Chapter 1
At the center of the whole Javanese religious system lies a simple, formal, undramatic, almost furtive, little ritual: the slametan (also sometimes called a kendurèn). The slametan is the Javanese version of what is perhaps the world’s most common religious ritual, the communal feast, and, as almost everywhere, it symbolizes the mystic and social unity of those participating in it. Friends, neighbors, fellow workers, relatives, local spirits, dead ancestors, and near-forgotten gods all get bound, by virtue of their commensality, into a defined social group pledged to mutual support and cooperation. In Modjokuto the slametan forms a kind of social universal joint, fitting the various aspects of social life and individual experience together in a way which minimizes uncertainty, tension, and conflict—or at least it is supposed to do so. The altered form of twentieth-century urban and suburban life in Java makes it rather less efficient as an integrating mechanism and rather less satisfying as a religious experience for many people; but among the group here described as abangan—the more traditionalized peasants and their proletarianized comrades in the towns—the slametan still retains much of its original force and attraction.
A slametan can be given in response to almost any occurrence one wishes to celebrate, ameliorate, or sanctify. Birth, marriage, sorcery, death, house moving, bad dreams, harvest, name-changing, opening a factory, illness, supplication of the village guardian spirit, circumcision, and starting off a political meeting may all occasion a slametan. For each the emphasis is slightly different. One part or another of the total ritual is intensified and elaborated; another part is toned down. The mood changes somewhat, but the underlying structure of the ritual remains the same. There is always the special food (differing according to the intent of the slametan) ; there is always incense, the Islamic chant, and the extra-formal high-Javanese speech of the host (its content, too, naturally, varying with the occasion) ; and there is always the polite,
it
embarrassed, muted manner which suggests that, despite the brevity and lack of drama the ritual displays, something important is going on.
most slametans are held in the evening, just after the sun has gone down and the evening prayer—for those who perform it—is done. If the occasion is, say, a name-changing, a harvest, or a circumcision, the host will have employed a religious specialist to determine an auspicious day according to a numerologi-cal interpretation of the Javanese calendrical system; if it is a death or a birth, the event itself determines the timing. The day is spent in preparing the food. The women do this: for a small feast only those of the household itself, for a large one a wider range of kin ties may be drawn upon. The ceremony itself is all male. The women remain mburi (behind—i.e., in the kitchen), but they inevitably peek through the bamboo walls at the men, who, squatted on floor mats ngarepan (in front—i.e., in the main living room) perform the actual ritual, eating the food the women have prepared.
The men invited are all close neighbors, since to a slametan one invites all those who Uve in the immediate area around one’s own house. The basis of within a short distance from one’s house in any direction must be invited and selection is entirely territorial : relative or not, friend or not, anyone who lives must come. They are called together by a messenger of the host (most often one of his children) only five or ten minutes before the slametan is to begin, and they must drop everything and come immediately. Despite this apparently haphazard procedure, almost everyone turns up, because during the period just after sunset almost everyone in Modjokuto is at home, people are usually aware—although no one may have actually said anything about it—that a slametan is about to be given a good while before it actually occurs and so expect the messenger, and the Javanese has a kind of punctuate sense of time which makes it easy for him to shift sharply from one kind of activity to another with very little transition.
Upon arrival each guest takes a place on the floor mats, squatting in the formal Javanese sitting posture called sila (with legs folded inward and crossed in front of the body and with the trunk ramrod stiff). The room slowly fills with the odor of the burning incense, and there is a little subdued small talk as people drift in and seat themselves (there is no special order) in a large circle around the food, which has already been placed in the center. When all have arrived and the circle is complete, the ceremony begins.
The host opens the ceremony with a speech in very formal high-Javanese. First, he expresses his profound gratitude for his neighbors’ attendance. He regards them, he says, as witnesses to the purity and the nature of his intentions and to the fact that he is holding the required rite in order to realize these excellent intentions, and he hopes they will share in any benefit the ceremony brings. Second, he states these intentions: he presents the specific reason for the slametan—his daughter is seven months pregnant, it is the
Prophet’s birthday, or whatever. Next, he gives the general reason for the rite. This is always the same: to secure for himself, his family, and his guests that peculiarly negative state of bodily and mental equanimity the Javanese call slamet, from which the ritual takes its name. To this end he petitions the spirits of the village, young and old, male and female. Lastly he begs pardon for any errors he may have made in his speech or anything he may have said which disturbed anyone, and for the inadequacy of the food he is serving. Through the whole speech he speaks in an even, rhythmic, mechanical cadence and at each pause the audience responds with a solemn “inggih”—“yes.”
When the host has completed the udjub, as this formal introductory speecL is called, he asks someone present to give the Arabic chant-prayer. Actually, most of those assembled do not know how to chant, but the host always makes certain that someone who does is present. On a special occasion he may even invite the modin, the official village religious specialist, to give the prayer, but usually he will just invite a friend who he knows has attended a religious school for a period and can chant short Arabic prayers (whose meaning, however, he is almost never able to understand). Fragments from the Koran, most often the Alfatékah, the short prayer which precedes the Koran proper, are usually used, although some people may know special prayers. The prayer leader recites the prayer or Koranic passage while the other guests sit with their palms turned upward toward the sky and their faces lifted as though awaiting a gift from God; or, alternatively, they stare down into their palms and may even bury their faces in them. At each pause in the leader’s chant they utter “cmiin” (amen), and when he is finished they rub the palms of their hands on their faces as though they were attempting to wake themselves from a sleep. For his trouble the prayer leader receives a small token payment called the wadjib.
The preliminaries completed, the singsong cadence of the Arabic chant having been balanced against the regular, mechanical rhythms of the Javanese speech, the serving of the food begins. Each participant (except the host, who does not eat) receives a cup of tea and a banana-leaf dish into which is put a sample of each sort of food from the center of the floor. The fare is much better than average: usually there are several kinds of meat, chicken, or fish, plus variously colored or molded rice or rice porridge, each variety with a meaning which the participants may or may not remember. (In giving the udjub the host often tells what each food means as part of his declaration of intentions.) The food is not served by the host but by one or two of the guests, who hop into the middle of the circle and fill the various dishes. When everyone has his filled dish, the host bids them eat. They scoop the rice and meat up with their fingers, eating hurriedly and quietly—for it is believed to be bad luck to talk while eating. After about a half-dozen scoopfuls or about five minutes, they one by one stop eating, and when all have stopped they ask permission to “follow my own will” (nuwun sakersa) and, receiving it, depart for home, crouching so as not to tower over the seated host, about ten or fifteen minutes after they have come. Most of their food remains uneaten. It is taken home, wrapped in the banana-leaf dishes, to be eaten in the privacy of their houses in company with their wives and children. With their departure, the slametan ends.
this, then, is the basic core ritual in that part of Modjokuto society in which the abangan world-view is most prominent. On some occasions, beginning a journey, for example, it may comprise the entire ceremony; on others, such as a wedding, it may be so brief and covered over by other and more elaborate kinds of ritual and ceremonial behavior that if you do not watch closely you will miss it altogether; and on yet others—death, for example—the exigencies of the situation may demand that whole parts be dropped out. Since all, or nearly all, abangan ceremonies are, nevertheless, in one sense variations on this underlying ritual theme, an understanding of the meaning of the slametan to those who give them brings with it an understanding of much of the abangan world-view and provides a key to the interpretation of their more complex ceremonies.
Why do Javanese hold slametans? When I asked this question of an old bricklayer, he gave two reasons: “When you give a slametan, nobody feels any different from anyone else and so they don’t want to split up. Also a slametan protects you against the spirits, so they will not upset you.” This tendency to state the implications of social behavior in psychological terms, according to its ultimate effect on the individual’s emotional equilibrium, and to state those implications negatively, is characteristic. At a slametan everyone is treated the same. The result is that no one feels different from anyone else, no one feels lower than anyone else, and so no one has a wish to split off from the other person. Also, after you have given a slametan the local spirits will not bother you, will not make you feel ill, unhappy, or confused. The goals are negative and psychological—absence of aggressive feeling toward others, absence of emotional disturbance. The wished-for state is slamet, which the Javanese defines with the phrase “gak ana apa-apa”—“there isn’t anything,” or, more aptly, “nothing is going to happen (to anyone).”
But since something might happen, and almost inevitably does, the abangan, aware of this, personifies the possibility of unforeseen bad fortune in terms of spirit beliefs and attempts to deal with the spirits by means of the slametan. In Java, said one of my informants with the usual Javanese sense for cultural relativism, the spirits are unusually disturbing: “I don’t know how it is in America, but here they are always upsetting one.” The reason for this, no doubt, is that there are more of them in Java—all around the house (especially the toilet), at every unusual point in the landscape, around cemeteries, at old Hindu ruins; and the woods are full of them. Thus the incense and the aroma of the food at the slametan are considered as food for the spirits in order to pacify them so they will not disturb the living. As a Javanese put it:
At a slametan all kinds of invisible beings come and sit with us and they also eat the food. That is why the food and not the prayer is the heart of the slametan. The spirit eats the aroma of the food. It’s like this banana. I smell it but it doesn't disappear. That is why the food is left for us after the spirit has already eaten it.1
This passage and others similarly employed without source reference throughout the text are transcriptions from the author’s field notes.