One of the greatest benefits of distant travel is a better understanding of where one comes from.
Last Easter I revisited Ann Arbor, Michigan to give a public lecture as part of a series of events under the theme of Citizenship at Risk: International Perspectives, organised jointly by The University of Michigan’s International Institute, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Citizenship Theme Year and Center for Southeast Asian Studies. The University prides itself as “one of the top-ranked public universities in the world, tied as the #2 public institution in the U.S. (U.S. News & World Report, 2006).” One of my hosts suggested that this probably is an American university with the largest pool of scholars with expertise on Indonesia, scattered in the university’s diverse academic disciplines and departments.
Despite the weather being colder than expected throughout my half a week stay (it snowed everyday), the generous hospitality of everyone I met there kept me warm and fully contented. Webb Keane organised to invite me. He was so generous with his time for me and impressed me most as an excellent host. I enjoyed enormous delight from seeing again my old gurus, Alton L. Becker and his wife Judith Becker, Peter Gosling and his wife Linda Lim, on top of old friends such as Mbak Nunuk, my former neighbour, Nancy Florida and Loren Ryter, and new friends like Deirdre de la Cruz and Ben Arps, Will Glover, Sumathi Ramaswamy, David Victor, and impressive post-graduate students Kate Skillman, Andy Conroe, and Daniel Birchok. The work of Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski on Venezuela has inspired me for years, especially when I prepared my book State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia (2006). It was such a joy to meet them for the first time and have a lovely dinner at Webb’s home, prepared by his wife Adela Pinch.
Two things struck me about the contrasts between doing Indonesian studies in 2007 in Ann Arbor and that in Melbourne, my current home base. First, seen from my Melbournian bias, Indonesia studies and Indonesia-related events in Ann Arbor appear to be highly concentrated on campus among academics and their families. Second, despite such isolation, colleagues in Ann Arbor with expertise on Indonesia seem to enjoy more resources relative to the size of their total teaching programs in Indonesian studies.
The first contrast is easy to understand. Ann Arbor is a small town with around 115,000 people in the Midwest, on the other side of globe from Indonesia. Outside the University there may be only a handful of people, if any at all, who have been to Indonesia. Indonesia may never get any mention in the local news in years.
In contrast, the significantly multicultural city of Melbourne has 3.7 million inhabitants. It is the capital of the state of Victoria where 20,000 Indonesians are permanent residents (some of whom are political exiles). Of the 400,000 or so Australians visiting Indonesia per year, many must have been Melbournians. Several thousand other Melbournians have learned Bahasa Indonesia since they are at their elementary or secondary schools. Exchange of unfriendly words between Indonesian and Australian politicians (mostly intended for their respective domestic audiences as manuveur within their domestic political affairs) appears in the local media on a regular basis. Indonesia to Australians is comparable to what South America is to the North American population.
The above contrast became most clearly visible to me when I gave my “public” talk. Although the room was almost full, all or nearly all were members of academic community. In Melbourne most public talks on Indonesia that I know, including those held on campus, are usually well attended by non-academics who ask the most challenging questions to the speakers. This is especially true when the meeting discusses politically sensitive issues. For better or worse, it is neither possible nor desirable for a speaker in such position to address a primarily theoretical enquiry and in a scholarly language full of jargons.
But there was another event during my brief visit to Ann Arbor helped me see the second difference between the two places for an Indonesianist. The night before giving my talk, I attended a major performance entitled Sinta Ablaze, led by an Indonesian artists-in-residence Sigit Soegito and his wife Yulisa Mastati, with Charley Sullivan as the star dancer, as Rahwana. It is a contemporary wayang perfomance, mixing shadow pupptery on a huge screen, slide shows, gamelan ensamble, and Javanese court dance. The story is adopted from India’s epic Ramayana, peppered with anti-Bush political commentary on the war in Iraq between dialogues of the characters in the story. I deeply regretted for not bringing my camera with me. But see below a picture taken by and reproduced here courtesy of Peter Gosling.
See a review of the performance by Kimberly Chou of the Michigan Daily. Another related performance by Sigit is available on youtube.
The show amazed me for several reasons. Not only did I enjoy the artistic excellence of the performance, involving more than 60 people in the team, including dozens of musicians and local students singing dan dancing in highly elaborated costumes. The one-night only production was prepared for six months (students got credit points towards their degree from this), costing estimatedly AUS$100,000 (including expenses for bringing and hosting the artists-in-residence). It was free for the public.
Despite Australia-Indonesia proximity and long history of relations, I have never seen any performance on an Australian campus of that magnitude and quality. Neither can I imagine to see one in any near future. Indeed I have very rarely seen a performance with such lavish elaboration and style in Java itself. If there is any comparable event in Melbourne that must have taken place in the city, prepared by non-academics, and sponsored by agencies other than academic institutions.
But there is yet another reason why I feel such major performance might never take place in Melbourne. For many in Ann Arbor, geographical and intellectual distance from Indonesia would make it be fairly easy to fantasise an exotic land with unfamiliar yet beautiful sounds, movements, and colours. For many in Melbourne, Indonesia is so close that makes it impossible to overlook the ugly sides of the neighbour. This, combined with strong political correctness, would make it a lot easier for the politically conscious in Melbourne to mobilise the population in a charity event for the disavantaged groups in Indonesia. In Melbourne it would be easier and more common to mobilise the Melbournians to join a political protest against the Indonesian government (or its military, its justice, or its religious militants) than to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of Javanese court.
In fact to have an anti-Java sentiment is politically correct in Melbourne, given the many years of Indonesia’s Java-centric state administration, and Melbourne is home of many Indonesians coming from the eastern islands that have endured the brunt of the so-called “Javanese imperialism”, especially under the New Order government (1966-1998).
5 Comments
Dear Ariel,
Thanks for your post on your visit to Ann Arbor, which helps us to see ourselves a little differently than we otherwise might in our “ivory tower”.
I have two contradictory comments. The first is that one of the arguments for an ivory tower disconnected from reality is that it protects and enables “pure” or “dispassionate” scholarship (and in this case, performance) “for its own sake”, not “contaminated” by contemporary social and political concerns or economic and commercial demands, such as you might have in Melbourne.
The second is that this very “social distancing” is what has led ivory towers to be condemned as “irrelevant”, “archaic”, “absorbed by self-interest” and even eventually, undeserving of public support (including state financial subsidy).
The wayang sandosa performance that you saw was actually an attempt by the Javanese artists to try to preserve their art by “modernizing” it—or, one could argue, moving away from “exoticism” and from Java-centricism, by performing in bahasa (in Java) or, in this case, in English, to “appeal to the audience”. This effort at “market responsiveness” includes the crowd-pleasing contemporary local political references you noted—as, indeed, would have been the case in a “traditional” Javanese performance as well (or in Gilbert and Sullivan performances in Victorian England).
I am sorry you did not get a chance to attend all the events in our Ramayana Across Asia series, of which Sinta Ablaze was only one (though the largest). For the full listing of events, see http://www.umich-cseas.org/ramayana/index.htm and my discussion of the series in pages 8-9 of our Winter 2007 Center Newsletter.
http://www.umich-cseas.org/eventsandnews/newsletters/SEA_newsletter_W07.pdf
The performance of Seeda: Tell Our Stories, by visiting Thai dramatic arts professor Pornrat Damrhung (and Pornrat’s presentation at the preceding Symposium) was particularly illustrative of how Asian performing artists grapple with the tension between contemporary social relevance on the one hand, and traditional art forms on the other—for example, in this work using the Ramayana as a vehicle to explore feminist themes, trafficking of women and children, etc. through a juxtaposition of “modern” multimedia (electronic sound, video projections) and “traditional” Thai movements and forms (costuming, dance, music, shadow puppetry).
Perhaps not surprisingly, this “radical” genre (present in every country) has been much more commercially successful, and popular among young people as well as performing artists themselves, in Asia, than the more “rigid” traditional court dance performances (Pornrat is also an expert on khon masked dance in Thailand) –which one might argue simply reflect a conservative (royalist) social hierarchy and artistic sensibility, and are more popular among Western tourists (and academics?). Asian artists themselves dismiss these as “exoticism”, especially when performed for Western audiences, and sometimes go out of their way to avoid such a charge themselves.
Which leaves us with the perennial question: Does the value of the performing arts/the Ramayana lie in their universal thematic appeal, requiring modernistic, audience-and-performer-sensitive reinterpretations, as have occurred through the ages? Or does it lie in the unique historical and cultural specificity often associated with “museum pieces”, which have their own, more esoteric and ivory tower, justification? I hope our series served in some way to bridge this divide.
Linda
Dear Pak Ariel,
In terms of music, I find Melbourne to be quite pro-Java. There are several gamelan groups and gamelan performances are held regularly. I suppose this is a sign of the curiosity of many musicians and Indonesian-interested folk in the rich court traditions of Solo and Jogja. I think though there is a problem if ‘Indonesian music’ becomes equated with Javanese music.
I say this particularly after having my eyes opened at a performance of music and dance at the Gedung Kesenian Jakarta a couple of years ago. On that night, the audience watched and listened to a steady stream of music and dance from Sumatra, Sulawesi and further east. The dances and music were presented in a packaged and formal way, yet, it was interesting to seeing the culture of a part of Java being relegated to that of a minor player.
If I’m not mistaken students in one of Dr.Ewing’s classes can play in a Cirebon gamelan ensemble as part of their course on performance traditions in Indonesia. I’m wondering if there are any gamelan groups which perform contemporary compositions? Or, other ensembles which incorporate various instruments which are usually found in the gamelan?
I am also interested to know more about your view on the charity events in Melbourne and which groups end up having money raised on their behalf. Would it also be possible to learn about how the experiences mentioned above compare with your time in Singapore?
regards
Andy
Dear Ariel
I think the better analogy to Melbourne’s relationship to Indonesia is not Americans’ relation to Native Americans, but rather to Mexico. A large close but autonomous neighbor, whose immigrants are a familiar presence at home, towards whom there is great ambivalence, both exoticizing attraction and fear, both fantasies about “ancient high civilizations” and “authentic primitives,” as well as anxiety about social and economic “disorder.” As for US and Indonesia, distance makes all the difference. Americans’ awareness and interest waxes and wanes depending on American needs, fantasies, fears, and the provocation of current events. During much of the Sukarno era, Indonesia was attractive because it seemed to promise a third way, an escape from the Cold War polarities, the hope of Bandung, lefist enough to be an alternative to capitalism, but not outright stalinist. In the sixties, the politically engaged found their attention drawn more to Vietnam, but Indonesia now had a strong counter-cultural attraction: rumors of gender equality along with gamelan and wayang drew a whole generation into Indonesia studies, including some people who later came to reject the very orientalism that took them to Indonesia in the first place. (Thus one should be wary of too doctrinaire a position on these things: without that first orientalist romance, many critics of orientalism may never have become committed enough to Indonesia in the first place to develop that critique later.) And now? For Americans Indonesia is dimly perceived, if at all, through news reports of tsunami, avian flu, earthquakes, terrorists, and riots. For the politically active, there was East Timor, but even that has faded. Even people who want to understand Islam are more likely to look first to the Middle East, on the assumption that’s the real homeland. So exotic performances remain one of the few accessible ways to attract the interest of Americans. As for the contrast between Melbourne and Ann Arbor in response to Java’s domination of the archipelago, you’re absolutely correct about the role of distance: few Americans are even remotely aware of internal distinctions within Indonesia, much less the politics. Very frustrating to American scholars of Indonesia, but is there anywhere in the world where interests are not shaped by distance, narcissism, desire, and fear (or, when the shoe is on the other foot, the need to defend oneself against the rich and powerful)? Webb Keane
Dear Linda, Andy, and Webb:
Many thanks for your separate comments.
ON LINDA’S’ COMMENTS
I do like many things in contradictions, Linda. Your “contradictory comments” are most welcome. Contradictions bring life, and they are perhaps resolved (only?) in death. The value of contradictions is also illustrated by Webb’s comments on the movement and mutations of “orientalism/anti-orientalism”.
But there are different kinds of contradictions, and different takes of such differences. I guess, we can pursue further the opposites (either/or) in the concluding paragraph of Linda’s comments. I recall some writing on the wall of a favourite café near my office. I can’t remember the text in verbatim, but it says something like art is not an object or what the beholder perceives, but the distance between them.
My personal take is performer-audience have no choice but must continually re-interpret. The same applies to what may seem the most “traditional”, “conservative” and “puritan” positions.
ON ANDY’S COMMENTS
You’re absolutely right, Andy, about the number of gamelan groups and performance in Melbourne, as indicated in our latest issue of INDONEWS (No.2: May – June 2007), page 7. Where Indonesia matters, it is hard to entirely avoid Javanese arts and cultures, is it not?
I am not connected to any of the gamelan groups in Melbourne, so my comment may be entirely mistaken. But as far as I know none of these groups is huge in size of membership or audience. They are great in their artistic quality, and I do not doubt the dedication of their members. But they appear to be mostly modest in the scale of their physical performances and public profile, and modest financially or stylistically of their stage management. This is in contrast to what I found impressively lavish performance in Ann Arbor. Also, in Melbourne (perhaps not in Ann Arbor) the several scattered Javanese gamelans co-exist with music groups from other regions of Indonesia (Sunda and Bali being most prominent), presumably with no one being dominant. In Melbourne, not only do these Javanese gamelan groups coexist (if not compete) with other major ethnic musical groups of Indonesia, but also with the various western contemporary bands established by Melbourne-based Indonesians. Overall, the various gigs, jazz nights, the Indonesian film screening and film festivals in Melbourne are no less, if not more, eventful than those of the gamelan that I know.
ON WEBB’S COMMENTS
I agree whole-heartedly with Webb’s comments on the dynamics and multi-dimensionality of positions, ambiguity of values. Anthropologists – I should say some contemporary anthropologists – like us tend to “complicate matters” as others say, don’t we?
There are moments when I envy American-based Indonesianists, for their distance, and for their resources. This should be evident in my original post. But perhaps I can have some envy for some moments, for selected others somewhere else, no matter where I reside.
It was interesting to read your article, especially on the subject of “Indonesia”. Being raised in Melbourne (and graduated from Melbourne Uni) and now living in Ann Arbor (for the last 14 months), it is usual finding ex-Melbournian, let alone ex-Aussie in Ann Arbor. One thing I could comment is that it is thankful, if the majority of Americans know where Indonesia is located! (Sorry for cynical comment, but for the Americans, they are the center of the universe!).