<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head><meta name="charset" content="UTF-8"/><title></title><link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css"/> </head> <body><h2>and General Dimensions of Prijaji Belief and Etiquette</h2><h3>The Development of a “Great Tradition”</h3> <p>It is Robert Redfield who has pointed out that, whereas the pre-civilized hunter or villager is preliterate, the peasant is illiterate.* When people come to live in cities and towns—and in Java they seem to have come to do this shortly after the time of Christ—there occurs a splitting (which Redfield calls a transformation) of the homogeneous cultural tradition of the self-sufficient tribe; for this cultural tradition has now to serve two social structures: that of the sophisticated city, economically dependent upon the village, and that of the rustic village, culturally dependent upon the city. Out of the confining chrysalis of inward-looking tribalism there emerges a dual tradition in which urban elaboration of aesthetic, moral, political, military, religious, and economic patterns is matched in the countryside by an increasingly effective elaboration of agricultural techniques to support such specialized efforts.</p> <p>There is a cultural elite, whose ultimate basis of power is their control over the central symbolic resources of the society (religion, philosophy, art, science, and, most crucially in the more complex civilizations, writing); and there is a subordinated practical hard-working peasantry, whose ultimate basis of power is their control over the central material resource of the society, its food supply. The two become symbiotically dependent upon one another, their two variant traditions reflecting back and forth within one another as in two etched mirrors, each catching dimly the other’s reflection. One cannot have a peasantry without a gentry or a gentry without a peasantry.</p> <p>In such a situation whether one calls the peasant tradition a vulgarization of the gentry,** or the gentry tradition a refinement of the peasant, is not very</p> <p>* Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, 1954).</p> <p>** Which in large part it certainly Is. The folklorists have taught us that, often, what seem to be prime examples of spontaneous “people’s art” are but outmoded urban traits “fallen by a peculiar cultural gravity into the lowest strata” (See G. F. Foster, “What is Folk Culture?" American Anthropologist, Vol. 55, No. 21, 1953, pp. 159-173).</p> <p>important. What is actually the case is that there is a persistent cultural dialogue between gentry and peasantry, a constant interchange of cultural material in which fading urban forms “coarsen” and “sink” into the peasant mass and elaborated rural forms “etherealize” and “rise” into the urban elite.</p> <p>The symbiotic relationship between folk (i.e., “peasant,” although, as I have already pointed out, one finds “peasants” in town in modern Java) and non-folk (i.e., “gentry”) here postulated as the key concept of folk culture implies that the direction of culture flow is not alone outward and downward, from city to country and from upper to lower classes. Rather, we are facing a circular phenomenon in which folk culture draws on and is continually replenished by contact with the products of intellectual and scientific social strata, but in which folk culture continually, though perhaps in lesser degree, contributes to these non-folk societies. The dance is illustrative of this process. In the 17th and 18th centuries Western European dance masters introduced folk dances to social dancing, adapting them to the needs of the courts. English country square dances played a part in the development of the French quadrille, which was then introduced back into London. These folk dances then became the forms around which composers, then and now, created important works. Folk dances, now become court dances, spread from Spain and France to Latin America, and the process began anew whereby little by little they became the property of the folk. The current American rage for square dancing also reflects this process: after suitable time the folk entertainment of yesteryear becomes the pastime of the artistic avant-garde.*</p> <p>In a fully developed non-industrial civilization, then, there is typically a ruling class of literates and a ruled class of illiterates (although both groups may be further internally differentiated), the two facing one another across an at best only sporadically bridgeable chasm of class. Those who can write provide the ideal model for those who cannot, and the latter ape the former as best they can from a distance which is usually great. The gentry represents the Great Tradition as the peasant represents the Little; and, although both may have been heavily stimulated by outside influences, as they were in Java by Hindu-Buddhism and Islam, they grow in time so close as to become distorted images of one another, alternately repelled by and attracted to each other. In the peasant the gentleman sees both a disturbingly barbaric parody of his own carefully controlled behavior and an attractive spontaneity and animal power which tempt him from the infinite boredom of his own constricted politesse. In the gentleman the peasant sees both a summation of all that he wishes he could be—self-controlled, polished, learned, spiritually refined—and a kind of self-important stuffiness and genteel fastidiousness which, he feels, must surely take most of the joy out of life.</p><h3>Gentry and Peasantry in Java</h3> <p>the abangcim are Java’s peasantry, the prijajis its gentry. Abangan religion represents the peasant synthesis of urban imports and tribal inheritances, a * ibid.</p> <p>syncretism of old bits and pieces from a dozen sources ordered into a conglomerate whole to serve the needs of an unpretentious people growing rice in irrigated terraces. Nowadays there are santri peasants also, for the old homogeneous peasant culture is beginning to break up under the pressures of modern life; but until this century, and still for most peasants (including many of the nominally santri ones), the abangan tradition—a little native curing, a little Tantric magic, a little Islamic chanting, all clustered about a simple commensality ritual—served to define and order the basic social interrelationships of the land-bound peasantry. And it projected for them a symbolic world of meaning in which the work they did, the lives they led, and the values they held all made cosmic sense.</p> <p>The prijajis have always been mainly of the towns; in fact, one of the most sociologically interesting characteristics of modern Java is the degree to which they have stayed in them. Partly because of the political instability of the pre-colonial kingdoms, partly because of their own inward-looking philosophies, which elevate mystical achievement over political skill, partly because of Dutch opposition to their direct encroachment upon the peasantry, the prijajis have not been able to turn themselves into a landed gentry. They are not, with a few exceptions (none around Modjokuto), baronial landlords working serfs or semi-serfs on huge estates. For the most part they are bureaucrats, clerks, and teachers—white-collar nobles.</p> <p>The “noble” element is less important now. Prijaji originally indicated a man who could trace his ancestry back to the great semi-mythical kings of pre-colonial Java; but, as the Dutch, rulers of Java for over three hundred years, employed this group as the administrative instruments of their policy, the term widened to include commoners pulled into the bureaucracy as the supply of authentic aristocrats ran out. Nevertheless, even in Modjokuto, which, being but a district and subdistrict capital, represents the lowest reaches of the central bureaucracy and so could be expected to be manned by the less elevated in any case, the sense of the importance of noble descent remains.</p> <p>Then I asked him (a titled prijaji draughtsman in the government Irrigation Office) about class. He said that there were just two: prijaji and non-prijaji. Prijajis are people who do “refined” (alus) work, those who work for the government. The other group consists of people who do “unrefined” (kasar) work, and includes peasants, laborers, traders, and everyone else. He said that this is an outgrowth of the old system here before the Dutch, which is still present to an extent in Bali: the Hindu system which had five groups: (1) Brahmans, or priests and teachers; (2) Satrijas, or soldiers and kings; (3) Vaisias, or traders; (4) Sudras, or peasants and craftsmen, and (5) Pariahs, who are beggars. The last three were all really set off against the top two, and the prijajis of today are the descendants of the Satrijas, the old kings and courtiers. (He said there were no more Brahmans.)</p> <p>I asked about Sosro (the town’s largest landowner, who has about eighty acres and is a former government official, also titled). He doesn’t work for the government; is he a prijaji? “Yes,” said Wiro (the informant), “because he follows the style of life of the prijajis and mixes with prijajis, and because he is descended from prijajis</p> <p>How about H. Abdul (a wealthy santri merchant)? “Oh, no, he isn’t,”</p> <p>said Wiro, laughing. “Yes, I know,” I said, “but is he really on the same class level as a carpenter out in the kampong?” And he said, yes, that from his, Wiro’s, point of view, they were on the same level. He said that this is relative, though: if one asked a village man whether H. Abdul was a prijaji he would probably say, yes, because he is up there so high that he seems like a prijaji to the village man.” (This, on my experience, is untrue. No village man would make the mistake of calling a rich santri, no matter how high up he was, a prijaji.) If one asked Abdul himself, he probably wouldn’t say that he was a prijaji, but he wouldn’t say that he was the same as a carpenter either, but higher. But from Wiro’s point of view as a prijaji, Abdul, the carpenter, and the peasants are all one big undifferentiated group.</p> <p>He said that there were a number of benchmarks which one could use to distingush prijajis from non-prijajis: wealth (but prijajis are, as a matter of fact, often less wealthy than rich santri traders and perhaps even than some of the richer abangan village chiefs); style of life—the clothes they wear, the houses they live in, the way they behave; whom they associate with, since prijajis associate almost exclusively with other prijajis; and, most important by far, descent. That is why Abdul and the carpenter are the same; their origins are the same—i.e., from commoners. . . .</p> <p>I kept at him on this, asking him about a boy who was born noble and was separated from his parents, grew up in a village, and then discovered his origin. Is he a prijaji? “Oh yes,” said Wiro, “if he is a descendant of kings he must be different; you would notice it right away. He would talk and behave in a much more refined manner than the village people around him.”</p> <p>I then said, “What about high government officials who haven’t got the pedigree—say the regent in Bragang? (The Regent of Bragang is a Mas-jumi man and so a santri, a situation which goes down very hard with almost all the prijajis in town, who almost never fail to lament his politically necessary appointment as “unfitting.”) Wiro guessed that the regent was considered a prijaji now, for the times are changing—a prijaji by “work” (i.e., achievement), which is more and more accepted now. However, from Wiro’s point of view the prijaji with descent is higher than any achieved prijaji could ever be. For example, there are many people with the titles of Mr. (i.e., Master of Laws) and Dr. (i.e., Doctor of Laws) now, and many of them are not from the prijaji group but are sons of rich village people, rich village chiefs, traders, and so forth and are not people with a real title but merely an academic one. Such people must think differently and have a different inner character no matter how hard they try to copy prijaji manners.</p> <p>I asked him just what the difference was. He said that those who have their status from riches and “work” (e.g., “study”) have less of a humanitarian feeling (rasa kemanusian) compared to prijajis of the same level and education—for the most part anyway, although there may be exceptions. For example, the Sultan of Djokjakarta compared say with a prijaji leader has much greater "humanity” (kemanusian). Even though he was educated in Holland he still has his Satrija-ness. . . .</p> <p>He said that prijajis never have stores . . . because no prijaji is ever really clever at trade. It is not in their “inherited duty” (darma), not their “cleverness.” Their “inherited duty” is as soldiers and guarding the government (i.e., as officials), and thus they can’t sell, and, if they try, their minds are unsettled. He knows that if he went into trade he would feel unhappy</p> <p>in his heart. Being clever at trade like other things is a matter of descent, but among non-prijajis—especially those from Solo, Djokjakarta, and Kudus. The “thought pattern” involved is lower than prijaji. . . . All non-prijajis have the same “inherited duty” and their souls are all the same. A trader thinks only about his own needs and not about society generally. . . .</p> <p>He said that the Pantjasila (President Sukarno’s Five Points, the basis of the present state) was an effort to re-establish the old Hindu system, which was very good. He said that in his view the times go in circles; history repeats in cycles and one keeps going back to the time before. This is the will of nature, the will of God. . . . What is important is not for the exact society of the past to be re-established, which is impossible, but just that people know each what his duty is according to his descent so that the descendants of peasants will be peasants, of traders traders, and so on. If not ordered so, society will be ruined. If common people keep acting like prijajis, who is going to hoe the fields after a while? The country will fall. However, he admitted, more and more village people are imitating prijajis, and he wondered who would hoe later. He said that if he, for example, were obligated to hoe, he couldn’t do it.</p> <p>This prijaji ethic, with its intense sense for status differences, its calm assertion of spiritual superiority, and its dual emphasis on the inner life of refined feeling and the external life of polite form, is the outcome of nearly sixteen centuries of urban living. The ancient Hindu-Buddhist city-states were headed by a king who was also a God, a divine monarch enthroned at the very peak of spiritual refinement upon a symbolically divine mountain set in the exact center of his squared-off capital.* They brought into being a group of religio-aesthetically concerned warrior-gentry, receivers of foreign cultural fashions and rationalizers of local ones. The city-states rose and fell, one following the next as so many unsuccessful political experiments. With the possible exception of the great fourteenth-century kingdom of Madjapahit, and the seventeenth-century Mataram, they were unable to throw roots very deep into the peasant mass. The Javanese aristocracy lacked the land-linked system of feudal obligation of Western Europe with its fief-holding agricultural gentry, or the rationalized Chinese bureaucracy drawing its officials from rural gentry as well as urban. They lacked even the solidified patron relations of the caste-organized India whence they borrowed so much of their worldview. Therefore, the Javanese aristocracy had, until the Dutch came, but two ways to hold the peasants in order to extract from them the rice and manpower they needed to support their own specialization: simple military terror and religious enthusiasm. They used both.</p><h3>Basic Concepts in the Prijaji. World-View</h3> <p>peasants clung to gentry princes not only for military protection but also because the latter had about them that magical-mystical aura Max Weber called</p> <p>* See R. Heine-Geldern, “Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia," Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 2, 1942.</p> <p>charisma. Spiritual excellence was correlated with political eminence and culminated in the immobile king, the incarnation of Vishnu or Shiva, meditating in his castle at the center of the universe. Spiritual power flowed outward and downward from its royal fountainhead, attenuating as it sank through each layer in the bureaucracy, draining weakly at last into the peasant masses. Peasant and king, center and periphery, pinnacle and base, God and animal, sacred and profane—these were, and, with some reinterpretations, are now the coordinate termini of the prijaji’s metaphysical and social measuring rod, termini summed up in a pair of concepts central to the prijaji world-view: alus and kasar.</p> <p>Alus means pure, refined, polished, polite, exquisite, ethereal, subtle, civilized, smooth. A man who speaks flawless high-Javanese is alus, as is the high-Javanese itself. A piece of cloth with intricate, subtle designs painted onto it is alus. An exquisitely played piece of music or a beautifully controlled dance step is alus. So is a smooth stone, a dog with his hair petted down, a farfetched joke, or a clever poetic conceit. God is, of course, alus (as are all invisible spirits), and so is the mystical experience of Him, One’s own soul and character are alus insofar as one emotionally comprehends the ultimate structure of existence; and one’s behavior and actions are alus insofar as they are regulated by the delicate intricacies of the complex court-derived etiquette. Kasar is merely the opposite: impolite, rough, uncivilized; a badly played piece of music, a stupid joke, a cheap piece of cloth. Between these two poles the prijaji arranges everyone from peasant to king.</p> <p>But even to begin to understand the prijaji outlook, one must comprehend the meaning of another pair of concepts: lair and batin. Batin means “the inner realm of human experience,” and lair “the outer realm of human behavior.” The immediate temptation is to equate them with body and soul, but this would be a serious mistake. Batin refers not to a separate seat of encapsulated spirituality detachable from the body but to the emotional life of the individual taken generally—what we call “the inner life,” or “the subjective”; it consists of the fuzzy, shifting shapes of private feeling perceived directly in all their phenomenological immediacy. Lair, on the other hand, refers to that part of human life which strict behavioral psychologists limit themselves to studying—the external actions, motions, postures, and speech of the individual. These two sets of phenomena, the inner and the outer, are conceived as somewhat independent realms to be put into proper order separately, or, perhaps better stated, sequentially. The ordering of the outward life leaves one free to turn to the ordering of the inward. The cultivated man needs to give form both to the naturally jagged physical gestures which make up his external behavior and to the fluctuating states of feeling which comprise his inner experience. A truly alus man is polite all the way through.</p> <p>Of the two tasks, the ordering of the external life is easier, in support of which statement I offer the following stanza, all too literally translated, of a long poem (or song, for Javanese poems—tembang—may always be sung). It was composed by a Modjokuto Javanese, who, although he is actually something of a santri mystic too, expresses a basically prijaji outlook on life in this set of moral verses intended for the edification of his children:</p> <p>Politeness in outward behavior,</p> <p>Although complex, is easy to learn If only you wish to,</p> <p>Because it is both audible and visible.</p> <p>If you inspect it carefully and in detail, over and over again,</p> <p>You will be able in a short time To do the polite thing</p> <p>From the point of view of good form and customary behavior. Wherever you may live,</p> <p>You will be able to mix with everyone.</p> <p>The contrasting task, ordering the inner life, is much more difficult:</p> <p>Now as for ordering the inner life,</p> <p>This is not something every person knows about.</p> <p>It is very, very difficult.</p> <p>One feels even more uneasy</p> <p>When one tries to know the order of the inner life.</p> <p>Because it is invisible,</p> <p>Even more than fine powder is.</p> <p>One might say it is inexplicable, or that it is unclear.</p> <p>So if you are not very thorough in searching for it You certainly will not find it.</p> <p>By “finding” the “order of the inner life” the poet refers to that ultimate aim of prijaji religion in general, mystical experience; for in the truly well-ordered man the whole being is permeated by politesse, the inner and outer merge, and there is a revelation of their significance.</p> <p>Whoever knows the politeness of the inner life Knows also the true nobility,</p> <p>Shows the true signs óf high character.</p> <p>He will be able to care for his spiritual castle,</p> <p>Indeed, a glorious place,</p> <p>Which is never further from him than his beard,</p> <p>And which will be shielded with but a curtain of light.</p> <p>Lo! Such are the teachings of extraordinary men.</p> <p>It is fitting that you should follow their advice.</p> <p>The political metaphors which identify spirituality with political nobility and employ the image of the meditating king’s castle for the light-shielded inner life of man (where, as we shall see, God also dwells) depend upon the more fundamental identification of religious and political status set forth in the concept of a kasar-to-alus gradation. But the combination of the lair-bat in distinction and the kasar-alus continuum brings about a situation in which the ascent from the uncivilized animalistic peasant to the hyper-civilized divine Icing takes place not only in terms of greater mystical achievements, more and more highly developed skills of inward-looking contemplation and refinement of subjective experience, but also in greater and greater formal control over the external aspects of individual actions, transforming them into art or nearart. In the dance, in the shadow-play, in music, in textile design, in etiquette, and, perhaps most crucially of all, in language, the aesthetic formalization of the surfaces of social behavior permeates everything the alus Javanese does.</p><h3>Prijaji versus Abangan: General Differences</h3> <p>of course there are no sovereign courts in Java, and there have not been for centuries. The Dutch, however, not only drew their native administrators, teachers, and clerks from among the descendants of nobles and king but also permitted the two great courts of Djokjakarta and Surakarta to persist through the entire colonial period, having destroyed their military power and relieved their kings of any independent authority. Thus the cultural tradition persisted, grafted now to a progressively more rationalized colonial bureaucracy. The prijajis remained both the cultural leaders and, so far as the indigenous society was concerned, the political ones even though everyone was aware that the ultimate locus of power in the society had shifted into foreign hands. The gentry concern for etiquette, art, and mysticism continued, as did the peasant imitation of the forms they developed.</p> <p>The prijaji religious orientation is more difficult to set off from the abangan than is the santri, because the change from a syncretic South Asian polytheism (or “animism,” if “deity” is too elevated a term to apply to such as danjangs, tujuls, and demits) to a Mid-Eastern monotheism is rather greater than the shift from such a religion to a Hindu-Buddhist pantheism. The traits I shall discuss under prijaji are not confined to them. The gamelan orchestra and the wajang shadow-play, for example, could hardly be said to be absent from peasant life; but they are included in this context because their cultivation, the elucidation of their religio-philosophical meaning, and their most elaborate variations are found in a prijaji context; and because they have been pulled into and integrated with a general gentry style of life toward which the whole rest of the society, even the santri sector, to an extent and grudgingly, looks as the very model of civilized living.</p> <p>Although the Prijaji and abangan orientations, from the point of view of culture content, are in part but genteel and vulgar versions of one another, they are organized around rather different types of social structure and expressive of quite different sorts of values, a difference Cora Dubois has characterized, speaking of the entire Southeast Asian culture-area, as follows:</p> <p>Here was a class (the gentry) whose ethos was deeply at variance from that of the peasantry. It conceived of life in terms of hierarchy and power rather than in terms of simple communal democracy; in terms of privilege rather than mutual obligations; in terms of ostentation and aggrandizement rather than subsistence and communal obligations.<sup>151</sup></p> <p>Thus, as one traces prijaji patterns downward, they tend to shift in significance as they approach the abangan social context. Mystic practices tend to turn into curing techniques; a vague and abstract pantheism gives way to</p> <p>* Social Forces in Southeast Asia (St. Paul, 1949).</p> <p>a vivid and concrete polytheism; a concern for individual religious experience is replaced by a concern for group religious reciprocality. And the corollary holds too: abangan slametans become prijaji formal banquets. In any case, although the prijajis and abangans have, in many ways, very similar worldviews, and although they share many concrete items of religious belief and practice, the ethics which can be deduced from these underlying world-views and which the items are arranged to symbolize differ rather markedly.</p><h3>Literati versus Intelligentsia</h3> <p>there is within the prijaji group something of a distinction comparable to the conservative-modem division already outlined in connection with abangans and santris. Here the distinction seems to coincide with one made by Redfield, building on Arnold Toynbee and Gordon Childe, between what he calls the “literati” and what he calls the “intelligentsia”:</p> <p>In emphasizing two contrasting aspects of the functions and roles of the literate in the early and later civilizations, Childe and Toynbee point to a difference that might deserve the distinguishing terms that these writers give to the two kinds of literate people. Childe is impressed with the separation between craftsmanship and literacy in the early civilizations and with the “scholastic attitude” developed by those clerics who used writing to set down traditional lore and knowledge and who came to develop the exact sciences and philosophy. Some of these became custodians and interpreters of sacred books. In this aspect of their functions, internal to the developing civilization, we might speak of the new type of men as the literati. The literate elite of China illustrate the type. These persons are enclosed within the culture that has become civilization. They carry it forward into a more systematic and reflective phase. . . .</p> <p>Toynbee, on the other hand, writes of the functions of those literate persons who mediate between the society out of which they arose and some other and alien civilization which is impinging upon it. These people have learned something alien to the culture of their native community; they “have learnt the tricks of the intrusive civilization’s trade so far as may be necessary to enable their own community, through their agency, just to hold its own in a social environment in which life is ceasing to be lived in accordance with the local tradition and is coming more and more to be lived in the style imposed by the intrusive civilization upon the aliens who fall under its domination.” . . . These people Toynbee calls by a word which developed for them in Russia, the intelligentsia. In contrast to the literati, the member of the intelligentsia “is born to be unhappy.” He belongs to two worlds, not one; he is a “marginal man.”*</p> <p>The intrusive civilization whose tricks the Javanese intelligentsia have learned is, of course, the Dutch version of the Western. In addition to the mysticism, the pantheism, and the palace etiquette there is in prijaji life an</p> <p>* Op. cit.</p> <p>all too familiar petty-bourgeois element whose provenance is not difficult to guess. It is among the prijajis that one finds women embroidering, giving wedding presents, furnishing their homes with heavy baroque furniture, and decorating the walls of their little box-shaped cement houses—which often would look less out of place in The Hague—with cozy landscapes. It is among them that one finds men engaged in tennis, chess, swimming, and hunting. One even still finds a few of them reading Dutch novels and magazines, although this has dropped off since the Revolution; and I even knew one or two who did pencil sketches, hardly a native Javanese custom. The peasants for such people are something of an embarrassment: they are not only ignorant and lacking in proper manners—a literati complaint—but they are also “disorderly,” “duty,” and “lazy,” and they bring up their children in an irregular fashion.</p> <p>When I told him I was studying children, he (the head of PNI—Partai Nasional Indonesia—the major prijaji-dominated political party, and Modjokuto’s purest case of the intelligentsia type) gave me his opinions on this. He thought Javanese children weren’t “trained”; that they were just let alone to eat what and when they wanted, sleep when they wanted; and some never bathed or got their clothes washed. His children get up at a certain time, bathe, eat breakfast, go to school; and only after school can they play. The old lady (a distant relative of the informant) chimed in, echoing Rekso, remarking that peasant children don’t eat regularly, are dirty, have to gather wood and grasses for their mother instead of going to school.*</p> <p>Prijajis at the middle and higher levels tend to speak Dutch instead of Javanese; and the higher levels do so to the point where, except for the low-Javanese they use to command their servants, they are nearly unable to speak their native language. It is the prijajis who before the war were the beneficiaries of what education the Dutch provided the Javanese (some of them even going to schools, with Dutch children), who worked as clerks and petty administrators in the Dutch sugar-factories, import-export firms, and transport industries; and it was from among them that the very few Javanese chosen to be educated in Holland were in the main selected prijaji pilgrims to a Western Mecca.</p> <p>Out of all this came a new model for the Javanese aristocracy and for the commoners patterning themselves after them, a model based on white-collar Western education emphasizing Dutch language, history, and literature and Dutch manners and values. Women’s clubs, credit cooperatives patterned on plans constructed by Dutch administrators anxious to raise the standard of living of the “natives,” noblesse oblige adult education movements to uplift the masses—by teaching them to read and write, to reduce their divorce rate, and to wash their clothes—appeared alongside the dance groups, the religious training sects, and the gamelan orchestras.</p> <p>Parallel to the social pyramid based on artistic-mystic skills and on closeness to the core of Hindu-Javanese court tradition there came to be erected another pyramid based on skill in manipulation of Western ideas and values</p> <p>* This passage is a transcript from my wife’s field notes.</p> <p>and on closeness to the Dutch colonial community—an intelligentsia as well as a literati.</p> <p>He (a well-educated young prijaji head of a private school run by a private prijaji educational society) criticized the failure of many prijajis to participate in modern life. ... He said that Sosro (the landowner mentioned above by Pak Wiro) was an example of this. In the Dutch times he had the highest position in the bureaucracy of anyone who ever grew up in Modjokuto, being head of the Fish Harbor in Djakarta, but now he doesn’t do anything at all; he just sits home being alus, studying mysticism and the like. I asked if that was because he was old. Narjo (the informant) said, “No, he is only fifty, and quite healthy.” In this case the passivity was mainly due to his Surakarta wife. After he married her, a Radèn Aju (a fairly high female court title), he changed course 180 degrees and started doing things the Surakarta way, which is very slow and alus. Narjo expressed strong disapproval of this and said Rekso (the PNI head) was different in this respect; he was very active in things.</p> <p>The difference between the two groups is not nearly so sharp as the comparable difference among the santris, however. Most prijajis have both a literati and an intelligentsia aspect to their outlook. (Even the above informant belonged to a mystic society.) In general, as one progresses up the status ladder in the direction of the large northern port cities—Djakarta, Surabaja, and Semarang, the literati element steadily lessens and the intelligentsia element steadily increases, until in some circles in Djakarta it would be difficult, if one ignored physical anthropology, to tell that one was not in Holland. Similarly, as one goes up the status ladder in the direction of the great inland court centers, there is an increasing tendency for the literati element to grow stronger, although the intelligentsia aspect does not necessarily decrease, until in the court circles of Djokjakarta and, especially, Surakarta, it is possible, if one ignores the furniture and the electric lights, to imagine one is in a pre-Dutch Hindu-Buddhist court.</p> <p>Modjokuto, in the middle geographically and socially, gets influences from both directions. If one were to wear customary court dress to the north, around Modjokuto and Surabaja, he would be laughed at, one informant told me; and he said that he knew a man who had had his traditional clothing literally torn off him. But in the Surakarta-Djokjakarta direction people prefer such dress, and many still look down on anyone who wears pants and a jacket as a Dutch imitator.</p> <p>In general, however, the intelligentsia and literati elements tend to get bound into the same person, with only relative emphasis on one or the other. The current (1954) prijaji culture-hero is the Sultan of Djokjakarta, who, it is said, behaves exactly like a conservative, mystic, traditional long within his palace and like a progressive, modem, Dutch-educated political leader outside of it. And even in the most intelligentsia circles in Djakarta one will often run into mysticism in unexpected places:</p> <p>He (an advanced student in sociology at the University of Indonesia) asked me if I had studied philosophy, and I said, “A little.” He asked if I had found there a key to life, an answer. He said that he knew very little philosophy but that he was always looking for such a key. He said that he had made up a philosophy for himself: one part Indian philosophy, one part Islam, one part sociology, and one part psychology. ... He had written all this down and sent it to Siasat (a weekly socialist magazine), but the editor said that he should send it to a theological magazine. He thought he would just keep it for a while, because if he published it people might not understand it the same way he meant it and then would be led astray.</p><h3>The General Dimensions of Prijaji Belief</h3> <p>The three major foci of prijaji “religious” life are etiquette, art, and mystical practice. I admit to using “religion” in a somewhat broader sense than may be typical, but there is nothing else to do when these factors are so fused as to make their separate consideration nearly meaningless. For etiquette, art, and mystical practice represent the prijaji effort after order as it moves from the surface of human experience toward its depths, from the outer aspect of life toward the inner. Etiquette, the polishing of interpersonal behavior into smooth decorum, lends to everyday behavior a spiritualized formality; art, a dual discipline of mind and body, provides a revelation of inner significance in outward gesture; and mystic practice, the intensive regulation of the life of thought and feeling, organizes the individual’s spiritual resources for an attack upon ultimate enlightenment. The connecting link between all three, the common element in them all which ties them together and makes them but different modes of the same reality, is what the Javanese, borrowing a concept from India, call rasa.</p> <p>Rasa has two primary meanings: “feeling” and “meaning.” As “feeling” it is one of the traditional five senses (pantjaindrija)—seeing, hearing, talking, smelling, and feeling. It includes within itself three aspects of “feeling” that our view of the five senses separates: taste on the tongue, touch on the body, and emotional “feeling” within the “heart”—sadness, happiness, and the like. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is a passion.</p> <p>As “meaning,” rasa is applied to the words in a letter, in a poem, or even in speech, to indicate the between-the-lines “looking north and hitting south” type of allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication. And it is given the same application to external acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative “feeling” of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But, in this second sense, it also means “ultimate significance”—the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence. Rasa, said one of my most articulate informants, is the same as life; whatever lives has rasa, and whatever has rasa lives. To translate such a sentence one could only render it twice: whatever lives feels, and whatever feels lives; or: whatever lives has meaning, and whatever has meaning lives. As the first, or sensationalist, definition of rasa indicates both feeling from without (taste, touch) and from within (emotional), so rasa in its second, or semantic, definition indicates both the meaning of events in the lair, the external behavioral world of sound, shape, and gesture, and in the far more mysterious batin, the fluid inner world of life.</p> <p>The changes which the Javanese ring upon this protean root are numerous and so marvelously consistent as almost to give in themselves a complete picture of the phenomenological analysis of human experience upon which the prijajis base their world-view. Ngrasani means to speak ill of someone, to gossip about them. Ngrasakaké means to sympathize with or “feel with” someone or something. (“My business is so bad,” moaned one storekeeper to me, “you can’t even ngrasakaké it”; and people urged to cooperate are told to ngrasakaké one another.) A rerasan (to rasa one another mutually) is a discussion or conversation, usually an acrimonious one. Sarasa (to be of one rasa) is to be in harmony, to agree. Mirasa is to reason over something, think about something. Krasa indicates “feeling” as an abstract noun; thus krasa bingah (bingah—“happy”) means happiness. Krasan means to “feel at home,” to feel comfortable in the situation which you are in, to be used to it. (“Are you krasan in Java?”—i.e., do you feel at home in Java? Are you already used to the heat, food, and customs here so that they no longer disturb your equanimity? This last is the Javanese equivalent of our perennial question to visiting foreigners, “How do you like America?”) Rasa-pangrasa means to “feel out” one another tentatively and warily, to hold back one’s feelings in untrusting concealment from one another, a typical prijaji pattern. Rumangsa means to be conscious of, to perceive, something. As J. Gonda points out in his Sanskrit in Indonesia,* the two meanings of rasa—“ultimate meaning” or “hidden significance,” and “tactile sensation,” “taste,” or “inward feeling”—actually derive from two different Sanskrit roots; but, as he also points out, in modern Java “the latter . . . word . . . has, indeed, blended with the former.” It is upon this blending that the prijaji religious analysis is based.</p> <p>By taking rasa to mean both “feeling” and “meaning,” the prijaji has been able to develop a phenomenological analysis of subjective experience to which everything else can be tied. Because fundamentally “feeling” and “meaning” are one, and therefore the ultimate religious experience taken subjectively is also the ultimate religious truth taken objectively, an empirical analysis of inward perception yields at the same time a metaphysical analysis of objective reality. This granted, the characteristic way in which human action comes to be considered, whether from a moral or an aesthetic or a religious point of view, is in terms of the emotional life of the individual who perceives it, whether from within or without; the more refined [alus) one’s feeling, the more profound one’s understanding, the more elevated one’s moral character, and the more beautiful one’s external aspect. The management of one’s emotional economy becomes one’s primary concern, in terms of which all else is ultimately rationalized. The spiritually enlightened man guards his psychological equilibrium well and makes a constant effort to maintain its placid stability. His proximate aim is emotional quiescence,</p> <p>* Nagpur, 1952, p. 158.</p> <p>for passion is kasar feeling, fit only for children, animals, peasants, and foreigners. His ultimate aim, which this quiescence makes possible, is gnosis, the direct comprehension of the ultimate rasa. To feel all is to understand all. Paradoxically, it is also to feel nothing—but we shall come to that problem later.</p> <p>Emotional equanimity, a certain flatness of affect, is, then, the prized psychological state, the mark of the truly alus character. As the forms which life takes vary from the disordered grossness of animal existence up through the only slightly more refined peasant to the hyper-genteel high-prijaji, and, finally, through the divine king to the invisible, intangible, insensible (except mystically), self-sufficient Being of God, so the forms of feeling vary from the vulgar actuality of base passion, through the spiritualized placidity of the true prijaji to the ultimate rasa, where feeling is but meaning only. Happiness and unhappiness, say the Javanese, are irrevocably connected and imply one another as up implies down. “Happy now, unhappy later; unhappy now, happy later,” is perhaps the most quoted prijaji maxim. The really good man tries to get beyond happiness and unhappiness as our mystics attempt to escape good and evil.</p> <p>If you can calm your innermost feelings You will be able to build a wall around them;</p> <p>You will not need to be or to feel greedy,</p> <p>To want this and that and the other thing.</p> <p>For the only things one receives in life Are merely happiness and unhappiness.</p> <p>In this there is no difference between the rich And the poor carrying burdens through the street.</p> <p>If you are happy now, you will be unhappy later.</p> <p>If you accept unhappiness, it will totally disappear.</p> <p>This stanza of my informant’s poem is worth comment. The word I have translated “calm” (puntu) really means to think seriously about, or, better, to talle yourself into not feeling about something you would normally feel deeply about. An informant, asked for an example said: “If my parents die, I am all upset; but if I say to myself, ‘Oh, they were already old and everyone must die sometime,’ then I will be at peace—this action is puntu.” This kind of behavior, from my observation, is a major Javanese defense mechanism:</p> <p>When Pak Ardjo (my landlord, whose house had been robbed in his absence) got back home after the robbery, he didn’t say anything to Bu Ardjo about it for quite a while. In fact, when I came in, just after he returned, he was talking to a railroad friend and said there had been a lot going on here too, but he just ignored this and went on talking about other subjects. . . . Later he told me he had resigned himself about the theft; had convinced himself by saying, “If it’s gone, it’s gone, and that’s all there is to it.” Being upset wouldn’t bring the bike back, nor would getting angry at his wife. ... He said he had kept himself from being upset about it all.</p> <p>There are three main values involved in this calming of the true feelings, this flattening out of affect: trima, sabar, and iklas. lklas I have already discussed, in connection with death, as meaning detachment from the contingencies of the external world so as not to be disturbed when things go awry in it or if something unexpected occurs. It is “not caring,” on the premise that if one does not care about worldly things they cannot hurt or upset one; or, as our poet puts it in another stanza:</p> <p>Although you may own A house like a great heaven And lock it with a golden key,</p> <p>You must surely die in the end and be buried in the ground,</p> <p>And all your material things are yours but for a moment.</p> <p>Sabar is usually translated patience. If one asks people what is the main quality which a leader, political or otherwise, should have, this is the characteristic they almost always mention. Sabar indicates an absence of eagerness, of impatience, of headstrong passion. A sabar man advances carefully through experience, stepping tentatively as we do when we are not certain that a plank is strong enough to hold us or that a hillside rock will not give way under our feet. His aim, as another line from our poem puts it, is to “go gingerly through life as a caterpillar inches over water.”</p> <p>Trima literally means to accept or receive; in value terms it means not to kick against the pricks, to accept what comes without protest and without rebellion. The three ideas are obviously very close. Iklas brings psychological peace through a lack of attachment to the external world; sabar brings such peace by an inward restraint of emotional drive, an atrophy of the will, an excess of caution; trima brings peace through the acceptance of the inevitable with grace: “If you accept unhappiness, it will totally disappear.”</p> <p>If one can calm one’s most inward feelings (by being trima, sabar, and iklas), the poet continues, one can build a wall around them; one will be able both to conceal them from others and to protect them from outside disturbance. The refinement of inner feeling has thus two aspects: the direct internal attempt to control one’s emotions represented by trima, sabar, and iklas; and, secondly, an external attempt to build a well around them that will protect them. On the one hand, one engages in an inward discipline, and on the other in an outward defense. Mysticism is mainly training in the first—how to be trima, sabar, and iklas. Etiquette is training in the second. At bottom, the refinement of the inner world—the batin—makes possible the refinement of the outer, which in turn protects one from being easily upset. The prijaji thus has two lines of defense against the shocks of the external world: the formalization of social behavior so that it is easily predictable, and the flattening of affect so that if the unexpected does occur it will be less likely to lead to an inward disturbance.</p> </body> </html>