INTRODUCTION

This chapter has two main components. One is the ASEAN Regional Forum which complements and supplements ASEAN co-operation efforts with non-ASEAN members. It serves as a political and security parallel of ASEAN post-ministerial meetings with ASEAN dialogue partners. The other component focuses on ASEAN external co-operation in consideration of the emerging new regionalism. This also covers the growing free trade arrangements between ASEAN and non-ASEAN trade partners. Monetary co-operation arrangements like ASEAN Plus Three and its impact on ASEAN consider whether ASEAN is challenged or stands to be marginalized. Thus, the question in the concluding section is whether free trade arrangements constitute a building block or a stumbling block to the ASEAN Free Trade Area.

ASEAN REGIONAL FORUM

The end of the Cold War had altered the configuration of international relations in East Asia. The new environment presented historic opportunities for the relaxation of tensions in the region through multilateral consultations, confidence building, and eventually the prevention of conflict. In 1992, the ASEAN Heads of State and Government declared that ASEAN should intensify its external dialogues in political and security matters as a means of building co-operative ties with states in the Asia-Pacific region.

The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) was thus established in 1994. It aims to promote confidence-building, preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution in the region. The present participants include Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, China, European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam. ASEAN has taken the lead in the ASEAN Regional Forum. Paradoxically, ASEAN itself seems to have gone a full cycle, back to security and political matters.

The ARF is a post-Cold War arrangement to mirror or act as a parallel to ASEAN post-ministerial meetings. The Forum involves the same set of dialogue partners and is meant to engage in constructive mechanisms to keep peace and stability in the region.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 2 explained the theory and empirical evidence of how trade co-operation is effected first through the ASEAN Preferential Trading Arrangement, progressing to the ASEAN Free Trade Area including the ASEAN Framework Agreement for Services. More intra-ASEAN investment is vital to increase intra-ASEAN trade which is the subject of this chapter. Intra-ASEAN investment is part and parcel of ASEAN's need to attract direct foreign investment from the rest of the world. As a group of developing and newly industrializing economies, tapping direct foreign investment and multinational corporations is imperative not just for capital infusion. More vital is the role of direct foreign investment and multinational corporations for technology transfer and other management resources, skills, markets, branding and overall linkage with the global economy.

INVESTMENT REGIME IN ASEAN

The ASEAN region is a leading recipient of direct foreign investment flows in the developing world. Between 1990 and 1997, direct foreign investment represented an annual average of 40 per cent of the net resource flows to the ASEAN countries, with Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam accounting for more than 50 per cent of direct foreign investment composition. A high percentage of direct foreign investment to net private capital flows in the 1990s is almost the norm for many developing countries, and this is true for ASEAN. This suggests the increasing importance of net private capital flows, particularly direct foreign investment, to official flows for development finance.

Five ASEAN countries were among the top 20 developing country recipients of such long-term global capital flows from 1997 to 1998. Between 1993 and 1998, ASEAN received about 17.4 per cent of the US$760 billion in cumulative global net direct foreign investment flows to developing countries. Over the same period, ASEAN received an annual average of US$22 billion in net direct foreign investment flows, compared with an annual average of US$7.8 billion in the period between 1986 and 1991. Direct foreign investment flow in ASEAN increased on average by about 14 per cent annually from 1996 to 1998, while direct foreign investment stock in ASEAN grew tenfold from US$23.8 billion in 1980 to US$233.8 billion in 1998.

INTRODUCTION

Since its formation in 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has changed from security and political concerns to the more economic. It started with a preferential trade arrangement (PTA) in 1977, graduating to a free trade area aimed for completion by 2002 which did not quite happen. Currently the concept has been modified somewhat to an ASEAN Economic Community with a single market in mind. ASEAN enlarged once in 1984 with Brunei joining Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand as ASEAN-6. It has faced greater and more profound widening and deepening issues since it took in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar in the new millennium with ASEAN-10, i.e., a total of ten countries are now members of ASEAN. If ASEAN continues to muddle through at its own pace and time as it has for almost four decades, it may be marginalized. This is because a new regionalism has occurred including ASEAN Plus Three with China, Japan and Korea since the Asian crisis.

Paradoxically, the geographical value of Southeast Asia has gained ascendancy as Japan, China, the United States and India have individually approached ASEAN for some free trade arrangements (FTAs). The challenge and dilemma for ASEAN is to get itself in shape to take advantage these offers. It has to take the evolving new regionalism in its stride. Drifting along as it continues to muddle through the changing geo-economics and geo-politics, is not an alternative. The most crucial ingredient, that is ASEAN leadership, seems to be missing. Individual ASEAN states are in various stages of their own political and economic transition. The “ASEAN Way” lacks deep political commitment to push for economic integration, unlike the experience in the European Union. The prospects of ASEAN remain ambiguous and ambivalent. Perversely, it may take another crisis or external threat for the ASEAN resolve to be glued together again.

GENESIS, ORIGINS, AND DEVELOPMENT

The brief existence of the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) started in 1959 was to deal with territorial and political disputes.

The passage of time has left its mark on the structure of inhabited space around Kaliasa but nowhere more than in the former forest of Krendawahana. A once free-floating toponym, now attached to the south back of the Cemara River, evokes in the minds of the Javanese peasant a whole series of associations deriving from oral literature and the wayang. Denys Lombard has summarized the aura of Javanese sacred forests (alas angker) and the typically Javanese vision of the forest found in literature (1974, p. 478; translation S.C. Headley):

On the other hand the forest as a school of nature, the inspiration of the poet, so important in India, gained wide favour in the Javanese court literature known as kawi (Zoetmulder 1974, pp. 163–64). This explains how the toponym of Kha–ndava (i.e., Krendawahana) appeared in the Javanese late tenth-century prose translation of the Ādiparwa, the first volume of the immense Indian epic of the Mahābhārata. This old Javanese text, with a dedication (manggala) to Siwa, derives from one north Indian version of the Mahābhārata. In Javanese it has been reduced to about 36 per cent of its original length in Sanskrit. Each part (parva) translated individually into Javanese varies in different proportions from its Sanskit original.

THE CORPUS OF THE MANTRA

The value of studying the different collections of invocation used for Durga in Krendawhana and elsewhere is to see, before this cult became haram (forbidden) for Muslims, the extent to which these prayer had begun to absorb Islamic terminology. Praying at graves of holy men to gain merit (pahala from the Sanskrit phala) is common among Javanese; Muslims and non-Muslim alike “send their prayers” (ngirim donga) in repetitive waves from the foot of the tertre (Pradjarta Dirdjosanjoto 1999, p. 89). However, few people have had access to the collections of mantras used in Krendawahana. The mantra for the maésa lawung, those used for the accession to the throne of the king and the birth of princes and outside the palace for the so-called Birth of Kala or exorcism (ruwatan) of, as well as some protective songs (kidungan), overlap, producing their present patchwork quality. Only the protective songs had some diffusion in the population. The dhalang kept his as heirlooms to be given only to those few puppeteers who were deemed by their masters to be strong enough to perform the exorcisms. In order to perform exorcisms, contemporary dhalang are usually required to be descended through seven or more generations from the court dhalang Panjang Mas or Cremaganda (van Groenendael 1985, pp. 58–65). The maésa lawung mantra were by definition a palace possession. We have seen in the preceding chapter the list of qualifications required to present oneself for the post of abdi dalem juru Suranata.

These mantras are “polyvalent”; they have multiple uses and may be sung on very different occasions. Furthermore there is an important historical dimension in the case of one mantra, the Tata Winanci for it is found in Bali and among the East Javanese Tengger. That having been said, Nancy Smith- Hefner (1992) for the Tengger pembaron ritual of renewal gives a seven-prayer corpus that seems to be older than other known cosmogonies.

The fact that these various mantras used in the buffalo sacrifices to Durga by the Susuhunan or Mangkunagaran palace officials on the anniversaries of coronation, are also used for exorcistic lullabies, and in the wayang purification ceremonies certainly sugggests that they are heterogeneous not only in usage but also probably in origin.

JAVANESE ISLAM IN MONSOON SOUTHEAST ASIA

Since unbiased presentations of a culture and religion foreign to one's own are difficult, the reader needs to be aware of the author's assumptions, those of historical anthropology. The present volume on the development of Islam in Java is the sequel to From Cosmogony to Exorcism in a Javanese Genesis: The Spilt Seed (Headley 2000). The first volume studied the marginalization of a major Javanese origin myth which had begun as a cosmogony, but ended up an exorcism. What had explained the creation of the world and the social relations of mankind and the gods started to be used in a much more private way, for curing persons of their bad destiny. In this second volume the accent is no longer on the Javanese half-man myths, cosmogonies used to compensate for personal and social lack of fulfilment, but the introduction and eventual encompassment of the Javanese pantheon by a “higher” God, Allah, who eventually plays the principal role in the restoration of social and personal wholeness. In fact, the very nature of social and cosmic wholeness for the Javanese changes with Islamic monotheism. The norms which the socio-cosmic “fit” guarantees are slowly being replaced by another hierarchy of values.

By describing two very different kinds of holism, Javanese and Muslim, and the growth of individualism in both of them, one can see the overall coherence, indeed the simplicity of Javanese social morphology. Our task is therefore an ethnographic one. Here we will try to explore not only religious praxis, but how a village, a social community, with a sacred forest called Krendawahana which had become the site of the royal cult of Durga, north of the Central Javanese palace city of Surakarta, later became just another Javanese “Muslim village with a minor offering site behind its mosque”. The Javanese were aware of foreigners coming to Java from the outside world, from “other shores” (sabrang), well before they encountered Islam. But during what Anthony Reid (1993, Vol. II, Ch. 3), has called the age of commerce (1450–1680), there occurred a religious revolution during which half the population of Southeast Asia adopted a monotheism.

INTRODUCTION

In the first chapter we isolated two features of Javanese social morphology — lineages and the foetus siblings — which favoured the creation of worship communities and the articulation of the Javanese society within the cosmos. Despite the strength of the Asiatic commercial networks and a limited occidentalization of this Javanese “crossroads”, the particularity of the cognatic societies in the centre of the Nusantara archipelago was that the social organization of Java (Lombard 1990), the social inheritance of the concentric medieval kingdoms, and the divine right rice agriculture with its strict social hierarchy founded economically on an apanage system, were to be harmonized as a whole, so that cohesion and equilibrium were constant preoccupations.

In Chapter 2, we saw that during the life of a person, myth and ritual bind him/her through a web of correspondences together with his/her foetus siblings’ cosmic dimensions. These two levels, micro and macrocosmic (jagad alit; jagad gedhé), refer to one another at the same time as the greater envelops the lesser. The conclusion of Chapter 2 concerned the semantics of Ego's generation in Austronesian kinship classifications where the symbolic expressions of elder sister-younger brother marriage appeared in Javanese myths defining kingship in terms of marriage with an elder female goddess. In Javanese and Malay, spouses are classified by a distinctive use of elder/younger and are assimilated to the category of intimate cross-sibling. In eastern Indonesian this linguistic feature can become the basis for designating the prescribed spouse.

Whereas in Chapter 2 we sketched out the relationship of village cults of the rice goddess Sri to those at the centre of the Javanese kingdoms in the palace, here we shall explore other provincial cults of female divinities, and how they relate. The rice goddess (dewi) Sri is not the only female divinity worshipped in the palace complexes (kraton) of the Javanese kings (ratu) or venerated in shrines in the countryside.

INTRODUCTION: EXPLORING THE JAVANESE MANIKMAYA

Cosmography usually designates descriptive astronomy. Here the term is used to designate the Muslim notion of the progressive emanation of the universe from Allah's fiat described in Chapter 10 as opposed to Javanese conceptions of the genesis of the cosmos and the gods designated by the term cosmogony. Since at least the sixteenth century Javanese genesis narratives have been retold in mantras and in compilations of myths. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century numerous collections were entitled Manikmaya (Made of Jewels). These constitute a new mythological landscape resulting from the new spiritual geography of the island. What is meant by “jewels” may be Guru's fallen seed from which the world is constructed. In later versions, it was from this seed that appeared Guru's monstrous son Kala and the rice parasites. The usual Javanese formula which introduces a cosmology is “when the void still existed and there was neither heaven or earth”. This signals either portions of these Javanese creation myths or, from the eighteenth century onwards, emanations from Allah's divine fiat.

These longer eighteenth century Manikmaya poems began to incorporate Muslim cosmographies by “weaving” them around the narrative of which the Birth of Kala (“fallen seed”) myth was the coda. Episodes from these related Javanese myths include: the fall of Guru's “jewel” (manik), the death of a Sri, a beautiful maiden who appears from a jewel box, and the creation of the first rice fields attacked by Kala's animal army led by Puthut Jantaka. In this chapter I will concentrate on the persistence of the Javanese cosmogonies, giving the relevant history of existing scholarship, description of recensions with quotes, and their analysis. These narratives combine several successive origin myths into one long tale. Under the influence of the Pasisir (Javanese north coast) Kandha, Book of Tales traditions, these Manikmaya then go on to tell the “history” of the Javanese world down to Jaka Tingkir and the realm of Pengging (late fifteenth century). The fallen seed episode is the best remembered from these cosmogonies because of its purification/exorcism (ruwatan) rituals. These texts clarify the links which existed in the minds of the Javanese compilers of mythology between the myth of creation, the myth of the origin of rice and the myth of Kala hunting down humans with bad destinies (sukerta).

What's in the umma? The umma is not a congregation (jamā’a, Arabic; jemaah, Indonesian) of a given mosque, but the entire community of faithful. For the word umma (Ind. Jav. umat) there can be no translation into English, only a paraphrase for an attempted definition. Can an umma be localized, that is to say, does it have boundaries, whether ethno-linguistic, national, or otherwise? Can we write a book, for instance, about the Javanese umma as a vector for the introduction of individualism in Java? There certainly is an umma in Java, but clearly it is not only made up of Javanese. Recently, the leader (penghulu) of the largest mosque in Surakarta (Central Java) came from the eastern island of Sumbawa, and no one found this unusual. Indeed, the umma is cosmopolitan. Does this mean that the umma is as ethnically varied as the entire Indonesian archipelago? Should we include in it the Muslims of Malaysia, Sulu (the Philippines), and Petani (southern Thailand)? If one begins to think in terms of a transnational virtual umma, it often becomes so vague, that locality disappears as a pertinent marker of identity. In this study, we are committed to describing the development of the umma of a given area, Kaliasa. Central Java is the historic heartland of the island and our focus precludes a broader comparative perspective.

Arjun Appadurai (1996, ch. 8) pointed out that ethnographers have long been occupied with studying how local subjects are produced by particular rites of passage. But the “local” umma in Central Java has become over time, since 1660, less and less preoccupied with incarnating locality, with taking over the social space and clientele of older “Javanese” deities like Durga. In the course of eighteenth century, this network of mosques spread from city to city and then out into the countryside once royal patronage became a burden as much as an advantage. The urban mosques and rural Koranic schools, began to realize that their teachers who had studied in Medina and Mecca and their faithful who had done the h. Ajj (Ind. haj), were much less motivated in incarnating local identity than in propagating a renewed vision of what it meant to be a Muslim based on contacts with currents of Muslim thinking in the Middle East.

This chapter poses the issue of origin myths of social order in Java, mentioned in passing in Chapter 1. In traditional Indonesian societies origin myths often formed a charter of social morphology. Whether they remain there after the arrival of modern ideologies is, of course, another question. Despite the enormous evolution of Javanese villages through peasantry and beyond, and non obstant post-modernism, the role of these founding myths is still evident. The premise of this myth is that the first kingdom was a primordial village, Mendhang Kamulan. The meaning of the name of this village, “the origin of the rice chaff ”, implies that rice has its origin in the same inhabited space as this first human social organization. There are not many ways to conceptualize the whole of a society like Java and these origin myths have not been sufficiently explored for our purposes. Rape is presented in the best known myth as the reason for the death of the rice goddess from whose fertile body rice and children come. In the other major variant, her younger brother, whom she has attempted to marry, returns to heaven but is reduplicated into the first king of Java, just as she is reduplicated as a rice field python repatriated by peasants to a village granary. Copulation related to rape or incest, rice cultivation and granary rituals are rendered in these myths homologous with the basic configuration of siblingship which orients the peasants in the cosmos and leaves the kingdom with privileged access to this founding princess.

THE BIRTH OF A JAVANESE

If as H.W. Scheffler (1977) has said, “Kinship is a locally elaborated theory to account for how children are born”, then the conceptualization and rituals surrounding birth are indications not only of the Javanese notion of physiology but also of personality formation and psychology. This vein has been mined by Jerome Weiss in his Folk Psychology of the Javanese of Ponorogo (1977, ch. 4). While in the islands to the east and the west of Java, lineage ancestors are often important members of kin groups, on Java these forefathers “are” those unsual older and younger brothers or sisters to Ego, I call “foetus siblings”, which remaining intimate guides throughout life (cf. Ch. 1), even after their former physical “bodies”, the amniotic fluid and placenta respectively, are buried in the ground at birth.

THE QUESTION OF THE CONTEXT: JAVANESE AND INDIAN ISLAM

Islamization in Java has been ongoing for some five hundred years and, in other parts of Indonesia, for even longer. Should a historian study this as a process of conversion or as suggested in the Introduction as an acculturation, that is to say, a cultural “adoption” involving both deliberate and involuntary adaptations by successive generations of Muslims?

Given the paucity of data this choice is often not left open. The biographies of individuals converted have usually vanished with the death of those concerned. Furthermore the conversion perspective, whether individual or aggregate, leaves little role for the ethno-historian who seeks to introduce a diachronic dimension. For that it is also useful to look for comparative data from other countries. A brief comparison with the Islamization of India, whose history lasted more than a thousand years, heightens the specific character of Javanese Islam.

Assayag (1995, p. 29) claims that, in India, Muslims generally preferred commerce over proselytism, which pushed them to adopt both local culture and languages. That is equally the case in Java (Pigeaud and de Graaf 1976), where is impossible to consider Islam as a foreign or imported religion, to speak as if the customs and the usages of both Javanese Muslims and non- Muslims were not cut from the same cultural cloth. What explains the lack of similitude between Java and India in this comparison is that the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist tradition disappeared as a state-supported, if not an organized religion in the seventeenth century after the fall of the kingdom of Majapahit (circa AD 1527), while 90 per cent of the Indian population continued in the Hindu tradition. Factors such as nineteenth century Dutch colonial distrust of Islamic movements or in the twentieth century nationalists’ combat against the Darul Islam separatists Muslim movements of the 1950s provoked distinction and isolation that had not existed since the arrival of Islam on the Javanese political scene in the late sixteenth century.