A sixteenth century Moslem could leave the Straits of Gibraltar, travel through the Middle East and northern India, cross over to the Malay Peninsula, go down to northern Sumatra and journey upwards along the west coast of Borneo to Sulu without leaving the familiar world he cherished. This was a world defined by the mosque and the minaret, the Sacred Book and its commentaries, a legal tradition based on Roman law and the Sacred Book, a philosophical system that drew inspiration from Aristotle, and an art that sought inspiration in abstractions and Arabic script. Though modern Islam never was a...

Culture enables people to make sense of their lives by making available ideas and meanings, with which they are able to articulate their experience of the world. It enables individuals and groups to traverse the U-turns and dead ends which inevitably come with the business of living, and helps to resolve the contradictions and uncertainties of such experiences. However in a world made smaller by the expansion of capitalism, technological revolutions, economic interdependence, and the rise of nation-states, the cultural resources for making sense of an increasingly complex world have multiplied several times. These sources of cultural knowledge may be...

Thus wrote Geertz more than thirty years ago in his paper discussing the problem of national integration in new, multiethnic states. While his concept of “primordial affiliation” which he put forward powerfully in his paper – or, more precisely, the tendency to look upon such affiliation as “primordial” – has been seriously criticized in the current debates on ethnicity, the interrelated processes of national integration and local ethnic response still remain among the key issues in an analysis of the contemporary situation of these countries, and the task of understanding them has yet to be fully accomplished.

The Republic of Indonesia, which...

Tourism is a modern phenomenon that has had an intense impact on Balinese social life and culture. It has dominated and encouraged changes in the economic organization of Balinese society, shifting it from an agrarian to an industrial and service structure. Tourism has also widened the social networks of the Balinese community, crossing ethnic and national borders on an international and global scale. It has also introduced mass culture and new values into Balinese culture and the lives of the Balinese people. Through tourism, Balinese society and culture are being transformed in a “melting pot” in which the Great and...

Gamelan degungis a type of traditional ensemble music among the Sundanese people of West Java. Thedegungensemble is rather smaller than that used in Javanese court gamelan music.¹ Contemporarydegunghas two different types of repertoire. One consists of classical instrumental pieces which are now calleddegung klasik ,and the other consists of pieces composed more recently calleddegung kawih.In this paper I focus on the process of development of thesedegungrepertoires since the 1920s when thedegungtradition known today is said to have been established. I also discuss these two types of repertoire...

This paper is about Indonesian batik, colorful cotton cloth intricately dyed using the wax-resist technique. This art form has won international fame for its fine handiwork and the artistry of its unique designs. However, this paper does not deal with the “arts and crafts” aspects of batik. Instead, it first examines the way batik-making in Java has adjusted itself to the ever changing circumstances of modern society and developed as a form of economic enterprise since the last century. A brief sketch of the development of the batik industry in Java will demonstrate how a textile tradition with a rich...

Thailand has, for a long time, subscribed to a policy of an open economy. Such a policy became the main driving force that facilitated the integration of the country into the world market. During the decade from 1986 to 1996, the policy has, on the one hand, encouraged very rapid economic development which can be seen primarily in terms of industrialization. But, on the other hand, the same policy has also committed Thai society to the globalization process.

As a concept, globalization has only developed in academic circles since the second half of the 1980s. It refers both to the...

This short myth was narrated by a middle-aged man living in a mountainous area on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.¹ It can be approached in various ways. It may be seen as a version of the “orphan stories” (“orphan” being the literal meaning of Anakalo) which are widely distributed in eastern Indonesia. It can be analyzed as an example revealing the significance of parallelism in this society, or it can be understood as an example of the distribution of mythical knowledge in the society. In this paper, it will be treated as a speech act. Since I was a foreigner, my...

The Muslim society of Sulu in the southern Philippines holds a unique position, not only for its geographical proximity to both the Malaysian and Indonesian borders, but also for its cultural peculiarity of being a Muslim minority community in the predominantly Christian Philippine nation-state. One purpose of this paper is to analyze aspects of change and the process of transformation of indigenous shamanic rituals in a Sama-speaking group in the Sulu archipelago from the viewpoint of the dynamics of local, national, and transnational cultures. Comparisons with similar cases in other areas, especially in Indonesia, will also be made.

It has...

This paper focuses on the process of the emergence of ethnic awareness and cultural consciousness among the Ayta (also spelled Aeta), amid their struggle for survival after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. Through the experience of diaspora (exodus, suffering, and resettlement and rehabilitation in new places), and especially through exposure to the lowland communities and through negotiations with journalists, government officials, and NGO workers, the Ayta have greatly enhanced their consciousness of being an indigenous people with a distinctive cultural heritage.

In terms of material culture and lifestyle, the lives of most of the Ayta victims and refugees are now greatly...

A homogeneous population, as Kelly (1991: 416) has aptly put it, has been one of the ideological homilies of cultural nationalism in twentieth-century Japan. It is true, that while Japan is unusual in having a two-millennium history in which ethnic, political, and linguistic boundaries have been largely coterminous, it remains a dangerous fallacy to conflate boundary isomorphism with internal homogeneity. Because homogeneity has been one of the most salient ideological preoccupations of the modern Japanese nation, the presence of ethnic minorities and other marginals in Japan – the Ainu, theburakumin,the Koreans, the Okinawans, etc. – poses an intricate problem, both...

The idea for this paper arose from an almost chance encounter I had with the Ami Cultural Village outside Hualien, in eastern Taiwan, in the autumn of 1996.¹ It was outside the tourist season, and the taxi driver clearly thought it was an odd place to go at that time of the year. When I got to the “village,” it turned out to consist mainly of an auditorium with a closed souvenir shop attached, and with a group of teenagers in sneakers, shorts and t-shirts playing basketball outside. Luckily there was a performance about to start, even though the five...