Published in Koran Tempo, 28 July 2002

Etnografi, Realisme, Fiksi

Fadjar I. Thufail

Sejak lima dekade yang lalu, para antropolog telah memanfaatkan etnografi sebagai wahana untuk menuangkan pengalaman dan kajian mereka. Etnografi menjadi sebuah cara yang dianggap paling tepat untuk menggambarkan realitas masyarakat yang diteliti. Dalam tradisi kajian antropologi klasik, etnografi menjadi “jembatan” antara pemikiran teoritis dan realitas kehidupan sehari-hari tangkapan sang antropolog. Tradisi semacam ini meletakkan etnografi sebagai “realitas ketiga”, yakni realitas tulis yang berada di luar realitas subyektif penulis dan realitas obyektif yang dituliskan.

Namun saat ini, etnografi, sebagai sebuah metode dan tulisan, mulai sering dimanfaatkan oleh kajian budaya (cultural studies), kritik sastra, sastra bandingan, sejarah, dan berbagai disiplin lainnya. Bahkan, etnografi tak lagi menjadi sebuah metode asing di kalangan para pembuat film, terutama mereka yang bergerak di bidang film dokumenter atau mereka yang sekedar ingin menonjolkan corak realisme dalam karya mereka.

Tetapi, pemanfaatan metode dan tulisan etnografi yang semakin meluas itu telah memunculkan kegamangan sangat dalam di kalangan para penganut gaya etnografi klasik, yaitu para antropolog yang berpendapat bahwa etnografi bukan sekedar karya tulisan, tetapi juga yang harus mematuhi kaidah “ilmiah”. Jika plot dan struktur menjadi prinsip baku penulisan sebuah novel, obyektifitas dan pembenaran empiris menjadi tulang punggung yang menentukan apakah sebuah tulisan dapat dikategorikan sebagai “etnografis.”

Maka ketika etnografi dipakai sebagai alat kajian dan representasi hal-hal yang dianggap bersifat “tidak obyektif” dan “tidak empiris” — misalnya bila metode etnografi dipakai untuk mengkaji dan menulis sebuah fiksi atau novel — para etnograf klasik mengatakan bahwa telah terjadi sebuah krisis representasi dalam seluruh bangunan antropologi sebagai ilmu sosial. Antropologi kini telah “disastrakan”, kata mereka.

Etnografi moderen mencapai titik puncaknya kala Bronislaw Malinowski menerbitkan karya besarnya Argonauts of the Western Pacific, sebuah karya etnografi yang dianggap nyaris sempurna. Buku tebal ini merupakan laporan hasil penelitian Malinowski tentang sistem pertukaran di Kepulauan Trobriand. Kekuatannya terletak pada cara penulisannya yang sangat realis sehingga pembaca seolah-olah diajak mengikuti ekspedisi kula, yaitu pelayaran masyarakat setempat dari satu pulau ke pulau lain.
Argonauts sering diajukan sebagai contoh bahwa seorang etnograf bisa menghasilkan sebuah karya bagus tanpa harus mengorbankan prinsip obyektifitas dan empiris dalam penulisan ilmu sosial.

Sekitar tiga puluh tahun setelah Argonauts — yakni pada tahun 1960-an — terbitlah sebuah buku Malinowski lain, A Diary in Its Strictest Sense of the Term yang menggemparkan dunia antropologi. Seperti tampak dalam judulnya, buku ini merupakan catatan harian Malinowski yang ditulis saat ia melakukan penelitian di Trobriand, dan baru diterbitkan setelah ia meninggal. Penerbitan Diary menampar muka para antropolog karena catatan harian Malinowski ini dengan jelas memperlihatkan bahwa ia kemungkinan besar tak pernah mengikuti ekspedisi kula dan sebagian besar deskripsinya tentang tradisi itu hanya diperoleh dari informasi masyarakat setempat.

Pada mulanya, banyak orang yang meragukan keaslian Diary, karena gambaran tentang kula di dalam Argonauts sangatlah rinci dan menciptakan imaji yang sangat kuat sehingga tampaknya tak mungkin apabila Malinowski menuliskannya dengan hanya berdasarkan informasi dan bukan dari pengalaman sendiri. Namun setelah salah seorang keluarga Malinowksi membenarkan bahwa catatan harian itu memang ditulis Malinowski, maka orang berpaling dari perdebatan tentang keaslian ke arah perdebatan tentang penulisan etnografi itu sendiri.

Perlu diingat bahwa Argonauts ditulis pada tahun 1930-an, saat modernisme secara kuat mempengaruhi gaya penulisan sastra. Penulisan gaya realis adalah salah satu elemen modernisme yang populer saat itu. Zora Neale Hurston, seorang antropolog Amerika yang beralih menjadi penulis, juga banyak menggabungkan prinsip realisme dan etnografis dalam karya fiksinya tentang praktik voodo di Haiti.

Prinsip realisme dalam penulisan dicapai melalui pemisahan antara penggambaran realitas — realitas tokoh maupun realitas alam — dan peran penulis yang tugasnya hanya merepresentasikan realitas itu dalam narasi. Pada masa puncak gerakan modernisme, belum ada kesadaran kritis bahwa pemilihan sebuah aspek realitas yang akan ditonjolkan dalam narasi sebenarnya merupakan fungsi atau subjektifitas sang pengarang. Oleh karena itu, pendekatan realisme sangat cocok untuk penulisan etnografi klasik karena etnografi realis semacam itu dianggap berhasil “mematikan” subjektifitas pengarang. Dalam hal ini sang etnograf atau antropolog dituntut untuk selalu bersikap “obyektif.”

Penerbitan Diary benar-benar menggoyah pandangan bahwa sebuah etnografi bersifat realis murni. Di pihak lain, pendekatan kritis menunjukkan bahwa etnografi juga bukan sebuah fiksi karena peristiwa atau konteks lingkungan yang direpresentasikan dalam narasi etnografi adalah situasi yang benar-benar terjadi. Apabila pandangan antropologi pascamodernis mengatakan bahwa semua etnografi adalah karya fiksi karena semata-mata merupakan refleksi si penulis, maka pandangan antropologi kritis mengakui bahwa sebuah etnografi pasti mencerminkan subyektifitas si penulis, yakni subyektifitas yang mempengaruhi pemilihan dan penafsiran realitas yang dijelmakan dalam narasi etnografi.

Dengan kata lain, narasi etnografi selalu bersifat kontekstual, dalam arti selalu terkait dengan subyektifitas dan kemungkinan-kemungkinan representasi yang ditawarkan oleh realitas itu sendiri.

Beberapa antropolog saat ini sudah mulai mencoba menerapkan perspektif etnografi kritis untuk menghasilkan etnografi yang lebih menonjolkan sisi manusiawi. Kirin Narayan, Paul Stoller, dan Keith Basso, adalah beberapa contoh antropolog yang meminjam teknik penulisan fiksi untuk menyusun etnografi tentang seseorang atau sebuah kelompok sosial. Meskipun meminjam teknik penulisan fiksi, karya mereka tidak sama dengan fiksi. Narasi etnografi mereka diciptakan melalui teknik dasar penulisan fiksi, seperti penggunaan sudut pandang, teknik dialog, deskripsi yang bersifat alegoris atau realis, dan, kadang-kadang, pemanfaatan plot cerita.

Meskipun demikian, tokoh-tokoh, situasi yang digambarkan, maupun kata-kata yang menyusun dialog, semuanya nyata dan bukan diciptakan oleh penulis/antropolog. Dalam pengertian ini, etnografi kritis mirip dengan pendekatan jurnalisme sastra (literary journalism).

Etnografi kritis adalah jawaban terhadap kegamangan antropologi yang dituntut untuk mulai dapat bercerita secara memukau tetapi pada saat yang sama mempertahankan unsur-unsur realisme yang menjadi syarat sebuah kajian ilmu sosial. Saat ini, pandangan yang menempatkan narasi fiksi dan narasi tulisan ilmiah sebagai dua hal yang tak bisa disatukan, sudah mulai dipertanyakan. Sudah mulai diragukan pula pandangan yang membedakan fiksi sebagai sebuah karya seni dan etnografi sebagai sebuah karya ilmiah.

Sebuah karya ilmiah dapat mencerminkan ketrampilan sang penulisnya dengan penggunaan teknik-teknik narasi yang memukau dan indah. Etnografi kritis menawarkan sebuah bentuk representasi realitas yang menarik tanpa harus terjebak pada kegenitan pascamodernisme yang menganggap semua realitas telah mati.

This blog has been dormant for the last twelve months. The reason is partly because I moved from Wisconsin to take up a new post as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Since then I have been preoccupied by my new research project on legal anthropology and the project’s fieldwork in Indonesia. Therefore, I would like to apologize to fellow bloggers who keep visiting this blog despite the inactive appearance over the last year. I think it is the time now to announce that this blog is resusticated…!! 

When the revolutionary youths gathered in 1928 and took a Youth Oath (Sumpah Pemuda), under the nervous gaze of the Dutch colonial government, they never imagined that the event would later stand to be the political foundation of the Indonesian nation and nationhood. The occasion was less than a heroic one, only hundreds people came to represent youth groups from all over the archipelago, still called the Netherlands Dutch Indies. There were Jong Sumatranen Bond (Sumatra Youth Group), Jong Ambon (Ambonese Youths), Jong Sulawesi (Sulawesi Youths), and many more groups acting on behalf of youth organizations. The event was called Kongres Pemuda (Youth Congress). It was the time when Wage Rudolf Supratman sang Indonisch, Indonisch, a melancholic song that would later be converted into Indonesia Raya, the national anthem of Indonesia.

Kongres Pemuda lingers on the national memory, commemorated every October 28 as Hari Sumpah Pemuda (the Youth Oath Day). Indonesians must remember the date, October 28, 1928, as the historic moment when Indonesian nationhood came into being, embodied in words of the youth oath that pledges allegiance to One Nation, One Fatherland, One Language called “Indonesia.” Indonesians find the root of their national-self on the Youth Oath. The self has stayed unwavering from the moment when the pledge was read to the moment when the nation faces the challenge of global capital forces. The self is Negara Kesatuan Indonesia (United Indonesia).

History textbooks praise Kongres Pemuda to be the earliest evidence of Indonesian multiculturalism. Teachers and politicians refer to Kongres Pemuda to illustrate how different ethnic and cultural groups can come together, transcend their primordial interests, and act as a national collective. The congress participants no longer pursued groups’ interests, but were engaged in a rational discussion that catered to a common interest, a kind of Habermasian rational discourse found in literary cafes in Europe. In other words, history teaches Indonesians to appreciate how the Indonesian multiculturalism has been constructed out of a rational assumption that one can put one’s ethnic and religious self below the common, national self.

When the notion of multiculturalism is stripped off of its cultural imaginations and reduced to a procedural political process, it loses most of its complex cultural meanings. Multiculturalism is not merely a political construct, like what most theorists of multiculturalism argue, understood to work like a judicial ruling, but is a fantasized and desired, for some is even feared, lived world. A society becomes a multicultural society only when it seeks for a common denominator that could be used for the interest of all members, and not only for certain groups. The key words here are “seek” and “denominator”, as multiculturalism is no more than a tool that people appropriate and use to imagine what social collectivity they want to acheive.

To build the notion of multiculturalism from a foundational principle, such as the national self, would risk to de-sensitize the concept from its most powerful pragmatic role. It opens up the space for people to come forward with their multiple affects. Multiculturalism is not the destination but a necessary lived world that allows fantasy and desire to emerge.

Over the last few weeks, the public has learned about a famous Muslim preacher, Abdullah Gymnastiar (aka Aa Gym), who took a second wife and has started to practice a polygamous marriage. The news has surprised many Muslims, not only because Aa Gym made a public announcement of the marriage but also because he hold an example of a ideal type of a modern Muslim preacher. Unlike the older generation of Muslim preachers, who took many wives and practiced traditional style of dakwah (preaching), Aa Gym uses modern internet technology and applies modern managerial knowledge in running his pesantren (boarding school) Daarut Tauhid. Therefore, the news of his second marriage surprises many of his followers who begin to question his modern outlook and the reliability of his statements (he once said that he was not interested in practicing polygamy).

Aa Gym’s second marriage appears to become a national issue when, in the aftermath of the news, President Susilo Yudhoyono summoned Minister of Women’s Affairs and officials of the Ministry of Religion to discuss the controversy over polygamous marriage. The Minister of Women’s Affair delivered a statement that the government would look into the legal ramification of polygamous marriage. But the conservative Muslims reacted strongly to the statement by pointing out that Al-Qur’an allows polygamy and that the government’s initiative to arrange polygamy is a transgression against religious teaching.

The controversy over polygamy has opened up a debate over the limit of state’s rights. In other words, I tend to see that what lies at the heart of the debate is not whether the state should or should not intervene, but whether the state has trangressed its rights in responding to the matter. Here the situation gets more complicated. For the proponents of polygamy, the state could not perform as the bearer of divine rights and the Divine Law should not be transgressable. On the other hand, as illustrated by comments from government officials, the state is caught in an ambiguous position. It needs to set up a proper boundary between “secular” and divine rights, but this proves a difficult task as the controversy over Aa Gym’s polygamy demonstrates.

I submitted this writing as an op-ed essay to Kompas Daily Newspaper one day after Geertz passed away. As usual, Kompas rejected this piece, arguing that what I wrote in the essay was an outdated topic. “Nothing new”, the rejection letter said. Interestingly enough, and for me surprisingly ironic, Kompas is planning to hold a symposium talking about Clifford Geertz and his legacy in Indonesia. Therefore, I decide to put this rejected essay on this blog [unfortunately, it is in Indonesian] for the public to see whether or not there is “nothing new” in the writing, and, most importantly, to let you know that Kompas’s initiative to discuss the legacy of Geertz is in fact “nothing new.”

Clifford Geertz: Sebuah Obituari

Fadjar I. Thufail

Hari Selasa pagi (31/10) waktu Amerika Bagian Timur, di Princeton telah berpulang salah seorang tokoh besar ilmu sosial, Clifford Geertz. Kepergian Pak Cliff, demikian dia sering dipanggil, menambah deretan ilmuwan ahli Indonesia yang telah pergi meninggalkan warisan pemikiran besar bagi generasi muda penerus. Sampai akhir hayatnya, Pak Cliff adalah profesor emeritus di Institute for Advanced Study di Princeton, sebuah lembaga penelitian yang pernah menjadi rumah bagi para pemikir besar seperti Albert Einstein. Pak Cliff adalah salah seorang generasi pertama Indonesianis yang selalu menaruh perhatian besar tentang perkembangan yang terjadi di Indonesia. Ia memang tak pernah memiliki murid dari Indonesia, tak seperti Indonesianis lain misalnya Daniel Lev atau Benedict Anderson yang telah menghasilkan banyak anak didik dari Indonesia. Tetapi, perhatian Pak Cliff yang besar terhadap Indonesia sangat mempengaruhi perkembangan diskursus ilmu sosial di negeri ini.

Sebelum bergabung dengan Institute for Advanced Study, Pak Cliff mengajar di Universitas Chicago, sebagai profesor antropologi dan kajian perbandingan negara-negara baru. Ia pernah mengajar sebagai profesor tamu di Universitas Oxford, dan sejak 1975 sampai 2000, ia menjadi profesor tamu di Universitas Princeton yang kampusnya hanya berjarak sekitar 2 kilometer dari Institute for Advanced Study. Tahun 2000, Pak Cliff pensiun dari Institute for Advanced Study, tetapi tidak mengurangi produktifitasnya untuk terus menulis.

Sumbangan Pak Cliff terhadap dunia pemikiran ilmu sosial sangatlah besar, tak dapat dirangkum dalam sebuah tulisan pendek. Ia mulai menekuni kajian Indonesia sejak menjadi mahasiswa antropologi di Universitas Harvard, dan penelitian lapangannya di Pare, Jawa Timur, pada tahun 1950an menjadi buku yang kontroversial tapi banyak dikutip orang sebagai salah satu karya pertama tentang Islam di Indonesia, The Religion of Java. Sejak itu, Pak Cliff, bersama istrinya saat itu, Hildred Geertz, banyak melalukan kajian perbandingan antara Islam di Indonesia dan Maroko.

Pemikiran teoritis Pak Cliff merambah ke berbagai dimensi, dan sejalan dengan berkembangnya teori sosial, pemikiran Pak Cliff juga selalu mencoba menemukan wilayah-wilayah teoritis baru. Salah satu terobosan Clifford Geertz dalam teori sosial adalah anjurannya untuk mengembangkan pendekatan interpretasi dalam kajian sosial, politik, dan kebudayaan. Meskipun pertama kali berkembang sebagai pendekatan alternatif dalam disiplin antropologi saat itu yang mengandalkan perspektif relativisme kebudayaan atau strukturalisme, kajian interpretatif saat ini mulai dipakai dalam berbagi disiplin ilmu lain. Terobosan pendekatan interpretif Pak Cliff dapat disarikan dalam dua hal. Pertama, interpretasi haruslah berdasarkan “deskripsi tebal” (thick description) gejala atau peristiwa sosial. Kedua, tujuan akhir interpretasi adalah menemukan dan memahami pandangan, keyakinan, dan penjelasan aktor sosial dari perspektif aktor itu sendiri. Tujuan ini hanya bisa dicapai apabila peneliti dapat menjalin hubungan yang erat dengan masyarakat yang ditelitinya. The Interpretation of Culture adalah karya magnum opus Clifford Greetz yang memperlihatkan pemanfaatan pendekatan interpretif dalam memahami gejala sosial yang beragam, dari politik hingga seni.

Salah satu karya Pak Cliff yang sering dianggap sebagai penerapan yang sangat indah metode “deskripsi tebal” adalah etnografi dia tentang sabung ayam di Bali. Dalam etnografi yang sangat rinci ini, Clifford Geertz membuktikan bahwa dengan pengamatan yang sangat jeli terhadap sebuah peristiwa sabung ayam, seorang peneliti dapat mempelajari tentang berbagai hal mulai dari nilai simbolis, aspek jender masyarakat Bali, kekerasan, dan bahkan politik negara. Sampai saat ini, etnografi ini masih sering dipakai di kelas-kelas sebagai contoh metode “deskripsi tebal” yang terbaik.

Terlepas dari sumbangan luar biasa Pak Cliff terhadap teori sosial dan kajian Indonesia, ada sebuah anekdot kecil yang memperlihatkan ambiguitas hubungan sosial Pak Cliff dengan masyarakat yang pernah ditelitinya. Salah satu tokoh utama dalam buku The Religion of Java adalah seorang dokter di Pare yang menjadi responden Pak Cliff. Anak sang dokter kemudian mendapat kesempatan belajar ke Amerika. Sang anak, yang bernama Mahar Mardjono (kelak menjadi Rektor UI), mendapat titipan sebuah wayang kulit dari Clifford Geertz untuk disampaikan pada temannya. Bahkan, menurut cerita almarhum Mahar Mardjono kepada saya, Pak Cliff sempat datang sendiri mengantarkan wayang itu ke rumahnya. Sekitar tiga puluh tahun setelah peristiwa di Pare itu, saya mendapat kesempatan bertemu dengan Pak Cliff di Princeton dan secara sepintas sempat menanyakan tentang peristiwa itu. Tetapi, alih-alih mengingat kejadian itu, Pak Cliff tampak agak enggan bercakap-cakap tentang peristiwa sehari-hari saat ia melalukan penelitian di Pare. Sikap Pak Cliff ini sampai kini menimbulkan pertanyaan di benak saya. Mengingat bahwa penelitian di Pare yang menghasilkan The Religion of Java itu adalah salah satu karya terbaik Clifford Geertz yang mengantarkan dia sebagai Indonesianis terkemuka, agak sulit dipahami apabila Pak Cliff lupa terhadap orang-orang yang pernah ditelitinya. Salah satu penjelasan yang mungkin bisa dikemukakan dapat ditarik dari kritik terhadap pendekatan interpretif Geertz. Pendekatan interpretif Geertz membingkai interpretasi dari politik dan perasaan, sehingga barangkali bagi Pak Cliff relasi sosial di lapangan harus dibedakan dari relasi sosial setelah penelitian lapangan berakhir.

Seorang pemikir besar memang bukan seorang yang sempurna, dan Pak Cliff tampaknya menyadari hal ini. Penelitian terakhir dia tentang keanekaragaman etnis dan dampaknya terhadap modernitas memperlihatkan posisi kritis Geertz terhadap perspektif posmodernisme yang cenderung melupakan persoalan identitas. Akhir-akhir ini, Pak Cliff memang tak pernah lagi menulis secara khusus tentang Indonesia. Ia pernah mengatakan pada saya sepuluh tahun yang lalu bahwa kecintaannya terhadap kajian Indonesia sedikit terganggu oleh kemampuan bahasa Indonesianya yang sudah jauh menurun. Tetapi, sumbangan Pak Cliff jauh melampaui bahasa. Ia memberikan pencerahan pada kita bahwa teori harus bermula dari pemahaman mendalam tentang peristiwa dan masyarakat. Indonesia pantas berbangga pernah memberikan sumbangan untuk pemikiran-pemikiran besar yang lahir dari seorang Clifford Geertz. Selamat jalan Pak Cliff…..

Ksenija Bilbija, Jo Ellen Fair, Cynthia Milton, and Leigh Payne, eds. 2005. The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

The most difficult challenge a country faces after the authoritarian regime collapses is in dealing with the legacy of violent pasts. The process is far from a smooth one, especially when the legacy of the violence remains to haunt the desire for coming to terms with the pasts. Some countries have instituted judicial and political mechanisms to deal with unresolved violent events, but other countries still face difficult challenge. However, it does not mean that the countries or societies with no judicial system in place to resolve the case have failed to confront the legacy of violence. In other words, working out the legacy of violence also takes place outside of the judicial process. This book documents how people resort to non-judicial processes to confront the legacy of violence in several countries that have just left authoritarian rules.

In this book, I contribute a short essay on Seno Gumira Adjidarma, an Indonesian writer who has written against the systematic attempt of the New Order political regime to silence any stories of state violence. Seno has used the medium of short story to talk about violence and oppression in East Timor, Papua, or in other parts of Indonesia.

In my previous blog, I wrote a short note on Clifford Geertz’s influential contribution to anthropology. Geertz was no doubt a leading anthropologist and cultural theorist whose interests spanned over a wide range of issues. His work has influenced not only anthropology, but also other social science disciplines. Several books written by his colleagues in anthropology and other scholars attest to how Geertzian hermeneutics and interpretive method have shaped how social sciences perceive culture.

In the blog I wrote as a short obituary to Geertz, I touched a little bit upon the role he has played in shaping Indonesian studies as a field of study. Amid the various works on Geertz, however, only a few, if any, which devotes attention on the relationship between Geertz and the Indonesian studies. I argue there are two reasons for this lack of attention. Firstly, Geertz never referred to himself as an “area studies scholar.” His strong and long-time interest on Indonesia did not lead him to call himself a country specialist. Geertz’s early work on Islam shows that his interest lies more on a comparative angle, although most people will argue that he advocates a more relativistic approach. It is interesting to see that Geertz could have fitted perfectly among those whom Benedict Anderson categorizes as people haunted by the specter of comparison. Secondly, Geertz sought little to establish an institutional and collegial relationship with Indonesians and Indonesian institutions. He had no students from Indonesia, never worked with an Indonesian institution, and never became an avid commentator in the Indonesian public discourse. He located himself more as a “participant observer” whose task is to make a sense of what the “natives” are doing through the ways the natives tell about themselves.

I think it is now the time to shed more light on examining the relations between Geertz and the genealogy of Indonesian anthropology. The significance of this endeavor contributes not only to a more critical view on Geertz, but also to a critical perspective on the state-of-the-arts of the Indonesian anthropology. More work needs to be done on this matter, but suffice it to say at this moment that Geertz’s seminal work and his theoretical tour-de-force have minimally affected the development of Indonesian anthropology, which has produced more work on cultural typology than on interpretive ethnography.

Clifford Geertz passed away on October 31, 2006 in Philadelphia. No doubt Indonesia owes much to this respected anthropologist. His book, “The Religion of Java,” is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of Islam in Indonesia, calling for observers to devote more attention on the reality of everyday Islam which is replete with categorical mixture of the ideal Islam and the practiced Islam. When Indonesian scholars were fascinated by structuralist and functionalist perspectives, Geertz introduced interpretive social science. His dictum of “looking over the native’s shoulder” has become a hallmark of ethnographic research that attempts to endow interpretive privilege on the local people. However, it is ironic that Indonesian anthropology has learned little from the Geertzian interpretive perspective, and hermeneutics, the key tool in interpretation, remains less favored in anthropological research in Indonesia. This perhaps owes to the fact that Geertz never took students from Indonesia, a reason that he never explained and that remained mysterious.

Geertz’s influential role in anthropology has been a subject of numerous studies. Sherry Ortner’s and Byron Good and Richard Schweder’s edited books discuss how various disciplines taught in US universities have borrowed from Geertz. In Indonesia, Ignas Kleden’s Ph.D. dissertation is the only comprehensive study on Geertz’s thoughts on economic and culture. Despite the abundant resources on Geertz, assessing how he helps shape the field of Indonesian studies and Indonesian anthropology remains an unfulfilled endeavor. Geertz’s life, which stayed aloft, detached from the passionate dynamics of Indonesian academic world and Indonesian scholars, unlike other Indonesianists, itself invites interpretive understanding. This, I think, is the task we must begin.

Mary S. Zurbuchen (ed.) 2005. Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

In this book, I contribute an essay, “Ninjas in Narratives of Local and National Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia.”

Click here for review of the book by Rommel Curaming on Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia

Over the last few years, after the New Order political regime crumbled in 1998, Indonesians have been debating whether we need to rewrite our national history. The major event driving the public debate is the history of the 1965 tragedy when seven army generals were assasinated and when the killing was soon followed by a military operation that resulted in more than 500,000 people massacred. The official history, written and endorsed by the New Order regime, claims that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was behind the killing and the military merely conducted a legitimate step to curb the communist threat. This official history lasted for a few decades, was taught in schools, and was the source of propaganda films commisioned by the New Order regime with the help from nationalist historians. The collapse of the New Order autocratic regime (1967-199 has opened up the long-awaited opportunity to challenge the New Order version of the 1965 history. Pioneered by several historians, the term “pelurusan sejarah” was coined, referring to the attempt to correct “the mistakes” that the New Order had relied on writing its own version of the 1965 history. Historians supporting the pelurusan sejarah argue that the New Order’s claim that the PKI executes the killing of the general run against the available historical data, which the regime had covered and had just been made public recently. Pelurusan sejarah seemed to gain necessary political support when they managed to convince the post-New Order government to take the word PKI from the history textbooks for high-school students. The New Order’s version of the killing tragedy on the night of September 30, 1965, was “G30S/PKI.” Despite the major revision, the debate over pelurusan sejarah has remained and some nationalist historians have expressed their concern that eliminating the word PKI would mean disregarding the threat of communism, then and now.

I am less interested in commenting on the historical accuracy of the allegation of a PKI-backed scenario of the killing. Neither am I interested in providing new evidence to support either argument. Over the last few years, books, written by Indonesian historians or translated from American, European, and Australian publications, have mushroomed. These are good sources to assess the historical facts and arguments. I am more interested in commenting on the pragmatic consequences of pelurusan sejarah, which I think has become a major political project in any country that is coping with the legacy of authoritarian past.

Pelurusan sejarah holds an assumption that sejarah (history) has been manipulated and a political and a scholarly step should be carried out to straighten (diluruskan) it out. I do believe that history can always be manipulated but the fact that history is prone to political manipulation does not necessarily mean that there is only one “correct” version of history. Pelurusan sejarah risks of strengthening the politics of historical writing which overlooks agency and produces the same historical version that the pelurusan historians have in fact criticized. The attempt to “correct the mistake” would produce new authority vested on historians who have the capability to identify the “mistakes” and offer different “legitimate” versions. This will launch a chain of pelurusan efforts as other historians will seek other mistakes and other legitimate versions. At the same time, any product of a pelurusan would claim to be the most validated and responsible historical version, and in so doing it simply reenacts the same process practiced by the New Order regime in claiming that its version was the most accurate one. What differentiates the New Order version and the “corrected” version is the legitimacy they evoke. The New Order version constructs its legitimacy through discursive politics of propaganda and education, and the pelurusan version relies on the discourse of scientific objectivity.

I am not suggesting that one should do away with pelurusan sejarah, because it will contradict the pragmatic view I am introducing here. I would like to propose, instead, to open a critical space of dialogue without necessarily assuming that one version contains the most accurate depiction of historical events. The New Order history and the pelurusan effort share the same historical burden. They strive to craft a national history that is politically and morally acceptable. Perhaps the most feasible step to open up the critical space is simply to forget the national history and brush the history against the (political and scientific) grains.