INTRODUCTION

The island of Java resembles Britain in possessing an unusual insularity. Situated at the crossroads of the maritime trade routes between China to the north and India and the Muslim and Mediterranean world to the west, this society has participated in international networks and absorbed foreign influences for over two thousand years. Nonetheless, once one leaves the cosmopolitan north coast, Java “Javanizes” into a “deep Asia”. A new kind of cultural coherence emerged during 350 years of Dutch colonialism. What changed? Since the Dutch first sought spices in the archipelago in the 1590s, the majority of the Javanese population, more than a hundred million people today, have converted to Islam. This volume chronicles that conversion as seen from one region, just north of Surakarta in Central Java: the sacred forest of Krendawahana where Javanese kings from Surakarta offered blood sacrifices to the goddess Durga.

Why choose Durga's forest as an historical benchmark? From at least the eighteenth century the two rulers of Surakarta, the Susuhunan and the Mangkunagaran prince, invoked Durga at her tertre for the well being of their kingdoms. Most likely cults of this kind existed in other forests with the same or similar toponyms nearby earlier kingdoms elsewhere in Java. The invocations, and the mythology that accompanied the offerings made in that forest, created a richly woven fabric of belief that survived the arrival of Islam at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While elsewhere in the countryside the massive development of Islam has left few traces of its spread, the proximity of the cult of Durga in Krendawahana, simply because of its urban and royal patronage, and the mythological fame of its cultic site already found in the first book of the Indian epic, the Mahābhārata (Ādiparva) of the shadow puppet theatre, permits a more detailed description of Islam's advance.

The construction of this new religious social space did not take place in an economic and political vacuum. Although the economic, political, and social changes that have swept through the region are not our focus here, they need to be sketched out.

INTRODUCTION

It was not immediately after the turmoil of May 1998 that calls for jihad appeared. The initial efforts to deal with the fractured Javanese society came from a healthy reform movment that wanted to promote social solidarity. Élite competition for the spoils of the defunct dictatorship came later. It could be many years before historians, economists, and other social scientists have a clear perspective on the changes wrought in Indonesia by the fall of General Soeharto's regime in 1998. In this chapter and the following one we will move our focus away from the rural area north of Surakarta and study the rituals and social healing practised in the city of Solo following these traumatic events. The urban scene south of the district of Kaliasa is chosen because of the apocalyptic disturbances that led to the sacking of the city of Surakarta. Theatre appears crucial for representing to the victims the trauma of these events.

Javanese wayang, a highly “traditional” art form, might be expected to evolve more slowly than other social indicators, artistic or otherwise, in reaction to such political upheaval. However, the very nature of wayangtheatre, and the nature of any living “tradition,” is indeed to evolve within its own structures. For once “tradition” becomes a completely static and immovable entity it is in textbooks and museums but not in the streets in tense times of rapid social change. Within wayang, the purification, or ruwatan genre, occupies a receptive place for change. For how can one claim to purify unless one heals today's ills? The agency of wayang during exorcisms addresses the current needs of the local populace. But how does it do so? More specifically, how can it address such all-encompassing social crises as the fall of the New Order regime?

The fall of General Soeharto created many new social currents in the later half of 1998 and during 1999. The social reconstruction of confidence, required for society to continue, took many forms. The economy had been going through a total crisis (1997+). Local neighbourhood committees in the town of Surakarta (Solo), as in many other places, were mobilized to protect the neighbourhoods (kampung) at night and help the poorest to get by through aid in kind and money.

In Chapter 4 on the deterritorialization of the Javanese village communities it was shown that the Javanese village headman, the bekel, was first and foremost a tax farmer and that his role was often in blatant contradiction to the territorial integrity of the village (Elson 1997, pp. 28–30). To begin with, the function of tax farmer was usually bought. Where the village settlement was at a certain distance from the palace administration, the bekel and his followers could develop their common interests at the margin of the stratified centralization of the divine right rice agriculture. As discussed in Chapter 3, between the village cults and the royal cults there existed a massive gap that was sometimes filled by regional cults, although these always risked royal censure. The appearance of a supra-village sphere often took the form of networks animated by lineages. These “new” genealogies manifested the partial marginalization of communities based on the “sharing” of a common village space, and the deployment of worship communities in a patchwork of kin-based networks whose activities could lie dormant for shorter or longer periods of time.

Javanese religious praxis in local territorial communities such as the village or the urban quartier (cf. Chapter 13) mostly involves either mosquebased worship or family life passage events with prayer meals (slametan) organized at a home, which then serves as the site of the invocations. It is also possible, however, for a person to go away, alone or with his family, on a pilgrimage, to pray at a particular shrine in the mountains or on the tomb of a king or Muslim saint in the valleys. Leaving Java aside, throughout western Austronesia, a third praxis which is not rooted in a place, such as a mosque or a household, takes as its focus kinship ties in the form of lineages worship communities. In Java, these cults are usually voluntary associations. In Part II we are describing two lineages, one aristocratic and the other Muslim, each one constituting a community of worship “centred” in the Kaliasa region. While their centre is territorial, their members are scattered. Each of these lineages also represented an historical stage in the development of individuation in the Javanese social morphology.

If the coherence of a representation resides in bringing together its elements in the order of their meaning, jihad in contemporary Java can be analysed as three successive processes. Jihad enables Javanese Muslims to: (1) reinvent Islam in Indonesia as the umat writ large; (2) face down the secularizing state; and (3) confront the growth of individualism promoted by statecentred nationalism. Nevertheless, these jihad campaigns fail to convince many Javanese Muslims that they fully represent Islam. For the unconvinced, Islam is already that whole which allows Indonesians to think through all of Javanese society, and so by definition Islam peacefully cohabits with all that is “other” in Java.

Here is an example of the difficulties of thinking of Java as a whole. The major conservative Javanese Muslim party, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in its July 2002 congress in Jakarta (25–28 July 2002), defended suicide bombing as a legitimate weapon to defend Islam. But at the same time it moderated that stance, insisting that it was necessary to prepare students to face relativism in ways other than monolithic rejection of alien opinions: the study of the Koran and hadith, the study of Islamic jurisprudence (fikh). These two positions were not irreconcilable. Calls for jihad are barometers of storms concerning alterity in a socially disintegrating Java. To combat this disintegration, many Javanese Muslims perceive an advantage in coexisting with contemporary non-believers (kafir). The opposite strategy for dealing with this social fragmentation is jihad, which imagines Java as a seamless Islamic whole and attempts to represent, to render present (prae esse), Islam as an exclusive totality, thus condemning the non-Islamic margins of Java.

What is the value of tolerance? In this less combative perspective, it appreciates the value of difference (ikhtilāf), used by some Muslims trying to create inclusive visions of their relation with other Javanese. Difference is thought of as an inherent dimension of society, consolidating their own community or umat. There is more to the Islamization of Javanese society than a militant communalism treating other religions as foreign to Javanese society. An Islamic current is trying to “civil”-ize the multi-confessional Javanese society through a religious encompassing. This is possible to the extent that all confess Allah, the standard word all Javanese use for God.

The role of Muslim prayer in the corpus of mantras used during the maésa lawung ritual at Krendawahana was a superficial one. It was also a temporary one in as much as eventually (1979+) the highest ranking abdi dalem juru Suranata one would confine himself to Muslim prayers in Muslim settings and no longer attend the offering of sacrifice buffalo meat at Durga's tertre. Constantly changing with each generation, it needs to be envisaged against a much broader historical and geographical backdrop which is what this chapter sketches out. Most of the material presented here comes from Central Java but the earliest witnesses are found on its north coast.

The Javanese were in a way colonized theologically by their way of defending their own traditions. We give examples from over four centuries of how Islamic prayer took root in Javanese soil. Perhaps the real test for the progress of Islamization is the increasing awareness of the content of Islamic doctrine and the differences between the mantras studied above in Chapter 9 and mosque-based prayer.

MUSLIM PRAYER IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY JAVA

When Islamic prayer entered Java, it was subject to Javanese influence. The Javanese are noted for the ease with which they adapt and incorporate foreign beliefs and practices from outside the archipelago. They provide a case study of adoption and adaptation. Syncretism is not the first word which comes to mind in describing Islam. Nonetheless Islamic prayer practice could not have taken root in Javanese soil without some “adaptations” undertaken by the Javanese, with repeated Islamic corrections of these adaptations over the centuries. There was a process of ebb and flow of what was still a marginal orthodoxy.

Examples from old texts are “thin” descriptions and cannot rival the “thickness” of contemporary socio-linguistic analyses. Nor do the citations from these literary witnesses make any pretence at balancing witnesses from all the currents in Javanese Islam, something which would require a full book in itself. We are not seeking to question the extent to which Java has become Muslim. That question should find answers from the mouths of the Javanese themselves, but in any case the massive impact of Islam on Javanese culture is everywhere present.

In this conclusion, I would like to lift this documentary monographic contribution on the introduction of Islam to Central Java to the level of a theoretical one. Throughout the preceding chapters our perspective on Java has frequently been contrasted to those of Andrew Beatty and John Pemberton. But our unnamed opponent has been Emile Durkheim and an untenable opposition of individual and society (Ingold 1996, pp. 57–98). If in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) the society is present in the individual, his search for a positive definition of religion, discourages Durkheim from starting from God/Allah as totality and pushes him in the direction of a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Our disagreement with this dichotomy is that our description of Java has made it clear that a Javanese may not perceive division between the sacred and the profane, since the social space created by his relations with others projects him immediately as part of a whole. It is less a question of collective representation of types of ideas which individuals accept, than individual(istic) participation in a common cosmology. A person with no relation of any kind would have no existence in society. It is in this sense of society that brings a man to life. As often as possible we have described how Javanese persona are formed by these relationships into which they enter.

In former times there was no precise word for this formative matrix. The word in Javanese now used is masyarakat which originally meant group or association before being used to translate the imprecise concept of society. Now during the 1980s Javanese themselves say, for instance, of the dakwah (“propagating” the faith) campaigns, that Javanese society (masyarakat) was still being Islamized. It was not Western social sciences that brought about the possibility of distancing oneself from the object of observation (society) to better understand it. As Jonathan Spencer has pointed out “this distinction lay at the very heart of colonial practice … orderly government without active reform of local society” (in Ingold 1996, p. 79). Already Boeke in his 1930 inaugural address in Leyden University had described Java as a dual (native and colonial) society. Needless to say, the Javanese had realized that long before.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

In the preceding chapter, it was claimed that the profoundly village-centred topos of the search for well-being was homologous to a larger, whole society, the difference lying in the circuit through which these similar values are passed. In the rural situation, a blessing is invoked for that particular place, whereas in the palace invocation society, incarnated in the ruler, is taken as a whole. Since the village perspective is so strongly rooted in an inhabited space, it is important to understand the evolution of the village communities in terms of their land tenure and taxation procedures. Without this, it is difficult to understand the transformation from membership in a village to a non-territorial community like the Javanese Muslim umat. Membership in the village involved many constraints. One could not leave the village and settle in another one since all able-bodied family heads and farmers, called cacah, were indebted to the ruler. The relationship of servant to master (kawula-gusti) was thus also economic. The king measured his resources in terms of numbers of these cacah. On the other hand the destiny of the village was perceived in large part as a communal one; local spirits protected the frontiers of that particular space and the residents who honoured its deities (dhanyang) at offering sites, sacred trees and wells, etc. The local ritual calendar involved the annual farming cycle as it related to these local deities. Communal meals were held, and communal labour was necessary for rebuilding houses and restoring bridges and wells. The king held no royal eminent domain (vorstelijk eigendomsrecht) over the village land; the local Javanese princes did not even measure these lands; what they did count was the number of farming families on them. They were preoccupied by sociology, not by territory measured in square metres of rice fields.

The apanage system in the central (nagaragung) lands, those closest to the king's palace, was controlled by the extended royal family. Relatives of the current and preceding kings parleyed their kinship relation as best they could into tax farming settlements (lungguh) and the cacah accorded them by the raja. The king, on the other hand, did not content himself with distributing rights to tax farming. He also exercised a monopoly on ritual genealogies leading back to the founders, both divine and human, of his dynasty.

THE UMAT‘S APPROPRIATION OF MODERNITY

In the introduction to this volume, we justified the need for an anthropological study of the nineteenth century Central Javanese umat by invoking the historical contrast opposing enveloping cosmologies to elective citizenship. We claimed that any effort to understand the appropriation of modernity by the umat of Javanese Muslims would need to take that route. Their community's morphology could only be grasped through a study of its changing forms. More fundamentally, one could only decide what kind of community the umat is by investigating to what extent it is encompassed. Our starting point was the attempt to show how the Javanese Islam had become the higher value by representing that society towards the exterior world, while vis-à-vis the older insular orientation of this island, the values of “Javanism” have remained primordial to this day. In this chapter their interface will be explored; the processes that led to this inversion of their value helps explain the emergence of communalism in the period after the fall of the Soeharto dictatorship (May 1998). Using contemporary data, it is no longer possible to confine ourselves to material from the village of Krendawahana and the area of Kaliasa, for the village has become “sub-urban”, or as its villagers say wis kota, and at the sociological level, the village has in some respects been assimilated to that of the urban neighbourhood (kampung). The village that used to lie on the northern frontier of the Mangkunagaran kingdom, now lies at the northern limit of the industrial influence of the city of Surakarta with its population of more than half a million people. Taking the framework of the greater (raya) Surakarta into which Kaliasa now belongs has the advantage of giving greater scope to the conclusions of our earlier chapters. As the revival of Islam in the 1980s moved from the city to the countryside using techniques of popular preaching (dakwah) it was no longer a question of the Islamization (Islamisasi) of the countryside but of the indigenization of a pure Islam (pribumisasi Islam murni), where “pure” was defined by urban Muslim values. And it was in this same urban milieu that after the fall of Soeharto in May of 1998, that a power vacuum was created into which the new reformers of the Javanese village communities rushed. It is to these that we now turn.

When we think of the encounter between Asia and Europe, we are aware of a lack of balance between the two entities. ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ may be counterposed geographically; but in cultural and civilizational terms, the counterposing is problematical. There is a historic cultural unity to Europe, due largely to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, which has no counterpart in Asia. By the mid-12th century, the Cistercian order of monks regularly held annual meetings in central France, its monasteries’ abbots, or their representatives, travelling there from the far ends of Europe—Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Portugal. For near comparisons in Asia, we would have to think of similar gatherings within China, within the world of Islam in West and Central Asia, or within India. Asia has been multi-civilizational.

China and India had a thin link in Buddhism; as did India and Southeast Asia in Hinduism. Islam spread through India and Southeast Asia rather swiftly, but the regions under its sway have been too disparate, and its institutional impulses too diffuse, to achieve the kind of shared ‘personality’ that Europe came to acquire. What gives Asia its unity, perhaps, is its common experience of Europe as an expansive—indeed aggressive— civilization; but that experience we have shared with Africa and with the pre-Columban Americas and Australia too. On the other hand, between Asia and Europe, there had been contacts much earlier, as with the Arabs in Spain, or Marco Polo in China at the Mongol court; and these contacts were profoundly consequential in shaping the course of history.

This essay considers only the period after Vasco da Gama. For all of us in Asia, Europe's expansion, and its more recent withdrawal from colonies, have had significant consequences in the making of the present. The record of the encounter between Asians and Europeans over these five centuries is a priceless resource, for, on our shrinking planet, such cultural encounters are becoming denser and more frequent than ever before.

We Were Soldiers (2002), the cinematic image of the first major clash between regular North Vietnamese and U.S. troops at Ia Drang in Southern Vietnam over three days in November 1965, is the Vietnam War version of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. The director, writer and producer, Randall Wallace, depicts both American family values and dying soldiers. The movie is based on the book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young by the US commander in the battle, retired Lt Gen. Harold G. Moore (in a John Wayne-like performance by Mel Gibson). In the film, the US troops have little idea of what they face, are overrun, and suffer heavy casualties: the American GIs fight for their comrades, not for their fatherland. This narrow patriotism is accompanied by a new theme: the respect for the victims ‘on the other side’. For the first time in the Hollywood tradition, we see fading shots of dying ‘VC’ and of their widows reading loved ones’ diaries. This is not because the filmmaker was emphasizing ‘love and peace’ instead of ‘war’, but more importantly, Wallace seems to say, that war is noble.

Ironically, the popular Vietnamese actor, Don Duong, who plays the communist commander Nguyen Huu An, who led the Vietnamese People's Army to victory, has been criticized at home for tarnishing the image of Vietnamese soldiers. Don Duong has appeared in several foreign films and numerous Vietnamese-made movies about the War. He has also played a pedicab driver in the movie Three Seasons (2000) and a refugee camp translator in Green Dragon (2001), both directed by award-winning Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tony Bui. In these movies, he represents for the first time a genuine person, a belated portrayal by American filmmakers of Asians, or here Vietnamese, no longer as ‘others’. His countrymen, through the official Army newspaper, see it differently and call him “a national traitor” (Peoples' Army Daily 18 September 2002).

Geography and identity

Social scientists have cut up the world into convenient regions: Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, East Asia and so on. A core argument for the regionalization of socio-scientific inquiry has always been that geographic proximity implies long-term cultural, economic, and social exchange. Hence, societies within a certain region share important characteristics which makes it relevant to study them together. Moreover, these regional studies are both rooted in intimate local knowledge and devoted to productive comparison, and this combination should lead to conceptual innovation and theoretical sophistication. However, this argument needs to be questioned.

First, it is important to re-examine the ways in which particular regions are constructed, how seemingly ‘natural’ borders of these regions are defined by academic specialists working within particular political contexts, how a particular process of regionalization affects the questions these scholars address, and how within certain areas an hierarchy of core societies and marginalized peripheries is established.

Second, the formation of institutionalized communities of area specialists and the reproduction of the paradigms which explain and underpin both the identities of the area they study and the academic community they are part of create the danger of an inward-looking habitus. Such a community of area specialists is characterized by a highly specialized language and an idiosyncratic research agenda, favouring particular topics and excluding discussions which are, for instance, considered to be highly relevant in other ‘areas’ or academic disciplines.

Criticizing area studies, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam wrote:

Introduction

The field of colonialism, health and medicine has been extensively and creatively theorized by scholars located in a range of disciplines and the emergent literature on the subject is voluminous, varied and valuable. Any analysis of the relationship between colonialism and health requires a recognition of the complexity and multi- dimensionality of this encounter. So far a variety of themes within this domain have engaged the theoretical and practical interests of scholars. Some examples include the impact of colonialism on indigenous systems of healing (Levine 1998, Marks 1997), on the use of ‘modern medicine’ to dominate and thus govern colonized populations, i.e., with emergent issues of power and social control (Haynes 1999, Lorcin 1999), utilization of modern medicine by ‘natives’ (Leng 1982) and even the benefits of Western medicine for maintaining good health of ‘natives’ and lessons to be learnt from Eastern experiences (Given 1929).

Despite the variety of themes addressed, a common thread runs through these accounts and discussions: that is, a sustained and singular focus on the colonies and the colonized populations, and the subject matter so defined is the state of health and healing in non-Western, colonized contexts (Denoon 1989, Manderson 1987, Patterson 1981, Yeoh 1991). I propose that this mode of approaching the field of colonialism and health is limited in being one-sided, in bracketing off attention to actual health conditions and healing strategies current in colonizing societies at specific points in colonial history. This chapter attempts to redress this imbalance by explicitly focusing on one colonizing context, and detailing the health scene in nineteenth-century Britain and the nature and impact of modern medicine in managing day-to-day health issues at ‘home’.

By now historical accounts of medicine and health care in Britain are plentiful (Lane 2001, Porter 1987, Wohl 1983). Much of the more insightful work has emerged under the banner of ‘social history of medicine’ in currency for the last 3 decades (Berridge 1990).

Characterizing Asian capitalists

For a long time, developments in South and Southeast Asia have inspired scholars to invent a terminology specific to the region because they believed that the processes studied did not seem to fit into the existing type of classification. Marx's ‘Asiatic mode of production’, Furnivall's ‘plural society’ and Boeke's ‘dual economy’ are perhaps the most well- known concepts that were conceived in colonial times to analyse South and Southeast Asian societies. In the last few decades, several new concepts have been employed to analyse the present-day developments in South and Southeast Asia. The South Asian economy in general and that of India in particular has been characterized in terms of a ‘semi- feudal mode of production’ (Bhaduri 1973; Chandra 1974; Sau 1975), a ‘semi-colonial semi-feudal mode of production’ (Sen Gupta 1977), a ‘dual mode of production’ (Lin 1980), a ‘constrained type of merchant capitalism’ (Harriss 1981), an ‘intermediate form of capitalist development’ (Harriss 1982) and a socio-economic structure dominated by ‘commercialism’ (Van der Veen 1976; Streefkerk 1985). The terms ‘rent capitalism’ (Fegan 1981), ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ (Robison 1986), ‘statist capitalism’ (Jomo 1988), ‘dependent capitalism’ and ‘ersatz capitalism’ (Yoshihara 1988) have been employed to analyse Southeast Asian economies, such as those of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

What all these concepts have in common is the insistence that the characteristics of South and Southeast Asian developments are so specific that they merit a terminology specific to the region. The relations of production in these societies are held to be of a mixed nature. Capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production are intertwined without any tendency of capitalist relations becoming more dominant. Merchant or financial capital is powerfully developed at the expense of productive capital; capital circulation instead of capital accumulation is the dominant tendency in South and Southeast Asia. Development of South and Southeast Asian capitalism has been largely confined to the tertiary sector: commerce, trade and services.