I am glad the conference is over. I bump into someone - a Dutch student who attended it - in a shopping mall in Malioboro. We are both enjoying a lazy day after all the discussions and networking in air-conditioned surroundings.
So much was said at the conference - so much that was in fact knew to me - that my head is still spinning. Of course, Indonesia is largely unknown territory to me whereas most of my colleagues, both Dutch and Indonesian, are specialists and have therefore been here many times before. Because I am Brazilian, it is in fact impossible that I could have been a real specialist in Indonesia (this is in fact my first trip ever to the country).
The perspectives of the Dutch scholars and those of the Indonesians at the conference were different, though not exactly conflicting. They are just not interested in exactly the same things, nor are they talking about exactly the same country. For the Dutch of course colonial Indonesia - the erstwhile Netherlands Indies - looms very large still, whereas the Indonesians are very interested in the postcolonial nation-state. There is not a real gap between the two groups but the difference between them is however quite noticeable.
Bambang has insisted in his last speech that Indonesian history is largely colonial history, not the history of Majapahit and other mighty polities of the distant past. I both agree and disagree. I think it is very hard to work from within a historical consciousness fashioned by Western colonialism when you are in academia and based in a place like Yogya, and equally hard to claim you want to work beyond it somehow. Bambang in fact does neither. According to him, Indonesian postcolonial historiography has a deep problem of origins because it has tried to look at the pre-colonial past as the founding moment of the nation-state. He rightly points out it is not. Colonialism is. However, this poses a conundrum. The nation-state looms too large in this view. Any visitor to Jawa can see - virtually literally see - that Jawa is beyond any nation-state. It would in fact be even if there had existed a Javanese nation-state instead of an Indonesian one. There is no nation-state that can encompass and successfully claim such a varied, heterogenous, complex and ancient - and often highly visible - past. Jawa therefore offers too much and at the same time too little for any nation-state building. There is too little continuity, the past is often far too obscure, and the connections consequently too vague and hazy. The conference indirectly shows that as it gropes to present various pictures of Jawa's caleidoscopic past. I notice other conference participants cannot relate to all that is being presented. As an outsider I am entranced by all that I am fed, but am also equally puzzled. Nothing seems to fit together though it all somehow does belong together.
Cultural citizenship was a big theme at the conference. Local histories are right now being constructed all over Indonesia, as for instance Emilie from Sweden showed for the island of Alor, and Margono, a local Yogya historian, for Banyuwangi in East Jawa itself, and Tular (also from UGM) showed for musical heritage in a part of Flores (an island with a Portuguese name, by the way, as well as a Portuguese past: Flores means flowers, and just as neighbouring Alor and Timor, it was part of the Portuguese colonial empire once. I know nothing about those places, though Larantuka in Flores sounds very familiar to my ears: it could be a Brazilian name somehow). However, everything is highly contested even as the State tries to engineer heritage as tightly as it can: the world of the wayang - Sadiah's presentation - shows that clearly. Innovations are introduced, changes happen, new views take over. Satadru, however, who was born next to Kolkata and grew up in the United States, introduces a chilling note to the conference: namely, the Andamanese, a subject of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's ethnography, one of the earliest of its kinds by a famous pioneer of anthropology. I read it as an undergraduate student in anthropology at Universidade de Brasília. I also know the Andaman Sea because of Penang and Langkawi: both are in its southeasternmost reaches. The Straits of Melaka also begin in it. Satadru tells me that in fact there were close relations between Penang and the Andaman Islands (now an Indian territory) in the colonial era.
The introduction of the Andamanese is very unsettling to me for various reasons. I come from Brasil, and many indigenous groups have suffered similar fates to that of the Andaman Islanders, namely, decimation through disease and colonialism (and just as Brasil the Andamans have both groups with an ancient history of contact - British colonial settlement began in the 1850s - and a history of contacts that are still unfolding. Only, for close on ninety years some of the islands were a penal colony. I cannot remember a similar case from Brasil, namely an indigenous territory that used to be a penal colony was well). It is also unsettling because, not wholly unlike in parts of Brasil, the Indian government and its anthropologists think the best way out for the remaining islanders is to keep them where they are: namely, their cultural citizenship will be well protected as long as they agree to remain in a reservation with the external world tightly kept at bay. This is in fact now quite rare in Brasil, but the idea has never really been discarded. Heritage as something related to a human museum, not unlike the museums that Pim, another specialist at the conference, showed us in what concerns the Netherlands.
He pointed out that exhibits with living human beings (as in a photograph he showed of fully dressed European men staring at African bare-breasted women somewhere in Paris well over a hundred years ago) or, as these could not be easily kept, mannequins. These are surrogate humans (he accordingly told us about the careers of some of the mannequins in the Tropen-museum in Amsterdam where he is a curator: some went from street vendors and peasants to teachers, others moved from being from one ethnicity to represent another ethnic group). The notion that human beings can be kept in a natural environment - in this case, islands - as specimens of humanity controlled by outsiders is very, very scary. In one of the islands the locals still relate to outsiders through beach barter, a well-known trading technique in the Indian Ocean according to Michael Pearson and other specialist historians. Namely, you leave your goods and then depart, and come back later to see the results of your barter. In this case, however, it is not traders from far away places that are taking part in the exchange, but rather government ethnologists and their associates. This also used to happen quite often in Brasil. I remember having met Olympio Serra when I was growing up in Brasília. He was a government employee, an anthropologist, and someone who had contacted indigenous groups during his career. I am not sure he would have felt comfortable in the skin of one of his current Indian colleagues, however. Of course here too there are different languages involved, though the main language in the Andamans nowadays seems to be Hindi.
The history-writing from below - but not too far below - that both Margono (for Banyuwangi) and Badri (for the dalits in parts of North India) present is curious. There are local historians who concoct local histories in complex ways. From an academic point of view their histories may be disregarded and may even seem ludicrously researched. However, they are perhaps more powerful on the local level than scholarly histories can ever hope to be. They involve languages too: dalit historians - often school teachers - choose a kind of Hindi that is midway between official Hindi and local Bhojpuri, a language the State does not acknowledge. Osong Asing, an indigenous identity in Banyuwangi, is of linguistic origin: a local language and its speakers end up being constructed as an indigenous group. In wayang too the local language - basa Jawa - is very powerful. The songs are linked to the traditional music, and they cannot really be properly sung in Indonesian, for instance, as I learn later in the evening when there is a performance that in fact introduces a story entirely told in English but sung in basa Jawa. A student orchestra, student singers, and one of the lecturers organize the performance. It is great. It is also both traditional and highly innovative. Members of the audience are invited on stage too. It is my first wayang performance ever.
I wonder whether heritage is not on some level the way the nation-state has to deal with its irreducible heterogeneity. For it is really not possible to bring all that heterogeneity to bear upon the state. In that regard, I do not believe that citizens will always be equal in any way in cultural terms. Speakers of Alor's dozens of Austronesian and Papuan languages number fewer than two hundred thousand people (in fact I cannot remember a place in Brasil of similar size and so many languages though we do have many areas with a good deal of different languages); Banyuwangi is a frontier space seen as inhabited by orang nakal or 'naughty' people (that is part of the self image of the place too). In fact it is inhabited by people of various origins and different histories. It is a frontier space because it was the very last area in Jawa conquered by the colonial power in the late eighteenth century. As it is right next to Bali, Balinese influence has been historically quite important. There are still Hindu groups living there.
All this is part and parcel of the nation-state. It is also part and parcel of a domain both before and well beyond the nation-state as the appearance of various local languages in the presentations shows.
The nation-state however is all about Bahasa Indonesia. I am not suggesting further official languages here. Only, the appearance of heritage and local histories and their languages on the stage of the nation-state - namely, at our very conference in Gajah Mada, the first real Indonesian national university as Bambang stressed to us, and therefore a vital microcosmos of the nation-to-be - shows how complex any interaction between the nation-state and its internal others can be through the very issue of language (s).
I think we may all be in need of an intensive workshop under the direction of those Banyuwangi and dalit historians, and using interpreters too. I wonder what we are doing. In my case it is even worse. The Dutch are reclaiming and revisiting their colonial heritage; the Indonesians are reconstructing their nation's past. Matthew has shown movies produced in his country - the US - and the Netherlands that present an exotic Bali and Jawa. Matthew's presentation was in fact quite nice because obviously everybody could relate to it. It also shows a side of Bali and Jawa that is similar to images on Brasil. A kind of Carmen Miranda side, in fact: hybridity, nudity, and fun. One of the trash movies he shows is called Guna-Guna after a famous colonial novel. It means magic. I muse it could also be good Brazilian Portuguese: Guna-guna aqui, guna-guna ali, guna-guna prá você! In one of the movies, the sensual and treacherous Mata Hari, a double agent who seduced hundreds to their death (according to the ad for the movie of the 1920s or 1930s), is also described as half Hindu, half European and more than half lunatic. It is funny that nobody at the Dutch-sponsored conference brought up the fact that another famous Mata Hari was played by Sylvia Kristel, a Dutch porno actress.
Susan suggests that stories are very important. She is right. She also mentions connections other than colonial connections: for instance, connections between Indonesia's late colonial intellectuals and the Ottoman Empire and the emerging Turkish Republic that replaced it. Again, she is right. Only, I wonder how somebody based in Yogya will be able to look into that. The Ottoman Empire also had connections to Brasil, another empire at the time. However, no Brazilian university I ever studied or worked at had any connections to Turkey. It is not possible to learn Turkish at any Brazilian institution either. The first time I ever met a Turkish citizen was in Tokyo. There are many people in Brasil who are traditionally called turcos, but these are the descendants of former Ottoman (almost always Christian) subjects from what is today Syria and Lebanon. Those are in fact ancient connections (dating back to the nineteenth century, that is).
Susan can 'see', so to speak, the connections between Turkey and Indonesia because she is in the Netherlands, from where she can access the entire world if she wants to. How is an Indonesian scholar going to do research on this? This is not only a practical matter of access to archives, to language acquisition, to Turkey itself: it is a conceptual issue too. Indonesia is so vast and varied, not unlike Brasil. Why would anyone be interested more than fleetingly in a former, distant and now vague colonial connection? If Turkey and Indonesia could establish their own scholarly exchange programme, not unlike what Brasil, South Africa, and India are now trying to do, maybe it would then become a meaningful connection again for both sides. As it is, it is almost too exotic. I noticed that the subject that triggered the most reactions from the audience was Sadyah's talk on the wayang kulit and its dalangs. It is a very local issue.
Turkey isn't.
The postcolonial state has been enclosed in itself, in Brasil as in Indonesia. In the 1950s, for instance, one of Brasil's first two universities, namely, Universidade de São Paulo, used to have courses in Byzantine history; you could also get a degree in Sanskrit if you wanted, not to mention Armenian. It was highly unique in Brasil, and of course directly linked to São Paulo's push for modernity and its newly found wealth (decades later it is now the financial capital not only of Brasil but in fact of the whole of Latin America). It is now all gone. The dictatorship of 1964-1985 killed all that off and the country has since become very inner-looking, though that is now again changing very fast. There is no knowing what will happen in the next couple of decades as there are now Brazilian scholars doing fieldwork and archival research in India, Syria, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt or China, not to mention Haiti, Timor Leste or the Cape Verde islands. Their research is more often than not financed from Brazilian government funds.
So Turkey is in fact an excellent idea. But Indonesia has to change first. In fact, to me this is a pressing matter of cultural citizenship: namely, reaching out to the world qua Indonesians from Yogya, Banyuwangi, Surabaya, Alor, Bali, Jakarta, and so on and so forth.
Source: Satadru Sen This is somebody who might be me.
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