People/paulstange/voices/5.html

Ancestral Voices in Island Asia

by Paul Stange

chapter five
APPROPRIATIONS OF MODERNITY

--globalisation of industrial capitalism
--crystallisation of bounded community
--scriptural reformations & spiritual visions of independence
--chronicles of Javanese transition

In each phase of evolution, adjustments in local worldview occurred as local peoples entered wider circles of contact beyond the region. Early changes are only comprehensible as shifts in vision which went hand in hand with socio-economic change. As intensified commerce brought Sinic, Indic and Islamic vocabularies into the region, changing the local environment, people found their own purposes fulfilled more clearly through new discourses. Applying this same perspective to the present, it is instructive to view the period since the late 19th century as the time in which Southeast Asians have been gaining control over and creatively adapting industrially derived structures.
We mark historical change not by surface appearances, such as religious identification or ethnicity, but by the nature of transaction within local societies and beneath labels, by structural changes in patterns of social life. Thus transition to the traditional era came with the rise of religious teachers as a new element within local societies. The rise of that class corresponded with shifts in conceptions of royalty and the state, as within the new world religions both were subordinated to religious frameworks. Similarly the modern era begins with the impact of industrial capitalism around 1870, rather than with earlier European arrival or activities. In dealing with the modern transformation we clearly touch a profound structural transition which is still in process.
We have access to far more information about the past century than we do of earlier times. But quantities of recorded information do not necessarily correlate with the complexity or significance of historical periods. If making sense of the past century is ambitious, it is in principle no more so than attempts to outline key patterns for the even longer earlier periods we have already touched. Recent historians might place great stress on the Japanese occupation, for example, because we know so much of it. But a bird's eye perspective suggests that it should feature no more, in our overview of the region's history, than the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Even a short overview can highlight the major themes we identify within the modern era.
The term modernity is used to stress a transformation which has been taking place throughout the world. Terms such as tradition and modernity can be dubious, every label has implications and raises a different set of problems. Our concept of tradition is dynamic, it is not a reference to stasis, and modernity refers essentially to the complex of social and cultural patterns associated with the industrial revolution. Notions of progression through imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, revolution and independence are most common in historical texts but far more misleading. They implicitly emphasise the significance of European-Asian relations and thus make it seem that that interchange constitutes the history of the region. I am stressing "modernity" to present recent local history as part of a general process, the reorganisation of global societies through the impact of the industrial revolution.

globalization of industrial capitalism
In dealing with nationalism and modern identities we enter an area public imagery usually frames in tacitly racial terms. Colonialism is imaged as domination of one ethnic group over another; nationalism as reactive, a process of individuals, policies and movements countering that domination. The personalities within and drama of recent political events are intrinsically interesting, but it is very helpful to characterise colonialism and nationalism sociologically, to sidestep implicitly racial categories. Via colonialism the industrial revolution brought new communications systems into Southeast Asia. Following that line we can then see that nationalism has been the competition to dominate these new systems. This definition of nationalism has little to do with ethnicity or ideology, referring us instead to social competition to dominate structures which did not exist before modern times.
Early relationships between ethnic groups and states were defined by spheres of fluid and personalised authority. As modern Europeans, bolstered in the late 19th century by steam, rail and telegraph, competed for influence within Southeast Asia they demarcated fixed territories and by about 1900 the boundaries of modern nations were defined. Each newly defined geographic region also became a frame for cultural interactions and thus distinctive senses of identity emerged within them. If we cannot see the resistance of heroes like Diponegoro as nationalist, it is because in our context nationalism is a function of specifically modern structures of self-consciousness and statehood, as well as of the technology which underpins them in their contemporary forms.
Europeans first had direct influence within Southeast Asia in the early 16th century, and from that time were increasingly influential local actors. However it is too easy to read history backward and see their early presence as the beginning of the modern period. Even when not intending to we also assume that modernisation is westernisation and that either represents progress. It is crucial to place European presence in proper perspective and, as the habitual conflation of ethnicity with modernity is as engrained in Asia as in the west, it is clearly not an easy task. Colonialism and nationalism are also familiar implicitly, so in dealing with interactions over the past century it is especially difficult to avoid identifying, we take sides reflexively as the events we treat often have direct implications in our situation.
Fundamentally modernity is a reference to the social and economic changes resulting from the industrial revolution. It may have originated within Europe, but is no more essentially European in its nature than earlier technologies of pottery, weaving or barter. Imperialism should thus be read as the vehicle of modernity and nationalism as the process through which local peoples have asserted control over it. Although Europeans were important actors before the 19th century, 1870 marks the general entry of modern capitalism and industry to the region. That is the critical transition to high colonialism, which began then and continued until World War II.
Within it local societies were reshaped just as Europe was being reshaped. The geographical boundaries which were established with precision later became those of independent states. New forms of communication connected events to global patterns; transportation drew economies into a world network; bureaucracies and secular education spread; cities with new functions mushroomed; migrant groups arrived and boundaries between all groups sharpened. Technology, capitalism, modern bureaucracy and education produced a network overlaying the structures identifiable within earlier epochs. Monastic and feudal relationships have been subsumed by the superimposition of a modern grid which sometimes crosscut earlier ethnic differences. Societies had been defined in personalised and magical terms by power at the centre; modern process produced systems of communication which defined communities by geographic limits and institutional affiliations.

Modern mining industries developed in the 19th century and were concentrated in the zones, in areas like Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Malay Peninsula. Tin was mined on a large scale in Malaya and on the island of Bangka, off Sumatra; rubber and tobacco plantations developed in around Medan, in Sumatra, and in Cambodia; and British foresting of teak in the Burmese hills could even be termed a mining operation. These activities expanded most in areas which had been relatively open, in the sparsely populated zones, and drew heavily on migrant workers. Villagers from south India and south China responded to extreme pressures of famine and social dislocation in their home contexts and came as contract or indentured labourers. They worked under pitiful conditions, being bonded for five or ten year periods, and, hoping to send savings home. Although they generally came with the idea of returning home, and many did, a large percentage stayed. Some remained engaged with plantations, including many Tamils in Malaya, others became market gardeners and shopkeepers or initiated new small industries. These migrants eventually dominated emergent commercial economies at their local level everywhere.
Within the old core areas there was also expansion, but of a different kind. In Java, Luzon, the Mekong delta, central Thailand and the Irrawaddy delta wet rice cultivation was dramatically extended. New technology meant it became possible to dredge channels through previously inaccessible lowlands and swampy deltas. Chinese junks gave way to steamships, which combined in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal to create a world market for bulk crops, suddenly those could be transport profitably. The rice growing cores expanded and their populations mushroomed. Both Burma and Thailand became major exporters of rice for a world market. Java's population, of around 5 million early in the 19th century, exanded to about 40 million in 1940 and has reached 100 million now. Excepting Java and north Vietnam even core areas had been under populated, relative to their potential, until the 20th century. Though rice expansion brought huge growth in cores this was static expansion, as modes of production were not transformed. At the same time socially new rice areas were distinguished from older ones by higher concentrations of land ownership and indebtedness.
Few natives wanted to work in colonial plantations or mines. Throughout the core areas rice growers did not respond to economic incentives to the satisfaction of European entrepreneurs, who consequently thought them 'lazy'. As a result of Chinese and Indian migrants arrived in larger numbers from the last quarter of the 19th century and there was a disjunction between two economies. In the 'dynamic' sphere private property and waged employment characterised relationships between workers, governments and producers. Dynamic expansion, through plantations, mining and in new systems such as railroads, had most impact on the zones; at the same time increases in rice production were dramatic within all of the cores. In areas like Malaya and West Sumatra local peoples did produce crops, of copra, rubber or coffee, for a commercial market. Rice growers, also catering increasingly to a commercial market, were not so much unresponsive to market forces as electing to respond, whenever possible, by expanding traditionally preferred activity rather than switching to new industries.
These patterns led Boeke to formulate his notion of "dual economies", focused on why local people failed to compete in modern terms with Dutch, Chinese and Indian ventures. In particular he explored why, following the liberal period from 1870-1900 in the Netherlands East Indies, peasants did not respond to privatisation and taxation by entering the market economy. Liberals claimed expectation that the market would lead natives to spontaneously create businesses, make profits, invest and multiply them, in short become capitalists. Communally oriented peasants were not intrinsically motivated by wage labour and were pressed into it only through absence of opportunity to work in their favoured rice fields. Similarly, local elites were oriented toward bureaucratic rather than entrepreneurial access to wealth. Insofar as monetary taxation was used as a mechanism to force local people to enter the capitalist sector of the economy it had limited effect. Gaps in economic status, between colonialists, migrant Asians and locals, corresponded to entrenched worldviews and social structures everywhere.

Urban structures were also transformed in the 19th century. Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon and Manila each became at least ten times the size of competitors within their spheres of influence. In the straits Singapore and Penang competed as centres. In the Dutch East Indies Batavia was paralleled by Surabaya, Medan, Bandung and others, there was more of a gradient of cities. Generally these primate cities contrasted with traditional urban structures in serving mainly as linking points to colonial metropoles. They became points through which international systems drew out goods rather than being integral, in reciprocal relation, to countrysides they also served. In traditional capitals inter-ethnic and international trade existed, but the economic cycle included hinterlands. Colonial cities became funnels through which Southeast Asian primary products have been sent elsewhere, a function which continued to characterise their relation to the world economy until local industries became contributors to world markets in the 1970s.
Even within these cities, the keys to the transformation, modern sectors were confined. Indigenous inhabitants generally lived in neighborhoods within which the resonances of village organisation remained strong, only a select elite joined Europeans in new suburbs. Cities became centres of administration and educational networks, their growth is accounted for by the fact that colonial bureaucracies centred in them. The development of rail lines, steamship travel, telegraph and telephones systems all focused on primate cities. They were larger than traditional capitals in proportion to their hinterland partly because they were made more exclusively dominant within the political frameworks that emerged, their size reflected modern colonial centralisation of power. The most distinctive feature of colonial systems was not that westerners controlled the apex of power, but that they operated through rationalised bureaucratic systems which coordinated industrially based communications.
The same pattern emerged in independent Thailand. The Thai monarchs Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, who ruled from the middle until the end of the 19th century, actively pursued modernity. Partly through interest in maintaining independence, they brought pervasive changes in Thai educational, military and bureaucratic systems. These integrated North, North-East and South Thailand into a centrally directed structure. Once semi-autonomous principalities such as Chiang Mai related to Bangkok through negotiation and a balance of power, now Bangkok became the clear centre and Chiang Mai a hierarchical subordinate. In Thailand, as elsewhere, a migrant Chinese minority also expanded to dominate the most capitalised sectors of local economy. Their association with modern communications, in rural areas tied to rice milling, marketing and money lending, is obvious through correlation between concentrations of their settlement and the railroad network.
Modern communication refers not only to the print media, but also to voluntary ethnic, political and religious associations or clubs. Print technology lent itself to forms of social organisation which sharpen concepts of identity in the same way that colonial administrations defined boundaries. As we approach the present in conceptual, social and institutional terms, we think increasingly of religion and politics as though separate from each other. In the 19th century traditional movements were dominant. In the Philippine case historians generally agree a modern form of nationalism predates the 20th Century. But most early movements of resistance and revolt centred on protest against the new order or effort to revive what was imagined to have been traditional harmony. The sense of identity which animated and motivated people was not defined by the modern state. In 19th century movements the pertinent boundaries were those of ethnicity, defined by language group, shared customs, kinship and a body of other social and cultural traditions.

crystallisation of bounded communities
To understand modern movements we need to link changes in consciousness to changes in forms of social, religious and political movement. Dealing with the formation of classical and traditional states drew attention to the emergence in each case of a new category of people. Thus the formation of Vietnam was through syncretic mixing of cultures, writing and blood lines and cultural self consciousness has everywhere been suspended in a web of mixed elements. In the modern context "semi-westernised intelligentsias" are produced by the new frameworks. They are the "national bourgeoisie" of Marxist idiom, compradores, brokers or middlemen who initially facilitated western interests. Those classes within local societies naturally related most easily to westerners, because they shared culture and education with them. They are a new class category within the Southeast Asian environment in the modern period.
Nationalists have aimed to control bureaucracies, newspapers and radio stations as a primary objective. In political coups control of radio, or now TV, stations is vital. This is only the most obvious sign that competition for elite supremacy in the 20th century is a struggle to control communications. With this we can see nationalism, beyond natives struggling against foreigners, as struggle to control nationally integrating institutions. Nationalism brings the rise to power of the semi-westernised intelligentsias, of the social groups carrying the consciousness created by precisely the integrating structures they aim to control. Competition has been not only between foreigners and local people, but also between migrant populations and local people and between different local ethnicities. Within migrant communities separate nationalisms developed, some focused on movements in their states of origin, as in Southeast Asian Chinese mobilised on behalf of Sun Yat Sen in the 1920s. On the other hand every local community, including ethnic minorities as well as migrants, has tried to control their own newspapers, associations and schools.

Capital cities became the context within which people from the areas which had been mapped out came together. People from diparate ethnic groups met within them and realised in the process that they belonged to the same system, albeit one dominated by outsiders. Modern educational drew people together and led them to think of themselves in collective terms. In Manila the illustrados, the mestizo elite, started to think of themselves as Filipino, rather than Tagalog, Chinese or Spaniard, earlier than most Southeast Asians made this transition. In Indonesia, people began to think of themselves as Indonesian as well as or instead of as being Batak, Minangkabau, Dayak, Javanese or Sundanese. Cities were the melting pots from which national consciousness emerged. The print media and radio communications within them generated new languages. This is particularly the case in Indonesia, where "Indonesian", the Malay which had become the language of Islamisation, was endorsed as the national language.
In the early 20th century styles of social organisation and cultural expression were strongly affected, especially within urban areas and amongst indigenous elites, by modern systems. It is only with the turn of the century that select elites gained wider exposure to western secular education and within that class literacy became standard. Usually education took place first in French, Dutch or English, the colonial languages, but as soon as it did people began producing literature, poetry, short stories and novels, in Vietnamese or Malay-Indonesian. This represented a departure, only foreshadowed in the 19th century, from earlier styles of cultural production. Within traditional society literatures had been rooted in religious world views and rituals. Authorship was not individual and each performer, even in written form, saw themself as validated through representing a tradition founded in oral transmission of collective consciousness. In the new literatures individual authors wrestled with issues arising in personal lives confronted with changing times, conflicts between arranged marriages and modern notions of love and choice became prominent themes.
Newspapers and print media took root early, as journals and authored creative prose emerged in remote local settings in the 19th century. Moves into print media came as a vehicle for traditional texts in Thai, Jawi (Malay with an Arabic script) or Javanese (in Sanskrit derived script) as well as in association with modern authorship in new languages. Even newspapers, which exploded to reach all of the urban elites early in this century, emerged quickly in local as well as colonial languages, presenting indigenous issues as well as world news. Generally elite appropriation of print medias preceeded the articulation of national political associations as another aspect of the same transformation. By the 1920s and 1930s a new elite culture, rooted in experience of secular modern education and expressed in daily engagement with print and radio medias, informed the social lives of indigenous elites, the same people who led nationalist political movements and worked as doctors, teachers or civil servants in urban contexts.
Among the new urban elites patterns of social organisation borrowed from the bureaucratised models colonial governments imposed. Literary and cultural, as well as political, associations were formed as voluntary associations. This is to say they sought identifiable memberships on an individual basis of choice which it was assumed came through ideological affinity with objectives which were spelled out in constitutions and statutes. Secretaries kept minutes, treasurers recorded dues and elected office bearers became standard. Though this pattern of clubs and associations became a reflexive norm, we might observe that as Southeast Asians adapted aspects of modern association they nevertheless tended to be especially attuned, through traditional conditioning, to organisational minutia and procedure in ritual terms. In any case every style of organisation in the social sphere adopted club lines among the elites.
The Dutch, British and French introduced secular education principally as an aid to colonial administration, but also established technical and medical schools. Their educational systems catered directly and almost exculsively to traditional indigenous elites, who had been largely coopted into alliance with European dominated administrative structures. In the Philippines the Americans aimed to spread secular education further and took schools into villages and towns, where they came to counterpoint the Catholic churches the Spanish had established as the most prominent of local institutions. Local elites gravitated to the new institutions as windows to a wider new world and not only as tools for access to power within colonial institutions of power. Even the schools which were created by colonisers carried a powerful seed of nationalism. Enlightenment notions of equality and revolution were as foundational as emphasis on reason and science within modern schooling. Thus, even those who were being trained to serve colonial administrations were implicitly taught the values of freedom and democracy. They generally noticed the contradiction.
As soon as new schooling came into view locals appropriated it for purposes beyond those determined by Europeans. In the mid 19th century the Siamese king Mongkut, already familiar with Enlightenment sciences, found an English tutor for his children and sent them to school in Switzerland. In Jepara, on the north coast of Java and before the turn of the century, Kartini aimed to establish schools for local girls. In the 1920s the Taman Siswa movement in Indonesia established a network of independent schools. These were tinged by nativist nationalism and aimed to use modern schooling for distinctive local spiritual and cultural purposes. Every borrowing culture selects elements which conform to established patterns. Thus selected voluntary associations, such as the Theosophical Society, were particularly influential. In them local and colonising elites met on equal terms, a rare event in colonial contexts, and western mysticism converged with local Indianised predispositions. Through it, among other channels, classical ideas, strongest among precisely the court related elites which collaborated with colonial powers, were rearticulated and new patterns of local spiritual practice took shape.

The same cities which forged national identities were also centres of pluralism in an increasingly rigid form. While comparing the social patterns of colonial Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, Furnivall identified a plural social pattern. He characterised it as one within which a diversity of ethnic groups, peoples of different racial or ethnic origins, occupy more or less the same space, but are stratified, their ethnic origin coinciding with particular slots in the economy. For example in Malaya political administration was monopolised by the British; Chinese worked as indentured labourers in tin mines and as market gardener, in manufacturing and retailing; Indians worked on rubber plantations, as policemen and as cloth merchants; and Malays clung to coconut plantations, farming rice or fishing when they could not enter the bureaucracy.
This pattern developed everywhere in Southeast Asia. Modern migrant communities were not a simple continuation of earlier Indian and Chinese presence. The influx which began a century ago was on a vast scale and was regulated more rigorously by centralised authorities. In earlier periods gradual development of Indian and Chinese trading communities meant they mixed with local populations. Older local communities of migrant Asians remained present at the same time. Indian cloth merchants were long established everywhere and Chinese traders were prominent in local marketing networks, whether of rice, opium or trade goods. In the latter part of the 19th century the influx, of several million migrants in a short period, meant they brought their own culture intact. These new migrants, not independent traders but indentured labourers, were also settled into cohesive working camps, often in isolated environments. Instead of inter marrying, as earlier migrants had, they married and socialised more exclusively among themselves; instead of identifying with the country they had moved to, they remained separate.
In many cases they were actively prevented from identifying locally by regulations designed ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples. The effect of colonial legislation was to exaggerate the ethnic division of labour and polarity of the economy. In Indonesia the Chinese were forbidden from owning land and confined to towns, they could not choose to become market gardeners and their main outlet lay through retail trade, which also happened to be the most dynamically expanding part of the economy. Naturally the Chinese moved into a position of dominance within it they still maintain. Colonial regulations, cultural proclivities and accidents of historical background combined to mean that new migrants entered most vigorously into the dynamic sectors of the economy.
The same networks which facilitated nationalism created new divisions. In earlier periods boundaries blurred, Chinese communities became mestizo and eventually adopted local languages. After 1870 the volume of migration combined with the mixture of sexes involved to lead to crystallisation of identities, within migrant communities just as among incipient nationalists. From the late 19th century, and continuing to the World War II, Chinese and Indian communities were able to maintain a more separate identity than they had previously. Like indigenous peoples, they also created their own schools, newspapers and associations and through them they promoted identities which departed farther from those of the people they lived among. In the colonial context, where European colonisers maintained precisely such apartheid styles, this development was not out of character. In the modern period lines between communities have been more sharply drawn even as nationalism took shape through the same medias.

scriptural reformation and spiritual visions of independence
Religious and political dimensions of indigenous response to modernisation should be considered together. When we refer to nationalism we habitually consider it in political terms, as a phenomenon of mass movements and primarily a response to colonialism. In other words we conflate modern social change with issues of cultural and ethnic identity while also imposing a distinction, which we hold prominent, between religion and politics. Nationalism is not only reaction against western imperialism, an Asian response to an externally imposed stimulus. It has been part of a world-wide process of social change reflected in every sphere of consciousness and organisation and extending far beyond the narrow domain of formal politics.
In touching traditional thought within Southeast Asian societies we noted that political, social and religious dimensions were not separated. Validations of polity have been simultaneously spiritual, social and political. Early systems did not distinguish religion and politics in the way we do and religious changes go hand in hand with the emergence of nationalism. Even in the Spanish Philippines the church was the most effective link between Manila and provincial powers. There nationalism also emerged first as a result of discriminatory practice on the part of Catholic orders, making it virtually impossible for Filipinos to become clergy, priests or monks. Thus religious issues fed nationalism and agitation centred on efforts of indigenous people to have voice within the most important integrating network, the Catholic church. Distinct modernisms, also related to political impulses, arose within Buddhist as well as Islamic communities.
Indigenous modernism arose first farthest from direct colonial impact as a process of independent religious innovation. In Thailand continuing linkage between the sangha and royalty has meant that modernist consciousness came vigorously through dominant religious and political institutions rather than as a counter to them. Mongkut, King of Siam in the mid 19th century, was a monk for 26 years prior to assuming the throne. Having studied Latin, English, mathematics and astronomy, through contacts he pursued with missionaries, he became critical of other monks who engaged in chanting without understanding the scriptures. The emphasis on comprehension of texts he initiated, through the Dhammayutikaya movement founded in 1833, aimed to reduce confusion of orthodoxy with popular magic. He brought modernist ideas into Thai Buddhism, his movement was the first identifiably modernist religious movement in the region and it demonstrates that initiatives to appropriate the fruits of the Englightenment, were not merely reactive to western colonialism.
King Mongkut of Siam, as Thailand was called in the 19th century, was the same king referred to in "Anna and the King of Siam", but far from being the benign fool he is made out to be in popular reproductions of that story. He was a noted scholar, a serious Buddhist and an astute politician with an innovative mind. These qualities of some account when we note that Thailand was able to maintain its independence partly because of them. Although close to the line of succession he was not selected as ruler in the l820s and it was convenient for him to remain in the sangha. Had he come out of the monastery it might have appeared as a claim to power, as his support within the elite was considerable. So Mongkut remained a monk while Rama III, his half brother, was king. Though he was a monk, as royalty he also had special influence. He was made the abbot of a prominent wat in Bangkok, which became the centre of his new movement, and the continuing close link with royalty meant that the movement he founded has had special influence, disportionate to its size.
The Dhammayutika, still considered an elite order within the Thai sangha, continues to emphasise a critical rational and scholarly approach to original scriptures. Its following study Pali so as to actually understand it, rather than memorising scriptures as many traditional monks might. At the same time the movement translated understandings into the language of Thai experience by introducing a sermonising style of delivery as an adjunct to ritual. The Dhammayutika is still associated with effort to purify Thai popular Buddhism of syncretic accretions, to reduce confusion of Buddhism with popular cults, magic, spirit beliefs and practices. The form of religion he advanced involved quest for meaning rather than magical, intuitive and ritualised powers. This can be glossed as a shift from an intuitive to a more intellectual sense of and approach to what religion is.
Subsequently related reformist sects become important in all of the mainland sangha. In Thailand, Laos and Cambodia the traditionalist group is known as the Mahanikaya, or "Great Order", and the reformists belong to the Dhammayuttikaya. In Burma the traditionalists generally belong to the Sudhamma, the "Good Dhamma" order while the reformists belong to the Shwegyin, also founded in the 19th century. In each case modernist groups are more committed to study of Pali texts, practice rigorous meditation without the magical purposes which tinged earlier habit and are strict with regard to prohibitions on the handling of money.
As the relationship between the Thai monarchy and sangha was continuous and royalty initiated western education, as well as change within the sangha, modernisation did not appear as opposition to tradition. In Burma, as in Thailand, the traditional state had acted as the major patron of the sangha. But British conquest eliminated the traditional state and Burma was subsequently administered as a province of the British Indian empire. Because the state had strongly resisted British control, the province was ruled directly rather than through residual elites. This meant the sangha was weakened, but on the other hand it was the only remaining significant traditional structure potentially challenging the British and nationalism in there took distinctly religious form. The sangha not only lost royal patronage, it was positively disadvantaged by British policies. As a result it did not have the strength and vitality which produced a revival and modernisation, such as we find in Thailand.
Lay Buddhists played a prominent role in the early 20th century reform of Burmese Buddhism. Modernism and religious change within Burmea thus came through different channels than in Thailand. It was generated by the western educated laymen who saw Buddhism as a point of reference for opposition to the colonialism. The impact of imperialism thus directly generated a division is between religion and political power. Where colonialism divided spiritual and secular domains, they nevertheless went hand in hand within nationalism. The first notable victory of Burmese nationalism came when agitation led to concession that even the British had to take off their shoes when entering temple compounds.
The early modernisation of Burmese Buddhism is most clearly associated with the Young Men's Buddhist Association, the YMBA. The parallel with the Young Men's Christian Association, YMCA, was not incidental. From its origins in the late 19th century until around World War II the YMCA was not just the youth recreation movement it appears as now, but an active mission force. During the 1920s there were 80 western YMCA workers in China alone. Their work was part of a wider Protestant 'social gospel' movement, which aimed to demonstrate Christian brotherly love through social service. Thus the Young Men's Buddhist Association in Burma was similarly dedicated to practicing Buddhist values through social, as well as ritual, expression and this social reorientation of religious teachings has been a fundamental correlate of religious modernism, one which, as it happens, converges easily also with political readings of religious purpose.

As has been noted, Islamisation was in the first instance facilitated by the fact that Islam came to Southeast Asia in a Sufi form. Its mysticism meant that continuities with earlier practices were clear, as sufism emphasises charisma and magic in a way that modern scriptural Islam does not. In the case of Islamic modernism there was a shift, not unlike that within Theravada, toward stress on the primary messages of the Koran and away from emphasis on relationships with charismatic teachers. The haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, was facilitated by the same steamships which carried cargoes of rice, so after 1870 the number of Southeast Asians with experience of the heartlands of Islam increased dramatically. Print increased the availability of both Arabic and local religious works, changing media of instruction about Islamic teachings. The development of new religious thought in Islam was tied to expression through newspapers and at the same time a challenge directed against British or Dutch power.
The Islamic University of al Azhar in Cairo became as much a Mecca for archipelago Islam as Oxbridge did for elites colonised by the English. It was a clear alternative focus for a reformed identity in the Malaysian case and depended, in the same way transmission of European culture did on modern communications. Malay nationalism initially centred on modernist Islam with roots in Cairo, initiated in the late 19th century by Mohammad Abduh. Abduh was influential in effort to reconcile Islamic doctrine and theology with modern scientific thought and his works fed Islamic modernism worldwide. Whether through the haj or through study in Cairo archipelago Muslims encountered nationalists from colonised Islamic countries in the Middle East. As a result effort to renew Islam, to interpret it in a way that made sense in the modern scientific world, went hand in hand with increasing awareness of colonialism as an international, rather than local, phenomenon.
In Indonesia the diversity of societies is greater than in Malaysia and modernist Islam took a variety of forms. The Padri movement began in the l830s among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra. The Padris were followers of Wahabi purism, which had become prominent in Arabia in the late l8th century.They created a network of schools which competed with the older sufism in Minangkabau society and set the stage for a civil war which led to Dutch intervention and control. Even after conquest, the Padri movement continued to revamp the traditional religious schools of the Minangkabau area. Throughout the 19th century new Islamic impulses spread through the islands. In the first instance, as in the case of the vigorour Nakshabandi tarekat, these came in the form of new versions of sufism. These movements, were interwoven with local revolts, such as the outbreak in Banten in 1888. On the whole we should veiw them as parts, albeit new waves, of the continuing process of Islamisation. That theme, ongoing since the advent of Islam in the archipelago, continually brought intensification in local practice and new versions of what Islam was understood to be.
More distinctly modernist versions of Islam become prominent only early in the 20th century. In Java the Muhammadiyah movement was founded in Yogyakarta by Ahmad Dahlan in l9l1. It set itself against the Islam of the kyai. Most Javanese, even in cities, experienced Islam as part of a synthesis including Indiic and animistic beliefs. Muhammadiyan stressed a revamping to expunge what it saw as outdated elements, setting itself against the syncretism present within the pesantren pattern. Muhammadiyah established its own modern schools with a curriculum including mathematics, science, and social science along with traditional Islamic subjects, as taught in pesantren. It also, like the YMCA or YMBA, aimed to work through social welfare associations and sponsored medical clinics. Ideologically the movement was against interaction with spirits in local practice and was originally not especially anti-colonial. Muhammadiyah stressed self-improvement of the internal structure of Islamic community.

Overview of religious movements suggests that in the modern period religion and politics have become more separate. Distinction between religious and secular power was increased by the colonial situation, as Christian powers monopolised political and military force in countries where most people were Buddhist or Muslim. In Burma early nationalism focused on Buddhist issues as counters to English monopoly of political power. The Burmese who were involved may have felt that religion and politics ought to be integral, but in the least their circumstance informed them that religion was no longer convergent with power. Islam served as a banner of revolt against Dutch and English power in Indonesia and Malaysia. The first mass movement of Indonesian nationalism, the Sarekat Islam which emerged in 1912, used Islamic identification to bring cohesion to opposition, directed in the first instance against Chinese business competitors but rapidly focusing on the Dutch.
New tensions arose as religious communities were defined in scriptural and purist terms. Syncretic practices did not emphasise boundaries, the outer limits of community. Religious communities focused on courts, schools or monasteries in a hierarchical world where people progressed through layers of knowledge until they came to a mystically conceived centre. In becoming scriptural people defined experience and identification in increasingly exclusive and literal terms. Whether in the Islamic or Buddhist cases, this meant that in modernism there was a new preoccupation with boundaries. Concern for the boundaries of religious community mirrored the development of national identities and brought conflict in new ways over religious issues. Paradoxically the very strength with which people held ideas isolated them more from each other. Growing separateness within the religious sphere was another aspect of the same forces and process which generated plural societies under colonialism.
With the print revolution Protestantism brought emphasis on scriptures accessible to local people, the Bible was translated from Latin into German or English. Use of languages that people understood brought emphasis on what was contained in scriptures and challenged the hierarchy of the church. Earlier religion had been considered implicitly universal within the contexts it dominated. Reform movements, whether of Protestant Christianity or of Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims, introduced notions of religion as a distinct and cohesive domain. Traditional religion had appeared as melded with society and folk practices. Geertz termed this "scripturalism", when commenting on Islamic modernism, and we can obviously relate it to an emphasis on doctrines presented through writing and accessible via print media. Print naturally brings more widespread focus on mental understanding which contrasts with emphasis on what may be felt, through personalised relationships within monastic structure or ritual practice.
Modernist shifts can thus be related to growing separation between the intellect, critical facilities, and other parts of the body. In commenting on traditional monastic systems within Theravada and Islamic, I suggested that participation was defined by attunement in feeling. The significance of ritual chanting lay not in whether words were understood but in the very act itself. Emphasis was on experience as such, not in understanding of or abstraction about it. In contrast within modernist movements emphasis falls on written words everybody has access to and these are located outside, apart from inner experience. Mental or rational understanding of teachings has been prioritised as a result. Both the Dhammayutika and the Muhammadiyah aim to "demythologise" religion, paralleling a theme of Christian theology. Each modernist movement works to disentangle what it registers as the kernel of religion, from the ritual, mythic and participatory structures which used to be fundamental to local practices. Ritual participation speaks to intuition through the heart; reformed religion appeals more directly to the intellect, to the head.

We began by considering the formation of the substratum, of village communities, and the classical era, which produced elite court cultures. Then we dealt with the growth of a middle sectors, in religious communities and trading classes, and now we have touched the generation of modern movements. In dealing with millenarian aspects of liberation movements we come full circle, to conjunction between the most deeply rooted perspectives of and the most recent influences on the region. In the first instance the village majority has interpreted recent events through old cosmologies. Though seeking social justice and economic wellbeing as we also imagine them, they have still tended to see those as reflections of cosmological mandates. Villagers have thus looked to leaderships, even when those have been drawn from modern classes, with expectation that they would be aligned to cosmic principles, even if in a new time, in the way earlier royalty was supposed to attune to their time.
Traditional spirituality is not an incidental leftover from a past era but a continuing source of dynamic response to new pressures. Some people cling conservatively to tradition, but on the whole traditions are being reintented, remoulded, readapted and redirected. By focusing on millenarian impulses of transition years we highlight spiritual purposes which appeared prominent to locals but seem incidental in our political narratives. Excellent new social histories treat local perspective through focusing on peasants, emerging new class groups and the diverse impulses revealed through local process. But beyond noting heterogeneity in local process or the presence of ordinary actors, we can also entertain local visions to grasp their volition.
Asian revolutions have usually been linked to millenarian impulses. Within upheavals such as the Chinese or Russian revolutions, peasants, who animated them, remained conservative. Historians view millenarianism as a throwback and usually distinguish peasant, religious, communist and nationalist movements. Some even hold that peasants are essentially duped if school teachers translate their aspirations into communism, as they did in Vietnam, and there is no doubt that for peasants ideology was secondary. Asian urban elites, the bourgeoisie or intellectuals formed by modern education and media, did formulate ideologies in western terms from early in this century. But even when peasants followed them, they read different meanings into those ideologies and from their perspective revolutions were neither nationalist nor communist at base.
Connecting peasants to states has been a primary challenge of nationalism and the fact that their movements take utopian form has influenced the linkage. Of modern ideologies communism converged most with the utopianism of earlier traditions. As Marxism offered a coherent critique of imperialism, early in this century it influenced even elite religious and secular nationalists who did not identify with it. More critically, it was easier for animists to relate to than scriptural or liberal modernism, as its utopianism facilitated their identification with it. Communism envisions classless society through revolution and projects a future without contradictions between capital and workers. It is totalistic and dialectical, holding that understanding depends on comprehending relations to the whole, and rooted in an absolute, in conviction that the doctrine itself is comprehensive; if a party is unsuccessful it is because it has not embodied the principles of historical materialism correctly. This circularity parallels traditional idioms of power, as within notions of divine kingship, or indeed most religious thinking, the human can err, but principles of the system are immutable.

Millenarianism is evident in all world cultures. The book of Revelations images final judgement and the beginning of a new epoch in which heaven and earth are merged. Periodically Christian utopian movements still crystallise around expectation that the day of judgement is near and will be heralded by a second coming of Christ. In this sense the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are millenarian. Whether through floods, divine intervention or atomic war there is expectation of cataclysmic change implying purification: those who are damned will find out they are; those who are saved will be elevated into a new world run according to God's will. Millenarianism refers not only to utopian movements tinged by Christianity but also to the range of movements which speak of radical end to the order we know, of a new order in which all things will be right.
The ghost dance religion, of the 1880s among the Sioux on the plains of the American west, shaped their violent outburst against domination. It was framed by prophecy that white people would be eliminated and the ancestral spirits and buffalo would return in the flesh. Hundreds of cargo cults in Melanesia have involved belief that westerners had magical access to material goods but colluded with local ancestors to keep a secret key hidden from local peoples. Expectations focused on the time when white people would disappear and 'cargo' would continue to arrive. There are senses of the millennium in both Buddhism and Islam. The famous General Gordon of Khartoum fought a Mahdi, an Islamic saviour in the Sudan. Buddhist notions of Maitreya, the coming Buddha, have been strong in China, Tibet, Japan, and within Theravada societies.
Christian time emphasises linear progression of events which do not repeat, leading to a final end. Indianised Southeast Asians have not held this sense of finality, their time repeats in cycles. Even the Brattayuddha, the final war in the Mahabharata, in not seen as a singular event, but as an acting out timeless struggle between spiritual and material dimensions. Within Khmer, Javanese or Burmese societies millenarianism is linked at once to ancestral spirits and Indianised cults. Concepts of the devaraja relate to the ebb and flow of power with the rise and fall of dynasties. In that frame when times are out of balance economically, politically or personally resolution is supposed to come through emergence of a new god king. The Javanese called their messianic figures the Just King or ratu adil, imagined as an ideal monarch who would again bridge the gap in planes between human life and cosmic law to re-establish balance.
Villagers usually expressed anger at oppression, frustration due to crop failures and resistance to demands in millenarian terms. For them material imbalances have been evidence, even proof, that rulers, whether kings, princes, presidents or prime ministers, are not in tune with the cosmos. Their movements typically focused on charismatic leaders presented, if in rudimentary terms, as kings to be. Leaders, thought to have extraordinary powers, collected regalia, claimed lineages connecting to royalty and structured village retreats as bamboo palaces. The most famous Burmese movement, the Saya San rebellion during the depression of the 1930s, took such form. Saya San was a western educated clerk in the tax office who was provoked by awareness of economic pressures on the peasantry. Despite western education and Buddhism, he had also been a monk, his movement took millenarian form and he was tagged as at once the founder of a new dynasty and the coming Buddha. The force behind uprisings in the Philippines, including the Sakdal movement during the 1930s in Luzon and the Huk movement after the war, cannot be explained by Marxist ideology.
In Indonesia the Sarekat Islam, begun in 1912 as a movement against Chinese traders, is seen as the first mass movement of modern nationalism, but its leader, Tjokroaminoto, was identified by Javanese with Herutjokro, the ratu adil. From its origins in 1921 the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, became mainly a vehicle for abangan, or peasant, Javanese interests. It became the largest party outside the communist block by its peak in the early 1960s, but from its inception membership was concentrated in animistically oriented Javanese communities. It extended to take in many who were not disciplined by Marxist ideology partly because it had no competitors in linking peasants to national politics. Although led by westernised elites peasant support for these movements has not been determined by modern ideologies as such.

For local intelligentsias everywhere independence meant opportunity to replace Europeans, to assume control over modern communications infrastructures, and political narratives focus on the contention which brought them into power. At the same time social history has highlighted the plurality of motives and crosscurrents in transition years. Only remote minority groups were untouched by the disruptions of the depression and war. But however sweeping the changes, most people no doubt remained embedded in ongoing life and wanted mainly to be left alone; the grand narrative of political drama intruded as a disruptive tangent in their lives. Insofar as subsistence oriented villagers considered independence, it likely meant aspiration for an idealised normalcy and balance in a context of minimised demands from the state. For religious people, whether embracing Christianity as an appropriation of modernity or celebrating established faiths, the shifts at the end of the war provided an opening to base wider social practice on their faith.
From a spiritual perspective colonialism was not just mechanical mastery of institutions, guns and economies, it was also a spell. In magical idiom the suppression of will, as in any hegemony, rests on tacit convictions about the way things are and can shift suddenly. In Southeast Asia at the end of the war, as in Europe recently, changes reflected not only who held what instruments of power, but also how human will was mobilised and perceptual gestalt configured. Sweeping changes in popular perception of the possible can occur almost instantaneously and such shifts are what millenarian projections refer to. For example the opening provided by glassnost led to dramatic shifts in perspective on Soviet dominance and a reconfiguration of social realities in Eastern Europe followed rapidly at the end of the 1980s.
Similarly the enforced quiet of colonial twilight in the depression years was broken dramatically when the Japanese punctured the myth of white supremacy. As the occupation drew to a close in 1945 most Indonesians, Burmese, Vietnamese and Filipinos felt the prewar order was already past. Urbanites and villagers shared this conviction and prepared for an independence which seemed immanent and cosmologically destined. European blindness to the spiritual depth and pervasiveness of popular sentiment contributed to the protracted painful transitions which ensued, as in the first instance cololialists assumed that only a small elite stood against them. The force of millenarianism was difficult for them to grasp. They did not recognised that its reference was to the same shifts in atmosphere which we registers through different idioms, and it appeared irrational to them.
From religious perspectives the transitional revolutions have been the outer layers of a reshaping which was also taking place spiritually. The state is responsible for regulating or providing a context for spiritual life according to traditional Theravada, Confucian, Muslim and Catholic religions. That conjunction had been suspended under colonial regimes, dominated by foreign worldviews. Though a reformation styled separation of political and religious spheres was evident in some elite ideologies, at the roots of social life traditional vision predominated. Thus among the plurality of interests and ideologies shaping transitions to independence we register powerful groups who pursued visions dominated by spiritual senses of purpose. These resonances are most apparent in the widespread movements toward an Islamic state, termed darul Islam in Indonesia, but similar convergence was evident in Buddhist senses of the Burmese revolution and even in the Confucian spirituality which remained implicit within Vietnamese communism. These perspectives both influenced transitions to independence and moulded trends of the postwar era.

In Vietnam traditional images presented the end of the war as implying an irrevocable end to the French order, one which had still held a place for imperial rituals. According to local spiritual culture the name for "village" (xa) meant at root "the place where people come together to worship the spirits". In the Vietnamese variant of the Chinese model it had still been held, even within the French order, that imperial rituals such as the Nam Giao drew on the power and good will of ancestors, especially those of the royal clan, to guarantee crops and the social welfare of the population. Rulers had to be tuned to nature and changed according to rythms which, even when not apparent on the surface, were felt in the tight village communities.
When the Emperor Bao Dai abdicated on August 22, 1945 he sanctioned the Democratic Republic led by the Viet Minh and especially entrusted it with the maintenance of his ancestral temples. To villagers, still bound to the land through cults of tutelary spirits focused on ancestral founders, this act represented more than a change of dynasty, it foreshadowed the end of a profound constellation of relationships between heaven and earth. Nevertheless ancestral rituals, including festivals such as Tet, the lunar new year celebration of ancestors, continued to have symbollic force as a way of reforging bonds between the ancestors, nature and society.
Deeply imbued vision of social order implied for Vietnamese contestants that the tensions at the end of the war would lead to one victor from among the many who initially appeared as candidates, not to pluralistic accord. Circumstances made it appear that the communists had made the most successful effort to assimilate modern western notions to the universe of Vietnamese discourses. This implied their victory was not only tactical, but also cultural, based on a shift in the mandate of heaven which could not be reversed by ploy or strategy. According to Mus's argument the revolution was decided in popular eyes in the critical period from August 1945 to March 1946 and this marked a whole generation of leadership, as the same period also did in Indonesia. This culturally rooted sense of the revolution remained largely invisible to French or American analysts and strategists. By focusing on ideologies, institutional structures and urban centres they consistently failed to register that the mobilisation of popular will, conceived locally as spiritual even when communist, influenced events more than formalised ideologies.
Imperial powers did note that in the Mekong delta the Hoa Hao variant of Buddhism attracted a following, as did analogous Javanese movements, around the founder's visionary projection of French defeat in 1940. Within it practices of individual spiritual enlightenment clearly intermeshed with the impending revolution. As Woodside noted, "...classical culture had been more discredited at the upper levels of society than at the lower and...the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po (whose spirit regularly entered Cao Dai mediums in the 1920s and 1930s) still touched the hearts of more Vietnamese peasants than did the Paris commune." Within that movement much was made of ethnic myths of origin which saw the primordial spiritual strength of the people as lying in a magical prowess which would defeat the technical advantages of modern powers.
The strength of the Hoa Hao movement, which had an independent military-administrative structure in the villages of the Mekong delta, provoked violent elimination of its leader in 1947. Insofar as Hoa Hao prophesy held true in the end it was as a statement about communist rather than syncretic Buddhist power. In urban centres a vigorous but limited (in 1935 some 2000 adherents) modern revival of Buddhism competed with Marxism in attracting intellectuals to a vision of independence in Vietnam. Though rooted in older Mahayana Buddhism these new movements emphasised the explication of original scriptures in the vernacular and especially competed with Catholic missionaries. The latter had succeeded in communicating to villagers through local language at a time when most local Buddhists still seemed esoteric and technical, making Mahayana appear as a preserve of monks.
At the same time on another front, examination of how communist intellectuals were drawn together led Marr to note significant resonances between communism and engrained millenarianism. Terms in prison politicised many Vietnamese who had not previously been radical and in the process they forged spiritual bonds which later underpinned revolutionary cells. While millenarian religious impulses converged with revolutionary commitment for many people, at the same time many intellectuals did opt for Marxism as a liberation from what they considered a stasis oriented Confucian traditionalism which they did want to jetison.

In Burmese theorising the interchange between Marxism and Buddhism was direct and profound. Sarkisyanz established that underpinning the ideology of U Ottama in the 1920s there were notions that political struggle for independence paralleled the stages of Buddhist progression toward enlightenment. Pursuit of "nirvana within this world" was a Buddhist equivalent of the contemporaneous Christian sense of the "social gospel". Burmese nationalists clearly evoked ideals, of how the state is supposed to house spiritual endeavour, which trace as far back as the Indian Emperor Asoka. Communal values of selflessness and an ethos of leveling were related at once to Buddhism and communism within the Thakin movement of the 1930s. Even popular readings of terms such as "revolution" and "liberation" were shaped at critical junctures by Buddhist imagination and constraints. While diverging radically in other respects most nationalists converged in this respect. Aung San's leadership of the revolution, at the close of the war, brought an emphasis on separation of religion and politics, on socialist militancy in modern secular terms. But the culturalist anti-western traditions of U Ottama and Saya San became especially relevant again under U Nu's leadership, after Aung San's death and up to 1962.
The relatively westernised ethos of transitional leaders like Aung San, or Sjahrir and Hatta in Indonesia, gave way quickly to a neotraditionalism U Nu shared with Sukarno. In Burma dedication to fostering a Buddhist basis of the state was foreshadowed in 1950 and in place by 1951. U Nu reasserted the traditional role of the state as the protector of religion, seeing it as embodying the cultural values which, following the era of colonial suppression, needed to be enhanced to facilitate spiritual liberation. Socialism continued to be invoked in Burma, as in Indonesia, but communism was disavowed by the political philosophies which became dominant in both. From 1949 onwards the presence of communist insurgents in the hills led governments, first under U Nu then Ne Win, to emphasise the incompatibility of Buddhism and Marxism, but they advocated Burmese Buddhist socialism in the same breath.
Revolutionary transitions to independence, as in Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma, sharpen collective focus on spiritual issues in the same way that the prospect of death does for individuals. In Indonesia intense energies were unleashed during the suspension and excitement which birthed the Republic. Whatever their variant views most participants look back on the early days of the revolution with nostalgia. They recall a spiritual unity of purpose which they imagine drew diverse classes and ethnic groups, if momentarily, into united effort and aspiration. Whatever the actual unity no doubt they were touched by the intensity of the time. Those of formative age remained indelibly marked and the way they were marked matters, because their generation moved on to assume leading roles in the Republic.
Stringent wartime circumstances and policies combined with chauvinism to alienate locals but many Javanese initially saw the Japanese as the liberators who had been predicted in the prophecies of Joyoboyo, a thirteenth century king of Kediri. The deprivations of the occupation functioned like an enforced asceticism, focusing senses and concentrating energies, but they were tempered by conviction that freedom (merdeka) would follow. Anderson suggests that local youth were spiritually especially prepared for revolution by the Japanese, who trained militias through ascetic practices not unlike those employed earlier in hermitages or Islamic schools (pesantren). In Javanese millenarian imagery the revolution was a momentary vacuum, an upheaval resulting from the departure of divine sanction (wahyu) from those in power, a time of craziness setting the stage for a new golden era. During the revolution defeudalisation was a theme alongside decolonisation, millenarian senses of the revolution underpinned populist idiom and mystical sects thought of their practices as integral to revolution. The collapse of the outer walls of the Yogya palace (kraton) was connected to deeper changes, reading symbolically as a physical parallel to a spiritual opening and leveling. Powers (kasekten), which had been concentrated in kings and courts, were seen as flowing outward so that the communion between human and cosmic planes, previously mediated through royalty, became widely accessible for the first time.

Even where the political order was relatively stable or transitions less violent religious aspirations have been interwoven with revolutionary movements. In the Philippines the hierarchical organisation of the Catholic Church tied its leadership closely to the state, paralleling social linkages between the Thai sangha and royalty. But liberation Theology, especially influenced by currents from Latin America from the 1960s onward, appealed to sectors of the priesthood who identified their mission with social and spiritual welfare. The people power revolution, which contributed to the end of the Marcos era in 1986, involved even the hierarchy of the Church and made candlelight prayer vigils a weapon of protest. At the grass roots of society Catholic idiom has been appropriated to converge with calls by the poor for social justice. Traditional imagery throughout Southeast Asia presented events within the human microcosm as interwoven with and parallel to the social and natural orders of the macrocosm. Accordingly, at the deepest level the idiom of local movements suggests that the spiritual struggle of revolutions related to a reorganisation within the individual psyche. This, simultaneous with the displacement of colonial power over national cultures, related to unseating the 'imperialism of the mind within the body'. Releasing spiritual consciousness, suppressed by the same colonialism which subjugated locals in political and economic terms, read as integral to external revolutionary process.

Throughout the archipelago Japanese appeals to Islam enhanced conviction that the occupation foreshadowed the creation of the dar-al islam (the house of Islam). Movement toward an Islamic state had already been a leading current in prewar nationalism and played an especially consistent and powerful role in Aceh, which was never regained by the Dutch. Elsewhere in Indonesia, in Sumatra, Sulawesi, West Java, along Java's north coast and within its heartlands Islamic teachers (kyai) and the ideal of Islamic statehood sparked movements which competed with secularism at local and national levels right though the 1940s and 1950s. In the southern Philippines the Muslim struggle began later but paralleled the Darul Islam in representing revolutionary nationalism in an Islamic mould. Orthodox Muslims aspirations in Malaysia and Indonesia had been suppressed by colonialism, but were tuned within early nationalism. Contacts with Mecca and Cairo brought awareness that European colonialism was a dampening force throughout the Islamic world. Muslim movements were not simply expressions of purism, at root they also drew from millenarian and magical strands of Islam. The Darul Islam, or Islamic state, movements of Indonesia carried emphasis on the internal spiritual facet of the holy war, the jihad. Both highly educated leaders such as Kartosuwirjo, and many followers understood that the establishment and expansion of the house of Islam involved inner purification as well as external war.
The Indonesian leadership contained these aspects of their revolution, standing against changes they felt could jeopardised negotiations. The relatively secularised priyayi, heirs to Indic court traditions but Dutch educated, controlled the bureaucracy and constrained the social and religious impulses of both the Darul Islam and communism. Implicitly religious differences undercut communist claims on Indonesian nationalism. In 1948, virtually as the revolutionary army under Sudirman threatened to break with Sukarno, enforced demobilisation of communist regiments precipitated civil war within the Republic, centring in the Madiun area of East Java. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was eliminated, as in had been previously by the Dutch in 1926, and many thousands died in local killing overseen by the firmly Muslim West Javanese Siliwangi division. By surmounting these populist guerrilla and communist "threats to nationalism", the leadership gained ground for negotiation, but at the expense of elevating the cleavage between Islam and Javanism to a new order of intensity which persisted through the 1960s. Post independence divergence between Muslim parties, the traditionalist Nahdatul Ulama and modernist Masyumi, and the syncretic or secular parties, the nationalists (PNI) and communists (PKI), converged with difference in cultural orientation and related to differing underlying spiritual senses of what the national revolution aimed to accomplish.
Though framed as banditry by the ostensibly secular victors, from an internal perspective Darul Islam movements, like the Moro nationalism of Mindanao and Sulu, expressed conviction that national revolutions remained unfinished so long as resulting states built on European rather than Islamic models. Like Marxists, for whom the revolution was incomplete without radical social transformation, many Muslims fought for a revolution they never won. In Aceh and along the north coast of Java changes were deep rooted and spontaneous, reflecting populist and religious impulses contrary to the thrust of what Europeans could register as "nationalist" political development.

National revolutions have not operated within self-evident boundaries. It is notable that the boundaries of new states do correspond, through most of Southeast Asia as in Africa, to those of colonialism. But within those diverse ethnicities maintain contending views up to the present and many impulses have been suppressed completely. We should consider revolutionary transitions as continuing well beyond the time frames usually defining them. In the broad sense, that is when considering national revolutions as more than a matter of legal recognition of national sovereignties, national revolutions continue now. Even those which might be considered 'complete' certainly involved extensive contention well beyond the apparent point of victory. In Indonesia regional struggles all through the 1950s continued the process of consolidating the state which had been proclaimed in 1945. In Burma wars have never stopped. In Cambodia the complexion of independence still remains indeterminate. In the southern Philippines, Aceh, East Timur, Irian Jaya, as among the Karens and other self-conscious groups, submerged nationalisms or proto-nationalisms remain present. At the same time populist and socialist energies within Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines animated activists earlier but have been suppressed. In the process of national revolutions there have been innumerable ethnic, social and religious aspirations which have been marginalised as victors captured the capacity to define states.
On the margins of the state colonialism meant not only conquest, but also missionising, mining and plantations. Communities such as the Karen in Burma and the Batak of Sumatra came into contact with modern education through Christianity in the 19th century. But on the whole colonial rule did not integrate tribal minorities culturally into modern states. Similarly, anti-colonial movements, such as the Aceh or Java wars in the archipelago or the Saya San rebellion in Burma during the 1930s, centred on aspiration to harmony through tradition. Within them opposition to imperialism was filtered through and identified with ethnicity, language, or kinship. These early peasant, court and religious movements were thus the dying gasps of traditional entities. They may be connected to nationalism through elements of aspiration and the mythology of subsequent activists but contained no vision of a modern state. In the modern era boundaries between worlds of symbolic meaning are sharpening as much as those between spheres of power. Even probing how religious changes relate to nationalism reveals a mentality once foreign to the region. Traditional validations of power construed politics as one aspect of an also spiritual process; their apparent separability, increasingly institutionalised, is a key feature of recent changes.
Local appropriations of classical and traditional idioms meant synthetic reformulation of identity at every stage. Vietnamese used Chinese structures as a weapon against China and synthesis made Indic myths local. Now local peoples aim to adapt modernity to their purposes and at the same time the prominence of spiritual commitment within their cultures means that independence has not been read simply as a matter of political and economic autonomy. Usually political independence has been seen locally as interwoven with social and religious purposes. Thus revolutions focused not only on transfers of sovereignty or promise that stomachs would be filled but also on aspiration to achieve spiritual freedom from imported idioms imposed through history.

chronicles of transition
Among recent books on Indonesian studies two deserve special attention. InLanguage and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Cornell UP 1990), Ben Anderson, a student of politics, treats central lineages of power, especially as embedded in languages extending from the kraton through emergent national elites into contemporary state philosophy. In The Political Economy of Mountain Java: an Interpretive History (U California P 1990) Robert Hefner, an anthropologist, focuses on reformulations of peripheral village economy and community through colonialism and the "green revolution". Anderson is a grand master of Indonesian studies and has defined a mode of discourse within the field. Hefner displays the competence of a new generation, bred on Anderson and Geertz, which finally brings balance to analysis of economic and cultural change.
Notwithstanding contrasts, the bridge between their works does not lie just in synchronicity of publication. Each highlights interplay between cultural and material domains while linking over a century of Javanese transition to global process. In each the ghosts of Max Weber and Karl Marx also dance against images of transformation. Yet these authors illustrate a sophistication surpassing that of the ancestors they invoke; they are sensitive to intervention and modest in claim. Each builds on grounded knowledge of Javanese subjectivities and crosses disciplinary boundaries fruitfully to explore local reformulations in response to encroaching capitalism. In passing both also betray telling hints of an ambivalent preoccupation with the fading of traditions which neither imply ever existed as cohesive or static entities.
I will begin with comments on each excursion in itself; turn to their impact on the subject, the "rebound" of scholarship; and finally reflect on what they together tell us, of Javanese identities and contemporary historical imagination. My aim is not so much to characterise the books as to situate them in their field and note how their production impinges on what they explore. Anderson is at once central to studies of Indonesian political culture and a shadowing presence for the New Order; his voice echoes in local views even when they register objection to it. Hefner's impact, naturally less ramified to date, may nevertheless already be evident locally, within the Tenggerese territory of his research.

Anderson is erudite and articulate; an essayist by disposition. His rhetorical skills combine with sensitivity to nuance, grasp of detail and ranging inquiry to make his excursions classics of Indonesian studies. Thus the appearance of this collection, opening them to a wider field, is more than justified. Yet, rather than trumpeting the relevance and cohesion of his works, he invites readers to question how they thread together, indeed whether the book has intelligible shape. His introduction, a synoptic biography of interest in itself, delicately outlines how his life history and professional perspectives have meshed.
Anderson's book groups essays according to focus on power, language and consciousness, but each excursion touches all of those, along with issues such as sexuality and personhood which remain obscure by this framing. Themes should not have overshadowed chronology, as significant trajectories of evolving imagination are clarified by these essays and deserved highlighting. Refigured temporally, for this consideration of them, the sequence of essays range through the imaginative 19th century world of court literature, especially the Centhini and Gatholoco, the awakening of Soetomo's national consciousness, transition to "Indonesian" language, kejawen (Javanist) resonances underpinning Sukarno's notions of power and the colonial roots of the New Order state. Finally essays on the politics of language and social communications delve into contemporary consciousness.
In probing an early 19th century "classic", the Serat Centhini, Anderson notes the absence of reference in it to prominent background realities, including Dutch presence and the ravages of war. Following Ann Kumar Anderson relates this massive project, which he notes has never been printed in full, to the encyclopaedists in France. Refering to Peter Carey's work, on early 19th century Javanese social conditions, he comments on the incapacity of the Javanese nobility to take advantage of disorder as Dutch power grew. Anderson notes that the ruling class is peripheralised in this text and that its authors aimed not to achieve social realism, but to pursue "professional dreams". Though framed as narrative, the text is filled with monotone enumeration, listing spirit beings, medicines, food, technology, sacred sites... indeed anything. To him the text suggests the absence of "heroic spirituality" and universality of pederasty and sodomy in the 19th century. In the least we learn that ways of speaking about sexuality have changed radically since then.
Anderson presents these insights to counterpoint overly romantic images of old Java. Romanticism is a silent opponent in this essay, but implicitly it speaks against stereotyped images which, in his introduction Anderson implies he was captive to in his youth. Here he emphasises that Javanese kingdoms were far from being seamless webs of "esoteric knowledge" and demonstrates that social and material concerns loomed large--even esoteric spiritual skills were deployed for livelihood. This silent target may be a straw man, as it is difficult to imagine who would mount a counter case. At the same time Anderson maintains a problematic distinction in this essay, while discussing conjuring, between "real power" and "real effects". Though this phrasing is doubtless acceptable to most readers, it appears as conjuring itself to this reader.
Moving to discussion of the Serat Gatholoco, Anderson observes that, by the 1860s, the likely time of its composition, earlier syncretism had clearly broken apart. In this text flagrant opposition between the hero, Gatholoco, and various kyai signalled profound disjunction between Javanism and Islam. The hero, an image of the "perfect man", is an undisguised phallus, his partner Dermagandhul a scrotum. Their wandering quest toward union, through what Anderson characterises as a stark imagined moonscape of pesantren, opium dens and sacred sites, depicts a Java stripped of the majestic complexity resonating behind the Centhini. By implication that world had passed. Poetic composition, violence to convention and verbal substance all rubbed against the grain of Javanism so deliberately that, as he suggests, only a master could have produced this classic.
In probing the memoirs of Dr Soetomo Anderson begins with a reference to Ronggowarsito, styled "last" of the pujangga, whose poetry imaged courtly decay. Soetomo, though a guiding light of Budi Utomo, the "first" nationalist movement, hardly mentions political life and wrote with a melancholy tone containing, as Anderson reads it, no sense of progress. Soetomo's sense of justice, in response to his treatment in Dutch schools stemmed from Javanese values animating him in youth. Anderson's treatment of how copying was viewed by Javanese and of nuances of the shift to Indonesian is marvellous. Despite traditional learning, Soetomo did not think of modernisation as imitating. Situating Budi Utomo as pivotal, looking forward as much as backward, Anderson says Soetomo's bequest was that he refound his ancestry in a new form.
In treating the languages of politics Anderson outlines how transitions between languages meant entry to new imaginative worlds, each characterised by distinct constraints. Beginning with the significance of krama and ngoko in Javanese, he explains the pressure to learn Dutch in the colonial context. Contrasting Javanese and Indonesian, he also notes that Indonesian became Javanised through the evolution of hierarchical levels in what began as "revolutionary Malay". Though updated from the original of 1966, this essay still imputes flatness to Islam, a view which is no longer apt. On the other hand this description of how words with meanings dissolved into mantric acronyms is evocative and still relevant, as is outlining of how local uses, of terms such as revolution, democracy and socialism, indigenised them. This essay does not make enough of the fact that Javanese is poly-vocal in itself, through the elaboration of its speech levels. This feature of the language implies that shifts into Indonesian (for that matter into Dutch or English) result in the addition of new levels as supplements to rather than always sharp breaks from indigenous discourses.
The leading essay in the volume, on "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture", is unquestionably the most influential of Anderson's works. Here he argues the momentum and interpretive relevance of indigenous imageries of "power" (kasekten). They are cosmologically rooted and mystical, presenting power as substantive rather than abstract, as an attribute of personhood rather than just a reflection of social positioning. To make the case he probes not only ideology, which he does treat in depth, but also concrete patronage patterns and complex internal politics of the Sukarno era. He certainly establishes that an indigenous logic, one also evident elsewhere in theories of divine kingship, remains a key to grasping social practices in Java.
Even in Anderson's formulation of the ideal within this essay there are limits, especially as he presented the Javanese notion of power as being essentially "amoral". For Javanese their ideas of power were never so divorced from morality. The teja, proof of power, was tested and moral judgements, of the type Anderson elsewhere applies to Suharto, are and were made within this framework too. Anderson does not properly pinpoint the ethics underlying the notion of halus, refined, personhood. Absence of pamrih, of concealed self interest as he puts it, is related in local mystical practices to the "selflessness" implicit in higher spiritual consciousness.
In their consideration of Anderson's essay, Koentjaraningrat and Soemarsaid Moertono both stress the necessity of practically siting Javanese theories. Koentjaraningrat argues that Anderson isolated the concept of power too much from the field of social practices; Moertono faults Anderson for failing to link the notion sufficiently to mystical conceptions and practices which are alluded to within kraton literature. Anderson does tie his vision of Javanese ideas of power to lineages of protest, as he registers the critical potential they contain. However he does not emphasise how such critiques relate to morality. In mystical terms powerful people act through conscious attunement to the collective, ideally as a vehicle for cosmic forces rather than personal will. Anderson cannot quite imagine that a ruler's connection to the will of others may be direct, so he does not register that Javanese once did.
Most western criticisms of this thesis take a different tack, faulting it for seeming to "explain" material issues ideologically. For example, in relation to how notions of power underpin "corruption" we need to site patrimonialism materially. Insofar as the pattern continues it is not only related to notions of power, but to realities of "income" dictated by exchange rather than monetised economies. In rationalised economies jobs are not just retainers, salary may equal income. However, since in Java, even now, "salary" rarely means (sufficient) income, continuing exchange is forced. Discontent usually relates to readings of the essay as idealistic, as claiming to "explain" society and politics exclusively in cultural terms. It is sufficient here to indicate that these debates arise from an imagined dualism, a reification of "material" and "ideological" domains. That polarity, as foundational to modern thought as "God" is to tradition, is no less problematic.
In his reconsideration of the issues, a late addenda to the essay, Anderson situates the notion of "charisma" historically. Interrogating Weber's use of it, as a sociological category, he now follows White in registering it as a "trope". In the end Anderson notes ironically that the devastating consequences of "charisma" are underpinned by the very rational technology Weber counterpointed it to. This inversion may implicitly constitute a warning, one Anderson does not note: that opposition to or obliviousness of this conjunction, may make us all the more subject to its dynamic. This discussion, increasingly abstract, runs the risk of situating concepts only inside other trains of thought, never as though also occurring in heads.
Whereas in the power essay Anderson focussed on links between Guided Democracy and the idioms of syncretic Mataram, in "Old State, New Society" focus is on the growth of the power of the state within society. This traces the emergence of the modern state during the past century. Situating independent Indonesia as "modern" the essay establishes that the nation is especially indebted to its immediate predecessor, the colonial state. Especially highlighting details of Suharto's career within military intelligence, in the succession of Dutch, Japanese and Indonesian states, Anderson indicates why "...the consistent leitmotiv of New Order governance has been the strengthening of the state qua state."
The essay is sewn with insight. For example he indicates that the American decision to side with the army, in 1965, was based on the view that it constituted a necessary integrating device. Sukarno had managed to pronounce the existence of the state, but its maintenance required reactivation of military underpinings such as had been essential within the Dutch framework earlier. Two decades ago Anderson drew special attention to two aspects of military systems in the third world: they gain power because within them tight chains of command master modern communications and because they constitute a prime vehicle for upward social mobility for the lower classes. This social function of the military has not been stressed in his writing, perhaps suggesting decreasing concern with local appropriative agency.
Questioning, in sembah-sumpah, why prominent Javanese, like Pramoedya, write in Indonesian, despite the richness and depth of their own tradition, Anderson finds a variety of explanations. He notes conditioning influences including the currency of Indonesian and the weight of an elite tradition so great that authors have been reluctant to face it. As Javanese literature was sung, he suggests it was not suitable for print. At the same time the "problem of pronouns", especially the absence of a generalised "you", makes it difficult to voice modern sensibilities in Javanese. One response lay in attempts to elevate ngoko, everyday Javanese, but these did not lead on. Beautiful discussions, of Poerbatjaraka picking up Ronggowarsito's mantle in Dutch, of silent Javanese within Pramoedya's Indonesian and of Yudistira's wayang intertextuality, all demonstrate the continuing, but "invisible presence of Javanese".
In speaking of the "impotence" of 19th century rulers, a refrain in these essays, Anderson, quoting a Dutchman, implies that potency is located only in material controls, as westerners habitually imagine. This paradigm slip conflates power with politics, ironically ignoring the very cultural potency of language he treats so well. His imagery, of fossilisation, similar to that stressed in earlier studies of Javanese literature, is tied to focus on the courts and at odds with the vigour of Javanism on other fronts. Javanese newspapers are referred to, but not situated as the counterweight to declining classics they may have been. Non use of classics and the absence of anti Dutch literature may alternatively mean those were no longer focal domains, that vitality centred elsewhere. Perhaps the real issue of local contest after the Java War was Islam, the "unswallowed lump", and not the pre-determined question of Dutch power.
Other kinds of writing and cultural expression, beyond the courts, are not sufficiently acknowledged in this framing of Javanese trends. Anderson implicitly maintains classist orientations: his images of "decline" are consistently in relation to "high traditions" and court power. Thus this essay, produced twelve years after the power essay, reverses its perspective. The earlier essay argued that the power of court idioms extends into the present; this argues their weakness even in the past. A centrist perspective is maintained in both essays as focus is implicitly on the necessity of opposition, as though preoccupation with and direct resistance to Dutch power is required to indicate local agency. Local power has been consistently evident through capacity to construct discourses outside and apart from the issues of subordination Anderson is preoccupied with, but in his eyes such expressions can only appear as powerlessness. Ironically it is precisely Anderson's interest in opposition that produces narratives which are directed by the same central lineages of power he ostensibly wants to elude.
Issues of krama and ngoko arise again when Anderson alludes to the difficulty of grasping recent codes. Following his 1972 glimpse of the New Order, he explores the language and cartoons of the Jakarta press. He notes that foreigners may grasp formal speech, the equivalent of krama, but miss innuendoes locals see. He styles the cartoonist Hidayat as Petruk, a clown/ commoner/ servant in the wayang, but elsewhere stresses discontinuities. Sarcasm tinges his references to constructs of this regime. Even when apt this shift in register, relative to his perspectives on Sukarno, merits comment. Anderson implies that Sukarno had something "real" to return to and Suharto has nothing to celebrate. This view is problematic.
New Order consolidation, of a framework only sketched by Sukarno, comes with military control at the expense of populist impulses. Overshadowing distaste for that aspect of the regime should not lead to neglect of continuities. Yet Anderson concludes "there are no kings, only Petruk", ignoring the rules he himself has outlined. According to those there is no doubt that Suharto, whether approved or not, has substantive wahyu in Javanese terms, as well as all that "real power" means in the west. This is not just an imagined or hollow claim. The monuments of the New Order, Project Mini or Suharto's grave, may appear only as pastiche to some, inside as well as outside the country. But in any case centralising powers are not alone in these endeavours. The creative impulse underlying this style is cultural, part of a shared field which tinges the whole spectrum of social and political positions in Java.
Anderson's reading is a sign of distance from the scene, as his empathy recently lies only with opposition. However the "old" idea of power should not be read only as mimicry just because moral evaluations of its use changes. Anderson's ambivalence stems from a confusion between moral judgments and interpretive frameworks. His angst arises over how, retrospectively, to integrate his wonderful sensitivity to Javanese cultural domains, once intuitively closer, with widening and critical global perspectives on a now distant place. At root the problem may stem from training in theories which set those in opposition unnecessarily.

Hefner frames Tengger transformations by stages of integration into wider markets and in his book the partnership of ethnography and history bears fine fruit. The wider scope of Hefner's overall project requires note. His first book, Hindu Javanese, treats the anthropology of religion; this one focusses on agricultural economy; and currently he is pursuing religious history, specifically Islamization, an interest foreshadowed in essays. In Hefner's introduction to this book he focuses on Marxist theory to set a stage for consideration of social changes in Tengger. From this stage his analysis of local history is that early development was mercantile rather than capitalist in the narrow sense. For Karl Marx free labour was essential to the latter, so Hefner concludes that Max Weber's sense of early, rather than modern, capitalism more fully illuminates the Javanese case.
At the dawn of the colonial era upland land holdings were small and undifferentiated, there was room to expand. Only in the lowlands did colonial interest, in organising extraction of surplus, lead to special support for communal structures and distinction between classes within villages. Land has became more concentrated recently, but in the highlands discrepancies in farm size remain less than in the lowlands and neither sharecropping nor rental are common. Bengkok lands, village land given to officials, are apparently insignificant in the highlands relative to the lowlands. A coffee revolution occurred, opening highland markets between 1860-1925 and tourism began in Tosari region in the 1920s. The potato blight of the 1930s had more pervasive impact in the mountains than the Depression. On the other hand the Japanese Occupation had devastating impact in the highlands, as tegal (dry field) cultivation was dependent on market economies and less subsistence oriented than sawah.
Along the way Hefner's study provides a rare glimpse into local dynamics during the 1965 coup and the suppression of debate since. He notes multiple causes of violence. Communist Party (PKI) strength was greatest in relatively cosmopolitan upland communities. Information on the Nahdatul Ulama (NU) leads to stress on religious rather than class sources of tension. In opening up a Nationalist Party (PNI) "land scam" he provides a gem of social history. Finally he touches local depths of the event by describing the incidence of mass spirit possession in Ngadiwono, a response to the killing of about forty cadres. He says this marked the "...end of an upland way of life" and comments that subsequent bureaucratic controls impose a struggle over "what sort of person to be".
Javanist or Hindu highlanders felt little identity with Pasuruan lowlanders, as the latter usually identified with Islamic patrons. Accepting Tenggerese self characterisation, Hefner holds that the highlands have been "middle peasant" territory, with haves and have nots but no unbridgeable gap between. He quotes a "poor peasant" saying:

Mountain people care less about rank and whether one becomes rich. What counts is to have something of your own, so you don't have to depend on other's and be ordered around. you want to be able to speak directly and look others right in the face.

Local objectives traditionally focussed on communal standing and autonomy, not identification with class. Mountain farmers continue, he says, to think their identity is tied to independent production and they cite the prevalence of gotong royong to distinguish themselves from lowlanders.
By the late 1970s new roads, bringing pesticides and the crops of the green revolution, brought excitement; people felt they did not have to remain poor. Hefner stresses local initiatives in the process, as farmers adopted a new cabbage strain from India in 1969 and pesticides in the early 1970's unprompted. By 1975 most farmers in Tosari and Ngadiwono had shifted from maize to rotating potatoes and cabbages. In early 1978 only one farmer used chemicals; ten months later one third did; by 1980 all did, in a survey of 142 households. Startup costs for crops such as coffee or cloves have been expensive, mainly a mid-slope development and dependent labour is an engine underpinning the green revolution, so these changes have accentuated class lines. However Tengger employers and workers alike stress personal relations, as even workers still insist they labour for kindness as well as wages.
Due to the lesser resilience of the highlands in contrast with sawah areas, highland history has been one of "ongoing ecological crisis" and new practices brought decreasing sensitivity to the land. Mound planting created deep downhill channels, setting a stage for mud slides and soil degradation. As Hefner puts it:

In a region once legendary for its rich, thick volcanic soil, bare rock and hard yellow clay are visible on steeply inclined fields. After rain showers, streams run thick with topsoil and roar down the mountainside, taking silt to irrigation channels and offshore reefs. What is happening to these hillside fields is nothing less than an environmental disaster... Farmers are well aware of the problem... The short term interests of production again run contrary to those of soil preservation.

With potatoes, triple cropping, deeper hoeing and shorter plant cover all combined to exacerbate problems which remained restricted under the old regime of maize.
Arguing that goods are both "practical" and "culturally expressive" he explores the '"anthropology of consumption". The consumerism of lowland culture brought national currents. In the late 1970s men began wearing watches, regardless of whether they could tell time. Class has been accentuated, through education and new elite aspirations channelled by schools. Ritual selametan used to be the prime channel for a conspicuous consumption which was contained within moral communities. Recently TVs have restructured entertainment. Once rare and semi public, they are now general and private. Now, "rather than suburban anonymity, the Javanese village today has... the feel of a well-disciplined high school."
Early chapters are enriched by excellent culling of secondary sources, but his detailing of local history could have drawn more on oral sources. Excellent treatment of the PNI land scandal is not contextualised by the aksi sepihak, unilateral seizures of land in the early 1960s which highlighted the extent of PNI and NU land holdings generally. Similar processes of local integration, though documented elsewhere, are not brought into view. The Tenggerese, like other once isolated communities, are only now being fully integrated into the state. In this instance Hefner argues the process is attended by vigorous Islamisation, essentially on hold from 1940 to 1970 but revived since with increasing force.
In commenting on his field interactions Hefner notes that by 1985 informants were very much more open, in relation to the events of 1965, than they had been in 1979. His appendix is a balanced statement of his relationship to informants and detailing of the material collected. However more information comes into the text from survey questionaires than from in depth interviews. He refers to Margo Lyon and Rex Mortimer, but does not draw from them for perspective on processes elsewhere in Java. More effort on that front would have helped frame his detailing of events on the road between Tosari and Pasuruan.
Joel Kahn's work on Sumatra is the most significant non Javanese material used and Hefner does not refer to Michael Dove's work on swidden. This may betray a resistance to translating his "mountain versus lowland" axis into the idiom of sawah and ladang (swidden), so altitude overrides ecosystem as his dominant frame. While he refers to works by James Scott and Jan Bremen, on Malay and Javanese peasant resistance, it is usually to enlist them to his cause and rarely to probe details they present. On the other hand, he draws on Michael Peletz to make good substantive comparisons in relation to marriage patterns.
In contrast with his first book, written almost as though only Geertz had previously written an ethnography of Java, in this book Hefner's grounding in relevant literature is excellent. Yet he speaks of mountains without reference to parallel developments around neighbouring Pujon or Jember, on the Dieng Plateau or slopes of Lawu in Central Java, or among the Sundanese or Badui in West Java. Here "mountain Java" means Tengger. Thus Hefner, while endorsing Jay's admonition that we must break apart "the Javanese", globalises himself; his title should read "Political Economy in (not 'of') Mountain Java".

time warps and the rebounds of scholarly vision

The power of texts is as evident in scholarship as in the communities we access through it; images mould apprehension. In counterpointing Ward Keeler's book, Javanese Shadow Puppets, with observation of performances, American undergraduates in Malang ironically concluded they had not seen a "real" wayang kulit. They viewed three wayang performances. However at Gunung Kawi both shadows and the human audience appeared peripheral; at Candi Ceto a village bersih desa performance occurred at midday; and in Malang Enam Suroto, the famous Solonese dalang, joined with the mayor and his brother in one performance--there were three dalang and three kelir (screens) at once. That none of these instances matched standard images is not surprising, but the thrust of their conclusions remains instructive.
Anderson once commented ruefully on the independent life of his essay on power. He is conscious of its use to justify an orthodoxy he does not approve. His text was translated into Indonesian and mimeographed in both Jakarta and Yogyakarta in the late 1970s. Subsequently a translation has been included in M Budiardjo's edited collection. However Indonesian translations have not included the allusions Anderson made to continuities between Guided Democracy and the New Order. As with Geertz's work, Anderson's has became a university "text", a basis for Javanese imagination of themselves. Certainly a disturbing number of Javanese books about Javanese ideology appeal to writings by westerners for inspiration.
At times scholarly production impinges even more directly. One Malang informant recently suggested that the strength of Muhammadiyah in Pare, the site of Geertz's research three decades ago, was due to lessons its members there learned from him. Hefner now researches the ongoing Islamisation of Java; meanwhile Sutrisno, his intimate associate, lives in Ranupani as an agent of Islamisation in Tengger. Sutrisno simultaneously now assists a student of Hefner's who is carrying out research in the mountains between Malang and Pare. My exploration of meditation practices in Solo, in the early 1970s, opened a door to others and two decades on, while a local generation has passed, that scenario scarcely resembles what I encountered. The rebounds of scholarly activity echoe in several directions simultaneously.
Anderson's introductory comments display special sensitivity. They touch his entry to the field, his experience of Java in the early 1960s, and the theoretical frameworks he has engaged since. Biography helps explain evolving perspective. Barred from visiting Indonesia, he entered progressively wider intellectual spheres during the course of producing essays between 1966 and 1989. Since the inception of the New Order, with the prominence given to his analysis of the coup, he has been a nagging critic of it. First, driven by concern for prisoners held without trial, Anderson became active on human rights issues, subsequently he has voiced vigorous opposition to American support for Indonesia's takeover of East Timor.
Anderson is institutionally as well as intellectually a linchpin within the key centre of American Indonesian studies. As Kahin's student he was rooted in grounded empirical work, Cornell's early trademark. But Anderson has actively tracked wider currents and took a lead in bridging between Indonesian studies and new cultural theories. At the same time he maintained extraordinary, considering the bar on visits, contact with Indonesia through continuing exchanges between Ithaca and the critical Indonesian elite. However the specificity of this connection, conditioning both Cornell studies and Indonesian images of them, bears note. Cornell facilitates conjunction between research, publication and employment, it is a patronage centre of Indonesian studies, so Anderson's prominent voice is amplified through that nexus. The Javanese theory of power could be deployed to unravel this nexus, a rebound which has been insufficiently considered.
Whatever ambivalence he may now feel, the power essay has been far and away the most influential of his works. His thesis, published as Java in a Time of Revolution, mainly reached historians of Indonesia. On the other hand the power essay inspired a crop of theses, several of which evolved into important books, including Keeler's Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves and Errington's Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. That essay also became one of only a few works on Indonesia, beyond those by Geertz, to draw note from wider scholarship. Until Anderson's Imagined Communities came out in 1983 it remained the most widely noted of his many works.
In Indonesia several books have focussed on or borrowed from Anderson's power thesis. Essays on the theme, collected by Miriam Budihardjo in Aneka Pemikiran tentang Kuasa dan Wibawa, include contributions by Koentjaraningrat, doyen of Indonesian ethnography, and Soemarsaid Moertono, whose monograph underlay Anderson's initial formulation. Other books, Fachry Ali's Refleksi Paham "Kekuasaan Jawa" dalam Indonesia Modern and Moedjanto's The Concept of Power in Javanese Culture, obviously take their lead from Anderson. Vedi Hadiz has summarised and critiqued Anderson's corpus in an extended assessment, Politik, Budaya dan Perubahan Sosial. He also notes ironically that Anderson, an outstanding student of the New Order, experienced Indonesia deeply only prior to it.
Other ironies abound. Anderson, positioned as radical by the New Order, is read by western theorists as conservative. Because his articulation of Javanese theory was so clear, it is seen as validating absolutism and dubbed "essentialist", due to what is read (incorrectly I believe) as stress on cultural explanation. In counterpoint Robison's book, Indonesia: the Rise of Capital, generated a stir in Indonesia because it contained material, earlier used by David Jenkins in a Sydney Morning Herald article, which disrupted Australian Indonesian relations. Robison, theoretically on the left, provides the sort of information businesses want and, insofar as he is disliked by Indonesian authorities, it is, in accord with Anderson's thesis, due to his exposure of its pamrih.
Because Anderson's works move progressively toward constructionist views over time, he feeds the impression he has 'recanted' from earlier 'idealism'. But the synchronicity between shifts in Anderson's career trajectory, his political sympathies and his interpretive values deserve probing. Continuing contacts would have conditioned perception, making the texture of ongoing and ordinary Indonesian lives accessible. As it is the romance of Sukarno's years, when populist hopes surged, remains his most vivid experiential image.
When projected back his grasp of that vitality fed insights on the revolution. Without renewal, and when this gradually fading intimacy is projected forward, it breeds discontent, as the trajectories of the revolutionary generation hardly match honeymoon hopes. Anderson's earlier works drew most on inspiration from the field; with time sources become increasingly textual and analysis slides from emphasis on the emic to the etic, from focus on local meanings to their global frames. The closer to the present his writing proceeds, the farther back his focus goes in time. Simultaneously distance, from his sources and lived experience of the place, increases. Despite the ambivalence generated by these vectors, with each step of his trajectory a master drives us deeper into Javanese imaginations.
Working along this vein he becomes progressively more convinced that the Javanism he once knew never was. Now he argues that even court poets, those he had imagined as its vessels, pronounced kejawen dead in their time. In an unpublished work he comments: "Both the Netherlands and Indonesia are equally parts of a world history in the continuous making. In this sense both "Europe-" and "Indonesia-" centric perspectives are, it seems to me, either misleading or beside the point." Apparently he wonders whether attempt to imagine local tradition is misguided, whether to erase the image he had grasped as living Javanism. Meanwhile Indonesian realities and Javanese experiences may have changed even more than Anderson's view of them during the same decades.

Hefner's books, which should be read in tandem, negotiate religious and economic ground simultaneously and without the theoretical trauma Anderson has in trying to reconcile those. Partly this may be because he is less politically engaged, but I believe it also reflects a shift of generation. Hefner moves with an assurance which is far from naive to chronicle transformations of local tradition and sits, more easily than Anderson, with what Indonesia is becoming. Where Anderson caught the last enthusiasms of populist revolution; Hefner arrived in the highlands as the waves of Suharto's guided capitalism reached flood, finally taking in the once distant Tengger zone. In 1979 he could glimpse residues of isolated life, but he caught them in the moment of their most dramatic transition.
Even within the period between his initial research and the present changes have been astounding in the Tengger region. In this book, based on research in the mid 1980s, tourism is a distinctly peripheral phenomenon. This may be because Hefner's deepest probing occurred along the route between Pasuruan and Tosari and less around Ngadisari, where tourism has been more prominent. Now, in any event, the influx of outsiders into the region, not just international tourists, but local tourists, Madurese and lowland Javanese, has accelerated dramatically. With this the textures of local social life, including the religious shifts his current research pursues, shift on an ever steeper curve.
In his first book, Hindu Javanese, Hefner focussed on the then consuming and contentious shift from Tengger adat, a version of ancestral Javanism centring on punden shrines, folk Hinduism and distinctive local priestly liturgy, to the New Order and reformation styled Hinduism of the Balinese flavoured Parisada Hindu Dharma, now the "officially" sanctioned version of that "religion". Then the latter seemed dynamic. Now Parisada pura, temples, certainly are prominent. They are decorated with imported Balinese carvings and mimic mosques by electrically amplifying Hindu prayer. The new temples, only sometimes on old sacred sites, overshadow the modest punden shrines of Tengger adat.
But several brief excursions to Tengger during the past year generate the impression that the Hindu reformation movement is already stale. Because it has been translated by the regime into an imposed orthodoxy, this once popular current has lost vitality. At the same time pockets of earlier adat shrink. Conversations with dukun Jamat in Tosari leave him standing out, as though among only a few who still deeply live with the grain of ancient Tengger impulses. In religion, as in economy, overwhelming new currents overtake a world Hefner could still taste at the end of the 1970s.
In the Tengger-wide Kasada Festival of December 1992 local ritual was lost in new frames. The Tenggerese seemed marginal amidst hordes of partying youth, urban Javanese tourists, a sprinkling of foreigners, seeking "authentic" culture, and stalls set up by lowlanders. Even Parisada was marginal to the "real", tourist, event. The primary drama of the all night event came through attempts to keep crowding photographers off the stage of the new pura. A small band of dukun, led by a Parisada authorised priest, were barely visible behind the cameras and spontaneous offerings to Mount Bromo were incidental. The night market festivity of a tent city predominated. During the opening ceremonies at Ngadisari officials from Surabaya dominated. Their speeches highlighted tourist infrastructure and they literally complained that local dukun still set the calendar of events, inconveniencing effort to promote tourism.
Hefner's works have come at exemplary pace; he has produced major books within five years of each extended research visit. Yet time moves so fast even these have been overtaken by events and cannot be read as though simply providing evidence of current practices. All ethnography is subject to the same constraint and must present itself within now extreme warps of time. Several decades ago history and anthropology seemed far apart, tentatively beginning to engage; now they are so enmeshed we cannot approach either independently. Even as social scientists we live in Einstein's universe and can no longer choose to imagine either time or space alone; they are collapsing into one fluid and complex frame. Every discipline must attend increasingly to the sites and frames which shape its vision and ethnographic inquiry becomes historical record within a matter of years.
Some scholars account for changing contexts well. In his Sumatran Politics and Poetics, for instance, John Bowen notes the rapidity of shifts in the narrative style of those whose discourse, only a decade before, he had struggled to grasp. Having registered it, and just as he felt able to articulate it fully, he realised his subjects had moved on. More often scholars ignore such changing realities and new work is positioned as "superceding" what was "wrong" before. Thus a linguist may introduce recent research, on Javanese spoken in the Yogyakarta kraton by suggesting that established scholarly views of speech levels were simply wrong--without considering that the kraton of HB X, her context, is a long way from those detailed in earlier works. No one can speak, though some still do, of static subjects. Anthropology, always implicitly historical documentation, must be positioned, more precisely than is yet conventional, as such.
Both Hefner and Anderson have explored Kejawen (Javanist) worlds "on the wane" and their works produce the impression that this world is virtually dead. As with similar pronouncements about living Amerindians or Aboriginals, such as that "the last Tasmanian" has died, these views are problematic to living subjects. Cultures, everywhere shape changing masters of disguise, live secretly. In modern guise bastardised translation, perversion and simulacra are all that register and in such frames Asian "democracy" may appear primarily parodic, "wrong" in the same way Angkorian rituals may have appeared to be in the eyes of visiting Brahmans. Superseded notions may be pronounced "dead" as those only ever exist in abstract thought. But it is cavalier to slip into believing, as many do, that what was once "imagined" is all that was. Figuratively living people are then buried alive and they will feel pain notwithstanding whether feeling is an issue for interpreters.
No one opened better than Anderson the significance of a generational factor within Indonesian history and his self-consciousness, about his own position, is exemplary. However diagnosis does not free us from disease. In register and tone his version of the present is shadowed by a past he knew and liked better. In early works he showed commitment to discerning impulses hidden from outside eyes; later works, increasingly documentary and historical, produce doubts whether locals views are even an issue. Scholarly generations and theories must be positioned as carefully as revolutionaries, they reflect and find meaning only in their times.
The analytical relevance of the "idea of power", for example, is situational; relevant to some contexts more than others. In the days of Sukarno that theory mattered more than now. Now pragmatic utilitarianism increasingly pervades all systems of power. Captives of the same field, universities change as rapidly as their objects of inquiry. Several decades ago "humanistic ideals" noticeably motivated educational actors and speaking of them had relevance to understanding practice; now "productivity functions" explain more about both institutions and individuals. But such shifts do not make what was pertinent now irrelevant. Shifting attitudes also constitute history, they are integral to the evolution of conscious being, a dimension these two histories especially bring into view. If views of what matters change, that does not mean retroactively that explanatory models are necessarily irrelevant to the past they were sited within.
Scholars question the notion of progress, yet grasp of Indonesia unquestionably deepens: new sources are accessible and richer theory informs reading of them. However conversely intuitive imagination is increasingly insulated, almost hermetically sealed from its field. A habitual reflexivity pulls the carpet from under our feet and we question whether there ever was what once we clearly registered. The lenses modulating vision are as fluid as the environments apprehended, so the past, as other than imaginary shadow, ceases to exist in itself. Unfortunately, with this drift increasing knowledge of it has decreasing relevance to readings of the present.
Time warps within the trajectory of a life. Age widens the span of memory as a base for imagination. As multiples of fifty years replace decades, the widening frame brings the distant past closer. It warps with pace as well. Now in decades we see changes which once threaded through centuries. Tuned increasingly to a collapsing time, the object of gaze recedes as we imagine, grasp and construct narratives of it. Time, far from being a static vector, is now so compressed that in the years required to articulate insight the subjects alluded to are changed beyond belief. Emboldened by this recognition interpretive views should be synchronised with time to validate and extend, rather than erase, imagination of what once was known.

In imagining the paths through which local peoples have responded to modernity one major trap is to structure understanding oppositionally, as though modernity is western, from the outside, and local systems simply resistant or in conflict with an imposition from outside the region. Thus in some thinking about colonial mediations of modernity the local is positioned consistently as generating movements of opposition, revolt, rebellion, tacit everyday resistance or whatever. Thinking in these terms itself tacitly presents the western forces of imposition as most crucial; local responses cannot be read only as negative counter to imposition of new controls, as focus on anti colonial movements tends to lead us to. It must be seen as a context within which opposition and resistance is but one part of a wider local process within which diverse local agencies are responding, only some in opposition and many also welcoming, to the genesis of industrialized insititutional structures. The discourse of opposition implicitly subordinates local voices thoroughly to agencies tagged always as 'from outside'. notes--Saminism--highlighted because named; but practices resonate with wider substratum of unnamed in other palces, not appearing as 'movement' because not highlighted in the same way. hence invisible elsewhere; another unseen ground; autonomous zones; creating space outside dominant discourses

Benda, structure

Steinberg, van Leur

ref to Benda

The best overall treatment of this period is in DJ Steinberg, In Search of Southeast Asia

Legge, among others

ref to GW Skinner

ref to Meisner on Maoism

ref to Hobsbawm and Wolf and Cohen

Landon, Southeast Asia pp 194-7.

D. McAlister & P. Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution, New York, 1970, pp 118 & 126.

A.B. Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam, Boston, 1976, p 188.

D. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, Berkeley, 1981, pp 305-6 & 316.

E. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution, The Hague, 1965.

B. Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, Ithaca, 1969, chapter 1.

C. Geertz, based on fieldwork in an East Javanese town in the early 1950's, in The Religion of Java, Chicago, 1976, notes both the emergence of sects (pp 112-8, 339-52) and that activists connected changes in spiritual practices to the revolution.

In the terms outlined by C. Geertz in Works and Lives (Stanford: Stanford UP 1988, pp 20-1). Anderson initiated a "discourse formation" within Indonesian studies by bridging politics, language, literature and history in a fashion many others now do.

S. Lansing's, Priests and Programmers (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991, pp 127-34) is another example of similar perspective in this respect.

B. Anderson, Language and Power (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990 pp 8-11, 78-93); R. Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java (Berkeley: U California P, pp ix-xiii, 23, 224-9).

B. Anderson (Op Cit , p 11, 13).

It is worth noting original details of works printed here, only two of which are previously unpublished. I list them as ordered in my discussion of them: "Professional Dreams: Reflections on Two Javanese Classics" paper presented to the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute in 1984; "A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light: Transposition in Early Indonesian Nationalist Thought" in A Reid and D Marr eds, Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Hong Kong: Heinemann, 1979); "The Languages of Indonesian Politics" in :Indonesia 1 (April 1966) "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture" in C. Holt et al eds, Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1972): "The Discourse of Charisma", paper delivered to the American Anthropological Association in 1985; "Old State, New Society: Indonesia's New Order in Comparative Historical Perspective" in Journal of Asian Studies 42 (May 1983); "Sembah-Sumpah: The Politics of Language and Javanese Culture" in R Long and D Kirchehofer eds, Change and Continuity in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: U Hawaii at Manoa, 1984); and "Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order" in K Jackson and L Pye eds, Political Power and Communications in Indonesia (Berkeley: U California P, 1978).

Anderson, Language and Power (p 273, p 286).

Ibid. pp 282-6.

Ibid. pp 294-97.

Ibid. pp 247-58.

Ibid. pp 261-2.

In Anderson's discussion the fluidity of local languages is not sufficiently apparent, breaks between languages thus appear too sharp. Jeff Roberts, a London based researcher from SOAS who is working in Tengger now, explains that in that context people routinely mix Tengger dialect, Madurese, Javanese and Indonesian in single conversations. In Becker's discussion of the wayang, in " Text-Building, Epistemology and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre", in A.L. Becker and A. Yengoyan eds, The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1979), he suggested that different figures, like different speech levels, represent coexistent epistemic realms which supplement each other.

W. Keeler, in Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves (Princeton: Princeton UP 1987) shows how Anderson's images translate into a village context in Central Java in the late 1970s. In Malang now, these notions of authority are abundantly evident in local practices. American exchange students have enthused about this essay as "the most pertinent key" to a range of village and urban contexts they encounter. The thesis, whatever its limits still "works" to open insight into local dynamics.

Anderson (Op Cit, p 31).

In M. Budiardjo ed. Aneka Pemikiran tentang Kuasa dan Wibawa, Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1984).

Anderson (Op Cit pp 60-2).

I have extended his thesis in this direction within an essay on "The Logic of Rasa in Java", Indonesia 38 (1984) and have commented on the critical uses of related ideas in "Interpreting Javanist Millenial Imagery" in P Alexander ed, Creating Indonesian Cultures (Sydney: Oceania Pubs, 1989). My arguments push in a direction similar to Moertono's (Op Cit).

Anderson (Op Cit, p 111).

In a lecture on the role of the military in third world states (Cornell, summer 1970).

Ibid. pp 213-37.

Ibid. pp 201, 205. Moedjanto, in The Concept of Power in Javanese Culture (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada UP, 1986), argues, contrary to this thrust of Anderson's, that the "power" of kings in important respects increased as Dutch power grew.

Op Cit p 192.

This represents a slippage J Smail warned against, in "On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia", Journal of Southeast Asian History, V II N 2 (1961). Smail distinguished issues of perspective and moral judgement, but errors remain common and are easy to make.

The full title is: Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985). Hefner's essays on Islam so far include: "The Political Economy of Islamic conversion in Modern East Java" (in W Roff ed, Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies in Muslim Discourse, London: Croom Helm, 1987) and "Islamizing Java? Religion and Politics in Rural East Java", Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987).

Hefner Op Cit pp 115-20.

Ibid p 40. Robert Elson, in his review of Hefner's book (Asian Studies Review V15 N2 November 1991, pp 324-6) says that upland coffee cultivation began earlier.

Ibid pp 194-223.

Ibid p 154.

Ibid pp 97-101.

Ibid pp144-50.

Ibid pp 6, 104-12.

Ibid p 111.

Ibid p 147.

Ibid pp 145-51.

M Lyon, Bases of Conflict in Rural Java (Berkeley: U California CSEAS, 1970) and R Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno (Ithaca: Cornell UP 1974).

M Peletz, A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property and Social History among the Malays of Rembau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P, 1988).

Hefner Op Cit p 229.

Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Conversation in Ithaca (October 1986).

M Budiardjo (Op Cit).

Information on Sutrisno's local role from Jeffery Roberts.

It is worth noting which essays Anderson has ommitted in this collection. Both a short monograph, On the Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1965), and two essays, in his (et al) Religion and Social Ethos in Indonesia (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Centre of SEA Studies, 1977), push beyond works included here toward reframing outsider views of Indonesia to encorporate local views.

The "Cornell paper", produced with R McVey and F Bunnell, was later published as A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1971).

B Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1972)

Keeler (Op Cit) & S Errington, Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989).

B Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

Miriam Budiardjo (Op Cit) contains a translation of Anderson's essay into Indonesia, along with essays by Koentjaraningrat and Moertono commenting on it. Soemarsaid Moertono's earlier work, State and Statecraft in Old Java (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1968), was a major source for Anderson, along with BJO Schrieke's, Indonesian Sociological Studies Vol II (The Hague and Bandung: van Hoeve, 1957) for his 1972 paper.

Fachry Ali speaks quite directly to the issues Anderson addressed (published in Jakarta: Gramedia, 1986). However Moedjanto's book, despite the title (published in Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada UP, 1986) treats the evolution of older systems of royal power on their own ground, not referring often to Anderson.

Vedi Hadiz, Politik, Budaya dan Perubahan Sosial: Ben Anderson dalam Studi Politik Indonesia (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1992). This includes a complete bibliography of Anderson's works, a very useful reference which, unfortunately, does not appear in Anderson's own collection.

R. Robison, Indonesia: the Rise of Capital (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

As noted by David Henley in his review of B Anderson, Language and Power (Asian Studies Review V 16 N 1 July 1992 pp 228-9).

Quoted in Hadiz (Op Cit p 161).

My excursions have been limited to three days in Tosari, two in Ngadisari and one in Ngadas and Ranupani. For impressions I rely also on reports by students, who have undertaken field experience in Tengger. The comments below, in relation to Kasada and dukun Jamat, are based on my observations.

J Bowen, Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900-1989 (New Haven: Yale UP 1991).

Suggestion of changes in the Yogya kraton of HB X are contained in F Hughes-Freeland, "A Throne for the People: Observations on the Jumenengen of Sultan Hamengku Buwono X", Indonesia N 51, 1991.

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