Each time we arrive in Bali for another visit I’m struck by change. Leaving the airport the billboards seem brighter, the shopping malls bigger and more opulent, and somehow there’s always a little more EurAm consumer kitsch than I remember from the last time.
This year’s first little surprise came when our taxi driver asked me to meet him with our bags… in front of Starbucks.
To find Starbucks at the Denpasar airport is hardly a shock in itself. Maple scones and non-fat lattes are now readily available in what, a few years back, would’ve been the unlikeliest of places. The real surprise, I guess, was the ease with which our Balinese driver’s heavily accented Indonesian seemed to accommodate the new term. Tunggu sebentar, pak… di depan Starbucks, ya? (Wait just a minute, sir… in front of Starbucks, okay?)
As a practice (what else is there?), language is continuously changing—perhaps especially in societies as cosmopolitan as contemporary Bali. Here I’m reminded of one of my favorite entries in the old Echols and Shadily Indonesian-English dictionary… merambokan, from the root-word rambo, “to destroy utterly.” Apparently somewhere along the way Sylvester Stallone’s infamous character, Rambo, became a transitive verb. (Though, in passing, I must confess I’ve never heard the term used as such.)
New terminology and ways of speaking are part of any living language, and Indonesian is obviously no exception. Elements of Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese, but also Dutch and English, are everywhere apparent in everyday conversation. And this reflects more generally the cultural complexity of the region. But how is this complexity best grasped conceptually?
Critical disciplines from anthropology to cultural studies have long recognized the problem. The solutions they’ve proposed generally take the form of a new term or concept, such as syncretism, Great and Little Traditions, creolization, glocality (!) and hybridity. The question is whether such concepts are capable of accomplishing their ostensible aim.
In each case the central contention has been much the same: contemporary cultural forms are the end result of a long history of change and—like the Indonesian language, with Rambo and Starbucks—they are fundamentally heterogenous. In my own area of study, this tendency manifests in phrases like “Saivo-Buddhism,” “Tantric Hinduism” and (my favorite) “Archipelago Sanskrit.” It should be needless to stress that parallels abound in other fields.
The point is that each of these phrases and concepts shares a purpose—namely to represent the heterogeneity of their object, reflecting the historical conditions under which it became possible. For example, we find the scriptural language of insular southeast Asia for a particular period shares certain salient characteristics with what today we recognize as Sanskrit. But it is also different in several important respects… In addition to “corrupt” grammatical forms (on which, cp. “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit”), it also exhibits many of the features of the region’s indigenous languages. So is this “Archipelago Sanskrit” (as it is often called) a syncretic form?
On reflection it seems that, for ideas like syncretism and hybridity to make any sense, their opposite—or at least an alternative—must also be possible. This alternative would be the ‘pure’ moment (“real” Sanskrit, Hinduism, tradition, or whatever) prior to the emergence of its hybrid transformation. The problem is that attention to history generally reveals such “pure” forms to be themselves complex—the products of equally contingent admixtures of earlier elements.
From this perspective notions of syncretism and hybridity would perhaps tell us more about our own practices than those of the societies they were designed to address. For instance, the moment of purity (“real” Sanskrit etc.) would comprise not a point of originary homogeneity, but rather the point at which we stopped inquiring as to what came before—be it arbitrarily or for a lack of evidence. If this were so, it would suggest that our existing language for dealing with complexity (‘syncretism’ etc.) does little more than to defer the moment of essentialization. No one believes in cultural essences any more… Yet what is ‘hybridity’ other than the idea that our essences are getting all mixed up?
Whether we’re dealing with Archipelago Sanskrit or Starbucks, I suspect the critical moment is that of asking questions—and so committing ourselves to certain presuppositions. Can we understand the social significance of Starbucks without making a prior commitment to some notion of ‘Balinese tradition’? If so, how so? If not, whose idea of tradition is to be adopted? And based on what criteria of judgment?
Tags: anthropology, Bali, contemporary culture, cultural studies, Indonesia, starbucks
October 12, 2010 at 9:03 pm |
I’ve been interviewing older Balinese to write, as a novice, an article about forests in Bali. I wanted to know what their lives were like 40-50 years ago. The most striking thing that has happened to me is a much more clear understanding or a new question in my mind about why Balinese would want to be so modern, chase the tourist ‘dollar’, change their culture and lives for advancement. I’ve been involved with Bali for 20 years and frequently wonder and ask others, why do the Balinese want to change and leave what we appreciate so much about Bali. I’ve learned, for example, that about 50 years ago, the majority of the Balinese population from Ubud, Gianyar, and the much larger surrounding area used to walk to Munduk to harvest coffee, frequently taking their immediate families. A 3 day walk and long-term temporary living on that site. Imagine! And not having enough money to buy food but depending on what they could harvest from the forests and nature, just to eat on a daily basis. So I have a new ‘thinking’ about ‘progress’. Still frustrated with ‘improvements’ like Starbucks and wishing that ‘progress’ could be adapted within the cultural and artistic village of Ubud instead of the new village of ‘mini-markets’.