Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Kathleen M. Adams, Loyola University
Discussant: Daniel S. Lev, University of Washington
These papers address the tangled articulations of the local, regional, and national in Indonesia. Inspired by recent scholarship which has shattered traditional cookie-cutter portrayals of indigenous groups and their productions as entities relatively autonomous from national and transnational dynamics (cf. Atkinson 1983; Kipp and Rodgers 1987; Tsing 1993), the panel participants explore a variety of cases which illustrate articulations, negotiations, confrontations, and mediations between the local, regional and national. With the aim of fostering new dialogues on this theme, the panel brings together Indonesianists from different generations and different disciplines (history, linguistics, anthropology, and political science). The cases to be presented span a broad range of time periods (from the colonial period to the present) and geography (from Biak to Sumatra). Focussing on the period from 1880–1927, Jeff Hadler spotlights transformations in local marriage practices to explore how Minangkabaus negotiated changes in Islam, Dutch colonialism, and contested ideas of "tradition." Philip Yampolsky also addresses the intersection of religion, localism and nationalism: his paper examines attempts to create a national church music with regional nuances, and, conversely, regional music within a national Indonesian religious administration. Joe Errington focuses on language change in south-central Java, exploring how both Javanese and Indonesian serve to symbolize and implement public authority, as well as negotiate ethnic and national identities. Finally, Danilyn Rutherford approaches the Indonesian nation as an imagined community of shared currency and explores the implications of Biak (Irian Jaya) cultural practices and conceptions for the relations between local and national orders of discourse. Through these varied cases, all of the papers strive to examine the dynamics involved in the constitution of histories and identities (be they ethnic, national, and/or religious). Daniel Lev, who has recently co-edited a volume on these themes, will serve as discussant.
Jeffrey Hadler, Cornell University
The Minangkabau society of West Sumatra is the world’s largest Islamic matriliny, and the reconciliation of a patrilineal religion and local patterns of residence and inheritance has been a driving tension in Minangkabau culture. Since the Wahabi-inspired, reformist Padri Wars of the early nineteenth century, Minangkabaus negotiated changes in Islam, Dutch colonialism and "progress," and a contested idea of "tradition." My essay highlights these negotiations in the small village of Koto Gadang. The essay is framed by two documents. The first is a handwritten manuscript from the late 1880s, titled, "On the matter of marriage in Koto Gadang." In it a Minangkabau schoolteacher remembers his marriage and wedding night, recalling rituals and a (clumsy) first sexual experience that intimates a great deal of gender equality and female power. This I contrast with an equally remarkable document from 1924—"Explaining the Letter of Request of the Women of Kota Gedang"—in which a group of women petition the male elders of the village, demanding the abolition of female endogamy. In forty years Koto Gadang was transformed from a model village that lead West Sumatra in both general co-education and the production of major national leaders (Haji Agus Salim, Sutan Sjahrir, and Rohana Kudus), to a place ridiculed for its absurd adherence to dated marriage convention where young women were bound to wed polygamous old men.
I trace the history of this transformation, placing the localized Minangkabau culture of Koto Gadang in the broader contexts of late colonial culture and Muhammadiyah’s Islamic modernism. In the national period, history has been renarrativized to turn on the Revolution. Colonial "Indonesians" had numerous models for their future society. Koto Gadang’s early acceptance of Dutch culture gave the villagers access to late nineteenth century opportunities, but kept the village from the Islamic florescence that the rest of Minangkabau experienced in the following decades.
Philip Yampolsky, Independent Scholar
The need to create a body of music for use in Indonesian churches has provoked varying responses at different times. During the colonial era, Protestant missionaries considered it sufficient to translate the texts of Western hymns into Indonesian and, to a lesser extent, into regional languages, while Catholics used European liturgical music sung (by priests and trained choirs, not the congregation) in European languages. Since Independence, however, there has been a growing movement to develop church music by Indonesian composers or manifesting Indonesian musical characteristics. For the Catholic churches in Indonesia, the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s imposed a more difficult and more precise obligation: to develop liturgical music that drew upon local or regional culture. Some Protestant churches have also in recent years begun to work along these lines.
All such attempts involve complex adjustments between local musical idioms (as well, of course, as local religious concepts and symbolism) and the national (that is, Western) musical idiom. Sometimes the process is one of simulation, as in the insertion of regional nuansa—"nuances"—into the harmonized Western idiom of church music. Sometimes, as in the inkulturasi ("inculturation") program of the Catholic church, it involves identifying appropriate pieces of regional music to be reformulated so that they can be sung by congregations throughout Indonesia. Sometimes, but as yet rarely, it leads to the creation of new music or the Christianizing of old music squarely in the regional idiom.
This paper looks at some of the attempts to create a national church music with regional nuances, and, conversely, regional music within a national religious administration.
J. Joseph Errington, Yale University
This paper deals with practical and symbolic dimensions of language change, a central part of Indonesia’s "miracle of development," as it is occurring in "the heartland" of south-central Java. I propose to focus on two specific aspects of Javanese-Indonesian usage there, to be read together not just as emerging forms of social difference and accommodation, but as key elements in shifting understandings of ethnic and national identities.
On the one hand, I discuss state penetration of rural society—in the environs of the city of Surakarta—with an eye to changing knowledge and use of "formal," standard Indonesian in relation to "high," polite Javanese in village communities. This involves consideration of how both languages serve to symbolize and implement public authority. On the other hand, I consider changing patterns of everyday, interactionally situated use of both languages, particularly with respect to elements which are relatively focal for negotiating interactional identities: personal pronouns and kin terms. These can be presented as broadly convergent or "syncretic" modes of expression with an eye to the homogenizing power of the nation-state, and the purchase which a national ideology of development (pembangunan) has on ways of being and speaking Indonesian.
Danilyn Rutherford, University of Chicago
Classical treatments of the nature of "modern" identity have rarely linked money and violence. The use of currency is held to entail trust, not terror: the suppression of fleeting passions and the materiality of the medium in the interest of a rational allocation of means to ends. But in many parts of the Netherlands Indies, monetization was not a consensual process. Colonial currency, like colonial law, was delivered through the barrel of a gun.
In the early twentieth century, when the Indies government imposed a head tax along the coasts of western New Guinea, the seafarers who inhabited the island of Biak understandably associated money and violence. Less understandable is the persistence of this association, which marks a confrontation between systems of value. This paper examines the aesthetic, political and historical qualities that contemporary Biaks attribute to currency. It shows how Biaks define money as foreign, despite their familiarity with wage labor and trade. Moving from myths to the market to the dynamics of Biak feasting, the author locates conceptions of money within a longstanding social logic that transforms the raiding of objects from distant polities into a source of personhood and prestige. Approaching the nation as an imagined community of shared currency, she explores the implications of Biak practices for the relation between local and national orders of discourse. In reenacting the violent history of currency in the region, Biaks challenge the hegemony of the postcolonial state: they consume the government’s money, but in ways that keep it strange.