Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2020.1732712
Ben Murtagh
This issue opens with Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan’s article ‘How to read a chronicle: the Pararaton as a conglomerate text’, winner of Indonesia and the Malay World’s Young Scholars Prize 2019. The article takes an innovative approach to understanding a key Javanese chronicle which has already received considerable scholarly attention. The methodology proposes new ways of thinking about chronicles and histories from the region more generally. As such, the article is in the best tradition of Indonesia and the Malay World, taking a fresh and dynamic approach to textual sources. We received more than 30 entries for the 2019 edition of the prize, and several other excellent articles will be published in upcoming issues of Indonesia and the Malay World. The overall quality of the articles submitted, across the range of disciplines within the journal’s remit, is evidence of the academic calibre of a new generation of scholars engaging with the region. I am grateful to our reviewers and members of the Editorial Board who were engaged in reading and evaluating the articles. Details for the next round of this biennial competition will be announced shortly.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1654225
Judith Schlehe, V. I. Yulianto
ABSTRACT This article discusses plastic and other solid household waste in both rural and urban Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (Special Region of Yogyakarta) and integrates several practical and theoretical perspectives in its analysis. An exploration of the everyday littering practices of the Javanese people is combined with analysis of their particular ways of relating to the environment. This study reveals that an abstract notion of nature is not seen as crucial by most actors. Rather, what counts for individuals is their immediate social environment. Government officials are increasing efforts to raise awareness of the issues at hand, and to encourage citizens to sort household waste and to recycle. However, bottom-up initiatives such as community-based ‘waste banks’, communal clean-ups and ‘recycle fashion’ street carnivals that address various social, economic, and emotional aspects of waste have proven much more efficient. Thus, a tentative path to transform the waste problem that, in the authors’ perspective, challenges the notions of growth, modernisation, and human-nonhuman relations is seen in Java in the mobilisation of the local, social and moral world. However, it is not certain that this will generate a less consumptive lifestyle leading to the much needed reduction of waste.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2020.1675279
Seung-Won Song
ABSTRACT This article examines the multiple foundation myths of North Maluku and reveals that they contain Austronesian concepts of origin structures within which diarchic divisions between a stranger-king and autochthonous groups are important. In Ternate, the Jafar Sadek and Nursafa myth, which emphasises stranger-king ancestors, has been adopted by the royal court and serves as a charter of revived rituals and symbols. The late Sultan Mudaffar Sjah, in particular, used the mythic narratives to disseminate a sense of his power, which helped his ascendancy in local politics. While the Tidore royal family has adopted the same myth, it is the autochthonous clan that controls rituals and spiritual matters. Rather than focusing on the sacredness of stranger-kings, the Tidore rituals reflect an interesting array of stranger-kings and autochthons, established in the pre-colonial era.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2020.1675277
Yuka Kayane
ABSTRACT The Sunni-Shi’a sectarian conflicts in Muslim countries have intensified during the last two decades; Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, is no exception to this trend. While sectarian discourses influenced by geopolitical dynamics are catalysed by many scripturalist groups in local sectarian conflicts, the traditional Islam represented by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) is left out from the scholarly analysis on sectarianism as it has been largely considered representative of tolerant Islam. However, a series of sectarian incidents have been provoked by NU clerics in East Java. This urges us to re-examine the more complex nature of NU’s diversity. Why have intolerant kiai emerged from NU, what motivates them to engage in sectarianism, and who are they? I argue here that sectarian anti-Shi’a sentiments emerged as an attempt to delegitimise NU pluralist leaders and enhance the influence both within and outside the organization. Specifically, I explore the rise of anti-Shi’a NU figures who have developed a particularly strong bond through their commonality as followers of Sayyid Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki (1944–2004), a cleric from Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He was an exceptionally well respected ulama among NU members. Although he proclaimed the importance of tolerance, and refrained from denouncing any one as a non-believer (kafir) including the Shi’a, some of his disciples are increasingly engaging in sectarianism in order to seek influence in Indonesia’s electoral democracy.
{"title":"Understanding Sunni-Shi’a sectarianism in contemporary Indonesia","authors":"Yuka Kayane","doi":"10.1080/13639811.2020.1675277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2020.1675277","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Sunni-Shi’a sectarian conflicts in Muslim countries have intensified during the last two decades; Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, is no exception to this trend. While sectarian discourses influenced by geopolitical dynamics are catalysed by many scripturalist groups in local sectarian conflicts, the traditional Islam represented by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) is left out from the scholarly analysis on sectarianism as it has been largely considered representative of tolerant Islam. However, a series of sectarian incidents have been provoked by NU clerics in East Java. This urges us to re-examine the more complex nature of NU’s diversity. Why have intolerant kiai emerged from NU, what motivates them to engage in sectarianism, and who are they? I argue here that sectarian anti-Shi’a sentiments emerged as an attempt to delegitimise NU pluralist leaders and enhance the influence both within and outside the organization. Specifically, I explore the rise of anti-Shi’a NU figures who have developed a particularly strong bond through their commonality as followers of Sayyid Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki (1944–2004), a cleric from Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He was an exceptionally well respected ulama among NU members. Although he proclaimed the importance of tolerance, and refrained from denouncing any one as a non-believer (kafir) including the Shi’a, some of his disciples are increasingly engaging in sectarianism in order to seek influence in Indonesia’s electoral democracy.","PeriodicalId":44721,"journal":{"name":"Indonesia and the Malay World","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13639811.2020.1675277","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47286222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1682316
M. Woolgar
ABSTRACT This article examines the development of the Institute of People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, Lekra) in West Java in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on contemporary publications, oral histories and archival documents, the article incorporates views ‘from below’ into an account of what became a vibrant cultural force. It shows how Lekra attracted a cultural elite but also wove itself into everyday life, as part of a web of organisations linked to the Indonesian Communist Party. Lekra in West Java combined an outward looking engagement in cultural diplomacy with efforts to reform Sundanese culture. Some developments in West Java paralleled national trends, including Lekra’s intensifying politicisation and growing cultural polarisation. However, developments in the province also had their own dynamics, manifesting in the contributions of prominent Sundanese Lekra figures to the ‘wayang controversy’ and in the role of a group of Sundanese writers who rejected the choice between Lekra and a rival group supporting the Cultural Manifesto. The article highlights challenges in applying a Cold War framework to cultural life in the decolonising world, and the need to move beyond elites in capital cities to incorporate views from the provinces and the grassroots.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2020.1701325
Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan
ABSTRACT Traditional historical chronicles from island Southeast Asia are crucial sources for our understanding of the region’s pre-modern history. These chronicles were produced in contexts of textual practice that are unfamiliar to modern historians, which can result in erroneous interpretations of their historical meaning. In this article, I present a method for reading the region’s chronicles that treats them as conglomerate texts, which consist of fragments of earlier texts that have been combined into new wholes. I illustrate the usefulness of this interpretive approach by examining the Pararaton, one of the main sources for the history of the late medieval kingdom of Java with its capital at Majapahit. The key findings of this article are a revised textual history of the Pararaton, new data from six unpublished manuscripts of the text, and a re-evaluation of the dynastic chronology of the Javanese kingdom between 1389 and 1429. These findings show that reading chronicles as conglomerate texts not only sheds light on their textual evolution, but also improves our understanding of the historical realities they refer to.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1663678
A. Burhani
ABSTRACT The Ahmadiyah in Indonesian Islam has often been seen as a deviant Muslim group, but there was a time when it had a cordial relationship with major Muslim organisations, particularly Muhammadiyah. The Ahmadiyah was once perceived as a highly respected revivalist and modernist Muslim movement, and became a model to be emulated by other Muslims. Erfaan Dahlan is a symbol of the dynamics of this religious relationship in the first half of the 20th century. Motivated by the spirit of Islamic revivalism, he was sent to an Ahmadiyah college in Lahore, British India, during the period of friendly relationship between Muhammadiyah and Ahmadiyah. But when he returned to Indonesia that relationship had deteriorated. As an alumnus of an Ahmadiyah missionary college, on the one hand, and a son of the founder of Muhammadiyah, on the other, he was in the midst of that difficult relationship. His religious identity has been a subject of controversy among competing Muslim communities. The fact that he chose to leave his country to live in Thailand after he completed his study in Lahore further raises curiosity about his religious affiliation. This article, firstly, intends to reveal the dynamics of Muhammadiyah’s relationship with Ahmadiyah in the 1920s. Secondly, it will discuss Erfaan Dahlan’s religious relation with Muhammadiyah and Ahmadiyah, and particularly, the controversy around the alleged heresy of the Lahori Ahmadiyah and persistent misunderstanding of Erfaan Dahlan’s religious affiliation. Finally, the article shows that the case of Erfaan Dahlan reveals the discordancy in a society which categorises its people on the orthodox-heterodox spectrum.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-28DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1648006
M. Ford, Lenore Lyons
ABSTRACT Ways of studying illegal behaviour are important in the context of Indonesia, a country well known for its failure to deal adequately with the corruption that permeates every level of society. They are perhaps even more salient at the peripheries of the nation-state where government agencies struggle to contain the illegal practices that necessarily emerge where nation-states meet. This article reflects on our experiences conducting a decade-long study of an Indonesian borderlands that, while not initially focused on illegality, came – as a consequence of its ubiquity – to include it as a key construct. This experience led us to grapple not only with methodological questions about how to research illegality but also with assumptions about what illegality is and does. We argue that the only way to recognise and account for the quotidian nature of many kinds of illegal activity in the borderlands is to eschew an ethnography of exception in favour of an ethnography of the mundane.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1639925
Andrea Acri
ABSTRACT This article is a preliminary exploration of suluk texts aiming at advancing P.J. Zoetmulder’s ideas with respect to the Indic origins of some characters and doctrinal elements in Javanese mystical texts. It will identify possible continuities between Indic and Islamic paradigms, thereby revisiting and rebalancing scholarly perspectives that have stressed the Sufi origins of Javanese Islam – or uncritically posited its inherent, yet nebulous, ‘Javaneseness’ – at the expense of its being situated in, and indebted to, a context of religious discourses and practices rooted in the Indic paradigm. Having introduced and evaluated Zoetmulder’s hypotheses about the figures of the santri birahi and Lĕbe Lonthang, it will analyse some passages of suluk that show indebtedness to ideas stemming from a pre-Islamic tantric fund. It will then link the figure of heterodox Muslim mystic Siti Jĕnar to other antinomian characters described in Javanese literature, and contextualise them against the background of the wider issue of the synthesis between Hindu-Buddhist (tantric) and Islamic (Sufi) identities in Java.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1657723
Andrea Acri, V. Meyer
Conceptually, this special issue in Indonesia and the Malay World stems from two collaborative projects undertaken by Andrea Acri and Verena Meyer in the period from 2016 to 2019, focusing on the Suluk Lonthang. The projects investigated the enigmatic suluk with respect to the relation it portrays between sex, transgression – intended as the subversion of gender roles, norm breaking in sexual ethics, and sacrilegious mockery of scriptural religion – and spiritual prowess (as opposed to puritan legalism and scriptural authority) as key elements in the religious experience. Our analysis upheld a comparative perspective that considered the resonances between those ideas in both Sufism and Tantrism, in particular the concept that an advanced spirituality required the overcoming of all oppositions, including those relating to gender and social status (Zoetmulder 1994). Over time, the scope of these projects has broadened further so as to include a larger body of Javanese and Malay mystical literature composed in the period from the 16th to the 19th century, and a wider-ranging variety of ‘encounters’ between Indic and Islamic religious strands embedded in the textual and cultural fabrics of the Javanese and Malayspeaking societies of Nusantara. The idea of putting together this special issue arose from an intellectual need to not only stimulate the investigation of the little-studied bodies of mystical literature like suluk etc., but also to overcome a disciplinary compartmentalisation and parochialisation that has shaped, and is continuing to shape, the field of Javanese and Malay textual and cultural studies after World War II. This situation had resulted in a lack of engagement between researchers working in these fields, who have often been unwilling to go beyond the ‘localised’ micro-histories and philologies that have investigated religious dynamics in the Javanese and Malay-speaking cultural worlds as self-contained phenomena. From a chronological perspective, scholars of the ‘Hindu-Buddhist’ period have rarely, if ever, taken into account ‘Islamic’ material post-dating the 16th century, and vice-versa. Indeed, the major divide in the field would seem to be nowadays represented by scholars studying (Early) Modern Javanese and Malay religious phenomena uniquely from the prism of Islam on the one hand, and those focusing on Hinduism and Buddhism in Java, Sumatra, or the Malay Peninsula up to c.1500 CE on the other. This in spite of the fact that scholars are inevitably dealing with overlapping geographical contexts and temporalities, and phenomena that clearly present as many continuities as changes, or that are amenable to being studied from a comparative and trans-local perspective.
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