A scholar's love affair with Indonesia

YOGYAKARTA (JP): For many Indonesian scholars, he is a living legend. For the international academic circle, he is their reference on Indonesia.

Clifford Geertz, a 70-year old American anthropologist, has been associated with Indonesia for almost four decades.

He is one foreign scholar who has brought Indonesia to the world's attention. The San Francisco-born Geertz is renowned as an ardent researcher of Indonesian, and Javanese society in particular. His books and theories on Indonesian society have become important references for those who want to gain an insight into the country and its people.

Noted Indonesian scholar Ignas Kleden said, "Geertz has made Indonesia a fertile land for the concepts of social sciences, anthropology and sociology in particular".

Among his famous books are The Religion of Java, Agriculture Involution and Negara: The theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali.

"Don't ask me anything about the Indonesia's current social and political situation. I know nothing about it," Geertz said during his recent visit to Indonesia.

Geertz was the star at the International Conference of Tourism and Heritage Management held in Yogyakarta late last month.

"I am extraordinarily pleased to be back here in Yogyakarta where forty-four years ago I started my studies," Geertz recalled.

Between the l950s and the late l960s, Geertz and his then wife Hilda Geertz conducted intensive research which he called the Mojokuto project. His in-depth research resulted in several basic social science theories. Though many contemporary scholars regard his theory as outdated, Geertz is still respected worldwide.

The 70-year old scholar is now a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University in New Jersey, the United States. He received a prestigious Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize from the Japanese government for his contribution in conducting thorough comparative studies on Asian and American cultures.

Surrounded by journalists eager to get his comments on the recent religious conflict in Situbondo, East Java and other political issues, Geertz chose to keep silent. Geertz's previous theory focused on Islam Society in Java.

"The government and the involved parties should restrain from further conflicts, otherwise they will spread elsewhere in the country. More understanding and tolerance is needed," said Geertz.

He deliberately turned the political topic into the cultural and tourism issues which brought him to the conference.

Geertz recalled the explosion of international tourism in Indonesia occurred around him as he studied in the fifties and sixties.

"I am so amazed by the present development of Indonesian tourism," he said cynically.

But he still wondered how Indonesian people viewed tourism.

Four years ago, Geertz was asked by an American magazine to write a piece on the extraordinary 250 events included in the Festival of Indonesia (KIAS) which was held in fifty cities across the United States from l991 to l992.

He said the festival was both enormous and enormously expensive. It was an Indonesian government effort to promote tourism and present authentic, Indonesian concepts of their culture.

Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, Indonesia's former foreign minister, called it 'cultural diplomacy'. The festivals included a large variety of art exhibitions and cultural performances from Indonesia's 27 provinces.

"To me, the most novel thing about it was that the objects of tourists' interest were being brought to them, rather than the other way around," he said.

The situation was no longer one of active tourists searching out passive "objects" to look at. The active party deciding what the tourist was to witness.

"I just wonder whether the message was received by the Americans. How should the culture of a nation as diverse as this one is be summed up for foreigners. The worry is that the inner significance of Indonesian cultural forms would be lost. Their meaning would be distorted," he said.

The festival reflects the organizers' lack of understanding about their own cultural heritages. "The Indonesian heritages were presented at the festival as ancient artifacts and art objects," he said.

According to Geertz, the cultural heritages of people, places and a nation are not solid, immovable blocks. It is something constantly changing in response to new circumstances and emerging needs.

"I call my theory an 'anti-essentialist' view of heritage," he said.

The so-called "museum" or "culture park" view of heritage as something that has only to be preserved is not only utopian but mischievous, he said. Heritage does not stand still, it is always a complex integration of the old and the new, the domestic and the foreign.

People should also change their view of tourism and its relationship to culture.

"We should not make tourism just an economically productive force, but a culturally productive force as well," he said.

To make a better tourism plan, archaeologists, site managers, tour planners and the like, should provide decision makers with the necessary information.

"They need to see themselves as engaged in a project of rethinking the whole idea of what tourism is, what it consists of, how it works, what its effects are, and what its goals should be," he explained.

Many people find Geertz's theory on tourism and heritage quite difficult to understand.

Ignas Kleden commented that Geertz's theories and arguments were often complicated but contained clear and bold ideas.

So what does Kleden think should be expected from a man like Geertz? His theories on Indonesian society could be wrong or no longer relevant to modern Indonesia, but Geertz has been trying hard to learn, to dig up all available information on Indonesia to support his studies.

"As I knew more about Indonesia, I deeply fell in love with the country," Geertz once said.

Indonesian could learn from Geertz how to understand and appreciate their own cultures. (raw)