Organizer and Chair: John R. Bowen, Washington University
Elizabeth Coville, Hamline University
While the recent objectification, formalization, and commodification of Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia) culture, history, and tradition have already been well documented, there has been correspondingly little systematic attention paid to what Mary Steedly in Hanging Without a Rope (1993) has aptly called "audiencing practice" (p. 199). How is an audience convened? How are listeners' or spectators' attention gained? What, to borrow an Ilongot phrase used by Michele Rosaldo, are the cultural practices by and through which speakers "carve a path for talk"? Following closely on the heels of foreign tourists, international television viewers in Japan, Great Britain, and the United States have recently become audiences to popular filmed representations of Torajan ritual performance (e.g., "Ring of Fire," "Rough Guide"). As the audiences to Torajan ritual performance rapidly expand, anthropology's tendency to privilege cultural speakers and spokespersons, if not specialists, limits our ability to understand the full import of the transformation from local to global audiences. By investigating Torajan conventions for the appropriate behavior of a ritual audience, I argue that the Toraja practices of audience participation-i.e., "witnessing," "remembering," and "requesting" (associated with animal sacrifice, meat-dividing, keening, spirit possession, etc.) actively engage individuals in the life of the collectivity. On the other hand, filmmakers appeal to the would be adventurer/explorer in their television audiences, who is invited to see Torajan culture as fragmented and Torajans as largely passive interpreters of their own condition. Further, I suggest that visual images of the behaviors that express the local audiencing practices-e.g., silent staring, intense weeping, and chaotic shouting-are likely to be misinterpreted by western audiences in a way that confirms precisely the stereotype of the "traditional" and "primitive." Thus the active audiencing practices of Torajan ritual performance become emblematic of passive tradition for modern, western television and film audiences.
Peter Suwarno, Arizona State University
While an effective and harmonious interethnic communication largely depends on the speakers' willingness to accommodate their language and societal norms to those of their interlocutors, symmetrical accommodation rarely occurs when the interacting parties differ in power and needs for social approval. This seems to be the case with the Javanese Komering interaction in Southern Sumatra. The Komering people have been living in Southern Sumatra for hundreds of years before the Javanese began to move into the area in the 1950s. Although in the district of Blitang, Ogan Komering Ulu, the two populations are equal in number, my observations there indicate that in their interactions the Komering people would speak Javanese at the ngoko (low) level, while most Javanese people would not speak Komering and rarely Indonesian. This situation is rather unexpected, especially considering the assertive, argumentative and often verbally aggressive speech styles of the Komering people, in contrast to the importance of politeness and tolerance in the Javanese interactional norms.
This paper will discuss the patterns, motivations and possible consequences of language accommodation in the Javanese-Komering interaction. The portrayal of Javanese language and culture as being more refined, the Javanese economic success in the area, as well as the social and political situation which seems to favor the Javanese may have contributed to this imbalance of power.
Sarah Weiss, New York University and University of Sydney
"They play with their own rules," remarked one urban, Central Javanese musician, contemptuously, when asked about women and village musicians in Central Java.
In colonial and post colonial Central Java, the ability to control rules was and is constructed as a kind of power, a power that excludes those who do not control the (male) Central Javanese rules. Likewise, an aesthetic of "correct" and refined practice has developed around music performance in urban centers in Central Java. This rule-oriented aesthetic is gendered male by the Central Javanese. In the accompaniment of wayang, it was once the tradition that the wife of the dhalang or puppeteer was his main accompanist. Today, the style in which these women play is called the female style or gaya perempuan. This style is described as uncontrolled, rule less and guided only by feeling or rasa. It is, however, this female style of accompaniment that many wayang enthusiasts and performers feel is most suited to the traditional performance of wayang.
Beginning with a critique of the contemporary, scholarly paradigm of potency in Central Java, I will explore the gendered differentiation of music styles in current practice. I will argue that while women and, likewise, female style performance are devalued in the contemporary Central Javanese, Western influenced (male dominated) ideology, as in the quote above, this ideology and the music practices which it continues to generate have not altogether masked another aesthetic in which both order (male) and chaos (female), or rules and rasa, are highly valued. I conclude my paper by examining how both "rules" and "rasa" are being affected by pressures coming from the New Order state and the commercialization of wayang.
Dolores de Manuel, Manhattan College
The experience of colonization and imperialism in the Philippines has left marks of fragmentation on the cultural fabric of the nation and on the psyches of the individuals portrayed in its literature. The encounter of native Filipinos and successive waves of Spanish and American colonists, who treated them both as an inferior race and as a fascinating object resulted in deep self divisions. At the same time, these apparent divisions can be seen as masking another impulse, one characterized as "construction of the future," a movement to recentering and reclaiming of identity that sees crossculturalism and multiracialism not as ultimately divisive but as creative.
In Nick Joaquin's "The Woman Who Had Two Navels," (1960) the title image summarizes the seemingly unnatural symbiosis of Asian and Western heritages. The novel's protagonist suffers from the delusion that her body is freakish, until she experiences some kind of reconciliation by confronting her own past and with the nation's history. This resolution indicates the possibility of reintegration, especially in remembering a moment of Filipino self assertion.
Later, Ninotchka Rosca's "State of War" (1988), depicts the complex socio historical forces that have shaped the Philippines' tangled existence, stressing their far reaching effects in a mythic framework that moves between present and past. The novel centers on a woman whose flight to join the underground is presented as both a personal movement towards autonomy and a possible solution to the political problems of the nation; through identification with her precolonial roots and her kinship with the native priestesses raped by the Spaniards, she has moved beyond the overdetermined colonial past, becoming a fighter for national identity.
Jessica Hagedorn's "Dogeaters" (1990) shows a similar movement from violent dislocation to relocation in the character of Joey, a homosexual prostitute whose "negro blood" from his American G.I. father fascinates both Filipinos and foreigners. Joey's situation can be read as a representation of the condition of Filipino men under colonization: marginalized and emasculated by their subordinate role, creations of the colonial masters and objects for their use. However, Joey escapes from this role; an accident forces him to flee to the guerrillas in the hills, where he learns a sense of purpose. He moves out of the categories of race and culture as criteria for judgment, his mixed race a superficial marker that does not prevent him from becoming part of a community that imagines a more creative future.
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