicated that, as there were different people at the two meetings, he saw little reason to take the outcome of the first as binding on the second. It appeared, though he did not say explicitly, he felt a copyright claim to the concept of the production and as 'author' of the script, that he imagined he would be 'artistic director' of the production. Once the Bona meeting upturned those claims, he adopted the view, one he did express, that the group was breaking away to do 'something different'. He said, holding it was the position he maintained at Bona, he could thus not be part of it in formal terms. There was no overt malintent in his expression but there was stubborn resistance to compliance with the understanding which guided his associates.

Obviously many factors played in to explain the intensity of the situation and it cannot be explained only by alternative readings of the significant silences. Sulistiyo indicated later that he had supported Prapto, in questioning Manuel's script at Bona, because they both felt the scenario ought to be presented more as a collective and 'Indonesian' enterpise. They knew little of Manuel's credentials; conversely the latter appeared unaware he was dealing with internationally established artists. Though grateful for Manuel's stimulus, they felt he should not have 'author/director' status. In their eyes he had basically assembled their ideas and put his name to them.
At the same time the local artists were generally inclined toward creative dance and music arrived at through freeform workshopping. Manuel's script emphasised drama within the constraints of a narrative he wanted to control. Focus on this difference converged with, and became a convenient way of sidestepping, Indonesian inability to even allude directly (in this another 'silence') to sensitive political issues which were apparently touched objectionably in Manuel's script. The Indonesians tried to take emphasis off the script without mentioning their objections to its contents. Rahardjo commented in an aside to me that the Indonesians understood this issue without need for verbalization. But at no point was this made explicit to Manuel, who probably remained unaware of his context, especially in this political respect.
The impass centered on intractable commitments to opposite readings of silences at Bona. Sija deeply felt he had articulated a consensus those present experienced and were bound to. Nothing explains his emotion or persistence except that the dispute struck deeply at his perception of a palpable reality. For Manuel the Bona meeting was a non-event, to him key issues had not been canvassed or resolved, something he identified as a silence in the group. From his perspective his own silence, at point of compact, meant withholding rather than affirmation of assent. The silence Sija read as felt assent, one indeed registered by Indonesian associates, was for Manuel failure to address the issues.
Sija's reading was direct expression of the sense of reality and guide for action characteristic within archipelago animism and related directly to idioms of consensual decision making. Efforts to harmonize with spirit realms do not relate just to distant, unknowable or imagined domains; that realm is co-present in moments of intercourse, a dimension of transaction between people in the natural environment. Other Indonesians recognised and acted in terms of this logic, both in readings of Bona and as suggested by their approach to the slametan as an opener to the meeting at Prapto's house. Sija's position was blunt, reflecting status, he is termed 'master' (empuh), and Balinese ethnicity. Recognising a felt compact which had been witnessed ceremonially he saw it as self evident and was shocked by Manuel's suggestion it did not exist. Though Sija's position was extreme, he was also most directly implicated as host for the first meeting. The bands of Manuel's radio, of his personal reception system, did not register those waves; he saw a different plane of the exchange, The result was like two ships passing at night with no-one on watch.

This incident highlights gaps between distinct planes of communication which are the human and spirit planes referred to within animism. Alternative readings of transaction are possible and that a plurality of perspectives intersect in such moments confirms the point. Sija's reference was to spiritual and Manuel's to material dimensions of transaction. The former's assumption was that all were engaged in a collective process to achieve a cohesion and harmony dependent on spiritual attunement, one not just rhetorically invoked, but brought into reality through ritual. Manuel's inability or unwillingness to enter the ritual space his counterparts invoked produced failure, in Sija's eyes spiritual violence, and ripples of the event were deeply felt even a year later. This exchange illustrates the spaces referred to by animism. Rituals to placate spirits are at once mechanisms of cooperative interaction, not just pale reflection of dubious, dated or constructed cosmologies. The substratum of local process is framed by, but not dependent on the labeling which intervenes to characterize it. The self-conscious commitment Marcel Robert professes in "embodiment without reference", a commitment Prapto tacitly maintains as well, is implicitly convergent with my argument that spirits are present without reference to them.
The constellation of elements present in the incident combined with its intensity to make it especially illustrative. Diverse and cosmopolitan Indonesians, focussing on a contemporary cultural project, nevertheless clearly approached their enterprise with a sensibility rooted in what are indeed common local patterns of interaction. They expressed values and demonstrated senses of what constitutes reality which are linked to a substratum which unites them. Ironically the failure of the production produced, in this respect, demonstration of the validity of an intent all shared, including Manuel, to affirm presence within the Indonesian arts of particular 'national' qualities.

In opening the careers and incidents I have alluded to, my aims have been limited. I have referred to orientations and practices amongst a small but prominent elite of artists and performers. While those mentioned have a high profile, being notable in themselves within their context, this does not imply the aspects of performance I allude to are predominant or representative, this is not global description, even of performance cultures in Solo. I aim only to draw attention to and affirm the relevance of one, often now underestimated, aspect of local practices. Even performers who are especially cosmopolitan, on the cutting edge of experimentation, see spiritual concerns as prominent cornerstones of their work. At the same time a wider spiritual gestalt shapes the ground upon which they tacitly move while gearing toward production. 'Modernity' within the arts should not reflexively be imagined as a departure from the spirituality which informed earlier performance traditions.

In other areas of the arts, as evident in Astri Wright's treatment of modern painting, similar undercurrents characterize modern synthesis.. expand.

Similar undercurrents are evident in other fields. In new university systems the surface structures of learning process and curriculum mimic those of western institutions. In every field the authorized lineages of knowledge are those emanating from western thinking about philosophy, psychology, literature, etc. Even lecturers whose interests are aminated by traditional veins of thought in relation to their fields are forced to treat those as hobbies, off to the side of their profession.... (illustrate, Darmanto etc) Yet if we reflect on the learning transactions in classroom situations there is much that resonates with the traditions which are marginalized on the surface. Texts and reading are ostensibly the basis for access to knowledge, but in tacit practice teachers most often simply reiterate the contents of authoritative texts; students memorize and regurgitate for examinations. In the mode of learning, mainly oral, and attitude toward authority, the structure of practice approximates learning within traditional religious more than critical academic institutions. On the surface local systems of knowledge, whether in universities or medical systems, are marginalized; in practice earlier styles of transaction predominate.
Also in 'present' section--expand to consider the implications of the way knowledge is constituted within Indonesian universities. I can tie this to the trip I made exploring how phil/ pol/ hist/ psych lecturers link interests they have with traditional roots of those ideas in their own culture to the things they are teaching, the basic point being that in effect all formal knowledge is constituted only by reference to western, usually outdated, theories. Even when lecturers personally make a hobby of local theories, they are unable to integrate them into classroom formal curriculum. Worse yet, as with Darmanto for instance, a thesis on Ki Ageng was really hard to handle as even having a psych dimension for the UGM department..
this certainly tells us something about phil imperialism & geneologies of knowledge. frame this a sacred links, like the geneologies of courts to majapahit, claims, maybe in our system too, should be interrogated through these tropes rather than just the reverse--so SEA systems of analysis should frame our views of our own systems of practice. at the same time tacitly this is subverted by the way knowledge is passed within the system, as while all the surfaces are western, the actual pattern of transaction within the classroom resonates more in many ways with pesantren styled transmission, thru memorization and proximity to those in positions of power, an implicit osmosis rather than interiorization of the kinds of mental procedures the western knowledge is, in its own terms at least, thought to rest on. same could be said of traditional medicine--dukun & doctors & of the way the modern systems are fitted into local practices.

in "present" chapter add use of the mapping/grids which cause difficulties as westerners ask for directions in the Indonesian context, setting understanding that local and outside 'mappings' are in relation to very different features of the environment and that this process indicates not only, as some have said, things about local tendency to 'say anything to satisfy' or 'lie gratuitously' but also of the very different conceptual grid spaces the two cultures are coming from. this can involve compass points, working from map versus visial images, local knowledge of key features of placement. works in village as well as urban environments and a nice illustration of substratum in the present. relates also to instructions for procedure in relation to bureacratic process, as locals have all sorts of tacit knowledge which mean that in giving instructions they are usually unaware/ unable to imagine the ignorance and mapping systems of outsiders, producing all sorts of frustration for the outsider even without intending to.

the substratum in time
Through the cycles of history Sinic, Indic, Islamic, and European forces have been superimposed on Southeast Asia. Each worked in some sense to claim it, to recast society within borrowed models. Local cultural memories nevertheless preserve senses of primal identity and at the moment still struggle to assert those through modern forms. Nationalist culture began to take root at the turn of the century, just as the colonial framework defined the boundaries of the contemporary state. Now metropolitan super cultures radiate from the new national centres, promoting new languages and the growth of a supraethnic identity they spread through the bureaucracy, schools, literature, electronic media, and, not least, the military. But the national revolutions have not been just a matter of achieving political and economic independence, they also involve assertion of identity in autonomous rather than derivative terms. Following the revolutions, the forces of modernity appeared to define national governments through models borrowed from the west and dominant elites, whether secular or religious, comprised the most westernised Southeast Asians. Tension between trajectories of growing global integration and resurgent primal identity combine to generate the pressures under which contemporary Southeast Asians labour.

The gestalt provided by the substratum has suggested that local peoples have appropriated symbolic, social and economic systems in each historical phase. Each adaptation involved restructuring of internal as well as reordering of external relations in a context of increasing integration into global networks. Traditional societies blended animistic and classical influences with world religions. As Islamic, Catholic and Theravada patterns became entrenched they were amenable to synthesis, blending with ancestral beliefs and rituals. Consolidation of a Theravada pattern involved no major conceptual break with the also Indic mold of previous classical states. Continuities are evident in traditional schooling and ritual. Whether in Islam, Catholicism or Theravada the focus of attention remained participatory and in this respect reminiscent of earlier animistic or Indic ritual. Ritual repetition, primary in all systems, infused sound with sacral power so that it resonated with states of inner being as much in Arabic, Pali, or Latin as it did earlier in Sanskrit.
Emphasis on the role of Sufism in conversion of the archipelago drew attention to the openness of the line between Islamic and pre-Islamic archipelago cultures. Examination of interplay between Islam and adat, or local custom, images that as a gradual dialectical redefinition within archipelago Islam. The earlier supposed disjunction between Islam and the substratum was not so severe as is implied through the scriptural view of religion, prevalent underlying earlier interpretations. Though traditional Southeast Asian Islam was more mystical than earlier recognised, tensions between customary spirit beliefs and doctrinal orthodoxy nevertheless began early, as 17th century Acehnese and Javanese disputes indicate. Presumption that Catholicism was more radical a break than Islam would also be unjustified. Syncretism predominated within the Hispanization of the Philippines and Catholicism has been deeply domesticated to Tagalog purposes.
Theravada Buddhism has generated other contradictions, but does not problematised the substratum in the way Islam has. Buddhist theory fits spirits into a continuum everybody is placed on and core scriptures encorporate spirit beliefs. Vietnamese also blended folk beliefs relatively comfortably with Chinese derivatives. Recent Chinese migrants brought folk religious patterns from the substratum of their ancestral villages in South China, compounding guardian spirits with Confucianism and Buddhism. Syncretism was characteristic among all local Chinese communities, as they had brought folk southern Chinese religion with them. Chinese temples still draw variously on elements of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. Within all traditional religious domains people drew on earlier popular magic as well as later ritual, maintaining an intuitive sense of what religious experience essentially involves.
At the social level a convergent analysis can be maintained to distinguish the impact of Islam and Theravad in relation to the substratum. In Thailand the boundaries of village society have been defined by relationships to Theravada temples, community and religious identities coincide. In Islam emphasis on law and ritual prescribe exclusive commitment as core profession. The territory of submission, dar al-islam, is defined by profession and ritual prayer and implicitly marks off those who do not belong. Traditional Islamic schools draw students from dispersed areas so the resulting sense of community correlated with intensity of personal commitment, institutional engagement, and lifestyle rather than with geographical community, as in Buddhism. Both doctrinal theory and the social nexus interweaving temples with community help explain the relatively harmonious relationship between Buddhism and the substratum.
Generally we can say that religion has been more politically volatile in island Southeast Asia than on the mainland and that this correlates to, being partly explained by, contrasting Semitic and Indic postures on syncretism, differing attitudes toward allowance of interchange between orthodoxy and the substratum of folk magic. In any case the syncretic mentality of earlier practices did not emphasise pre-occupation with boundaries, community was formed in and focussed on courts, schools or monasteries. Traditional religious ideologies everywhere did not distinguish religious and political domains as we now do. This break became more severe only with the development of modernism beginning in the 19th century.

Scriptural religion allowed such distinction and arose through institutions and technologies mediated by colonialism. Whether in the Malay, Thai or Vietnamese cases scripturalism defined identities in increasingly exclusive and literal terms, generating religious boundaries paralleling the geographical limits produced by imperialism. The context of and concern for boundaries produced new modes of contention and increasing division between religion and politics. This happened despite the insistence of many Muslims and Buddhists that those remain intrinsically related, as was evident in nationalism throughout the region. To put this point more properly, some local actors have been consistently unable to imagine these as separate; their commitment has still been to spiritual purposes expressed only sometimes through what we call political process.
In all contemporary polities in the region states have aimed to construct entities which link peasant and tribal structures to national centers. This integrative revolution related urban structures to the substratum within national territories to a previously unimagined extent and explains much of the way national politics have drawn from, and then worked to contain, popular impulses. Peasants have not distinguished as we might between nationalism, millenarianism and communism. Religious conflicts have often thus underlied and related directly even to those political movements which are framed in secular political terms on the surface. In several notable cases the force behind uprisings which are communist, in ideological terms at the top, has been closer to the animism of the substratum at base.

Indonesian tensions in the initial period after independence were clearly shaped in part by division between syncretic and modernist Muslims. The Indonesian Communist Party has been widely interpreted as having, in its effective operation in the end, represented the most syncretically oriented Javanese, those most committed to patterns rooted in the substratum. The party was strongest, certainly in its numerical membership, among syncretic Javanese; opposition to it was also fiercest from orthodox Muslims youth, who along with the army helped eliminate the party in the mid l960's.The party became a vehicle for abangan Javanese interests through the fact that it made an effort to forge a new link between peasant society and politics at the centre.
The notion of the substratum also helps us grasp the Vietnamese wars of independence. The French scholar Mus emphasised that French and American protagonists did not see the political situation or issues in the same terms as Vietnamese. Westerners tended to be aware of and pay attention to events in urban centres, the sites colonialism created, and never knew the hearts and minds of villagers. He evoked images of primal village spirituality and cosmological court traditions to suggest local perspectives. His analysis suggested that most of the Vietnamese population concluded in 1945 that the 'mandate of heaven', the mantle of nationalism in our terms, had clearly fallen on Ho Chi Minh. Drawing attention to cultural miscommunication as an aspect of the Vietnamese wars does not imply it is the only element worth considering.
But tragic events such as those of Indochina recur, in Kampuchea they continue, and remind us that comprehension is a prerequisite to constructive communication. Enlarging our worldview to subsume another lies beyond translating other worlds into our established frameworks. The Vietnam wars represent powerful evidence that societies, insofar as we can speak of collective consciousness, misread each other in the same way that individuals may. Western powers remained oblivious of both the pervasive power of and radically different attitudes present within village society. The Indonesian and Vietnamese illustrations are but two suggestions of the ways substructures surface through social contention in the recent past. Animism is relevant to understanding both popular movements and Marcos ideology in Philippine politics. The resonances of revolutionary ideology and earlier religion in Burma are analogous to those Geertz and Anderson noted for Indonesia or Mus for the Vietnamese.
At another level, through the formation of neotraditional political ideologies, examples from the contemporary period suggest that early beliefs about power still have relevance. Sukarno emphasised slogans and symbols in an effort to subsume diversity within one vision of the world. He claimed, in syncretic terms, to be simultaneously a Nationalist, Marxist and Muslim and argued that these were not different in essence. A similar emphasis existed in U Nu's Burma, as his sense of socialist Buddhism highlighted underlying similarities between these frameworks and translated the national revolution into Buddhist notions of merit-making, reciprocity and equality. Another exemplar of this style has been Sihanouk, who throughout his career has tried to work as a balancer, to balance Thailand against Vietnam, East against West.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sukarno concentrated on maintaining consensus among the elite, among those who were political voices in the capital. When it looked as though elections and the rise of the Communists threatened elite consensus he insisted that Indonesians had to formulate their own style. He invoked notions of gotong-royong and musyawarah-mufakat, traditions of mutual help and consensual community, within a nationalism welded to Marxism and Islam. In his terms problems arise from the fact that people catch the embers rather than the flame of these systems, they became dogmatic literalists. He argued he was not against Islam, but the corruptions of practice, and held that his ability to synthesise depended on capacity to see the essence rather than just outward forms of systems. His thus thoroughly syncretic approach suggests precisely the conjunction of consciousness and power emphasised within traditional systems.

As a communal substructure within Southeast Asia the substratum is certainly now both breaking down and becoming less visible as it disintegrates. But at times, as in eastern Europe with the turn of the decade, superstructural cracks reveal cultural forces which had been obscured by political oppression. Ethnic and state identities had been submerged within umbrella structures, but surfaced with an intensity and trauma commensurate with preceeding repression. Powerful popular movements such as those recently in Poland or the Philippines combine with less dramatic instances to remind us that long repressed and unspoken forces can be sustained, sometimes bursting through powerful hegemonies. Even when peoples have been declared extinct, as some native Australians or Americans have at times been, renewal of identities remains possible and often become, through 'reinvention', sources of inspiration in the present.
Casting an eye back through time, we can say that everywhere external influences have been transformed, reworked and used by local systems which have had ancestral spirits at their heart, that the template world religions have fitted into is animistic. There is no doubt that guardian spirit cults and magical practices also still percolate below the surface throughout Southeast Asia. Malay spiritual specialists can be linked not only to shamanism but also to shaivism and sufism; the strands of Malay religious history wove into a pattern based on a pre-historic systems. Kalijaga's conversion is presented in Javanese mythical histories as a fulfillment of earlier Javanese ideals through Islam, without implying insignificance to the shift. Animistic healing practices transcend boundaries between Buddhism and Islam among Thais and Malays.

Structural breaks in spiritual practice occur and these are clearly present when burial practices change or there is a transition from a multiplicity of deities to one God. But continuities are also often remarkable and subtle. In Java the establishment of a saint cults became a new cover for an old pattern of spirit contacts. If local Muslims meditate on the graves of the walisanga in search of magical powers we may question whether the primary modality of their spiritual life is Islamic. In New Order Indonesia Suharto's grave complex mimics earlier Indic styles and the enshrinement of Sultan Agung as a national hero suggests dynastic claims to a guardian ancestor. Spirit houses complement Buddhist temples in Thailand, the mosque becomes a gateway to grave shrines in Java, and claims to royal power in Burma or Java still seem to depend on relations with ancestral figures.

 

A. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Albany, 1987.

D. Miles, Cutlass and Crescent Moon, Sydney: Centre for Asian Studies, University of Sydney, 1976 and R. Hefner, Hindu Javanese, Princeton, 1985.

von der Mehden, Religion and Modernization, p 110.

C. Geertz, "'Internal Conversion' in Contemporary Bali" in his The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973 and J.D. Howell, "Modernizing Religious Reform and the Far Eastern Religions in Twentieth Century Indonesia" in S. Udin ed. Spectrum, Jakarta, 1978.

Schecter, The New Face of the Buddha, p204

KP Landon, Southeast Asia, Chicago, 1949 pp 202-3.

B. Kiernan, "Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Vol 20 No 4 (1988).

This remarkable continuity is evident in the three part documentary film by John Darling, "Bali Triptych" (Bozado Pty Ltd 1988). Part two, "The Path of the Soul", especially compares footage of rituals performed in the 1930s, taken by Mead and Bateson, with his from the 1980s.

Cheu Hock Tong, The Nine Emperor Gods, Singapore, 1988.

A.B. Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam, Boston, 1976, p 259.

Schecter, The New Face of the Buddha, p 180.

M. Spiro, Buddhism and Society, New York 1970 and S.J .Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-east Thailand, Cambridge, 1970.

D.J. Steinberg ed. In Search of Southeast Asia, Syndey, 1987, p 465.

Keyes, The Golden Peninula p 49.

R. Subagya, Kepercayaan dan Agama, Yogyakarta, 1973, p 129-138.

Woodside, Community and Revolution, p 307.

J. Peacock, Rites of Modernization, Chicago, 1968, p 242-3.

Tambiah, World Conqueror, pp 267-268.

For comments on such constructions see Benedict Anderson, Language and Power (Ithaca NY, 1990) pp 152-193 and James Siegel, Solo in the New Order (Princeton NJ, 1986) pp 281-84. Candi Ceto is one of the most powerful and significant of such reconstructions. Though many old temples, sites such as Borobudur, Prambanan and Gedung Sanga, have been substantially reconstructed, usually this has been only for the tourist market. Candi Ceto's reconstruction is impressive because its stone foundations have not only been rebuilt, but topped with wooden pavilions which make it usable for pilgrims; the site is indeed prominent among those focussing on danhyang, guardian spirits such as Semar, contrasting markedly with current uses of Borobudur.

There have always been conjunctions between spirit shrines and the sources of material prosperity. In the past sources of wealth were primarily agricultural, now tourism is a new source, but perhaps the underlying grammar of human/spirit/nature conjunctions is consistent.

For my extended probing of related theorisations see "Deconstruction as Disempowerment: New 'Orientalisms' of Java", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars V 23 N 3 (1991). Niels Mulder, Individual and Society in Java (Yogya, Gadjah Mada UP 1989) stresses the extent to which kebatinan oriented people, those enthused about mysticism around 1970, had a decade later often lost that interest, having moved toward pragmatic interests. There is no doubt about a change in atmosphere during the decades Mulder refers to. However we might also note that Dick Hartoko registers disagreement, in his introduction to Mulder's book, by refering to a revival of traditional mysticism around the time of the Sultan HB IX's death in 1978.

When I mentioned this objective to Marcel Robert (in Solo 12/92), the Swiss dramatist who has since 1975 bridged actively between Java, Bali and Geneva based productions in France, his response was that this point was self-evident. While pleased at the confirmation he implied, my point nevertheless appears to deserve emphasis, especially when directed at audiences of academic Indonesianists.

The term 'dance' (tari) is problematic in Prapto's case. He was never a performer of classical styles and other Solonese performers object to the suggestion that he is a 'dancer'. Hendra Cokrodipo, the custodian of dalam Joyokusuman in Gajahan (where Prapto's students have stayed) and also a painter, commented that a series of meeting among local performers addressed what Prapto's practice should be called. Prapto has separate concern for sensitivity about terminology. He terms his practice 'healing movement' (gerak penyembuhan) or 'movement meditation'. Nevertheless performance is involved and non-technical observers would, on first reflex, term it 'dance'.

I will not linger on the connections which link consciousness of rasa, the intuitive, to spiritual disciplines. I address that in "The Logic of Rasa in Java" Indonesia no 38 (1984).

I have no technical expertisse relating to dance or theatre, being only an enthusiastic and regular spectator. General introduction to the major dance traditions can be found in Mantle Hood, "Music and Theater in Java and Bali" in Ruth McVey ed. Indonesia (New Haven 1963) and in Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia (Ithaca NY 1967).

Claire Holt, in Art in Indonesia (Ithaca NY 1967) pp 103-4, affirms the ancient roots of these traditions. The most informative study of this variant is Margaret Kartomi's "Performance, Music and Meaning in Reok Ponorogo" (Indonesia No 21, 1976). The Hartley's film, "Sacred Trances of Java and Bali" (Hartley Productions 1975) and a film on "The Sakkudei" (in a series on 'Disappearing Worlds'), demonstrate resonances between the jaranan/ jatilan/ reok family and other archipelago traditions. MG Nasuruddin's "Dancing to Ecstasy on the Hobby Horse" in WJ Karim ed, The Emotions of Culture (Singapore 1990), documents Malay versions of the dance, but makes clear it originated in Java. Sal Murgiyanto, Deputy Rector of the Jakarta Arts Centre (Taman Ismael Marzuki), confirmed (through a guest lecture at Murdoch, 2/3/1992) that Dayak dances invoked totemic animals in a ritual context to protect rice crops and that related trance dances connect generally to spirit propitiation.

Dr Murgiyanto (2/3/92) admitted that there is a connection between the kris and Javanese dance movement, as the basic posture underpinning movement is to facilitate attack, but generally argues that connections to martial arts are remote, even if implicit in the refined (halus) notion of stressing minimal and 'slight' movements. He notes that dance traditions absorbed Islam most clearly in West Java, but that even there the structure of earlier dance practices remains relevant. In contrast he notes that in Sumatra dances are typically more closely related to the martial arts.

See Nancy Florida, "The Badhaya Katawang: A Translation of the Song of Kangjeng Ratu Kidul" (Indonesia No 53, 1992).

My sense of the extent to which this remains so comes partly through Marlene Heins (conversation in Amsterdam 26/1/92), who in the 1980s spent several years studying dance at both Solonese courts. According to her it appeared as a radical breakthrough when Humardani, the founding director of ASKI (Akademi Seni Kerawitan Indonesia), was able to place two female students in the kraton to study this dance. This appeared especially radical as Humardani was apparently committed to a formalisation of dance, to emphasis on technique and notation, rather than its ritual and spiritual aspects. Ironically students of STSI (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia), successor to ASKI, speak of Humardani's spirit as a 'founding ancestral presence' within the new and beautiful (but cement) pendopo which houses its performances. Thus a modernizer's spirit may be appropriated within traditional frames.

During conversations in March 1993, Helene Berman, whose socio-linguistic research is concentrated within the Yogyakarta kraton, confirmed that even in the modern court of Hamengku Buwono X the court attendants (abdi dalam) uniformly attest to the presence of spiritual power in the environs of the kraton. For an informative discussion of the ambiguities of 'tradition' and spirituality in this new context see Felicia Hughes-Freeland, "A Throne for the People: Observations on the Jumenengen of Sultan Hamangku Buwono X" (Indonesia No 51, 1991).

The appearance of age is deceptive; in important respects modern wayang wong is a creation of the 1920s. Soedarsono stresses continuities and deep roots in his survey of its history, in Wayang Wong (Gadjah Mada UP, Yogya 1984, pp 1-39), but Jennifer Lindsay, in Klasik Kitsch or Contemporary (PhD thesis, Sydney U, pp 83-101) puts the accent on twentieth century development of the art within a colonial context stimulated especially by ethnic Chinese patronage.

See Astri Wright, "Javanese Mysticism and Art: a Case of Iconography and Healing" (Indonesia No 52, 1991).

John Pemberton, in his thesis, The Appearance of Order (Cornell U PhD thesis 1989), insistently qualifies 'tradition' in this sense. Claims to 'authenticity' are problematic. It is beyond the scope of this essay to pursue that issue, but relevant to acknowledge the issue as one.

Siegel, Solo in the New Order (Princeton 1986 pp 87-116) and also on ludruk see James Peacock, Rites of Modernization (Chicago 1969).

At the same time its continuing relevance, as a framework interpentrating with popular social practices, that is not only as a focal reference for the arts, is attested to by Ward Keeler, in Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves (Princeton, 1987).

American films, and to a lesser extent Hong Kong cinema, are dominant now in a way they were not two decades ago. Then an active Indonesian film industry provided local fare which was often also inspired by wayang idiom.

Political circumstances have changed in the interim as well, so in part this difference would be explained by the increased sense of security underpinning the regime's power. The same reading, that is use of drama as a foil for wider events, still applies at least for older members of audiences now. On the role of ketoprak, in the current context as one of resistance to state idiom as well as popular entertainment, see Barbara Hatley, "Theatre as Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Indonesia" in Arief Budiman ed. State and Civil Society in Indonesia (Monash Papers on Southeast Asia No 22, Clayton, Victoria, 1990).

Every Saturday night a full live wayang kulit is sponsored by RRI and broadcast. At the same time these performances, which rotate each week among the major cities, are well attended. Even in Malang, on the margins of the traditional Javanist region in East Java, where I have worked from August 1992 to the present (May 1993) wayang performances sponsored by local government and RRI are well attended. Wayang has lost more ground in urban contexts than in villages.

Triyono, a Solonese kris maker and Javanese teacher, explained (12/1991) that this was a new practice initiated by the dalang Mantep, that other dalang had felt compelled to follow suit, though none seemed to know how they could integrate these rather wild new elements smoothly into performance. I am speaking impressionistically about this shift toward emphasis on technique and joking, but have a strong sense that earlier constraints required the gara gara to bridge more actively between lakon and social context.

Ben Anderson already noted this trend three decades ago, in his monograph On the Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (CMIP, Ithaca, NY 1965).

A comment less dependent on my rough judgement than on the more informed remarks of Carol Block, a musician and teacher long resident in Solo and Yogya, and her husband Widjiyono, who has been a dancer in Solo. We were all impressed that a mutual friend, Suwito, was still performing at least twenty years after he began.

This institutionalization is touched in Lindsay (op cit) and in Laurie Sears, Text and Performance in Javanese Shadow Theatre (PhD thesis, U Wisconsin, 1986)

Interview with Marlene Heins (27/1/92). In my conversations with Humardani in the early 1970s he professed an actively spiritual interest within the arts. This would have been consistent with the fact he was the younger brother of Sudjono Humardani, then ASPRI (special adviser) to the President. That connection was not incidental to the financing and founding of ASKI and the elder brother is especially noted for the centrality of his concern with spiritual aspects of Javanist tradition. For notes on that connection see my "Interpreting Javanist Millenial Imagery" in Paul Alexander ed, Creating Indonesian Culture (Oceania Pub, Sydney, 1989).

I attended one of the all night performances in Perth and did enjoy it.

See Adrian Vickers, Bali: a Paradise Created (Ringwood, Victoria, 1989).

Bits of his personal history have been gleaned through conversation with one of Sardono's nieces, in Solo (December 1991). I met him in the mid-1970s, through mutual friends in Jakarta, then in Solo, as his uncle Suwondo, is friend and teacher through Sumarah.

I was not yet, at that time, resident in Solo nor trained to its aesthetics. Its pull may have been foreshadowed, as the Solonese performance struck deepest in an array which included Kathakali, Punjabi, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Malay, Balinese, Sundanese, Yogyanese and East Javanese troupes.

A video of which was presented by Dr Murgiyanto during his visit to Murdoch in 1992. Murgiyanto showed another related video, of Ed Herbst writhing in mud and sound in a Geneva performance. This illustrated what Marcel Robert had described, in conversation in Solo (12/92), as the direction of his work. Marcel studied karogo, automatic movement, with Sri Sampoeno, then leader of the Solo branch of Sumarah after 1975.

It is important to note, from the Sumarah perspective, that neither of these faces typify the organization, within which in general karogo has long been dropped and within which Islamic, rather than Buddhist, terminology predominates.

Prior to Prapto's creation, in late 1973, we had both witnessed a performance of Rendra's, then Yogya based, drama group. Rendra borrowing then from Balinese styles, also used living fire and shadow within a modern syncretic drama.

Ruwatan texts and performances are described in Ward Keeler, "Release from Kala's Grip: Ritual Uses of Shadow Plays in Java and Bali" (Indonesia No 54, 1992).

Interview with Christian and Christine in Solo (5/1/87)

Hidden only just across the stream from Prapto's property I found a substantial limestone cave. In context that seemed significant, as caves of that sort are so often used for spiritual purposes. To my surprise, as I found it by myself on my first visit, his student's of 1991 were unaware of it.

This synopsis is based on the description given by Christa Stempel-Thul, "Suprapto Suryodarmo: Portrait of a Javanese Movement Teacher" (Murdoch Univ, independent study paper 1992).

interview (June 29th 1987) with Jose & Christina, in C Stelzer ed. Talking to You (Solo 1987).

Helen Poynor, "The Walk of Life", Human Potential (Autumn 1986 p3-4).

Christina Stelzer ed. Talking to You (Solo 1987) p5.

I have referred to Sudarno's interpretations in "Mystical Symbolism in the Javanese Wayang Mythology" The South East Asian Review (V1 N2 1977).

See Keeler, Op Cit.

His interpretation on this point would be disputed vigorously by the Solonese Hindu teacher, Hardjanta, who associates Semar, in his divine form as Ismaya, with the kuncung, the center he believes is emphasised in Javanese yoga and located in between the ajna cakra (third eye) and the crown center.

According to Marlene Heins (27/1/92) Sulistiyo is from the kraton and was raised in it and trained by the same teachers who taught at the dance school run by Sardono's mother.

Mark Parlett became involved in Indonesian arts through the 1986 Expo in Vancoever. Sardono and Sija were both leaders within the contingent representing Indonesia. After contact with them he arranged to tour with his performance group, then to study in Bali. We met in Solo in August 1991 and I have been able to fill in details of the Bona meeting through him. Wayan Sadra, originally a pupil of Sija's and a lecturer at STSI in Solo, was at the Solo meeting I describe below and also joined in discussion with Mark Parlett and I.

(Tambiah 1970 p 195)

Johns (1961)

Abdullah's (1966), as do recent studies (1983)

Mature grasp of Islam, as in Woodward (1988)

al Attas (1966; Johns (1965)

Phelan (1959) Ileto (1979)

Lester (1973 pp 45, 135)

Geertz (1971)

von der Mehden (1963)

Geertz (1973 ch 10)

highlighted by Geertz (1976) and Jay (1963).

Mortimer (1974)

ref to Mus

McCoy (1982) linked them to the same wider patterns I note

Sarkisyanz (1965)

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