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.