Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia by Benedict R. O’G Anderson
In this lively book, the great social theorist and Southeast Asianist Benedict R. O’G Anderson explores the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen from two critical facts in Indonesian history - that while the Indonesian nation is young, the Indonesian state is ancient, originating in the early seventeenth-century Dutch conquests; and that contemporary politics are conducted in a new language, Bahasa Indonesia, by peoples (especially the Javanese) whose cultures are rooted in medieval times.
Benedict intensively explores the social values of Indonesia’s most dominant culture, the Javanese. The Indonesian government is centered on Java, and it is also intensely Java-centered. There has always been tension and conflict between the seafaring, mercantile Muslim states of Indonesia's Outer Islands and the bureaucratic, powerful, Hinduized forces of Java.
Yet, most native political processes in Indonesia have been built on ancient Javanese customs. To give just one example, the Arabic words musyawarah (discussion) and mufakat (consensus) describe methods of resolving political, policy, and personal differences by prolonged deliberation ending in unanimous decision. These methods are used both in the state's highest legislative body and at the humblest village meetings.
The Javanese and by extension, Indonesians - don't generally believe in the Western-style system of decision-making by voting, where the majority of 50% plus one gets its way, a method disdained as "dictatorship of the majority." They believe this system isn't fair. The will of the minority is just as important as that of the majority, so the council just talks itself out until all parties come to an accord, too exhausted or too hoarse to discuss the issue any further. The process proceeds slowly, but all points of view are eventually brought together in one compromise agreement.
Analyzing a spectrum of examples from classical poetry to public monuments and cartoons, in this book Anderson deepens our understanding of the interaction between modern and traditional notions of power, the meditation of power by language, and the development of the Indonesian national consciousness.
Winner of the Academic Prize in the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize competition, this classic volume brings together eight of Anderson’s most influential essays written over the past two decades. Most of the essays address aspects of Javanese political culture - from the early nineteenth century, when the Javanese did not yet have words for politics, colonialism, society, or class, through the early nationalism of the 1900s, to the era of independence after World War II, when deep internal tensions exploded into large-scale massacres.
In the first group of essays Anderson considers how power was imagined in traditional Javanese society, and how these imaginings shaped Indonesia’s modern politics. Other essays focus on the significance of the incongruities between the egalitarian unifying national language through which modern Indonesia has been imagined and the powerful influence of the hierarchical, authoritarian Javanese official culture.
Finally, two essays on consciousness illuminate the crucial eras before and after the rise of Indonesia’s nationalist movement. One reflects on Javanese intellectuals‚ phantasmagoric efforts to keep imagining “Java” as the island was overrun by colonial capitalism and absorbed into the huge, heterogeneous Netherlands East Indies; the second traces the transition from old culture to new nation through the autobiography of an eminent Javanese first-generation nationalist politician.
Although the essays were written prior to great upheavals and political bloodlettings of the late 1970’s, there is much in them that relates to contemporary Indonesian political culture and the book on the whole contributes much to the reader’s understanding of Javanese politics, thus Indonesian politics.
Perhaps the Indonesianist R. William Liddle described Language and Power best, “This wonderful collection of essays is rich in ideas and interpretations. The central theme of the book is the crisis in Javanese culture which began in the seventeenth century and the attempts of successive generations of Javanese-Indonesians to deal with the crisis.”
Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Cornell University Press 1990, 305 pages, index, 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches, ISBN 0801497582.
Available for $24.95 from Amazon Books Australia or directly from the Cornell University Press website (http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_order.html) using your credit card. Note that their site is protected by Verisign <http://www.verisign.com/>.
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