Scholar of Javanese language, culture

Scholar of Javanese language, culture

Yenni Djahidin, Contributor/Washington

She is an anthropologist who specializes in Indonesia, speaks Bahasa Indonesia and has performed Javanese and Balinese dances.

However, she was known in Indonesia primarily as the spouse of an American ambassador.

Dr Clare Wolfowitz is more like a shy woman from Java than a professor of a major American university. She is warm and softly spoken.

Her office is decorated with tapestry from North Sumatra, Javanese puppets, and countless pictures of her trips to Indonesia.

There is a photograph of Wolfowitz in front of a library that bears her name at an Islamic school in South Sulawesi. Another picture shows her, and two of her three children, clad in traditional Javanese clothing.

They were in Java recently to attend a friend's wedding. The pictures are all neatly pinned on a wall behind her desk.

"I was partly raised as an Indonesian," she says, when asked why she chose Indonesia as her specialty. She says she lived with an Indonesian family in Yogyakarta for three months in 1962, when she was a teenager.

"It wasn't very long, but I loved everything there. It was the place I wanted to be -- I didn't want to go home," she said. The mother of the family she stayed with was West Sumatran, the father, Javanese. The family had eight children and they spoke Bahasa Indonesia at home.

"That's where I learned bahasa," she said.

"There was nothing that I didn't like," she said, but added, "Well, maybe the bathroom because of the cockroaches and the spiders."

She said that she was in the last group of exchange students from America because the late president Sukarno stopped the program.

"Sukarno thought we were CIA spies," she said, with a laugh. She added that she was not smart enough to have been a CIA spy.

Wolfowitz took her interest further and studied anthropology in college. Later, she wrote a book based on her dissertation, Language Style and Social Space, which examines how Javanese people use their language and the way they use their homes.

"I would love to do an addition to that (book) for an Indonesian audience," she said, adding that the book is full of academic terms that are not easy to understand.

"I would do a rewrite, just a little bit more in English, and someone else could translate it into Indonesian," she said. She admitted that she can understand more Javanese than she can speak.

"I am very shy about speaking Javanese; I thought it was so hard but it's such an interesting language," said Wolfowitz, who also speaks French, Italian and German.

Wolfowitz is also actively involved in organizations that promote arts and culture. Last year, she took a group, the Indonesian Youth and Children's Choir, on a tour of cities in the U.S.

"I would love to bring them back again to the States next summer," she said, looking at pictures from the group's performance in Washington DC.

The small woman, who grew up on Long Island, New York, says she would love to go back to Indonesia and learn to dance again. She says she was very impressed with an Indonesian performer she saw recently and wanted to learn from him.

"Javanese dance is what I did naturally, but I also learned some Balinese," she said.

She said the most memorable part of her stay in Indonesia as the wife of the American ambassador (1986 to 1989) was the funeral of the late sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengkubuwono IX.

"Hundreds of thousands -- maybe millions -- of people lined up on the street and they were all silent out of respect for him," she said.

Clare Wolfowitz is separated from Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. deputy secretary of defense. She currently works for the public affairs division of the institutional reform and informal sector (IRIS) unit at Maryland University, outside Washington, DC. She helps to manage Indonesia projects for the democracy, governance and regulation team.

"I hope we will have a project on Indonesia soon,' she said.

Wolfowitz previously taught courses in sociolinguistics and social change at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins School of Continuing Education and Georgetown University School of Language and Linguistics.