Imagining selves and inventing festival Sriwijaya

Daniels, Timothy P. Clifford Geertz, in his discussion of the social history of an East Central Javanese town, described how rural migrants attempted to make sense of modern elections and political factions by applying old systems of meanings.(1) As people adjusted to the evolving social conditions of new urban contexts, new knowledge supposedly emerged to order social relations. Yet he observed that in the 1950s this rarely was the case; usually a sense of vagueness and incoherence persisted. Similarly, Geertz's analysis of a Javanese funeral concluded that the ritual "failed" and consequently tensions persisted and intensified as a result of societal and cultural discontinuity; the social and the cultural were moving in opposite directions.(2) Old cultural notions did not tend to give way to new notions more adept at effecting social solidarity. The contest over whose voice, whose sense of self and image of post-colonial Indonesia would prevail eventually culminated in the bloodbath of 1965-66, which marked the abrupt end of the Old Order and the birth of the Suharto- led New Order regime. New Order officials used a combination of politico-military repression and explicitly promulgated national ideology to secure their position atop the political hierarchy. Pancasila, the five-principle ideology of the 1945 Constitution, and the Bhinneka Tunggal Ika philosophy of "Unity in Diversity" became more widely institutionalized and were rigidly interpreted. Tourist promotions, a key element in the Indonesian government's five-year plans since 1969, were a crucial vehicle for delivering New Order messages and values,(3) and in 1993 President Suharto declared 1991-2000 "Visit Indonesia Decade". Tourist promotions fulfil the New Order's major ideological shift towards linking national unity with economic development and modernization.(4) The tourist industry has been a way to attract foreign capital and investment, especially with the decline of the oil boom in the 1980s. Balinese average incomes more than tripled from 1979 to 1985 as a result of the growth of tourism,(5) but its rise in Tanah Toraja and Bali brought on a crisis of identity, partially due to static images used to market regional cultures. Images of elaborate funerary rituals and exotic dances are used to represent the Toraja and Balinese people and their administrative units as "pillars" of the Indonesian nation.(6) Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger argue that invented traditions, relatively easy to trace practices and discourses, are often used by people to create an aura of antiquity and perpetuity in social contexts characterized by large-scale structural change.(7) Moreover, Hobsbawm and Susan Wright both underscore the fact that certain representations and interpretations are routinized in public celebrations to promote the goals and projects of organizers.(8) The notion of invented tradition has come under criticism for its apparently limited perspective on human creativity and the distinction the idea often entails between actual and invented culture.(9) What I suggest in this paper is that while it is true that humans are always creating representations, and that such meaningful symbolic creativity is an inherent quality of culture, it is analytically important to make a distinction between "actual culture" and "invented tradition" in terms of the different ways knowledge is internalized and socially distributed. From this perspective we can view the process by which invented tradition becomes actual culture and actual culture, with a long and difficult to trace historical trajectory, becomes invented tradition. This perspective can provide insight not only into ongoing social contests for the power to publicly define selves but also into a culture of crisis in which hegemonic inventions of self, based upon opposition to other non-represented groups, restrict the incorporation of diverse groups into the larger community and serve to channel violence in plural societies. …