Is reading habit a cultural need?

Is reading habit a cultural need?

The government has proclaimed this month "Book Month" to
encourage reading among the people. Noted sociologist Ignas
Kleden digs into the nation's traditional oral culture to probe
the status of the reading habit in Indonesian society.

JAKARTA (JP): People tend to forget that books and book
production are the phenomena of a reading and writing society. A
society in which the need to write and read books comes from the
fact that oral communication is no longer adequate as the sole
source of information. In other words it would be very difficult
to expect the full-blown development of the book industry if the
basic cultural exchange of a society still rests on oral
communication.

As an illustration, it is quite impossible for motorists in
European countries or the United States to make a long journey
without having maps at hand. This, however, is quite common in
Indonesia due to the fact that one can still rely on oral
communication with people along the road, asking them for
information which most of them are still willing to give. No
wonder the sale of maps here breaks no records. It is just so
much easier to access information concerning geography orally.

Some modern Indonesian poets such as W.S. Rendra and Emha
Ainun Nadjib seem to understand the basically oral nature of
Indonesian literature. They have turned out to be quite
successful in staging the reading of the poems, which they have
written and even published in book form. They are fairly aware
that for the most part modern poems are still treated as a new
version of the traditional pantun, the Malay sonnets people used
to recite on different occasions and for a variety of purposes.
In that sense these sonnets became the main linguistic means for
young people who were looking for their "better halves" or for
the traditional adat leaders when they were getting together to
decide on a local issue.

Nowadays we can still observe this established tendency
towards oral literature even among very educated persons. People
who very seldom buy novels or short story books are usually very
pleased to attend short story readings by contemporary writers.
The prominent essayist and literary critic Goenawan Mohamad once
put it trenchantly and beautifully. He said that in Indonesia we
are easily deceived by the seductive temptation to overstep
written literature by jumping from a pre-writing stage, as in
traditional literature, to a post-writing stage, which is
characterized by radio and TV.

On another level we notice that in the face of the sluggish
book business, seminars on various topics are highly popular. Not
only do they draw throngs of people, they also have a high status
in society, which profits the organizer both socially and
commercially. Experience in taking part in seminars, mostly
academic ones, both in Indonesia and in Germany drives home an
interesting comparison.

In Germany, if you are invited to give a talk or a lecture,
then you have only to prepare yourself to talk and to make an
oral presentation. There is no need to write down the full text
of your presentation. The assumption underlying such an
arrangement seems to be that a speaker is expected to speak, and
the audience are expected to listen to the presentation, while
they can put down in their notebooks whatever they feel is
important or relevant or even disputable for their own purposes.
As for the speakers, their oral presentation and the ensuing
discussion serve as a preliminary input for a final paper writing
stage before a publication.

In Jakarta, it seems to be a matter of course that you have
to prepare a full text if you are invited to give a talk at a
seminar. The reason for this is that the audience can read the
paper beforehand so that they can follow the actual reading of
the paper more easily. This is something quite peculiar, if we
stick to the nature of oral or written presentation.

People who just want to read need not come to listen to a
speaker, since they can stay at home and look for the publication
of a writer dealing with a problem which might interest them, or
which might touch upon a question they are grappling with.
Conversely, those who want to listen to an oral presentation are
expected to listen carefully and put down things which might be
of any significance to them. If speakers for a seminar have to
write down what they are going to talk about first, and if the
audience has to read it beforehand, what they are going to listen
to? It appears that the prepared text is treated more as a
preliminary stage of an oral presentation, and not the other way
around as is the case in Germany or in many developed countries
for that matter. Writing a paper in Jakarta is more a matter of
preparing a talk, whereas in Heidelberg or Leiden it is a matter
of preparing a publication.

Why this difference? It is partly because many of the
developed countries have become reading and writing societies,
where both oral tradition and writing tradition are equally
autonomous. Books and papers are produced not only as the
inscription of what has been orally mediated, but because the
writers and authors want to address a reading public and not a
listening public in the first place. In a basically oral society
like Indonesia (notwithstanding the fact that some ethnic groups
in this country have their own local alphabet) writing is treated
rather as part of the oral tradition. It assumes a role which is
essentially secondary in nature, either as the documentation of
what has already been said, or as a written preparation for what
is still to be orally conveyed.

There used to be a general belief that a reading society
rests on the reading habit, and that this habit can be encouraged
politically through a particular program. Of course this can be
done to certain extent, and we can safely assume that the book
month which has been proclaimed by the government is intended to
encourage such a habit. In other words, reading and writing can
be treated as a political program and can be promoted
politically. On the other hand, however, as has been mentioned
above, reading and writing are elements of the cultural
propensity of a society, and should be dealt with accordingly as
cultural phenomena. As cultural phenomena they can never be seen
as autonomous patterns, which can develop entirely independently
of other cultural patterns.

In that sense, written material will be important if the
social relationship does not rest merely on a personal, but
rather also on an impersonal, basis as is the case with
contractual relations. The best example of impersonal relations
is the bureaucracy which operates according to formal procedures,
without having to take into consideration the personal aspects of
those involved in it. Theoretically speaking, in bureaucratic
matters the personal identity depends on the availability of
written documents. In reality, if one has something to do with
the bureaucracy in Jakarta, for example, one can experience time
and again, that the effectiveness of the written documents
depends very much on the personal relationship. Based on the
research of Clifford Geertz, a prominent American anthropologist
and a leading specialist on Indonesia, we can say that as far as
the bureaucracy in this country is concerned "it is not the
document that makes the man believable; it is the man who makes
the document such". In an "ideal" bureaucracy written documents
are both necessary and sufficient conditions for identity and
legality. In the existing bureaucracy, however, the written
documents as necessary conditions have to be underpinned by
personal relationships as sufficient conditions. In other words,
written documents are only a part of, or a supplement for, direct
personal oral communication.

Another aspect pertains to the place of privacy in a
cultural system. Where privacy becomes a basic need, books and
other reading material are very likely to become important, owing
to the fact that social and human intercourse can be carried out
without the physical presence of other people, for whom books and
reading materials can very well substitute. This can be the case
if the nature of human encounter is understood not only in terms
of getting together physically, but also in terms of the meeting
of minds and even the exchange of human feelings through books
and reading materials. In this connection, one of the features of
social development seems to have to do with the question of
whether or not there is a development toward a more "abstract"
social structure which is made up of abstract relations. As a
rule, the more a society moves towards abstract relations, the
more likely it will be for the habit of reading to develop, and
the more it sticks to concrete relations, the more likely it will
be for the oral culture to persist.

At any rate, the reading habit is only a facet of the whole
cultural pattern. It is worth noting that there is a dialectical
relationship between the parts of a cultural pattern and the whole
of it. This means, at one time one can start to change a small part
of that cultural pattern in order to enhance the change of the
whole pattern. At another time, one would be better off trying to
change the whole pattern in order to enable the transformation of
a particular part of it. This rule holds true fairly well for the
encouragement of the reading habit.

To encourage the reading habit not only implies the
production of more titles per year, but also the opening up of a
wider horizon intellectually, philosophically, economically and
politically. If we are going to encourage the reading habit, it
is well advised to prepare ourselves to cope with more ideas and
to face more challenges, which will result from more choices,
which are made available by more information. On the other hand,
however, it would be very difficult to expect rapid development
of the reading habit, if other cultural prerequisites are not met
satisfactorily. Some of the cultural preconditions have been
mentioned above. Whether or not we are seriously determined to
promote the reading habit will be seen in our willingness or our
reluctance to allow for other concomitant changes
correspondingly.

The establishment of the reading habit can be seen as the
result of the national effort to promote it. That is why the Book
Month which has been proclaimed by our government deserves our
support both morally and technically. Nevertheless, it is too
important to ignore the fact that the reading habit is only a
phenomenon, or even an epiphenomenon of a larger cultural change.
The reading habit is the cultural expression of a reading and
writing society. Therefore it would seem paradoxical, or perhaps,
self defeating, if we were to pursue the reading habit ideal, but
did not do our best to enhance the reading habit among the public
and to promote the production of books, while at the same time
remaining happily comfortable with the oral nature of our
culture, which makes the reading habit either not necessary or
superfluous.

The writer has a Master's of Arts degree in Philosophy from
the Hochschule Philosophie, Munich (1982) and a Doctorate degree
in Sociology from Bielefeld University, Germany (1995). He is now
working with the Jakarta-based SPES Foundation research center.