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5 - From Geertz to Ricklefs: The Changing Discourse on Javanese Religion and its Wider Contexts
- from II - Geopolitical Framing of Western Discourse
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- By Riwanto Tirtosudarmo, Senior Research Fellow at the Research Center for Society and Culture, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)
- Edited by Albert Tzeng, William L. Richter, Ekaterina Koldunova
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- Book:
- Framing Asian Studies
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 28 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 12 November 2018, pp 101-119
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- Chapter
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Summary
It is particularly true that in describing the religion of such a complex civilization as the Javanese any simple unitary view is certain to be inadequate; and so I have tried in the following pages to show how much variation in ritual, contrast in belief, and conflict in values lie concealed behind the simple statement that Java is more than 90 per cent Moslem.
(Geertz 1960, p. 7)Much is about religion and politics, about the relationship between two forms of authority, knowledge and power and those who wield them.
(Ricklefs 2012, p. xviii)This essay, through reading of books written in English, analyses the changing discourse of the Javanese religion in the last half century. The analysis starts with Clifford Geertz's book The Religion of Java that was first published in 1960, seven years after he started his fieldwork in Java. It was only after the publication of The Religion of Java that a discussion on the notion of religion in Java among scholars was sustained. The last book in this analysis to comprehensively deal with the topic is Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java by Merle C. Ricklefs, published in 2012, seven decades after Geertz began his study. There is a clear discursive genealogy linking these two books, with Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java providing a convenient ending to the analysis. In between, several books were analysed, most notably Robert Hefner's Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (1985), Andrew Beatty's The Variation of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account (1999), Denys Lombard's Nusa Jawa: Silang Budaya, especially volume two, published in Indonesia (1996), and Mark Hobart's Java, Indonesia and Islam (2011).
The above-mentioned books are viewed as landmarks of Western scholarly discourse concerning Javanese religion, spanning the eras from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Certainly there are many other books and journal articles — as shown in the list of references — that could be quoted to support the arguments in this chapter. The chapter is chronologically structured by locating Indonesia's political development in three periods: during the Cold War (1950–70), during and after the New Order (1970–2000), and during the War on Terror (2001–13).
8 - Population Mobility and Social Conflict: The Aftermath of the Economic Crisis in Indonesia
- from Part II - Human Capital
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- By Riwanto Tirtosudarmo, Indonesian Institute of Sciences
- Edited by Aris Ananta
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- Book:
- The Indonesian Crisis
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2002, pp 213-244
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Summary
Migration is a dream gone sour in Indonesia, with scenes of weary refugees dominating nightly news broadcast.
(Far Eastern Economic Review, 8 April 1999, p. 26)Introduction
An unprecedented reversed stream of population movement characterizes the pattern of Indonesia's demographic configuration today. Thousands of migrant families were forced to leave their homes as rampant conflict erupted in several provinces that were previously major destination areas of the state's transmigration policy. Social conflicts, among others, were manifested in the form of violence between migrants and the local population, apparently marking the shattering of the New Order's political order. Soeharto himself, the New Order's main pillar, was hesitantly pushed down, after more than three decades at the apex of power. The interconnection of population and conflict is not a new phenomenon, as Choucri (1984) has argued, “…conflict is a central feature of all political behavior, at all levels of human interaction, and the prominence of population variables in shaping political behavior places population issues and conflict in close proximity”. The incidence of social conflicts in Indonesia in 1999 and 2000 shows that, given the archipelagic nature of the country and its ethnic and religious plurality, the most serious population variable that has a strong link with social conflict has been geographical population mobility. As the conflict is often strongly loaded with an ethnic tone, the lack of information on the ethnic background of the migrants has resulted in difficulties for social demographers and social scientists in general to comprehend the conflict.
The demography of Indonesia has long been the object of the ruling élite's engineering schemes that have resulted in the establishment of current political-demographic construction. Besides its explicit social and economic objectives, strategic and political goals have always been at the centre of the state's demographic engineering practices. Populating the empty areas in the outer islands through colonial emigration policy and post-colonial transmigration policy has been a major demographic engineering initiative for almost a century. After independence, national integration was the ultimate goal perceived by the national leaders as the major justification to continue engineering the country's demographic configuration.