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.