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]

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.