On the basis of a presentation of the content of the three religious variants in Modjokuto alone, one might easily come to the conclusion that abangan, santri, and prijaji are encapsulated “pure types,” and that Modjokuto community life consists of three sub-communities whose main relationships with one another are geographical and perhaps economic—a “plural society” within a plural society, so to speak. Such a notion would be totally incorrect; for the three groups are all enclosed in the same social structure, share many common values, and are, in any case, not nearly so definable as social entities as a simple descriptive discussion of their religious practices would indicate. Therefore, I wish to close this report on Modjokuto religion with a brief discussion of the interrelationships among the three world views I have set forth within the Modjokuto social system. Because, contrary to some theorists, religion does not play only an integrative, socially harmonizing role in society but also a divisive one, thus reflecting the balance between integrative and disintegrative forces which exist in any social system, I shall discuss both the conflicts between the three religious types and the manner in which these conflicts are minimized and, in fact, turned to positive social uses.
To sum up in advance the points I wish to make, three propositions may be set forth as broadly describing the situation as one finds it in Modjokuto:
1. There is a great deal of antagonism between the adherents of the various religious orientations; and this antagonism is probably increasing.
2. Despite their differences and antagonisms, all, or nearly all, Javanese share many common values which tend to counteract the divisive effects of variant interpretations of these values. In addition, there are also various social mechanism which tend to prevent value conflict from having disruptive
. effects.
3. In such terms one may point out several factors tending to exacerbate conflict among the three groups and several tending to moderate it. Among those exacerbating it might be included:
(a) Intrinsic ideological conflicts resting on deep-felt dislike for the values of other groups.
(b) The changing system of social stratification and increased status mobility which tends to enforce contact between individuals and groups formerly more or less socially segregated.
(c) The sharply increased struggle for political power to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the Colonial Government, which tends to embue religious differences with political significance.
(d) The need for scapegoats upon whom to focus tensions generated by a rapidly changing social system.
Those moderating the conflict include:
(a) The sense of a common culture, including the increasing importance of nationalism, which emphasizes what all Javanese (or Indonesians) have in common rather than their differences.
(b) The fact that religious patterns do not become embodied in social forms directly, purely and simply, but in many devious ways, so that religious commitments and other commitments—to class, neighborhood, etc.—tend to balance off, and various “mixed type” individuals and groups arise which can play an important meditating role.
(c) A general tolerance based on a “contextual relativism” which sees certain values as appropriate to context and so minimizes “missioniza-tion.”
(d) The steady growth of social mechanisms for a pluralistic, non-syncretic form of social integration within which people of radically differing social outlook and basic values can, nevertheless, get along well enough with one another to keep society functioning.
antagonism among the several religious groups is easily enough documented. The strain is clearly greatest between santris and the other two groups, but significant tension between prijaji and abangan also exists. This general antagonism has almost certainly increased markedly in this century, has sharply intensified since the Revolution, and is probably still increasing. But it is by no means an entirely new phenomenon. Since the days of the struggle between the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram and the north coast harbor kingdoms (Demalc, Gresik, Surabaja), at least, i.e., since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,* prijaji and santri have not seen eye to eye; and the resentment of the peasantry against the more or less exploitative ruling aristocracy and the shrewd urban-centered santri trading class is obviously of long standing. Nevertheless, at the moment, the conflict between the various groups is probably more intense than in the past and almost universally felt to be so by the Javanese themselves.
IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICTS
the tension between abangan and prijaji is more subtly expressed than between these two groups and the santris, where the strain finds a more explicit outlet:
Talking of santris, Juminah (an abangan woman) told me of a taunting jingle the children shout at santri women. They just recite the first line, which has meaningless rhyming sounds, and keep the second, which carries the content, in their mind—thus not really saying out loud what they are thinking, although, as everyone knows the jingle, the intent is clear:
Mendung-mendung tjap gomèk Kudung-kudung digawé lèmèk
Clouds, clouds, a Chinese holiday A Moslem lady’s head-shawl used as something to lie on.
The meaning is that, although they wear shawls (only santri women, and almost all of them, wear these shawls; they are in no way veils, however, but are merely draped over the top of the head) and make a great profession of piety, they are promiscuous.
Here the resentment is directed, as it commonly is, against santri holier-than-thou moralism which abangans, particularly, tend to resent. But another aspect of the conflict, insofar as it is focused on ideological patterns, santri universalism and salvationism, also draws the pragmatic, relativistic abangan's fire:
I talked the other evening to Mbok Min and her husband, who is a day-laborer in the rice fields when he finds work. They said that the santris say that if one doesn’t chant the Koran one will end up in hell, but they, the Mins, don’t believe it. As the Mins put it, heaven and hell are in the here and now. “If you don’t have enough to eat, if you steal and do bad things, if you are emotionally upset, then you have hell now.” . . . The village children nearby were yelling traweh (to announce the extra evening prayers during the Fast) and I asked the Mins innocently, what was that and they said, “O, it is just for santris to pray every night in the prayer-house. . . . The santris have ‘Arab religion’ but we don’t hold with that. What is important
* For a review of this period, see B. Schriebe, Indonesian Sociological Studies (The Hague and Bandung, 1955), Part I, esp. pp. 80-82.
is not chanting and all that business but doing right, not stealing and so on. The santris around here are always telling us we will end up in hell if we don’t do just as they do.”
In prijaji attacks, the criticism of scintri hypocrisy and intolerance is often combined with theoretical differences on patterns of belief:
He (an independent mystic guru) said that his “science” was not religion like Christianity or Islam but real “science” and so not easily to be dispensed to all comers like religion. . . . He commented on the santris, whom he dislikes rather intensely, saying that people spend money to go on the pilgrimage which is just throwing money away. He said: “They go to pray at the holy place and then come back here and are very honored. But the fact is that they haven’t done anything to be honored for, because the real holy place is within the bat in, the inner life. I make my pilgrimage to that. There is no need going off to Mecca when you can make a pilgrimage to God in your own inner life. Take the Mosque in Modjokuto. It can be ruined, can’t it? Or fall down? Well, my mosque (pointing to his chest) cannot be ruined. It is in my heart and it is not like a building. Nothing can happen to it. And it is in there that I pray and that I come in touch with God.” He said that during the Japanese period, when the big riots occurred in Modjokuto, in which the Javanese populace stripped the Chinese stores of all their goods, all his pious santri neighbors joined in the looting, but he didn’t. He told them not to, but they went ahead anyway and considered him a fool for abstaining. But now he still has a good job, whereas many of them have lost all they stole and are poor again. “That’s the way santris are,” he concluded. “Hypocrites—all of them.”
From the santri side the attack is no less astringent. They accuse the abangans of being idol-worshipers and the prijajis of failing to keep themselves separate from God (a mortal sin of pride) and they have a marked tendency to consider everyone outside the fold a communist:
While talking with Abdul (a kijaji) he said that there were a lot of “wild” religions around now, naming some of the sects in town. He said that they were all communist dominated and were a mixture of communism and “Javanese science.” He said that he thought that the communist plan was to set up lots of little religions so as to generally confuse the religious situation, and then later they would say: “See, religion just disorganizes things; away with all religions!” ... He said that he had told one man that the “native” beliefs of his sect really came from India, not from Java, and the man said he was talking like a colonialist. He told me that some time ago five communist youths came down from Surabaja and one of them said that when he became dictator all the kijajis would be done away with. Abdul said that there was a sect in Modjokuto called Islam Sedjati (Ilmu Sedjati)—“true Islam”—but it really was “false Islam.”
On the ideological level, the differences between abangan and prijaji are rather muted, both because of the general relativism of the two groups and because the abangans are not much interested in dogma in any case. Many prijaji, especially the better-educated ones, regard many abangan beliefs and practices as “mere superstition”; and they generally regard the abangans as over-credulous. But the prijajis seldom express open disapproval of abangan beliefs and practices to the peasants directly. For the most part they deal with villagers as they always have—by minimizing direct contact with them as much as possible.
One exception to the non-interference policy is the prijaji attitude toward abangan beliefs centering around childbirth and to a lesser extent, around the role of women. Emancipated women of the prijaji group, organized into women’s clubs, propagandize against birth practices and theories they consider unhygienic and in favor of modern Western methods as practiced by the trained midwives attached to the hospitals. Similarly, they express disapproval of certain elements in the marriage ritual which symbolize the subservience of the woman—such as the washing of the groom’s feet by the bride, certain “degrading” art forms—such as the tajubart, and, of course, polygamy— although this brings them into sharp conflict with the santris rather than with the abangans. Their efforts are, in any case, half-hearted, and, although ostensibly directed toward the peasants and town proletariat for whose welfare they feel responsible, are actually mostly aimed at advancing the status of women within the prijaji group itself.
In the other direction, the abangans are likely to regard most prijaji mystic theories as beyond their comprehension. They view prijaji religion with much of the grudging respect with which they view prijajis and the prijaji style-of-life generally—as undoubtedly admirable, but not necessarily attractive.
CLASS CONFLICTS
the prijaji-abangan tension shows most clearly in relation to problems of status. Prijaji often accuse “village people” of not knowing their proper place and so disturbing the organic balance of society, of having big ideas, and of unsuccessfully aping the prijaji style-of-life.
I asked the prijaji wife of the Modjokuto government animal-husbandry agent who lived in the houses around her, and she said, “Peasants.” I said: “When you visit around, where do you go?” She pointed in the direction of the center of town and said: “Peasants aren’t very good for mixing with. . . . They say anything they want to—just follow their impulses of the moment. They talk about people; they don’t keep secrets. Prijajis won’t tell about anyone, won’t disclose secrets. . . . Village people nowadays dress like prijajis. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference. They even do their hair in the prijaji way.
. . . This first happened just about the time the Japanese came (1942-1945). The Japanese used a lot of village girls for nurses, and this introduced them to wearing dresses, nice sarongs, etc. They buy one nice set of clothes and don’t care if they have to wear rags when they’re around the house and don’t care if people see them always in the same set of clothes. Prijajis prefer to buy many sets of clothes, which may not be of top quality, so then they can change often; they feel ashamed if they are always seen in the same clothes ... or village people will buy a bicycle. Nowadays many have them that didn’t before, and they ride their bicycle in any old clothes.” Talking about the comparative situation of prijajis now and in the Colonial period, I asked which was a better time for them; and she said that from the point of view of those who are not “convinced” (i.e., convinced nationalists) it was better before and many people complain nowadays. But those who are “convinced” say that these times are like war times, and one cannot expect much. She said that in the Dutch time the prijajis who were at the level of Police Chief and above wore trousers and spoke Dutch to their superiors. Her husband, as animal husbandry agent, was in this group. Those who were below the Police Chief wore sarongs and spoke Javanese, and called the District Chief etc.,
“ndoro” (roughly: “master”).
That the blurring of social demarcations began only in the Japanese period is, of course, not true; but that the blurring has been progressive and is continuing is obvious no matter at which aspect of the Modjokuto social system one looks. Although the claims of the more Jacobinic among the nationalists that sharp stratification contrasts have disappeared in Java, that the prijaji values system is dead or dying, and that power in Indonesia has been put into the hands of the masses—in other words, that the Revolution completely cut off Indonesia from her past—are very much over-stated, it cannot be denied that the Revolution seems if not to have begun at least to have stimulated wide-spread changes in the hierarchical patterns of prestige in terms of which Javanese society has been for so long integrated. The tracing of such changes, of their bases and their implications, cannot be carried out here; what is important to note is that such changes bring the prijaji and abangan (as well as the santri, who, so far as status is concerned, tends to side with the abangans against the prijaji claim to traditional privilege) world-views into more direct opposition than they have been in the past.
The traditional system of social stratification allowed mobility for individuals, as does every such system, but the system itself was stable and more or less unchanging; it was, in Schumpeter’s image, like a hotel, always full but of different people. Today the system itself is changing, not just the people within it; and this changes the whole basis and perception of social mobility. It is no longer a situation in which a few favored individuals (or families) rise by a combination of luck and cunning out of the peasantry into the gentry but one in which mobility is a normal, expectable occurrence. Now, although the barrier between the governed and the governing (which was the major basis of the old system) remains real enough, it is considered crossable not merely by the extraordinarily fortunate or talented but also by anyone of normal ability and persistence. As a result, the bettering of his station is a legitimate and reasonable aim for a man to have, a meaningful goal toward which his life can be directed. Further, since whole classes are moving now, even if the individual, so to speak, stands still, his class relationships do not remain constant. It is as though the floors in Schumpeter’s hotel have begun to move and rearrange themselves. In such a situation, a sharp conflict between class-linked value systems is inevitable as the old pattern attempts to maintain itself in the face of the changing bases of social evaluation.
I asked a young modernist santri about class. He said that the main difference is between the prijajis and the non-prijajis. Then he drew a triangle, saying, with no prompting from me, “This is the whole society—with occupational ranks:
government officials
high clerks and administrators,and high teachers(i.e^high-school,teachers school, etc.)
petty clerks and lower teachers
traders, store-owners, land-owning peasants
small craftsman,petty traders, plantation workers
landless agricultural workers,handymen, unemployed, beggars, etc.
He said, in response to my question, that many of the Moslems came from the upper trading class and that most of this “class” was Moslem. ... He said that teachers used to be somewhat higher before than they are now; in the Dutch times a teacher in an elementary school was a really big person; but now less so because there are so many. He emphasized that this was not a class ladder, and said that a number of other factors besides occupation determined class standing. Wealth was one, he said, and was becoming much more important now than it used to be, so that a well-off craftsman could be at the same level as a trader. Who one travels with is another factor, i.e., people who are socially conscious, who join organizations (political parties, labor unions, fraternal organizations, etc.) and mix with people are considered higher. He said Ali (the head of Masjumi) was a good example of this. Ali was not rich, he had only a fair education, and he was only a small teacher in the years before the war; but he mixed with the higher-up people, was socially conscious, joined Masjumi and Muhammadijah etc., and got along with bigger people so that now his class standing was much higher than one would expect. Education was another important factor in ranking; so was age. ... As for family, this was much less important than before, for people looked more to the individual than to his origins now. However, it still - counted, particularly on the prijaji vs. non-prijaji business. For example, when Sarta started his store in his place he was still considered higher than H. Arifin (a faintly wealthy santri store-owner) because he was from a prijaji family, and by and large he is still considered a prijaji, having lost no status by going into trade (he did in the eyes of some prijaji informants, however). ... He repeated that he thought that the thickest line was still between prijajis and non-prijajis.
The sense that the old barriers are down, that feats of mobility are possible and extremely desirable, appears in many of the Thematic Apperception Test protocols : for example, in this one from a twenty-year-old urban abangan given a card showing a man ploughing and a younger woman standing nearby, the picture being redrawn with Javanese scene and figures:
There was a man named Pale Karta. He had one child named Suprapti. Besides this he also had a servant named Mbole Sosro. Pak Karta was a peasant whose home was near the mountains, and his work every day was farming. He wanted very much to send Suprapti to school so that she would become an intelligent person and of a high rank. He worked eagerly, day and night, sweated, so that his daughter, Suprapti, could go to school.
After she graduated from elementary school, Suprapti went to high school and there Suprapti was never lax in her studies. Because their village was one of the more advanced ones, many of her friends were also industrious. Suprapti was rather popular in school in comparison with her friends, because at home she didn’t have to work, because she was taken care of by the servant. Then she wanted to continue (her studies) and she thought she wouldn’t get married until after she carried out her wishes. After the final examination of the Junior High School she went on to Teachers School for six years. There she studied many different things concerning teaching. Suprapti was there long, and her many young friends tempted her (evidently to get married and abandon studying), but nevertheless she remained steadfast in her aim to study knowledge of a high level. After she had studied three years in the Teachers School, her parents frequently sent her letters saying that the situation at home was not good, the household economy was poor, and that Suprapti should remember that one day she would have land of her own and a household of her own. Suprapti, when she heard this, was rather let down, disappointed. But it was her fate. After graduating from Teachers School, Suprapti was given a position as a teacher in a certain city, and there she set up a household for herself and helped the income of her parents in the village. After awhile Suprapti’s teaching became well-known, because she was very clever in language and mathematics, etc. But every year she had to go home, carrying things from the city which were needed by her parents. After about seven years Suprapti was married to a teacher who also taught in school, and her parents were in agreement, and they lived after that in harmony.
Thus the caste or semi-caste mechanisms which in the past isolated the abangan and prijaji value systems from one another no longer operate with the traditional effectiveness, and a forced contact between the two world-views occurs in which each is obligated to take the other into consideration in a far wider range of occasions than once was necessary. It is no longer a case of the prijaji being, from the abangan point of view, way off in the dim distance (spatially as well as socially, for there has never been a really strong rural gentry in Java), as awesome figures of power, wealth, and magical strength perched at the thin-air altitudes of the social structure. Nor of the abangans being, from the prijaji point of view, a great undifferentiated mass of animalistic peasants least painfully dealt with through a few of their more polished representatives as intermediaries. Now, instead, the abangan and prijaji world-outlooks are competing to define the same social situation. There are a great many abangans in town (and even village abangans are more directly involved in urban life than they have ever been in the past), and prijajis who have any grasp on present day realities know that their maintenance of traditional prerogative rests on an acceptance of their values by a wider group than that consisting entirely of noble or near-noble bureaucrats.
POLITICAL CONFLICTS
in addition to intrinsic ideological conflicts and increased status mobility, the intensified struggle for political power is a third divisive element which exacerbates religious conflict. In a colonial regime, particularly one so con-servadve in policy toward changes in native social structure as the Dutch, the subject people tend to be progressively cut off from the crucial political and economic roles in the system. Indirect rule, whether motivated by ethical or administrative considerations, is postulated on the supposition that traditional native institutions serve native interest better than any other institutions, particularly Western ones, are likely to do. This, in a sense, may well be true, and proponents of such a doctrine can point to the anomic results of more direct impact of Western forms on non-Western peoples in other parts of the world, say the Indian in the United States. Nevertheless, despite the theory, what actually occurs is not the mere stabilization of native society in its pristine forms, but, rather, as the social system “naturally” grows more complex, the European ruling group takes over each new role of functional importance as it appears, either filling it themselves or permitting certain others, typically non-European immigrants, half-castes, and a few specially chosen native aristocrats, to fill it, thus “sheltering” the native society from the effects of change. In time, not only do the loci of all types of power shift more and more away from native hands as the “Western” sector of the “dual” (or “plural”) society grows in complexity and importance, but also the ruling group has to spend more and more time merely in keeping the native society intact. Traditional forms of life no longer exist naturally, as adaptive responses to their environment, but must be consistently and consciously shored up by special efforts on the part of the ruling group in the name of “native welfare.” Keeping the nattes native becomes a full-time job.
When, at length, a political revolution occurs, as in Indonesia, the power vacuum suddenly revealed as almost all posts of crucial political importance are suddenly left vacant is tremendous and draws almost the whole of social life into it. (For various reasons, this occurs to a much lesser degree in the economic sectors; a fact which only magnifies the importance of the political in the eyes of the native population.) With the well- or cynically-intended deceptions of Colonial rule removed, the real distribution of power becomes apparent to all; and, with the new understanding of what the score really is—an understanding confined in the pre-revolutionary period to a few nationalist intellectuals—the scramble for power becomes intense. Such heightened political struggle naturally results in a sharpened internal conflict between various religious groups. Religious positions become political ones—almost without alteration.
Mhd Rais spoke next (Rais is one of the dozen or so most important Masjumi national leaders; he was speaking at a mass meeting at the Regency capital to which all the local Masjumi leaders went). He said that he had read some nasty comments about him in the PNI (the pn/a/ï-dominated Nationalist party) press in Surabaja, but that he wasn’t angry; he only laughed, because one couldn’t expect politeness from the PNI. He started off on the PERMAI problem (a PERMAI leader had been reported in the press as saying that Islam was a foreign religion and Muhammad a false prophet, an event which was something of a cause celebre for awhile), and rose to high pitch with, a rhetorical challenge to the cabinet: “Muslims are patient, but they won’t be patient forever. You had better realize that they will take only so much and then they will fight. You must consider that your actions may bring about the flow of blood, that if you allow these insults to Islam to continue we may end up in a civil war.” . . . Then he attacked the proposals for separation of Church and state, ridiculed the religio-ideological theories of PNI as empty of meaning, and said that the non-Islamic groups were urging marriage without going to the Naib, which would lead to a nation of bastards and Indonesia would become known as the bastard country. . . . The other speaker started off by attacking the Communists in general terms, reading off the organizations he held were Communist dominated, and rising to heights of sheer spleen. He spoke entirely at a shout, pounded the rostrum, interrupted his speech to get the audience to shout ALLAH HU AKBAR (God is most great) back at him, attacked the “half-ripe intellectuals” who were for separation of Church and State, and in fact attacked intellectualisai in general, saying that the only thing one had to do was fear God and follow the Moslem law. He attacked all non-Islamic parties as infidel and said that Muslims who joined them were breaking the rules of religion. He said that the idea of a secular state was infidel; that Indonesia should not try to learn from Russia and America, but just base its country on Islamic teachings. . . .
A few comments must be made concerning this quotation. In the first place, comparable remarks could be quoted for each political group which would show little difference of intensity or rationality. Secondly, speeches of this sort are not to be taken over-literally as heralding immediate recourse to arms and violence, for they are well within the limits of permissible political hyperbole in present-day Indonesia. Thirdly, in each party there are, in contrast to foot-stompers such as the one quoted, calmer, more rational, and more thoughtful leaders to whom such men are as inherently unattractive as our Western political demagogues are to our more responsible leaders. Nevertheless, despite the qualifications, such demagogy is hardly without effect, and the quotation does indicate both the rather intense level to which political conflict has come in present-day Indonesia and the manner in which it tends, in part, to focus around ostensibly religious issues.
PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS
heightened status struggle, intensified political conflict, and, although in a more indirect form, increased economic stresses have all tended to emphasize religious divisions in post-Revolutionary Indonesia. The connection between such rapidly changing social structures and the accompanying heightened feelings of anxiety and aggression and the consequent fantasy search for scapegoats to provide a rationale for the anxiety and an outlet for the aggression is well-attested in the literature of the social sciences.
The Dutch, and to a lesser extent Westerners generally, form natural objects of such aggression, around whom fantasies (not all of them necessarily unrealistic) of imperialistic exploitation can be built, but, particularly in a town the size of Modjokuto, they are at such a distance as to be largely abstract and not completely satisfying. Since the Chinese are near at hand, they make somewhat better scapegoats; but even they can’t be blamed for everything, thus, the need for local, everyday scapegoats from the Javanese community itself tends to get satisfied along religio-political lines. Fantasies (again, aside from any judgment as to their realistic elements) of santri persecution of non-rflntr/i if they come to power, of the suppression of Islam and the murder of kijajis if the “Communists”—a term often applied with about the same degree of accuracy as it has been recently by some of the more politically primitive elements in the United States—come to power, and other similar ones tend to account for anxiety. They also legitimize rather more open expression of hostility than the Javanese value system and patterns of etiquette traditionally allow. Such anxiety and aggression arise not only out of realistic social fears, of which there are enough, but also out of the psychologically wearing process of rapid social change.
if the divisive forces were the whole story, Javanese society would have fallen into a war of all against all a good while ago. It is necessary now to turn to the integrative elements in Javanese society which tend to maintain it against the divisive elements. Among the most important of these is the sense of a common culture. This takes two main forms: a denigration of the present in terms of the past, especially criticism of contemporary practices by traditional standards of judgment, a practice mainly, but not entirely, resorted to by older people; and the growing strength of nationalism which attempts to appeal to sentiments of national self-respect, solidarity, and hope for a more “modem” style-of-life in order to curb social disorganization, which is characteristic mainly, but again not entirely, of younger people.
A night-long political discussion in a heavily santri village some fifteen or twenty miles from Modjokuto displayed both of these themes.
About ten or so, the kijaji showed up and started giving speeches of one sort or another, and a quite interesting discussion began. . . . They started by lamenting the decline of traditional religious life, saying that only a few of the larger pondoks were still running in the old style and putting this decline down to laziness. The kijaji asked me about the general election in the United States and he said that there would be a hot time in the election here later (the election was then scheduled for early 1955). He talked about the Masjumi-NU split and said that it was too bad and then said something to the effect that he thought a 100 per cent Islamic state here was not possible because there were too many other groups; and so the Muslims should learn to get along with them. This statement met general agreement, one man saying that not all the Islamic law could be carried out in daily life; what was important was that Islam influence the State. There was some discussion then of Freedom (i.e., the post-Republican period), and the modin said that Djojobojo (a semi-legendary Javanese King) had predicted that when there was a Just King there would be good time for Islam and it would prosper. Then, surprisingly, he said that under the Dutch this was so—that they had just kings and Islam prospered. Someone said, “Well, we have a President now, and we can’t have a king again”; but the modin insisted that the old days were better than now because now party politics were tearing the country up. The kijaji agreed that the real differences between people in Indonesia were not those, say, between Christians and Muslims, but between political parties, and that one can’t go back to the old days. He said that there were two ways that this prediction of Djojobojo could be read. One way was the way the modin had read it: literally, as meaning that there would have to be a real king in the future who was “just” as a leader of the people, and then Islam would prosper. But another way to interpret it was that if all the people, the people as a whole, tried to be “just,” Islam would prosper—in a democracy the people is king, he said. . . . The kijaji said that this was the Islamic view; he didn’t know about the Christian view. One man then asked me, as the local expert on Christianity, I guess, if I could give them any information on this matter. I said that I thought that Christians would agree with the kijaji's comment that if the mass of the people were just, religion would be well-off, hoping that this was a high enough abstraction for the purposes. But the kijaji suddenly changed his tune and said, “Yes, but, often men have to die to achieve justice; blood has to be shed”; and then they launched into the Communists, saying that they were anti-religion, etc. . . .
TRADITIONALISM AND THE INHERITED COMMON CULTURE
traditionalists tend to lament the younger generation and refer to the greater stability and single-mindedness of people in the past. They invoke against the open expressions of discord the values for harmony and cooperation, for polite suppression of feeling, and for proper behavior in terms of status-values which still have some force for even the most “modem” of young men. A treatment of Javanese religion in terms of its major variants, such as I have offered, tends to obscure the common value consensus upon which these variants are based and out of which they grow.
All Javanese—santri, prijciji, and abangan—hold certain general truths to be self-evident, just as behind the division into Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, Americans cling to certain over-arching values which in many ways make, for example, an American Catholic more similar in his world-view to an American Protestant than, say, to a Spanish Catholic. The high concern for status formality; the emphasis on rigid politeness and on dissimulation of emotion and avoidance of intense external stimuli; inwardness; a view of religion as phenomenological “science” and of fasting as “applied science”; the idea that resolution and fixity of will are one of the most important elements in living an effective life; the conviction that people (particularly if they are neighbors) ought to rukiin, that is, cooperate and help one another (almost no one completely avoids giving slameians), and that religious beliefs of others ought to be viewed relativistically, as suitable for them if not for everyone—• all these are beliefs and values which appear throughout Javanese society, even among the san tris, whose departure from them is most marked.
In support of the last proposition I offer my notes on a speech by the head of Muhammadijah—in theory, one of the “purer” Moslems in Modjokuto—to Aisjijah, the women’s auxiliary of Muhammadijah, on the subject of the approaching general elections, a speech in which the influence of the general prijaji-abangan “Javanism” outlook is more apparent than the Middle-Eastern reformist Islam element.
He said that he was supposed to speak about the approaching General Election, but first he wanted to explain the intention of it. So he started out on a lecture on the nature of man. He said first that it was important to note that there was both the body and the soul. A body can’t live without a soul; if it is lacking there is only a corpse. “How do you know there is a soul? You feel it. For instance, if you are pinched, it hurts, and if you try to describe the hurt you can’t—it just hurts. This is the supernatural thing within you, an alus object.” From here he went on to draw a stick figure on the blackboard, and to label the head with “mind” and the body with “heart.” “The ‘heart,’” he said, “is what makes you feel unhappy, makes you want to do things, while the ‘mind’ searches out ways for you to do it. It is the ‘heart’ which feels the pinch of poverty and says, ‘I’ll be a market-seller and get money.’; but it is the mind which shows the way. Otherwise you would just keep wanting to be a market-seller and never do it.” Then he went into a sort of typing of the desires, using an Arabic classification. “First, the desire to make yourself beautiful, to decorate yourself, to please yourself. Second, the desire to be a leader, to say to others: ‘Follow me, I will show you the way.’ Third, a liking for your own kind, your own nationality. Fourth, courage in the face of risk of loss. Fifth, fear.” He didn’t say much about the first two but gave several illustrations for the third, love of one’s own kind. He said, “We all like our own children best, or our own cousins. Then we all like best our own organizations. We get invited to GERWIS (a leftist women’s organization), but we are reluctant to go; we get invited to an Aisjijah meeting, and we want to go because we know we will see our friends there. When we meet an Aisjijah member on the street we feel different about them because we know they too are Aisjijah. . . . We like to be with Javanese because they are alus. All have brownish-yellow skin, not too black, not too white, just right. If you are in a group of Chinese, everyone doesn’t talk much, but in a group of Javanese, everyone is talking happily. If you talk with a Chinese, it is as if you don’t ‘meet the man’; you don’t come in contact with the man. This is because he is from a different nationality. The fourth feeling, courage, means you have to be daring, be willing to take risks. If you go into business, you have to expect to lose as well as to make a profit. The fifth one is really not good, except as
fear of God which lies behind everything, for it is dangerous to people and makes for loss. If I am selling in the market and I am afraid that everyone else is undercutting my prices, I lower mine and I lose. Actually none of these desires are good in themselves or bad in themselves. People may have a stronger concentration of one desire than of the other two. Everyone is different. The desire to please the self may be weak in one person and almost absent in another. Some people emphasize the desire to lead, and this is necessary in order to have leaders. You can have too much of one of these too (and he gave the Germans and the Italians and Hitler and Mussolini as examples of too much love of their own kind). Understanding or knowledge enters the eyes; then it goes to the head, the ‘mind,’ and from these to the ‘heart.’ This shows that understanding is not just reason but emotion.” He went on to talk about ideology and said that Islam meant “slamet” (wellbeing) . Thus Islam means to wish in the heart intensely so as to reach slamet. ... He said: “If we want a slamet life, we must go by the Islamic Ideology, which is based on the Koran and the Hadith. To do this we must study and struggle. . . . We must struggle in three arenas: in the home, in society, and in politics. Politics concerns how we will be able to grasp the State. This must be done not by revolt but by election. Then if the State is in the hands of the Moslems, the fight for the slamet life can be carried on through the State Police, the Civil Service, the National Radio, the National newspapers (there are no State-owned newspapers, however), etc.; and obviously this will be much faster than merely struggling in the home. The changes one person can make in twenty years of effort in the home can be made in one year through politics.”
There are many characteristically santri aspects in this—the emphasis on “business,” the Fear of God and the Islamic State based on Koran and Hadith, the recourse to Arabic analysis rather than Hindu-Javanese ones, the split between “body” and “soul” rather than “inside” and “outside.” But what is striking is how much of santri ideology gets stated here in generally Javanese terms: the emphasis on a phenomenology of feeling, on slamet—well-being— as an end, the relativism based on different feelings for different peoples, the emphasis on concepts like “ah/i” and “heart” (ati), and the like. Islam almost becomes another “Javanese Science.” Only “almost” of course; but the common vocabulary and the reliance on widely shared concepts, beliefs, and values means that even if santris differ with their neighbors they are at least able to talk intelligibly with them and to agree on some of the ground-rules of dispute and on some of the basic truths—such as that everyone in life seeks slamet—upon which differences of opinion may then be elaborated. The integrative importance of such an underlying agreement is crucial. Santris may not like abangans, and abangans may have their doubts about prijajis; but they all prefer each other to Chinese or Europeans.
NATIONALISM AND THE PROJECTION OF A NEW COMMON CULTURE
the more nationalistically inclined among the Javanese (who, of course, may be the same concrete individuals as the traditionalists in another context
or mood) also rely somewhat upon the common traditional values, for the doctrines of nationalism are, in many ways, attempts to restate those values in a somewhat more generalized form; but over and above this, the nationalistic Javanese appeal to the lands of aspirations stimulated by contact with the world outside of Java. At nearly everyone of the almost daily meetings of one or another of the town’s “organizations,” a term (organisas!, from the Dutch) used to refer to the various modern-type political parties, women’s clubs, youth groups, lending cooperatives, social and charitable organizations, labor unions, and so on which have proliferated spectacularly since the Revolution; at each major holiday, in addresses by local political officials; in the government newsreels and over the government radio; in the big-city newspapers, magazines, and the like, which are more and more read in Modjokuto—whenever and wherever the opportunity offers—the din of the nationalist ideology is unremitting.
Rather than give an example from my notes, I translate below a newspaper report of a prospective celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the women’s movement which conveys a more vivid and precise sense of both the tone and content of this ideology as it is repeated day after day in Modjokuto than any summary could.
“One-Quarter Century Celebration”
Surabaja, 16 May. The Committee for the Celebration of One-Quarter of a Century of the Unity of the Women’s Movement in Indonesia was set up on 24 November, 1952, by the Women’s Congress of Indonesia, in order to lay plans for the celebration of this anniversary on 22 December, 1953.
As already announced by this committee, the 22nd of December marks the passage of 25 years since the Women of Indonesia united their will in support of the realization of the National Struggle. On 22 December, 1928, for the first time the various women’s organizations of Indonesia met in one Indonesian-wide Congress at Djokjakarta. This Congress reflected the deep-felt struggle for freedom that had spread throughout the entire Indonesian society. In that year the youth of Indonesia had already set forth the famous revolutionary slogan:
One People: Indonesian One Country: Indonesia One Language: Indonesian
The Women of Indonesia were also fired by this slogan, and for the first time there occurred a unification of the Women’s Movement.
Thus this day, the 22nd of December, has been proclaimed The Day of the Women’s Awakening. Before this historic day the various women’s organizations were interested only in general advancement, but beginning December 22, 1928, the Women of Indonesia, fully conscious of their responsibilities, merged their movement with the national struggle.
Today, 25 years later, our country has attained its freedom. The Women’s struggle does not end with that. And although, perhaps, in content and form it is somewhat different, its aim is unchanged; it is the Glory of our Country and People. The form and the content of the movement will continue to progress as Indonesian society progresses. . . . (Suara Rakjat [Surabaja], May 18, 1953.)
This sort of intensely felt but curiously abstract kind of ideological expression, with its emphasis on the unity of all groups, on struggle, and on social morality, is in part a symbolic masking of real value conflicts within the society, a kind of cultural protesting too much, by means of which conflicts which threaten to upset the social equilibrium can to a degree be kept out of conscious awareness or at least from open expression. But, in part, it is also an attempt to work out a set of values which, while related to traditional values and developed out of them, are less concrete and specific and so more able to deal with the wide range of situations in which a modem society inevitably finds itself. Thus a traditional value such as rukun is freed from its explicit and concrete context in the slametan, in carefully specified village “public” labor on the roads and irrigation ditches, in traditionally frozen labor-exchange patterns in agricultural work, and becomes generalized to celebrate cooperation in any context. In this form it serves two functions: it hides (to a degree) the real differences of opinion which exist, and it serves as a basis for the development of genuinely effective patterns of cooperation more widely applicable.
Supported by a new, if still weak, sense of national identity, a new, but still uneasy, sense of self-confidence, nationalism is thus becoming an important integrating factor in the society, most especially for the elite, for the educated youth, and the urban masses. It is, in fact for some of the more engaged, a secular religion in the sense in which Marxism for the Soviet Union and “Free-Enterprise” success ideology for the United States serves as such a religion for certain elements in those populations. “ ‘Revolution’ is still a holy word in Indonesia,” a professor at an Indonesian university told me. “It is still a holy word in America?”
MIXED TYPES AND MARGINAL GROUPS:
SOCIAL STRUCTURAL FACTORS
in addition to the sense of a common culture, whether expressed in the vocabulary of traditional religion or of modern nationalism, a second factor in preventing value differences between prijaji, santri, and abangan from having the full effects which seem implicit in them is the fact, universal in the articulation of culture and social system everywhere, that value patterns are not institutionalized directly, purely, and without distortion but, rather, are integrated into a differentiated social system in such a manner that the resultant social structure does not mirror the cultural organization in any simple way.
The first reason why this is true is that organizing forces arising from religion, stratification, geography, economics, and so on do not all run in the same direction. A high-status santri has often more in common with a prijaji than with a low-status santri. An abangan who, confounding the probabilities, makes good in business, is likely to find himself seeing tilings the scintri way to a degree, even if he can’t be bothered with praying. And for a scintri, as for all Javanese, a neighbor is a neighbor after all, even if he does bum incense to idols.
This cross-cutting, balance-of-forces nature of social life is what allows several antagonistic social and cultural elements to be contained within the same relatively balanced system. It is, in fact, the absence of such cross-cutting which bodes ill for the future of a social system. One of the most important reasons for the extreme instability of the relations between Javanese and Chinese, for example, is just such an ominous coalescence of racial, economic, and religious factors all going in the same direction. The chances for open violence in such a situation are greater than in a case where the divisive aspects of racial and religious difference and inequality of wealth do not support but check one another.
The general failure for cultural and social forces to coincide exactly in any concrete society produces a type of individual one can only call “mixed,” and whose “mixed” character lends to him a greater ability to mediate between contrasting groups. For example, one of the first-rank leaders of NU, the conservative Moslem party, in Modjokuto is in almost every other respect but the political a prijaji. Before the war he was a bookkeeper, belonged to such moderate prijaji nationalist organizations as Parindra and Budi Utomo, and did not pray, go to mosque, or know very much about Islam. In general he followed the prijaji variant of Javanese religion—its mysticism, aestheticism, and rank-consciousness—as, despite externals, he still does. After the Revolution it was considered certain that he would appear as a leader in PNI, the nationalist party successor to the type of organization to which he belonged in the pre-war period, but he startled the entire community by joining NU and, for the first time in his life, by beginning to pray five times a day and to attend mosque.
What was involved here was not a religious conversion; this man is still as strong a prijaji as he ever was. He still looks down on most santris as fanatic and uneducated, regards his own position as frankly anomalous, and realizes that he doesn’t “fit” (tjot jog) where he is. The rest of his family does not even make the pretense of being santri. His wife does not pray; she keeps aloof from NU women’s activities and continues to restrict her friendships to prijaji circles. We are korbans—“victims,” “sacrifices”—both the man and his wife say, claiming that they gave up their more “comfortable” position in the prijaji group to provide much-needed intellectual leadership to the ignorant and over-religious orthodox Moslem group, sacrificing personal happiness to contribute to the progress of the new Indonesia. Those who take a less kind view of this man’s behavior say that he joined NU because, being one of the few educated members, he would be a major leader (he is the party’s representative on the Regency governing board), whereas in PNI, with its greater supply of intellectuals, he would be only second rank. The details of the matter are, however, unimportant. What is important is that this man serves as a link between two culturally defined groups otherwise rather antagonistic by the simple expedient of being a member of both of them at the same time.
There are other people of the same sort: the now-retired Sumatran doctor, a prijaji by status but, like Sumatrans generally, a pious Moslem and so sympathetic to the santris; the prijaji store-owner who, although he dislikes Islam, mixes more with santris than with non-santris (his store is in the Moslem Kauman); the abangan village clerk in an otherwise entirely santri village administration; the santri high-official—the Bragang Bupati is an example—who naturally tends to move in prijaji circles.
But in addition to mixed-type individuals there are also mixed-type groups, cultural “minorities,’’ members of which are able to perform similar mediating roles. An example here is the small Protestant community in Modjokuto. Speaking broadly, there are two main types of Protestants (Catholics in Modjokuto are nearly all Chinese) within die town of Modjokuto: first, those who adhere to the Dutch Reformed Church, who are mainly prijaji in social status and style of life, many of them being or having been in the past white-collar employees of Dutch sugar concerns, the local HVA hospital, etc.; and second, those who adhere to the more revivalistic Protestant sects (Seventh Day Adventist, Pentacostal, etc.), who, if they are Javanese—perhaps the majority of the members of such sects are either Chinese or non-Javanese Indonesians from Ambon, Flores, Sumatra, etc.—are fairly poor abangans. The second group is of only marginal social importance in Modjokuto, but the first serves as an important buffer between the major religious groups. Other cultural minority groups, such as certain Chinese and the above-mentioned non-Javanese Indonesians, serve similar functions, being, as they are, more-or-less neutral with respect to the major Javanese religious variants.
Groups which are products of recent social change and Western contact, and so to an extent secularized, also tend to fall “in between” the major religious variants. The most important of these is undoubtedly the pemuda group, pemuda being an Indonesian word meaning “youth.” The relatively sudden expansion of Western-type education in Indonesia in recent years has produced a “youth-culture” whose members are marked by a deep-going restlessness, a sharp ambivalence vis-à-vis traditional Javanese values, and an intense nationalism. They are often relatively free of commitment to any of the major religious systems described, a situation which leaves them both more independent of traditional constraints and more anxious and uncertain about how they ought to live—although rather unwilling to admit it. In Modjokuto, the secularization of this group has proceeded less far than in larger cities such as Djakarta and Surabaja, and most young men can still be classified as at least vaguely santri, abangan, or prijaji. But it can hardly be denied that pemudas, even in Modjokuto, often find much more in common with each other, irrespective of religion, than they do with adults of their own (rather attenuated) religious persuasion. This emergent Indonesian “youth-culture,” made up of an intense, idealistic, and perplexed group of young men and women who have suddenly been projected into a world they never made, is an important cross-cutting force in present-day Modjokuto, tending to off-set the conflict between religious views with the war between the generations.
Another social structural circumstance militating against the simple segmentation of society along religious lines is the fact that the prijaji are the traditional leaders of the society, the time-honored holders of power. The result is that the elites of all groups have a tendency to include at least some prijajis, either because prijajis attracted by power-wielding possibilities have moved into them or because their own leaders have become “prijaji-ized” as their personal power has grown. Peasant leaders, for example, are rarely peasants; most often they are lower prijajis; for, though the abangans have the numbers to form an impressive followership, they but rarely produce from among themselves men with the social skills to lead them, even in terms of their own values. The Communist party, as all others, is largely led by town-based clerks, not agrarian radicals. In the early days of the nationalist movements, almost all the leaders, even of the santri groups (Tjokroaminoto, the founder of Sarekat Islam being an example), were drawn from the civil-servant class because the latter had a virtual monopoly on education and because they bore the traditional trappings of authority.
The converse proposition holds as well. As individual abangans or santris gain in power because of their leadership of effective political groups, they tend naturally to adopt prijaji ways, which poses something of a problem, because in so doing they lose at least part of the specific ideological attraction which gained them power in the first place. The problem is particularly acute among the santris, whose values are so anti-bureaucratic, “independent,” and “equali-tarian” in nature; for they realize that as their leaders become civil servants due to santri political power, they become also less santri in outlook. This is not entirely integrative, however, because the more “traditional” prijajis tend to resent such parvenu power holders and, as I have already remarked, some of the more conservative literati elements among them tend to hold aloof altogether from activity in the “newsociety” for this reason. In part, what is occurring is a shift in traditional leadership patterns, in which lower prijajis particularly, those with more of a stomach for contact with people of all types and emerging leaders from non-prijaji groups are forming a new elite with a culture based to a degree on the old prijaji patterns and in part on the newer intelligentsia culture connected with nationalism, more or less cutting out the purer literati.
TOLERANCE AND PLURALISTIC SOCIAL INTEGRATION
the last two points making for a moderation of religious conflict—tolerance based on “contextual relativism” and the growth of social mechanisms for a pluralistic non-syncretic form of social integration—may be dealt with together, for they are, in part, merely two sides of the same coin. Relativistic tolerance has been mentioned several times in this report as being characteristic of non -santri religious views, but even santris adhere to it despite the intense concern with missionization which tends to be characteristic of
Islam. Traders and richer peasants are seen, by all groups, as more or less “naturally” santris, civil servants as “normally” prijaji, and poorer peasants and town proletariat as “typically” abcingan; and there is really little serious thought in any of the groups that there is much possibility of “converting” the others. The santris may talk much about “missionary work” (tablèg) and rail about the heathenism of the non-5£W/ri group, but in fact almost all their missionary work is directed inward, toward the santri group itself, being designed to improve the doctrinal purity of those who are already committed rather than to gain new adherents. Most santris would be appalled at the idea of personally trying to talk a convinced prijaji or abangan into becoming a santri. Thus the three groups tend to become socially segregated to a degree and come to accept the de jacto, if not de jure, existence of one another. In part, the displacement of religious conflict to the political level is based on just this deep-going reluctance of Javanese to urge their own beliefs on others who differ with them.
Thus, despite protestations to the contrary, it seems as if at least some members of each group are coming to the conclusion that a new synthesis based on the complete triumph of their own values throughout the entire society is not likely to occur, and that an open society is to replace a closed one. Such views, even in a half-concealed form, are not dominant as yet; and an American committed to a loose balance-of-interests system not only in government but in social organization generally is especially likely to overemphasize them. Certainly the yearning for a new synthesis which will have some of the psychological and social comforts of the old syncretic unification of belief is easily to be found; it is perhaps the most widespread social sentiment and that upon which the Dar Ul Islam Moslem rebels, the Communists, and the more xenophobic nationalists all play. Nevertheless, the realization that such a re-establishment of an organic society is not possible or, if possible, not desirable, is becoming increasingly apparent to many people of all shades of opinion, albeit in an almost unconscious form. But if a society is to be formed in which groups of rather different outlooks on life and committed to varying basic values are mutually to co-exist, social mechanisms in terms of which the necessary continual adjustment and readjustment among such groups are to take place must be constructed.