Robert Wessing

Porous boundaries : Addressing calamities in East Java, Indonesia

Social constructions of reality must account for adversity and calamities. In East Java this is commonly done with reference to the spirit world and to God, with only occasional appeals to modern science. Rather than being a uniform phenomenon, adversity can be conceptualized as happening on the individual, the household, the community, and the state levels. Explanations similarly vary from specific individual offences, to communal household or community culpability, and national-level disasters like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that are blamed on the activities of gods and spirits. All these social units are seen as porous, and care must be taken to protect them from deleterious outside influences. Parallel to these explanations at all levels run appeals to God and His mercies. The difference between these streams of explanation is resolved in the case of the more pious by either denying the spirit world, or otherwise resolving them in various ways by unifying the categories of God and the spirit world.

The last tiger in East Java : symbolic continuity in ecological change

The present paper examines beliefs about tigers in East Java, Indonesia. There, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the tiger serves as a symbol, functioning especially as a complement to shamans and ancestral spirits. The tiger also acts as a symbol of nature, though not of uncontrolled nature - the animal guards the order of both the jungle and the village, and serves as an agent of the supernatural beings that own the forest. The Javan tigers numbers have declined drastically in the face of ecological change, to the point where it is doubtful that any still remain. The tiger is very much alive as a symbol, however; this aspect of the creature has adapted to its new situation far better than the animal itself. At present the role of tiger-as-symbol has changed, so that now it guards not only nature but the Islamic faith as well. With the disappearance of the actual tiger, the panther has come to take over many of the roles once held by the larger cat. This shift has been facilitated by the fact that both animals occupy the same linguistic category.

Human sacrifice at Prambanan

While the discovery of a human skeleton is nothing extraordinary in Indo nesian archaeology, that of one in the central area of the famous Hindu temple complex of Candi Prambanan in Central Java, which dates from the first half of the ninth century A.D., does call for an explanation. Such explanations as have been put forward up to now have all been unsatis factory. Although an explanation in terms of human sacrifice was sug gested at the time, the idea received scant recognition in the archaeological literature. Only after another human skeleton was found in a neighbouring Buddhist temple complex could the possibility of the practice of human sacrifice in ancient Central Java no longer be ignored. The phenomenon remained a difficult topic among archaeologists, however. The problem that hampered scholarly progress was the choice of the appropriate ideological framework in which to place such sacrificial practices: Hindu-Buddhist religious ideas or Javanese folklore. It is this problem that we want to discuss and try to find a solution for in this article.

Centred on the source: Hamlets and houses of Kanekes (Baduy)

This chapter describes and analyses the hamlets and houses of the Urang Kanekes, in the literature often referred to as the Baduy of southern Banten, West Java. Like elsewhere in Indonesia, these structures and the rules to which they are subject are part of the way of life of Kanekes as a whole. The chapter presents a short sketch of the culture of these people to provide the background against which their houses must be understood. In discussions about the Kanekes hamlets, the north-south axis along which the hamlet appears to be organized is sometimes emphasized. Tangtu houses in particular are made from locally available materials. Both in the layout of Kanekes as a whole and in the individual hamlets we find the idea expressed that the centre is female and, as the origin of everything, the source of fertility. Keywords: Indonesia; Kanekes hamlets; Tangtu houses; Urang Kanekes houses

Constituting the world in the Sundanese house

It has long been established that houses, rather than being just shelters, may embody cosmological principles. Lately this has been brought into sharp focus once again by various overviews of the current state of research on houses in Southeast Asia. Sundanese houses, as I will show, come into being through the intersection of two domains that extend into the larger Sundanese world, including the world of the spirits. This intersection creates a third space or domain, which is the central part of the house. The spirit world in Sunda (and Southeast Asia generally) can be divided into two parts; nature spirits, which were never human, and ancestral spirits, which once were. The mixture of the two ancestral lines of fertility takes place in the context of the intersection of the two domains of natural fertility; the two are inextricably linked. Keywords: ancestral spirits; nature spirits; spirit world; Sundanese house