don't force a pig to sing. It will not work, and it annoys the pig as well.

[intertribal]

I fucking TOLD YOU Indonesia would never give the fundamentalists control over the country. Did I not?! 

Disclaimer: I don't have a problem with religious parties in general, and I certainly don't have a problem with Islam.  But religious governance doesn't fit Indonesia - leaving aside the problem of the people in Indonesia who are not Muslim, everybody practices Islam so differently.  It doesn't work to force people to follow sharia when some of them still worship spirit-gods.  And a lot of Indonesians, quite frankly, are not into modesty and propriety - no matter what the anthropologists tell you.  Indonesia needs to stick to the Pancasila (its Constitution) - non-denominational acknowledgment of religion and spirituality.  Respect!

Indonesia’s Voters Retreat From Radical Islam. 

On a deeper level, some of the parties’ fundamentalist measures seem to have alienated moderate Indonesians.  Although final results from the election on April 9 will not be announced until next month, partial official results and exit polls by several independent companies indicate that Indonesians overwhelmingly backed the country’s major secular parties, even though more of them are continuing to turn to Islam in their private lives.

“People in general do not feel that there should be an integration of faith and politics,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “Even though more and more Muslims, in particular women, have become more Islamic and have a growing attachment to Islam, that does not translate into voting behavior.”

The hard-line stance, though, was at odds with the attitudes of Indonesians; most of them practice a moderate version of Islam and were attracted to the Islamic parties for nonreligious reasons.  The parties angered many Indonesians by pressing hard on several symbolic religious issues, like a vague “antipornography” law that could be used to ban everything from displays of partial nudity to yoga. The governor of West Java, a member of the Prosperous Justice Party, tried to ban a dance called jaipong, deeming it too erotic, but many people view it as part of their cultural heritage.

It makes me so proud.  SBY FTW!!!  This man is my home-boy.  So is Azra.  He's a smart cookie (and he's in my thesis!). 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

cool.

i have to say, though, the anthropologists probably won't tell you that Indonesians are all into modesty and propriety.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

well, the ones I've read often say that Indonesians are into hierarchy and propriety... if not modesty.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

though I certainly do not know all anthropologists' views on Indonesians, and furthermore that some of the "anthropologists" whose views I've read are probably more like pop-anthropologists.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

meh, not all anthropologists are the same. and i didn't do much reading for the class, but...focus of SE Asia course (wrt indonesia): spirits and ghosts, death and murder, trances, the media, politics and elections, power, nationalism, java (where i guess hierarchy fits in, but we read Pemberton, and he wanted to get away from that, even while looking at ritual and custom and history and relating it to political events...i think), colonialism and changing social organizations, trade, factory work, foreigners, islam and women. but the point is more, i guess, that it's been a very long time since any good anthropologist would say that any given people have a particular sort of character (which i guess is a simplified ruth benedict sort of understanding, but people don't do that anymore), or that ideals and values can be taken at as directly indicative of practice (though the relationship between those is a theoretical stumbling block), or that roles determine the behavior of individuals (not sure if anyone ever thought that...).

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

well, that's a good improvement, then! a lot of stuff I've read is from the '60s. also, it's one of the reasons I don't like Ben Anderson. And yeah, it doesn't surprise me that Pemberton tried to get away from that.

also, like I said, pop-anthropologists - a lot of times poli scientists with a very antiquated reading on Indonesia trying to make a cultural argument.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

haha, improvement. you mean getting rid of benedict? things should be different from that even by the 60's, though. symbolic anthro (geertz...incidentally one writer on indonesia we didn't read in SE asia because we have to read so much of that in Intro.) and structuralism were in full swing. and well, those have a different way of looking at ritual, practice, and conceptual schema, than either the Benedict stuff or structural functionalism (another older anthro theory, which tends to emphasize the conservative character of culture...not that structuralism is much better at dealing w/ change).

all we read from ben anderson was about how indonesians have a different understanding of 'power' or something. it was weird. i didn't really believe him...more because i didn't think he accurately described a 'western' idea of power than anything else, and so it seemed that if there was a difference, he was wrongly generalizing it to the 'concept of power'.

yeah, cross-disciplinary attempts like that tend to go bad...i mean, where people from one discipline attempt to venture into another without much background.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

'course, geertz was writing IN the 60's and 70's, so people doing ethnography while he was still building the theory probably weren't using symbolic anthro.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

and all that said, i don't like geertz. haha. ok, i give him credit for avoiding the boasian trap of being like "every culture is univerally united by these core values of beauty, religion, etc....that are expressed radically differently in every culture!" which is where benedict comes from. i also give him credit for modifying his thought over time. but then he goes and says shit like:

"In attempting to launch such an integration from the anthropological side and to reach, thereby, a more exact image of man, I want to propose two ideas. The first of these is that culture is best seen not as compelxes of concrete behavior patterns--customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters--as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms--plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call 'programs')--for the governing of behavior. The second idea is that man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his behavior."

and you know my feelings about how that computer nonsense.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

-how. ooops.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

and *complexes

although compelxes rhymes with belches, and that...is something.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, that's a little nasty. I do know people that supposedly live by "programs" that are probably formulated as having basis in culture, but the programs are dreamt up entirely on their own. they're more like personal programs. and well, I often go for the more individual-based explanation.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i don't think he meant them to be conscious, though. usu. when people suggest some sort of 'computational mind' or whatever (that phrase i stole from generativism, not geertz), it's to explain unconscious behaviors... anyway, different theorists have different ways of dealing with the individual (it was like one of 'the problems of anthropology' that boas outlined). i like bourdieu's habitus, personally, and i think that even though he uses it in a more sociological than psychological manner, the concept doesn't prevent a more complete synthesis of the two.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

actually, tbh, the habitus is probably the ONLY anthro concept that actually belongs to the individual.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

aside from "subjectivity," which can piss off and die.

i'm sorry i'm apparently incapable of responding in only one comment.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

aw, I like subjectivity.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

it's utterly useless in analysis...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

that is true.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

well, yeah, exactly - the only way I can really imagine people living by instructional programs is consciously, which of course complicates the idea that it's an instructional program at all.

I think I like psychology more than any kind of social-ology.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

it's like, it's a nice metaphor (if you're into that sort of thing), but bad theory. feel the same way x1000 about Foucault, because Foucault is metaphoric theory + Hobbes + bad Nietzsche.

meh, i like aspects of both, i guess. i learned to appreciate sociology when i had to write a paper comparing Sapir and Durkheim. where Sapir thought that the social was just an aggregate of individuals, culture could be effectively deposited within them, Durkheim was like, no no--there is something distinctively social. something that by our individual participation in it becomes more than its parts, that places us under the influence of ideas larger than ourselves. plus hierarchy, social organization, and the like need a sociological model

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying sociology isn't necessary, I just don't find it as interesting or convincing as psychology.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm the reverse. the only good part of psych was social psychology and maybe some stuff on perception, because elsewhere 'the social' just kind becomes a dumping ground for stuff that can't be explained and variables they can't account for. and imo, the only good theory they have is based on freud, which they would like to disown because we all know how much freud sucks, relying on concepts like 'energies' as a borrowed analogy from physics...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

yeah, I don't really study - or am interested in studying - either one.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

it is all one discipline, and that discipline is Anthropology, the study of man. ;) But anthropology "must needs be an historical science," and its philosophical counterpart is Semiotics. We usurp disciplines!

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

okay then.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm a crazy person, but that's ok.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

of course it's ok - so am I.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm alluding to Vico, btw. which i haven't read but like to pretend i know something about.

"These two disciplines combine in a method or "new critical art" (nuova'arte critica) where philosophy aims at articulating the universal forms of intelligibility common to all experience, while philology adumbrates the empirical phenomena of the world which arise from human choice: the languages, customs, and actions of people which make up civil society. Understood as mutually exclusive disciplines-a tendency evident, according to Vico, in the history of philosophy up to his time-philosophy and philology appear as empty and abstract (as in the rational certainty of Cartesian metaphysics) and merely empirical and contingent, respectively. Once combined, however, they form a doctrine which yields a full knowledge of facts where "knowledge" in the Vichean sense means to have grasped both the necessity of human affairs (manifest in the causal connections between otherwise random events) and the contingency of the events which form the content of the causal chains. Philosophy yields the universally true and philology the individually certain."

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I should note that the primary reason I care about psychology as a sort of... hobby... is because I like researching serial killers and mass murderers. In the latter case, however, I do think that the social needs to be taken into account and incorporated, and I think not doing that is part of the problem of a lot of columbine explanatory theories.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

uh, anyway, the point was that dividing the individual from the social is a bad way to approach analysis, and you get that as much in ideas like sapir's where we can just focus on 'the social' because clearly individuals just instantiate that, as in psychology where you can pretend the social has nothing to do with your object of study. and grrr.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

or maybe you meant something different by that than i first read it as. anyway, bourdieu suggests that rules don't exist as anything individuals live by but rather an ideal that they understand and perhaps have to 'play by', but not anything that determines their behavior. what could be considered unconscious for him is more the 'dispositions' of the habitus, which have to be learned and modified in context. so... a habitus could be suited to following the rules, but the rules didn't form the habitus.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

that's really interesting, actually. habitus, huh?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yeah. i think i'm realizing now that where i used to think that bourdieu was just awesome all-around, what actually most impressed me, and where he most diverges from both structuralism and sociology, was the idea of habitus. that and symbolic power.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

also i'm braindead right now. please excuse.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

speaking of which, somehow propriety = hierarchy in my head, which perhaps says something about how i think, but wasn't what i meant to write.