Jaka Tarub,a Javanese culture hero?

The origin of the Jaka Tarub story in oral tradition shows how Javanese culture deals with encounters and fissues in its civilisation. Drawing on a north Javanese kentrungan performance recorded in the 1980s the article shows how these Islamic storytellers have skilfully blended ancient myths and folktales with local history and non-Javanese Islamic legends. As a rich source of information on local language, manners and customs, these oral tales may also help to answer questions on the relationship between Javanese and other cultures. Investigation of this genre is urgent since the art of storytelling is rapidly fading under the pressure of modernisation.     

Becoming a true Javanese: A Javanese view of attempts at Javanisation

The active bearers of Javanese culture have two main aims in life: to make themselves true Javanese, and to try to make ‘others’ Javanese; others include other races or ethnicities. This article explores the relationship between Javaneseness and politics, and the attitude of Indonesian presidents from Sukarno to Megawati Sukarnoputri on this subject. The promotion of Javaneseness is most characteristically embodied in various kinds of Currents of Belief, united in two umbrella organisations: namely the Himpunan Penghayat Kepercayaan Terhadap Tuhan Yang Maha Esa or HPK (The Association of those who have Faith in the One Supreme God), and the Badan Koordinasi Organisasi-Organisasi Kepercayaan Terhadap Tuhan Yang Maha Esa or BKOK (The Coordinating Authority for Organisations of those who have Belief in the One Supreme God).     

Sailing up the Map: A re-examination of constructs of Javaneseness in the light of new evidence

While Java's culture has extended to other parts of Indonesia and mainland Southeast Asian countries (on Angkor under Jayavarman II, for example, and on the Chams) it exerted even stronger influence on a more distant country, Japan. The encounter pre-dated Indianisation and was between the Jomon population of Japan – a decentralised population living by hunting, fishing, and gathering – and wet-rice growing Javanese immigrants who had an advanced and much more centralised political organisation and sophisticated technology, art and culture. We need thus to adjust our ideas about the antiquity of Javaneseness and the length of time this civilisation has been in contact with other cultures.     

Mixing Religious Rituals and Mystical Experience with Modern Democracy: Indonesia's Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX

Abstract

Religion is the most divisive, even violent, issue dividing Indonesians both in the past and today. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the Western-educated Sultan's mystical experiences and religious rituals were used as tools for creating democratic traditions, preserving peace and religious tolerance in religiously diverse Yogyakarta province, the national educational center. As the Muslim King who ruled the Mataram kingdom from 1940–1988, Sultan Hamengku Buwono (HB) IX strived to combine elements of rationality with both his Muslim faith and Javanese mysticism. He primarily invoked traditional Javanese ethics and mysticism, rather than Islamic orthodoxy, to appeal to the cultural legacy of the indigenous citizenry, and invoked western democratic values to reassure the Indonesians from other provinces and foreigners engaged in Yogyakarta's colleges and universities. Research findings explain how the Sultan shared with many educated/uneducated persons this particular worldview in which there is no conflict between modern scientific education and a traditional religious worldview and practice     

“Et nulle autre me faict plus proprement homme que cette cy:” Michel de Montaigne's embodied masculinity

Writing in a period of considerable anxiety about gender roles, Montaigne (1533–92) developed a series of reflections on gender and masculinity in which he destabilized the gender and sexual hierarchies of early-modern France. First, drawing on an increasingly global archive of information about non-European societies, he argued that culture plays a major role in shaping the lives and experiences of women. Secondly, his understanding of nature enabled him to foster a notion of the equality of the sexes, even as he recognized that nature creates certain differences between men and women. Finally, on these foundations, Montaigne constructed a vision of masculinity that stresses it as an ethical value, one that he opposes above all to cruelty. Montaigne's sexual politics were, I suggest, at least in part a response to the Wars of Religion that had led to an excess of barbarity in early-modern France.     

Japan's Policies Towards the Ainu Language and Culture with Special Reference to North Fennoscandian Sami Policies

Under Japan's colonization of Ainu Lands (Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin), the Ainu were disconnected from their lands by relocations and deprived of their language and culture by regulations. In 1899, the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act came into force to finalize the assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese society. In 1997, as a result of Ainu efforts to scrap the assimilation policies, the Ainu Culture Promotion Act (CPA) replaced the Act of 1899. The CPA was expected to emancipate the Ainu from the sufferings caused by the assimilation policies, and yet it stipulated neither Ainu indigeneity nor their linguistic and cultural rights. It is still in effect even after the 2008 official recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people in the northern part of Japan by the Government of Japan. This article attempts to examine Japan's past and present policies towards the Ainu language and culture in the international context for the revitalization of the Ainu language and culture as the Ainu desire. In order to do this, it first outlines the assimilation policies, and then traces the Ainu struggle for survival as a people. It also discusses the CPA and the Final Report written by the Advisory Committee for Future Ainu Policy, which both form the basis of Japan's present Ainu policies. Finally, in order to explore the revitalization of the Ainu language and culture, how the North Fennoscandian Sami policies have advanced is surveyed.     

The potential of destruction in art and science

ABSTRACT

Artist and researcher Neal White argues for the potential role of radical engagements in science by drawing on the work of pioneers of conceptual art: John Latham (1921–2006), Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) in the UK, and György Kepes (1906–2001) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973) in the US. Starting with destruction as a positive force in artistic practice, White examines the ideas developed by these artists as a conceptual framework for thinking through time, chemical process and event structures within the context of the Cold War. In further examining the social context and contemporary landscape of cultural forms servicing science in terms of the communication of ideas, or underpinning further a knowledge economy, he argues for artists to engage science on their own terms, through a renewal of radical practices. This would in turn create new and critically framed work of benefit to culture and society more generally.     

LIVING IN A TIME OF MADNESS: LAST DAYS OF JAVA'S LAST PROPHETIC POET

Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.     

Judd's China: a missionary congressman and US–China policy

Congressman Walter Henry Judd was an active player in Sino–US relations in the twentieth century. Unique for an American Congressman, he served for 10 years as a medical missionary in China. This article examines his motivation for going to China, his perceptions of Chinese culture, society, and politics, and the impact of Chinese culture on him. It demonstrates that cultural influence is not a one‐way process, but reciprocal. Judd's views of China and his ardent Christian beliefs made him in turn a liberal missionary and a conservative anti‐Communist congressman with a significant role in Sino–US relations. His political behavior was profoundly influenced by both ideology and the attitudes and judgments shaped by his 10 years in China.     

Friedrich Sunder and the boundaries of gender

The article explores the gendered imaginary in the Gnadenleben of Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328) and the formation of clerical masculinity in the context of feminine devotional life. Friedrich Sunder worked as a convent chaplain for a Dominican female community and lived within the convent's area. In his book Sunder employs language, images and devotional practices that can be considered in medieval culture to have been feminine. Almost simultaneously, however, he applied masculine roles and emphasised his own manliness. Although Sunder accepted female forms of religiosity and wrote on practices that were considered especially suitable for women, at the same time his priestly masculinity was defined by the physical boundary the cloister created between the enclosed feminine religiosity and that of a pastoral masculine priesthood. His discussion of gender within the mystical frame defined the boundaries of his own masculinity in the web of different traditions of both the proper way of life and the gendered nature of religious practices.     

Review

Letters of a Javanese Princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, translated by Agnes Louise Symmers (Hong Kong: Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd, 1976).     

《和名类聚抄》成书过程的文化概观

一个民族语言的发展,离不开其周围环境和吸收先进文化的内涵,而语言的表现形式又与其发展过程中的语言资料——辞书的发展有着密不可分的关系。《和名类聚抄》是日本辞书中对中国大陆文化吸取过程的代表之作,它的成书过程和内容有着一个划时代的意义和平安时期语言文化史所应该拥有的价值,同时又包含了作者源顺与《和名抄》之间的一个文化故事。     

THE SPACES OF NATURE: INTRODUCTION

The articles in this section aim at critical reappraisal of space from the viewpoint of the materiality of human action which is underpinned by a special focus on its dealings with nature. Space is primarily viewed by others than geographers and/or from outside Scandinavian and Anglo‐American research. The role of language and culture, as well as using the possibilities of ecosemiotics grown out of the Tartu–Moscow school, is highlighted in an attempt to enliven discussions of lived space and human relationships with nature.     

Hans Nielsen Hauge

In this article, the author examines the role Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824) played in encouraging literacy in Norwegian peasant society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, an aspect of his ministry rarely discussed. This poorly educated son of a peasant broke the unwritten rule of never publishing texts for a large readership without the necessary educational skills. Thus he opened up a new literate space where the common person could express him-or herself on paper. Hauge printed around 40 different texts, 14 of them books, in a language the peasants could understand. This inspired his followers not only to read, but also to write, mainly letters to Hauge and to Haugeans in other parts of Norway. Some even became authors. Women played a central role in this wave of literacy spreading throughout the country. Based on Hauge’s original texts, the author presents some crucial aspects of his mentality and shows how his ministry served as a catalyst to the growth of literacy among peasants during the period.     

The archaeological remains of Ratu Boko: From Sri Lankan Buddhism to Hinduism

From the 8th to the early 10th century the region around mounts Merapi and Sumbing in central Java was the centre of powerful Indianised kingdoms. One such site, Ratu Boko, was transformed into a Javanese replica of the Abhayagiri-vihāra, a well-known Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka. Shortly afterwards, the Sinhalese influence showed elements of Hindu and Vajrayāna traditions revealing from the archaeological remains that it was not merely a copy of a Sri Lankan model but a testimony of Javanese civilisation and history.     

SEARLEWORLD1

John Searle's most recent effort to account for human social institutions claims to provide a synthesis of the explanatory and the normative while simultaneously dismissing as confused and wrongheaded theorists who held otherwise. Searle, although doubtless alert to the usual considerations for separating the normative and the explanatory projects, announces at the outset that he conceives of matters quite differently. Searle's reason for reconceiving the field rests on his claim that both ends can be achieved by a single “underlying principle of social ontology” (7). This principle, he maintains, proves basic both to any explanation of how the social arises and sustains itself as well as to all justifications of core common norms, for example, human rights. His approach transforms what previously appeared to be ontological/explanatory questions (and so prima facie empirical/causal matters) completely into semantic/conceptual issues. By situating language as constitutive of the social, and intentionality as a necessary conceptual precursor to language, Searle claims to join by semantic necessity philosophical projects that the philosophical tradition that he rejects held distinct. Searle's notion of the social comes for free once one has language as a conventional cloak for prelinguistic, semantically well‐formed intentional contents, individual and collective. But upon examination, Searle's key argument for displacement of the tradition depends upon the viability of his linguistic mechanism, and that in turn requires prelinguistic necessity for all forms of intentionality. But he can produce no compelling connection, conceptual or empirical, to establish the role that collective intentionality supposedly must play.     

Articulating minority nationhood: cultural and political dimensions in Québec's reasonable accommodation debate

Given their precarious position within larger states, national minorities cannot rely on federal governments to affirm their nationhood. Moreover, insofar as nationhood is predicated on a shared history, language and culture, immigrants place additional strains on the maintenance of national distinctiveness and the political claims that derive from it. In 2006–2007, following a series of confrontations over religious practices in the public sphere, Québec's provincial government appointed the Bouchard–Taylor Commission to investigate avenues for the accommodation of immigrant‐related cultural and religious differences. While it failed to generate policy, the commission did provide a discursive space for the (re)assertion of Québécois nationhood. Analysing the production of national identity in newspaper debates of the Bouchard–Taylor report, we offer an alternative to the ethnic–civic paradigm in nationalism theory. Rather than treat ethnic and civic as two separate ends of a single continuum, we conceptualise a relationship between two dimensions: one of culture and one of politics. We show that in contemporary articulations of Québec national identity, the prerequisites of political membership derive their meaning from a productive tension between blood‐based and adoptive conceptions of national culture.     

Paul Cohen-Portheim: questions of nationalism,messianism and nostalgia in a prison camp in England, 1914–1918

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the little-known Jewish writer Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880–1932) and his notions of nationalism and Zionism. Born in Berlin to Austrian parents of Sephardic origin, Cohen-Portheim was interned during the First World War in various English prison camps. This experience profoundly affected his intellectual outlook and he dedicated much of his effort to the fight against nationalism. It was in the English prison camps that he developed an eclectic theory of nationalism which combines a quasi-evolutionary progress towards global justice with a messianic notion of Zionism. The Jewish people play a crucial role in Cohen-Portheim’s vision of a world devoid of nationalism, whose absurdity is disclosed in the arrival of Zionism. Juxtaposing Europe’s crisis of culture and Asia’s spiritual vitality, Cohen-Portheim ascribes to Zionism a bridging of the gap that separates Europe and Asia, and fragments modern nationalistic man. This article follows Cohen-Portheim’s intellectual development and highlights shifts and continuities in his writing, arguing that he shows two different types of nostalgia, namely a longing for the East as developed in his early works and a longing for the past as displayed in his last major work.     

Der Lexikograf Gerhard Wahrig – Systemgrenzen und Ressourcen: Zur Entstehung seines Projekts „Wörterbuch als Datenbank“

Systems, Boundaries and Resources: The Lexicographer Gerhard Wahrig (1923–1978) and the Genesis of his Project “Dictionary as Database”. Gerhard Wahrig’s private archive has recently been retrieved by the authors and their siblings. We undertake a first survey of the unpublished material and concentrate on those aspects of Wahrig’s bio-ergography which stand in relation to his life project “dictionary as database”, realised shortly before his death. We argue that this project was conceived in the 1950s, while Wahrig was writing and editing dictionaries and encyclopedias for the Bibliographisches Institut in Leipzig. Wahrig, who had been a wireless operator in WWII, was well informed about the development of computers in West Germany. He was influenced both by Ferdinand de Saussure and by the discussion on language and structure in the Soviet Union. When he crossed the German/German border in 1959, he experienced mechanisms of exclusion before he could establish himself in the West as a lexicographer. We argue that the transfer of symbolic and human capital was problematic due to the cultural differences between the two Germanies. In the 1970s, he became a professor of General and Applied Linguistics. The project of a “dictionary as database” was intended both as a basis for extensive empirical research on the semantic structure of natural languages and as a working tool for the average user of the German language. Due to his untimely death, he could not pursue his idea of exploring semantic networks.     

History of German Universities

This article has three main goals. Firstly, it intends to present the interesting but little-studied intellectual figure of Sir Francis Kynaston (1586ca.–1642), his educational enterprises, and his contributions to 17th-century English culture. Secondly, it aims to illustrate in detail his often neglected or, at best, misunderstood political ideas and connect them to the type of debates and controversies he was involved in at the end of the 1620s. In doing so, one of the principal objectives will be to revisit the traditional scholarly interpretations of Kynaston's place within the history of political thought in early modern England. In particular, attention will be paid to the language Kynaston employed to attack a specific political paradigm, that is parliamentarian “patriotism”. Finally, the essay will endeavour to show the interplay between Kynaston's educational project and cultural ideals, on one side, and his absolutist political doctrines and goals, on the other.