<?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><h3>The Role of Etiquette</h3> <p>the wall, then, is a wall of etiquette. Etiquette provides the alus prijaji with a set of rigidly formal ways of doing things which conceals his real feelings from others. In addition, it so regularizes behavior, his own and that of others, as to make it unlikely to provide unpleasant surprises.</p> <p>In the model conversations dictated by prijaji informants teaching me Javanese, the same sort of situation occurs and reoccurs almost to the point of monotony. Two men are speaking. One wants something from the other (a loan, a service, his company in going somewhere), and both know it. The petitioner does not want to put his petition directly for fear of angering tire petitioned; and the petitioned does not want to state his refusal directly for fear of frustrating the petitioner too severely. Both are very concerned with the other’s emotional reactions because ultimately they will affect their own. As a result, they go through a long series of formal speech patterns, courtesy forms, complex indirections, and mutual protestations of purity of motive, arriving only slowly at the point of the conversation so that no one is taken by surprise. Etiquette is the transfer to the level of interpersonal behavior of the calm and muted feeling tone of the inner life.</p> <p>The relation between rasa and etiquette often gets expressed in an incisive commercial metaphor:</p> <p>What is the aim of life? (The informant, a teacher-leader (guru) of a mystic sect, was giving me a kind of catechism of his group’s beliefs.) The aim of life is to seek emotional peace; other than that there isn’t any. No one seeks upset, disturbance; everyone just seeks peace. Now each person starts out on this search for inward peace with a certain amount of capital, as in the market, only it is not in the form of money but of rasa. This capital is neither more nor less than the ability to make other people feel at peace. . . . Every person has a capital of rasa to accomplish this. When I came to his house he emerged in proper style to meet me. This was his capital because it put me at ease; and so I was in turn polite to him, and so he was at ease and his capital of rasa was increased. You often see written and hung in people’s houses, or hear people say: “Men must have etiquette-feeling (rasa sopan-santun).” This etiquette-feeling, this form of politeness, is a kind of instrument or tool for making others peaceful within, and thus yourself also; a kind of capital of rasa, because all movement is from rasa and so this politeness has rasa. If you meet a man on the street and you just coast by and don’t say, “Where are you going, Pak?” in high-Javanese (the typical Javanese greeting), he will feel upset; and later his upsetness will react back and you will feel upset.</p> <p>He said that each people has its own politeness forms, and that no American, for example, would behave thus—and then he gave a perfect demonstration of the way Americans in fact do behave, clapping someone on the back and saying, “Let’s go into town” while towering over him. (Having your head higher than another’s is impossible manners for a Javanese.) In fact, his imitation was so good that I misunderstood and missed the point, agreeing that was the way Americans acted. He looked appalled and then said, mumbling, “Well, if you knew someone for a very, very long time.”</p> <p>Lest this be thought but an interpretation of the views of just one sect, I cite the following, from a conversation with a policeman who, although a prijaji, was not at all learned in mysticism, which points up even more sharply the unity of etiquette with the rest of the prijaji religious complex:</p> <p>The policeman, who originally came from Surakarta but who has been here a long time, informed me of the various levels of the Javanese language and said that these were very important to the Javanese. Formal language, Javanese art, and etiquette, he said, were all of a piece. Each person has within him a capital of rasa which is his real riches and which is what makes for smooth relations between people and for peace among them and within people. Thus, said he, before I (the ethnographer) came here to Indonesia, I felt inside that I was going to try to be like the Indonesians and not try to feel higher than they were and try to get to know them; and so when I got here things worked out well and I was peaceful inside. This “emotional set” is what is called a capital of rasa, and it is very important. Etiquette, language, and art, such as the gamelan orchestra and the shadow-play, are all intended to build up within the individual this store of rasa capital.</p> <p>Four major principles animate prijaji etiquette: the proper form for the proper rank, indirection, dissimulation, and the avoidance of any act suggesting disorder or lack of self-control. Under the proper form for the proper rank comes the all-important matter of the correct choice of linguistic form, to which we shall come in a moment; but it also includes the andap-asor pattern. Andap-asor means to humble oneself politely and is the correct behavior to adopt toward anyone who is either of approximately equal rank or higher. It is always a situation of some anxiety when two Javanese, especially prijajis, meet for the first time, for each must determine the other’s rank in order both to employ the correct linguistic forms and to apply the andap-asor pattern correctly. (There are many cues: dress, occupation, bearing.) If the two are of the same rank or nearly the same, then both will adopt the andap-asor pattern; and I have seen many prijaji conversations that seemed to consist almost entirely of an attempt by each of the participants to put himself in the lower position, a kind of obsessive competition to be bottom dog. (The competition is pretense, of course. If either were to flatly acknowledge the other’s inferiority in such a situation it would be a grave insult.)</p> <p>If one participant is very obviously higher in rank than the other—a prince and a commoner, a high official and a low one, a master and his servant, an adult and a child, a rich man and a poor one (which is, however, a touchy situation, since many a poor abangan peasant will be unwilling to acknowledge inferiority to a rich santri trader)—the problem is much simpler. The lower man takes the andap-asor pattern and the higher takes a superior one, sometimes even a haughty one even though it is considered unseemly. The problem comes in the “about equal rank” situation—in deciding in borderline cases whether one’s opposite number is clearly enough inferior to one to permit an adoption of a superior attitude or, conversely, if the other is high enough to be allowed to get away with such behavior. There seems to be a general fear on the part of many people that they will ngrendahaké (literally: to humble or lower) i.e., insult, someone lower than themselves and will be met with a sudden burst of unexpected aggression in return. One must always be careful in speaking to lower people, one woman said, because they are very easily insulted and once insulted they become uncontrollably angry.</p> <p>As a result, the tendency is to move “like the caterpillar creeping over water”; to be doubly cautious about missteps. One gives people the benefit of the doubt; and so the mutual andap-asor competition pattern is perhaps the most common, at least within Modjokuto prijaji circles, where no one is really high enough to get very haughty with anyone else. Similar problems arise when separate rank characteristics conflict. What is an old man of no particular standing to do when dealing with a young man of high rank (or, nowadays, education); or a poor prijaji dealing with a rich trader? In part the problem is resolved by the fact that the andap-asor pattem as well as linguistic usage is not an absolute matter of either abject humility or lordly pride but can be indulged in by degrees. This, in fact, is half the fun of it. The accomplished prijaji can express all sorts of nuances of status (and insult), many of which escape Western perception altogether; and a true virtuoso can reduce novices to quivering immobility. As a Javanese put it, “I have a friend who is very andap-asor [to me], so that I feel ashamed with him because I am not capable of behaving as he does; and when I am going to reply to him I want to be andap-asor too, but I can’t, so I feel ashamed.”</p> <p>In behavioral terms the andap-asor pattern consists in the first place of all kinds of submissive actions, for the Javanese take the physical metaphor seriously, associating height with high status. In the old days (and one still sees it occasionally in prijaji circles in the larger cities) servants served the family’s meals on their knees, and the correct greeting of an inferior to a superior was to kneel and make the obeisance gesture (palms of hands together with thumbs at the nose and a “horizontal nod” of the head) to the superior’s knee or even to his foot. I saw this done only once in Modjokuto —by an old servant who had come to visit her former mistress, the wife of a high prijaji. This sort of thing is considered too extreme nowadays, but the anxious effort to keep one’s head lower than a superior’s is still very much present. So is the custom of the host not sitting at the visiting table* when an important guest calls but placing himself on a low chair to the rear and side of the guest. Allowing others to go first to take the best seats and minimizing one’s own abilities, property, and accomplishments are part of the same pattern.</p> <p>Indirection as a theme of prijaji behavior, and of Javanese behavior generally, has been mentioned in this essay several times already. I have quoted the proverb “to look north and hit south,” and related something about the magnificent beating about the bush that goes on when the family of the groom requests the bride from her family for their son; and I have quoted the Modjokuto naib on the fact that old-time kijajis (Koranic teachers) never explicitly informed people they were wrong but told little stories from which the listeners could get the point less painfully. One must get the rasa of what people are saying, the real content, informants are always emphasizing, because alus people often don’t like to say what is on their</p> <p>° A small round or square table, which nearly all Javanese seem to have, around which host and guests always sit, sipping lukewarm tea and nibbling bland cookies. It is also part of the andap-asor pattern for the host to insist that the food being offered is highly inadequate; the more the insistence, the better it is.</p> <p>minds. Bluntness is simply not a virtue, and by the time one comes to the point in a well-modeled prijaji conversation everyone should be quite aware of what one is going to say. Often it is not necessary to come to the point at all—a great relief to everyone.</p> <p>One of my prijaji informants wished to divorce his wife, but he thought it unseemly of someone of his status to go boldly into the naib’s office and simply dismiss her “village style.” Instead, he unobstrusively exacerbated a latent conflict between his wife and the mother-in-law of his first, now deceased, wife, who lived next door. (He was living on his first wife’s lands.) The conflict between the women soon got to the point where the wife, evidently sensing her husband’s withdrawal of support from her (although he said nothing to her and behaved as though things were as normal as ever between them), could bear it no longer and went into town to request the divorce herself. The husband thus appeared to the naib and to his neighbors to be the injured party and to be doing his wife a favor by divorcing her. A triumph, he said to me, of alus behavior.</p> <p>Another similar situation occurred in which a wife, unhappy not so much with her husband as with the in-laws with whom she was forced to live, got her husband to move away without coming right out and asking him to do so.</p> <p>One day the husband suddenly found a postcard in the house which said,</p> <p>“I can’t stand it any longer here. If my husband doesn’t want to move, it would be better for me to go back to my parents.” Then the husband was angry at everyone. First he went to his wife and asked her: “Did you write this?” No, she said, it wasn’t her writing anyway. Then he accused his younger sister, who also denied it. Since the parents couldn’t write, they were out of the question. He thought it might have been written by someone not in the household who wanted to make trouble. Nothing was done, and after a while things settled down again. Then the husband found another postcard just like the first, and again there was a quarrel. He gathered the family together and asked them one at a time about it, but no results. Five times the cards appeared. Finally the husband went to look for a house of his own, and after he moved things were peaceful again. Now everything is fine once more, but as yet no one has admitted writing the letters.</p> <p>The use of go-betweens is part of the same pattern (although in using a go-between, a prijaji is caught between his great desire to keep his own affairs secret and his unwillingness to face issues in their naked form). Several prijajis in Modjokuto lend money, for example, and almost everyone knows they do; but they nearly always employ agents to do the actual loan arranging and keep their own identity as secret from the borrower as they can. As the borrower on his side will often employ a close friend as agent (or, if not, will insist anyway that he is acting as someone else’s agent), the circuitousness of the process can become quite elaborate.</p> <p>Dissimulation is rather close to indirection, and most of the above examples, especially the postcards, display it as well. The Javanese have a word for dissimulation or pretense: étok-étok. The characteristic quality of étok-étok, in contrast to our patterns of dissemblance, is not merely that it is far more prevalent and that it is largely approved (being sometimes called “proper lying”), but that it need not have any obvious justification, being merely gratuitous. I asked one informant to define étok-étok:</p> <p>He said: “Suppose I go off south and you see me go. Later my son asks you: ‘Do you know where my father went?’ And you say no, étok-étok you don’t know.” I asked him why should I étok-étok, as there seemed to be no reason for lying, and he said, “Oh, you just étok-étok. You don’t have to have a reason.”</p> <p>When we tell white lies, we have to justify them to ourselves, even though the justification be weak. We tell a woman her horrible hat is pretty because it would be rude not to; if someone sees us en route to a lawyer, we may say we are going to the bank because we do not wish to advertise our troubles or have others poking into our affairs. In any case, we usually have to find some sort of reason for telling a lie. For the Javanese (especially the prijaji) it seems, in part anyway, to work the other way around: the burden of proof seems to be in the direction of justifying telling the truth. The natural answer to casual questions, particularly from people you do not know very well, tends to be either a vague one (“Where are you going?”—“West”) or a mildly false one; and one tells the truth in small matters only when there is some reason to do so. Thus, if a Javanese is going to the movies and people ask him were he is going, he will probably tell them “to the store” unless he wants them to join him or wants to ask them if the picture is worth seeing. When I went to see a curer with my landlord about a half-dozen people asked him along the route where he was going, and each time he replied that he was going to the house of someone a half-dozen houses or so down from where they were. It was only when he finally met someone he wished to invite to accompany him that he told the truth about his destination. In general, polite Javanese avoid gratuitous truths.</p> <p>In terms of etiquette proper, étok-étok is especially valued as a way of concealing one’s own wishes in deference to one’s opposite. As one informant said: “For example, you are working. Then I come to visit. ... I come and call out at the door. Then you act as though you were not working, not doing anything. Étok-étok you aren’t working.”</p> <p>The same sort of pattern is involved in the nearly absolute requirement never to show one’s real feelings directly, especially to a guest. Any kind of negative feeling toward another must be dissimulated; and people are strongly enjoined to smile and be pleasant to people for whom they have very little use. Strong positive feelings are also supposed to be hidden except in very intimate situations. The effort is to keep a steady level of very mild positive affect in interpersonal relations, an étok-étok warmth behind which all real feelings can be effectively concealed.</p> <p>Similarly, one must call out to any passerby one knows inviting him to stop in, even though he may be the last person on earth you wish to see. One must refuse food (unless the host persists in offering it) even if one is dying of hunger (and the host must offer it even if it would be great trouble to prepare and he wished the guest would go away and leave him alone). One should never refuse outright people’s requests to do something for them; rather, one merely agrees even if one has no intention of going through with whatever it is, and then one never gets around to doing it, putting the petitioner off with various étok-étok excuses until he realizes at last that one was not serious in the first place. For this last the Javanese have a proverb: “The crocodile is quick to submerge but slow to come up,” meaning: it is easy to get people to agree to do something but hard to get them actually to do it.</p> <p>One result of all this is that even Javanese are sometimes not quite sure whether the other person is being étok-étok or serious. One hears people saying: “Come to my house. I really mean it; it’s not just étok-étok. Please come.” But the other person will still not be certain whether he is in fact expected to come or not. Just when to accept offered food in a very prijaji household is always a problem, for a host never quite believes the guest is serious in refusing it, and there usually has to be much backing and filling before the signals are clear.</p> <p>One often hears people say in praise of someone that “one can never tell how he feels inside by how he behaves on the outside.” At a village election where the candidates for village chief had to sit immobile and expressionless in full view of the voters for the entire day, including the almost unbearable tense period when the votes were counted aloud one by one, people kept saying to me in a tone of high praise: “Just look at those candidates—they may be burning up inside but they show no feeling at all on the outside.” One political speaker in my village began by saying: “No one ever says what he really thinks. People always étok-étok when dealing with other people. I’m no different. I too never say what I really think, and you can’t tell how I feel about things by what I say.” This seemingly self-defeating statement for a politician was evidently but mere common sense to his audience, who listened to him for all the world as though he were actually communicating something.</p> <p>Lastly, there is the avoidance of any act suggesting disorder or lack of self-control. According to the Javanese, the difference between men and animals is that the former “know order.” By “order,” the prijaji means formality of bearing, restraint of expression, and bodily self-discipline—a constant awareness of himself as being an object of perception for others and therefore obligated to present a pleasing, alus picture. Spontaneity or naturalness of gesture or speech is fitting only for those “not yet Javanese”—i.e., the mad, the simple-minded, and children. “If life is disordered,” writes our poet, “it has the value of a dried teak leaf,” and elsewhere he has a whole stanza on the subject:</p> <p>Because if you do not yet know How to put things in order And how to use them in order,</p> <p>You will become disoriented, wandering here and there,</p> <p>Mistaking things for their opposites.</p> <p>If you do things in this disordered fashion, you will meet troubles And will be confused by them.</p> <p>This may be said to be a loss of humanity.</p> <p>And as humanity is God’s greatest creation,</p> <p>You must not be careless with it.</p> <p>Here he again emphasizes from the point of view of the individual’s spiritual advancement the relation between order in the outer life and in the inner. Order in the outer life regularizes stimuli so that they will not puzzle, shock, or surprise. In the same way, following the “emotional capital” theory, one should provide an ordered picture for others so as not to upset them. Here one would point to the great concern with correct posture, with soft-colored (browns and blues mainly) abstract textile designs, with graceful gesture, with soft, slow, even speech. Care, deliberation, the careful sorting out of one thing from another is the proper mode of procedure; and behaving otherwise puts one in danger of being diguju pitik—laughed at by the chickens.</p><h3>Linguistic Etiquette</h3> <p>but the entire etiquette system is perhaps best summed up and symbolized in the way the Javanese use their language. In Javanese it is nearly impossible to say anything without indicating the social relationship between the speaker and the listener in terms of status and familiarity. Status is determined by many things—wealth, descent, education, occupation, age, kinship, and nationality, among others, but the important point is that the choice of linguistic forms as well as speech style is in every case partly determined by the relative status (or familiarity) of the conversers. The difference is not minor, a mere du and Sie difference. To greet a person lower than oneself (or someone with whom one is intimate) one says Apa poda slamet, but one greets a superior (or someone one knows only slightly) with Menapa sami sugeng—both meaning “Are you well?” Pandjenengan saking tindak pundi? and Kowé seka endi? are the same question (“Where are you coming from?”), in the first case addressed to a superior, in the second to an inferior. Clearly, a peculiar obsession is at work here.</p> <p>Basically, what is involved is that the Javanese pattern their speech behavior in terms of the same alus to kasar axis around which they organize their social behavior generally. A number of words (and some affixes) are made to carry in addition to their normal linguistic meaning what might be called a “status meaning”; i.e., when used in actual conversation they convey not only their fixed detonative meaning (“house,” “body,” “eat,” “walk,” “you,” “passive voice”) but also a connotative meaning concerning the status of (and/or degree of familiarity between) the speaker and the listener. As a result, several words may denote the same normal linguistic meaning but differ in the status connotation they convey. Thus, for “house” we have three forms (omah, grija, and dalem), each connoting a progressively higher relative status of the listener with respect to the speaker. Some normal linguistic meanings are even more finely divided (kowé, sampéjan, pandjenengan, pandjenengan dalem, for ascending values of “you”), others less (di- and dipun-) for the passive voice; but most normal meanings, taking the vocabulary as a whole, are not divided at all. Thus the word for “table” is medja no matter to whom one is speaking.<a id="footnote1"></a><sup><a href="#bookmark0">1</a></sup></p> <p>A further complication is that status meanings are communicated in speech not only intentionally in terms of word selection within the speaker’s dialect but unintentionally in terms of the dialect he uses as a whole. Not only are there “levels” of speech within the dialect which are ranked in terms of their status (or cilus/kasar) connotations; the various dialects in the community as a whole are also ranked in terms of the alus to kasar spectrum, this latter sort of ranking being characteristic, of course, of any stratified society.</p> <p>In order to clarify the relationship between the intra-dialect and interdialect systems of status symbolization, one voluntary and one involuntary, I offer the accompanying three charts depicting paradigmatically how a single sentence alters within each of the dialects and among them. Chart I shows the speech range in status terms for what I would call the non-prijaji but urbanized and at least slightly educated group, which would include the better educated abangans, most urban santris, and even some of the lower prijajis, particularly when they are mixing with people outside their own immediate circle. It is, then, the most common dialect in the town. Chart II shows the dialect of most peasants and uneducated townsmen, which is the most common style of all in terms of sheer numbers of users. Chart III depicts the prijaji dialect, which, although spoken by a relatively small group of people, provides an ideal^jnodel of correct speech for the whole society.</p> <p>The English sentence selected as an example is: Are you going to eat rice and cassava now? The Javanese words (low forms first) are as follows:</p> <p>Are: apa/ napa/ menapa you: kowé/ sampéjan/pandjenengan going: arept adjeng/ badé to eat: mangan/neda/dahar rice: sega/sekul and: lan/ kalijan cassava: kaspé</p> <p>now : saiki/ san iki/ samen ika</p> <p>The numbers at the sides of the charts indicate the levels, and the sentences, on the right, derived by reading across the chart at each level, are those available to a speaker in the particular dialect concerned. This range of sentences does not represent a mere theoretical set of possibilities. All of these variations are used every day. Moreover the Javanese have names for each of the levels. Level 3a is krarna inggil; level 3 is krama biasa, or just krama; level 2 is krama madya, or just tnadya. (These three highest levels are often</p><div> <p>Level</p></div><div> <p>3a</p></div><div> <p>menapa</p></div><div> <p>napa</p></div><div> <p>DIALECT OF NON-PRIJAJI, URBANIZED, SOMEWHAT EDUCATED PERSONS</p></div><div> <p>you</p></div><div> <p>going to eat rice    and cassava now</p></div><div> <p>Complete sentence</p></div><div> <p>pandjenengan</p></div><div> <p>badé</p></div><div> <p>dahar</p></div><div> <p>kalijan</p></div><div> <p>samenika</p></div><div> <p>Menapa pandjenengan bade dahar sekul kalijan kaspé samenika?</p></div><div> <p>selcul</p></div><div> <p>Menapa sampéjan badé neda sekul kalijan kaspé samenika?</p></div><div> <p>sampe¡an</p></div><div> <p>adjeng</p></div><div> <p>neda</p></div><div> <p>kaspé</p></div><div> <p>saniki</p></div><div> <p>Napa sampéjan adjeng neda sekul Ian kaspé saniki?</p></div><div> <p>la</p></div><div> <p>Ian</p></div><div> <p>apa</p></div><div> <p>a rep</p></div><div> <p>sega</p></div><div> <p>saiki</p></div><div> <p>Apa sampéjan arep neda sega Ian kaspé saiki?</p></div><div> <p>Rowe</p></div><div> <p>mangan</p></div><div> <p>Apa kowé arep mangan sega Ian kaspé saiki?</p></div> <p>DIALECT OF PEASANTS AND UNEDUCATED TOWNSPEOPLE</p> <table border="1"> <tr><td> <p>Level</p></td><td colspan="8"> <p>are you going to eat rice and cassava now</p></td><td> <p>Complete sentence</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>2</p></td><td> <p>napa</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>sampéjan</p></td><td> <p>adjeng</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>neda</p></td><td> <p>sekul</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>lan</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>kaspé</p></td><td> <p>sanilci</p></td><td> <p>Napa sampéjan adjeng neda sekul lan kaspé saniki?</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>la</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>apa</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>a rep</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>sega</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>saiki</p></td><td> <p>Apa sampéjan arep neda sega lan kaspé saiki?</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>1</p></td><td> <p>kowé</p></td><td> <p>mangan</p></td><td> <p>Apa kowé arep mangan sega lan kaspé saiki?</p></td></tr> </table> <p>Chart III</p> <p>DIALECT OF THE PRiJAJIS</p> <table border="1"> <tr><td> <p>Level</p></td><td colspan="8"> <p>are you going to eat rice and cassava now</p></td><td> <p>Complete sentence</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>3a</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>menapa</p></td><td> <p>pandjenengan</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>badê</p></td><td> <p>i^ahar</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>sekul</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>kalijan</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>kaspê</p></td><td rowspan="2"> <p>samenîka</p></td><td> <p>Menapa pandjenengan badé dahar sekul kalijan kaspé samenika?</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>3</p></td><td> <p>sampéjan</p></td><td> <p>neda</p></td><td> <p>Menapa sampéjan badé neda sekul kalijan kaspé samenika?</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p></p></td><td colspan="8"> <p></p></td><td> <p></p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>lb</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>apa</p></td><td> <p>pandjenengan</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>a rep</p></td><td> <p>dahar</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>sega</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>Ian</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>kaspê</p></td><td rowspan="3"> <p>saiki</p></td><td> <p>Apa pandjenengan arep daharsega Ian kaspé saiki?</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>la</p></td><td> <p>sampéjan</p></td><td> <p>neda</p></td><td> <p>Apa sampéjan arep neda sega Ian kaspé saiki?</p></td></tr> <tr><td> <p>1</p></td><td> <p>kowé</p></td><td> <p>mangan</p></td><td> <p>Apa kowé arep mangan sega Ian kaspé saiki?</p></td></tr> </table> <p>referred to merely as basa or language, although by high prijajis only the first two would be so considered.) Level la is either ngoko madya, or just madya; and level 1 is ngoko biasa, or just ngoko. Level lb, a prijaji specialty, is called ngoko sae (“fine ngoko") or ngoko alus.</p> <p>Krama, madya, and ngoko—or high, middle, and low—are the three main levels expressing status and/or familiarity available to speakers in the language. They represent sets of linked conjugates (menapa . . . badé . . . samenika; napa . . . adjeng . . . saniki; apa . . . arep . . . saiki; etc.), the occurrence of one of which for any given meaning (e.g., menapa/napa/-apa) will predict the occurrence of the other if the meaning concerned occurs (i.e., badé/adjeng/arep; or samenika/saniki/saiki, etc.). In some cases the madya conjugate is the same as the ngoko (e.g., Ian); sometimes it is the same as the krama (e.g., sampéjan, neda, sekul); and of course, sometimes the conjugate is the same in all three cases (e.g., kaspé).</p> <p>In addition to these sets of linked conjugates, there is a group of special words, mostly referring to people, their parts, possessions and actions, which occur independently of the first kinds of conjugates and which act to raise the level of speech indicated by the first, inevitable selection, one “notch” higher —or, better, one-half notch. Dakar and pandjenengan are such words in the above sentences, rasing level 3, krama biasa (literally: “usual” or “common” krama) to level 3a, krama inggil (“high” krama). In the ngoko level, the use of krama words (e.g., sampéjan, or neda in the above) also has an honorific effect, lifting ngoko biasa (level 1), to ngoko madya (level la). As these krama words employed in ngoko sentences occur in the same meanings as the special honorifics, they might be called “low honorifics,” in contrast to the special “high honorifics,” such as dahar, pandjenengan. Finally, the use of high honorifics in a ngoko context yields level lb, ngoko sae. As a result, the intra-dialect system of status symbolization consists, at the most, of three “stylemes” (high, middle, and low) and two types of honorifics (high and low). The honorifics occur, at least in the dialects described here, only with the high and low stylemes, never with the middle one.<a id="footnote2"></a><sup><a href="#bookmark1">2</a></sup></p> <p>On the basis, then, of how many stylemes and how many types of honorific are customarily employed and what combinations occur, the three “class dialects” diagrammed in the charts are distinguished. In the dialect of the non-prijaji, urbanized, and at least somewhat educated group (Chart I), all three stylemes are customarily used (high, middle, low) and both types of honorific (high and low). Since the high honorifics occur only with the high style and the low ones only with the low style,<a id="footnote3"></a><sup><a href="#bookmark2">3</a></sup> a speaker of this dialect has five possibilities, represented by the five sentences: 3a, krama inggil (i.e., high styleme and high honorifics); 3, krama biasa (high styleme without honori-fics); 2, krama madya (middle styleme without honorifics); la, ngoko madya (middle styleme with low honorifics); 1, ngoko biasa (low styleme, no honorifics).</p> <p>In the peasant and uneducated townsman dialect or idiom (Chart II), two stylemes (middle and low) and one type of honorific (low) customarily occur, the honorifics occurring only with the low styleme, to raise ngoko biasa to ngoko madya.* Thus the possibilities for the expression of “status meaning” for a speaker of this dialect are only three: 2, krama madya (middle styleme without honorifics); la, ngoko madya (low styleme plus low honorifics); 1, ngoko biasa (low styleme, no honorifics).</p> <p>Finally, in the prijaji dialect, the middle styleme—considered to be vulgar —drops out. Thus, there are two stylemes (high and low) and both high and low honorifics, the high occurring with both high and low stylemes, the low, again, only with the high. This gives five possibilities: 3a, krama inggil (high styleme plus high honorifics); 3, krama biasa (high styleme without honorifics); lb, ngoko sae (low styleme, high honorifics); la, ngoko madya (low styleme plus low honorifics); and 1, ngoko biasa (low styleme, no honorifics).</p> <p>It will be noted that sentences 3 and 3a are available to both prijaji and educated townsmen; sentence 2 to both educated and uneducated townsmen and to peasants; and 1 and la to all three groups (although, as mentioned, la tends to be omitted by the more alus among the prijaji)-, lb is characteristically employed only by prijajis.</p> <p>Given this brief and over-condensed formal analysis of the level problem, the sense in which Javanese linguistic behavior is but a part of their wider system of etiquette and, in fact, a simplified and summarizing model of it is more easily set forth. First, as already noted, the levels themselves reflect the kasar to alus continuum. Ngoko, level 1, is the basic language. People think in this, fall into it whenever the urge to express themselves overcomes the desire to maintain propriety, and generally regard it, like the peasant himself, as the rough, down-to-earth, and necessary foundation on top of which all the prijaji fancy work is erected. It is for this reason that all Javanese terms in this report have been given in their ngoko forms.</p> <p>As one moves up the level ladder from ngoko toward krama (level 3 ) and krama inggil (level 3a), the manner of speaking shifts too: the higher the level one is using, the more slowly and softly one speaks—and the more evenly, in terms both of rhythm and pitch. As, on the whole, the “higher” conjugates tend to be longer than the lower ones (kowê/sampéjanjpand-jenengan—and, for the very elevated, pandjenengan dalem—for “you”; kéné/-ingriki for “here”), the high language levels, when spoken correctly, have a kind of stately pomp which can make the simplest conversation seem like a great ceremony. Like the forms of etiquette generally, the patterns of linguistic</p> <p>* As low honorifics are but high styleme “markers” occurring in low styleme contexts, a combination of high styleme and low honorifics is, of course, impossible, for the honorifics could not be distinguished from the styleme markers.</p> <p>etiquette modulate, regularize, and smooth the processes of social interaction into an alus, unvarying flow of quiet, emotionally tranquilizing propriety.</p> <p>It has already be^n pointed out how etiquette patterns, including language, tend to be regarded by the Javanese as a kind of emotional capital which may be invested in putting others at ease. Politeness is something one directs toward others; one surrounds the other with a wall of behavioral (lair) formality which protects the stability of his inner life (batin). Etiquette is a wall built around one’s inner feelings, but it is, paradoxically, always a wall someone else builds, at least in part. He may choose to build such a wall for one of two reasons. He and the other person are at least approximate status equals and not intimate friends; and so he responds to the other’s politeness to him with an equal politeness. Or the other is clearly his superior, in which case he will, in deference to the other’s greater spiritual refinement, build him a wall without any demand or expectation that you reciprocate. This is, of course, but a restatement of the andap-asor pattern discussed more generally above. But in terms of language it is possible to state the exact nature of this pattern, the core of Javanese etiquette, in a rather more precise, abstract and formal manner.</p> <p>If we take the six levels (or three levels and three half levels) of speech present in one dialect or another in Modjokuto, we can diagram them in terms of the “wall” metaphor as follows:</p><div><img src="main-4.jpg" alt=""/> <p><sub>2</sub>    3    3a</p></div> <p>The solid center is intended to represent the batin, the inner life. The solid lines represent the stylemes—the low styleme taken as one “layer,” the middle as two, the high as three. Low honorifics are represented by a dotted line, high by a dashed. The circles—solid, dotted, or dashed—around the solid center are thus intended to diagram the lair, the behavioral world of etiquette. The higher the level of language spoken to an individual, then, the thicker the wall of etiquette protecting his emotional life.</p> <p>In such terms one can diagram nearly any relationship between two individuals of whatever rank or familiarity.<a id="footnote4"></a><sup><a href="#bookmark3">4</a></sup> Thus, two close friends of</p> <p>equal rank (that two close friends will be of roughly equal rank is nearly a tautology for most Modjokuto Javanese) will both speak ngolco to one another:</p><div><div><img src="main-5.jpg" alt=""/></div></div> <p>E    *</p> <p>A high official, say the District Officer, and an ordinary educated urbanite will follow a sharply asymmetrical pattern:</p><div><div><img src="main-6.jpg" alt=""/></div></div> <p>—i.e., the District Officer will speak ngoko biasa, the ordinary man, krama inggil</p> <p>Two ordinary townsmen who are not intimate friends tend to speak krama madya reciprocally:</p><div><div><img src="main-7.jpg" alt=""/></div></div><div><div><img src="main-8.jpg" alt=""/></div></div> <p>2 2</p> <p>Two prijajis who are not intimate friends tend to speak krama biasa (if particularly elevated, krama inggil) reciprocally:</p><div><div><img src="main-9.jpg" alt=""/></div></div> <p>3    3</p> <p>A peasant speaking to a higher status person will use krama madya, for the most part, for he doesn’t use krama biasa or krama inggil:</p> <p>2</p><div><div><img src="main-10.jpg" alt=""/></div></div><div><div><img src="main-11.jpg" alt=""/></div></div> <p>o</p> <p>One might get a similar pattern if a “lower class” townsman were conversing with a “middle class” townsman, say a carpenter with a well-off storekeeper.</p> <p>A peasant speaking to a fellow peasant with whom he is not intimate might use kratna madya, but more commonly he will use ngoko madya, reciprocally:</p><div><div><img src="main-12.jpg" alt=""/></div></div><div><div><img src="main-13.jpg" alt=""/></div></div> <p>la    !o</p> <p>Middle or lower ranking townsmen who are casual acquaintances might also use reciprocal ngoko madya or krama madya, depending mostly on the occasion, the content of what was being communicated, and so on.</p> <p>Ngoko sae, the prijaji speciality, is used between prijaji who know one another fairly well and are of equal status but regard each other to be so elevated as to make the reciprocal use of ngoko biasa, or ngoko madya, which might sometimes be used in this context, unseemly:</p><div><div><img src="main-14.jpg" alt=""/> <p>lb    lb</p></div></div> <p>The inclusion of this level in the dialect shows the prijaji reluctance to use very low language to anyone of much status. Ngoko sae is used to close friends and relatives whom one knows well enough to use familiar speech but to whom one wishes nevertheless to show proper respect. Thus sentences on this level resolve the conflict between familiarity and respect implicit in the Javanese etiquette pattern with a greater delicacy and subtlety than is possible in either the “urbanite” or “peasant” dialects.</p> <p>A thorough semantic study of the contexts within which the different levels are employed would in itself be a complex and extended investigation, for</p> <p>the number of variables specifically determining the selection of a particular level are very numerous. They include not only qualitative characteristics of the speakers—age, sex, kinship relation,<a id="footnote5"></a><sup><a href="#bookmark4">5</a></sup> occupation, wealth, education, religious commitment, family background—but also more general factors: for instance, the social setting (one would be likely to use a higher level to the same individual at a wedding than in the street); the content of the conversation (in general, one uses lower levels when speaking of commercial matters, higher ones if speaking of religious or aesthetic matters); the history of social interaction between the speakers (one will tend to speak rather high, if one speaks at all, with someone with whom one has quarreled); the presence of a third person (one tends to speak higher to the same individual if others are listening). All these play a role, to say nothing of individual idiosyncratic attitudes. Some people, particularly, it seems, wealthier traders and self-confident village chiefs, who tend to think the whole business rather uncomfortable and somewhat silly, speak ngoko to almost everyone except the very high in status. Others will shift levels on any pretext. A complete listing of the determinants of level selection would, therefore, involve a thorough analysis of the whole framework of Javanese culture.</p> <p>In terms of the more general relationship between the Javanese language and Javanese culture, it is of interest to note how the three charts when taken together present a picture of how the three groups—“urbanites,” “peasants,” and prijajis—perceive the Modjokuto-wide status system, the varying form of their etiquette systems, and how they are related to each other—how, in essence, the ideal model set by the prijajis refracts through the rest of the social structure. The prijaji chart (Chart III), with its excluded middle, shows the prijaji tendency to put people into two categories: those to whom one speaks respectfully, equals and superiors (i.e., other prijajis) ; and those to whom one speaks familiarly, inferiors (i.e., non-prijajis) and very close friends and relatives. As noted, level lb, ngoko sae, forms a nice compromise between respect and familiarity, and among the more refined prijajis in the larger towns, the omission of ngoko madya (la) in their dialect would even further strengthen the dichotomous nature of their model of the status system.</p> <p>The peasant chart (Chart II) shows both the peasants’ lessened sense of internal differentiation of status within their own group and their view of the whole structure from the bottom, the upper reaches of the system being mostly beyond their ken. The chart, in fact, provides a concrete case in point of the relationship between gentry and peasant culture patterns outlined earlier. Gentry patterns are reflected dimly and in a somewhat distorted fashion in the peasant context, but they are reflected there. Prijaji speakers of (what they regard as) “correct” Javanese are continually making fun—to one another, or to the ethnographer—of “ignorant” villagers who use tjinten as the high form of tjina (Chinese), when “really” there is no higher form. Similarly for the village use of konten for kori (door) and, worst of all, their creation of high forms for place names which never should alter: Kedinten for Kediri;</p> <p>Surobringo for Surabaja* For the abangan peasant at any rate, prijaji speech, like prijaji etiquette, religion, art, and style of life, is the ideal form, even though they may regard it as too difficult and restrictive for their own use. For the santri the religion and art drop out as patterns worthy of emulation, but the speech, etiquette, and style of life remain as models.</p> <p>Chart I shows the results of the jostling together of people from all walks of life in the urban context. Since the average middle rank urbanite mixes with everyone from prijaji to peasant, he employs whatever language level seems reasonable in the situation. To speak respectfully to a peasant, he will use krama madya (level 2) ; to a high prijaji, krama inggil (3a) ; and to people of his own rank or slightly higher he will use krama biasa (3). But he will have little use for the kind of subtleties represented by level 1 b, ngoko sae. Thus, in place of the dichotomous (gentry versus the field) view of the status structure of the prijaji and the relatively speaking more equalitarian view of the peasant, the urbanite sees a more even gradation of status over quite a wide range.</p> <p>Lastly, a word should be said about the increasing popularity of Indonesian, the national language based on Malay, among certain groups, particularly the urban youth and the political elite of the town. Indonesian appeals to those whose sense of political nationality as Indonesians rather than as Javanese is most developed, to those who are interested in the cultural products of the new Indonesia’s mass media (newspapers, magazines, movies, radio), and those who wish to take leadership positions in government and business. But the use of Indonesian, now taught in all the schools, is spreading very rapidly beyond these somewhat special groups to nearly all townspeople and to a greater and greater number of peasants. As most available reading matter is now in Indonesian rather than Javanese, literacy more or less implies Indonesian, although a reading knowledge does not, of course, imply its use in everyday life. In any case, although the use of Indonesian for everyday conversation is still mostly confined to the more sophisticated urbanites, and its use suggests something of an air of “public speaking” for most Javanese, it is rapidly becoming more and more an integral part of their daily cultural life and will become even more so as the present generation of school children grows to adulthood. That it will, in the foreseeable future, entirely displace Javanese is, of course, entirely unlikely. Rather, it seems destined, at least in the short run, to become part of the general Javanese linguistic system, to become one more type of sentence among those available, to be selected for use in certain special contexts and for certain special purposes.</p> <p>Before the meeting began, when they (the members of a mystical religious</p> <p>sect) were discussing language, Sudjoko said that one simply couldn’t</p> <p>* These “mistakes” are based on false analogies to types of formal alteration which are common in moving from high to low Javanese. Though there are no specific rules for such changes, a few sorts of changes occur repeatedly (lower terms given first): (1) a shift of final vowel from a to i: djawa/djawi, “Javanese”; (2) a shift form i to os: ganti/garitos, “change”; (3) a kind of “pig-latin” form in the higher term involving, among other processes, various forms of medial or final nasalization: kena/kenging, “hit,” “may”; karep/kadjeng, “wish,” “want”; kari/kantun, “left behind”; (4) a complete change of form: omah/grija, “house.”</p> <p>use Indonesian to discuss mystical philosophy. When I asked him why, he said: “Well, all the terms are in Javanese in the first place; and in the second place Javanese fits the kind of thought better. It would be very hard to express such thoughts in Indonesian; it just wouldn’t feel right.” Contrariwise, he said that, giving a political speech in Javanese is one of the hardest things in the world to do; it just doesn’t seem to have the expressions. Someone then noted that even when one goes to a political meeting in the village and they use Javanese, many of the words are Indonesian words which, although the people in the audience perhaps cannot use them or at least cannot make them into whole Indonesian sentences, they nevertheless understand quite well.</p> <p><a id="bookmark0"><sup><a href="#footnote1">1</a></sup></a></p> <p> Although in terms of the total Javanese vocabulary the number of words which show formal changes in terms of status connotations are relatively small in percentage, since they tend to be the most frequently occurring in actual speech, in word counts of common utterances the percentage of status-expression forms is quite high. In general it may be said that there is no set rule by which one can determine which words change in different status situations and which do not except a vague one that the commoner the word and the more it denotes something fairly closely associated with human beings, the more likely it is that it will have such forms.</p> <p><a id="bookmark1"><sup><a href="#footnote2">2</a></sup></a></p> <p> In utterances of more than minimal length the chance that at least one krama/madya/ngoko style marker will occur is nearly unity. I owe the suggestion to treat the “style” problem and the “high word” problem separately to Mr. Rufus Hendon, who has also suggested that the three linked conjugate sets be dissolved into a new unit, called a “styleme,” which then occurs once in (nearly) every sentence, and that the high words, which occur sporadically, be called “honorifics.” The formal parts of the above discussion are heavily dependent upon his analysis.</p> <p><a id="bookmark2"><sup><a href="#footnote3">3</a></sup></a></p> <p> As the two types of honorific are in complementary distribution, high ones occurring only with high Stylemes, low ones with low, the difference between them is redundant and could be eliminated in a more elegant analysis.</p> <p><a id="bookmark3"><sup><a href="#footnote4">4</a></sup></a></p> <p> One complication is that it is not entirely true that the status and/or familiarity relationship between speaker and hearer is the only determinant of status forms, because sometimes the status of a third person referred to, especially if he be quite high, may determine the form used: thus, in speaking to a lower-status person one will still use the high, krama, form of “house” when speaking of the one the District Officer lives in.</p> <p><a id="bookmark4"><sup><a href="#footnote5">5</a></sup></a></p> <p> For a discussion of the selection of language levels within the kinship and family context, see H. Geertz’s volume in this series, The Javanese Family.</p> </body> </html>