Felicia Hughes-Freeland
Geertz’s formulation prioritises style or surface over morality, and produces what I call a semiotic orientalism, dramatically illustrated by Roland Barthes’
discussion of Japanese semiosis. For Barthes, the value given to corporeal gestural precision ‘has nothing which is rational or moral … the logic of Occidental morality is to be impolite, is to be true’ (1994: 778, 790).3
Positive socio-cultural evaluations of a person who is ‘sincere’ and ‘natural’
whose behavioral style shows what they are ‘really like’ have often led to a mistaking of different presentations as morally suspect. But ‘Orientals’ do not necessarily have a monopoly on dissimulation. Take this moment from a novel by John Le Carré:
... the privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman … is the greatest dissembler on earth. … Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully, or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool. … He can have a Force Twelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue, and you may be his best friend, but you’ll never be the wiser.
(1991: 29)
Indirection as social style
The practice in polite Javanese social interaction of dissimulating fact and feeling in social interaction (ethok-ethok) is not necessarily ‘other’ as a form of presentation. Goffman’s approach (1956) brings Javanese and English behaviour into a single frame, where politeness conceals ‘the dirty work’
(Goffman 1956: 28), and everyday life is a performance, organised in contexts classified as ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’, to which styles are adapted to appro- priate degrees of formality. Polite Javanese social interaction is well known for its use of elaborate and nuanced speech ‘levels’ which are used to manipulate relative social statuses. The concealment of intention by using deferential language codes gives the user power over the one being offered such codes (Dewey 1978). These ‘levels’ or ‘codes’ become less exotic and morally suspect when treated as ‘styles’ in a ‘matrix of face-saving practices’ (Goffman 1967, cited in Errington 1988: 238). Politeness, for the Javanese, is ‘the management of meaning’, a ‘fundamental property of political interaction’ to be explained with reference to the ‘phenomenological realities of situations … [it is] an essential aspect of power’ (Cohen and Comaroff 1976: 87–9).
Javanese language is performative as well as informative. Ordered behaviour depends on a knowledge of ‘the relative values of language’, unggah-ungguh.
Nine levels are used, according to whether an interaction is formal (krama), semi-formal (madya), or basic (ngoko) (Koentjaraningrat 1985: 234). The correct use of levels is crucial for expressing polite deference. For example, a Yogyakartan Prince was quick to correct me when I mistakenly asked him if
he had seen (ningali) a recent shadow play, using the plain polite level (krama) instead of giving him the self-abasing krama andhap word for ‘see’ (mirsani).
Politeness is used forcefully, and speech styles are more than verbal acts. The intertwined relationship of being Javanese, speaking Javanese, and Javanese manners was nicely expressed by a court musician, who explained that however perfect one’s linguistic skill, it is only complete (jankěp) when accompanied by the appropriate gestures. He demonstrated ‘complete krama’, accompanying a sentence with a gentle forward inclination of the shoulders.
Kramais melodious, measured, ‘muted gesturally’ (Errington 1988: 245), and is used for first-impression management and distance-preservation, for keeping on the safe side. When speaking Javanese it is better to be overweeningly polite than sorry. The rhythms of kramaare the rhythms of dance-measures as they are practised in the court; these do not exclude the possibility of violence but it is kept under a strict rein. By contrast, people using the informal and semi-polite codes (ngoko and lower madya) have a bickering, insolent tone, a ragged, fraying texture.Ngokois rich in word play for comic effect; its pungently derisive or ironic effects are exploited in comic perfor- mances of all kinds. Ngoko expresses a hint of contempt, a hostility, a proximity to open physical violence which tends to be overlooked if one concentrates on polite areas of speech behaviour. The difference, in short, is that where ngoko has a screeching nasal laugh, in krama a smile is quite enough.
‘A person’s speech and comportment are strategically adapted relative to the status of the addressee, as a means to social ends extrinsic to norms of etiquette’ (Errington 1988: 228). In these terms, Javanese people become agents instead of being constrained by codes. For instance, a speaker can use indirection to subvert the rules governing a situation by directing the speech to themselves away from the addressee by using the familiar code,ngoko. This
‘as if ’ internalisation frees the utterance from constraints and gives it licence to be daring, blunt, shocking and funny, and is often used by noted come- dians. Comedy is thus able to deal with political matters which can only be articulated by virtue of indirection and humorous framing. It makes it possible to say things which the normal rules of Javanese discourse – and current Indonesian politics – make it otherwise impossible to say.
As linguistic data have been given priority over embodied action, and studies about the effect of power and social effectiveness on the Javanese self have focused on speech,4I will concentrate on the behavioural significance of physical gesture and movement in social interaction, and show why embodied behaviour has come to have particular importance in the state’s view of culture and identity.
Dance and everyday life
The boundary between formal performance as an event and the performance of everyday life is deliberately blurred by Javanese experts on court traditions
and educationalists. Since the late colonial era in the sultan’s palace in Yogyakarta, court dance training has been a form of socialisation which promotes socially approved behaviour by developing the self-control which is necessary for harmonious social interaction. These codified movement systems have maintained significance in the post-colonial Indonesian Republic of which Java forms a part.
Dance movement is the enactment of ěmpan-papan, best understood as a Javanese version of Goffman’s ‘impression management’. The dance sěmbah (salutation with joined palms, thumbs just below the nostrils), is also used in daily court life to show respect to the sultan. Dancing is thus both art and exemplar. This relationship between dance and manners (tata-krama) was explained to me by Prince Suryobrongto, a dancer who was later responsible for court protocol.5
In trapsila, every movement is ordered … Everything is in dance move- ment: how to stoop so as not to be taller than someone you are passing in front of; how to do the sitting walk; how to sit cross-legged, how to sit in sila marikělu (‘broken rice-stalk’, the masculine position of respect to the sultan, cross-legged with the knees close to the ground, with the hands folded – see Figure 9.1) without fidgeting and shifting around, which may be for hours in dance drama; how to hold the front pleat of one’s bathikwith your left hand so that the fold does not flap open in the wind, which would be sloppy (ngělomprot); how to sink to the ground holding a tray so that the glasses don’t spill; how to hold one’s arm so that your armpit does not show indecently. Subasita is being polite, having a friendly attitude, and being modest, not arrogant, respectful and consid- erate of others. In Yogya the Princes express this by using krama to people, not ngokolike they do in Surakarta … Unggah-ungguhis language use. … These kinds of tata-kramaall come into dance. … In the dance is reflected the character of the person.
Formal politeness is fitting for certain occasions and places, although ethnography presents politeness as normative behaviour. Indeed, one theme in Orientalist images of the Javanese is their essential grace. ‘Few peoples are more naturally sensitive to rhythm than the Javanese’ wrote Van Lelyveld in his text about Javanese dance, published for the colonial exhibition of 1931 (1931: 47). This sort of cultural stereotyping has given ‘The’ Javanese an ethnographic reputation for being graceful by nature. Individual Javanese people may find this stereotype useful to hide behind, and words like sensi- tivity, refinement, and self-control come up in local discourses as well that of outsiders, and play their part in defining and shaping national programmes of identity production.
This effect or ideal should not be confused with actuality. Being Javanese is not naturally given, but the result of socialisation or training. Before this one
is ‘not yet’ Javanese (dhurung Jawa), a phrase applied to children under five, foreigners, or insane people (Geertz 1961: 105), and glossed by my Javanese teacher as ‘not being able to think yet’.6As the well known Javanese poet and dramatist W. S. Rendra writes,
It may be that Javanese civilization has consciously balanced the violent character of its masses. Their insights, psychologism (kěbatinan), language and arts are directed primarily towards controlled sensibilities.
(1983: 11, author’s translation) The Javanese do not value behaviour as ‘natural’ in any general sense, so no movement may be understood as ‘everyday and normal’ in contrast to those used in dance situations. The regular observation of formality in movement, speech delivery and styles, in the palace may generate an ease within the constraint which might appear ‘natural’.
The catch-all term in Javanese which summarises this effect is alus(refined, gentle), a word as ubiquitous in Javanese conversation as ‘nice’ is in English, and as vague. And where English people oppose ‘nice’ with ‘nasty’, Javanese say kasar (rude, harsh). Alus describes behaviour which is appropriate to context: it is not alus to behave with excessive formality at informal events.
Figure 9.1 Refined male dancer sits in sila marikělu. Dance drama by Siswa Among Běksa, Yogyakarta, 1983.
Source: Photograph by author.
Court appearances require that people feel at home (in all senses) in the formal codes of etiquette, so that these codes appear natural, unconstrained, and graceful.7 Rather than simply denoting the show of manners which is etiquette, they refer to the prior knowledge and sense of appropriateness necessary to know about when and how to put on such a show and when to play it down. Effective competence and performance of ěmpan-papanis alus.
This includes judging the time and the place as appropriate for informal behaviour. Misplaced or excessive manners are not alus at all; they are mannered, badly performed. In the broader context of the potential chaos of Javanese everyday life, alus is a kind of rationality or morality for Dutch- educated Javanese priyayi, for whom its absence produces barbarism. But alus also refers to a gentleness of spirit which can only be acquired through strin- gent self-examination and discipline. Prince Suryobrongto’s generation puts a value on honesty, and included speaking the truth as a fourth point of court etiquette:
Udhaněgara is politeness in general … if you say ‘yes’ you should mean
‘yes’.Ethok-ethok(polite dissimulation) is not in keeping with udhaněgara, which means ‘a king is as good as his word’.
He explained the absence of masked dance forms from the Yogyakartan palace as the result of an ethos of openness: the dancer’s eyes carried the role, and a mask would conceal the truth of that gaze. This view counters nicely a favourite Western image of so-called Oriental inscrutability, and also reminds us that we need to be careful of how we use metaphors of masking with reference to different styles of face-saving.8
Dancing develops physical balance consistent with the claim that there is a cultural preoccupation in Java with keeping one’s balance (Geertz 1961: 149).
This principle is not theoretical but at the forefront of consciousness, and there was general agreement in Yogyakarta that the dance movement is
‘always on one leg’. Learning the feminine mode was learning how to effect the subtle shifts of weight between the feet. Taking the body’s centre of gravity down to the pelvic girdle but notinto the turned-out knees, and then shifting it slowly from one side of the body to the other for eight counts of the gong in a movement called ngoyog, described and demonstrated as the most difficult movement (Hughes-Freeland 1988). Skill is required to control the constant shifts of weight from one leg to the other which, together with detail in the movements of the head, neck, arms, wrists, fingers and dance sash, completes the figure.
The expressive power of all Yogyakartan dance movement rests not on the élancé style of classical western ballet, but on a sustained control over any desire to take off. Dance rhythms in the feminine dance mode are cautious, tentative, assessing, without abruptness; there is an unbroken flow subsuming the individual poses. Dancing is about keeping on the ground, and keeping
within the limits. Apart from the footwork, this style of court dance is noted for its strict convention in the control of the arms and elbows which are held in a square shape. The muscles of the upper and lower arms need to be supplemented by a fluid and supple wrist and precise control over the fingers which must be neither tense not relaxed.
Just as effort is dissimulated in polite strategic social interaction, in dancing the appearance of the movement conceals the work that produces it to produce the effect of refinement and grace. But dancing is not simply a form of disciplined physical practice. It is the acquisition of social resources which produce possibilities. As a training it instils Javanese values and a sense of rhythm and measure, but the performance of dance movement goes beyond control. The experienced dancer ceases to experience the doing of the move- ments: the experienced dancer reaches the point where the acquired habits of movement have their own momentum, independent of the performer’s inten- tion (Hughes-Freeland 1997a).
Competence in dance is not only a matter of balance and control of one’s own movements, but the interaction with others, which is expressed choreo- graphically through avoidance and learning to be in place (mapan). Once trainees develop a better balance they are then faced with problems of orien- tation. The matter of avoiding the pillars which support the roof in the dance pavilion is complicated enough, but things become worse, because most dance forms are for groups of two, four, or nine. To lose control of one’s orientation is to run the likely risk of collision, especially in fighting sequences. Most difficult are the complicated transitions in the asymmetrical floor patterns in the complicated Bědhaya dances for nine experienced female dancers, which demonstrate the greatest logistical skill in Javanese choreog- raphy, especially in the changing of formations which are achieved by the dancers running swiftly on tiptoe to reform without interrupting the sustained rhythm of the dance, impossible without control and coordination.
Orientation and positioning are thus closely linked to etiquette and ěmpan- papan. There is a close connection between movement, manners and identity, which serve to articulate ideas about order and coherence (Suseno and Reksosusilo 1983). Dancing expresses a Javanese theory of space and is a metaphor for Javanese ideas about behaviour, both in regard to a person’s own occupation of space and their interrelations with others. Dancing thus repre- sents fundamental orders of practised behaviour appropriate to person and place which form part of the practical knowledge about being Javanese (cara jawi) (see Figure 9.2). These Javanese semantics resonate with analytical concepts such as De Certeau’s notion of ‘practised place’ (1984).
Javanese people are polite in situations where it is strategically expedient to be so, but in ongoing situations, the equivalent in everyday polite social inter- action of not bumping into other dancers or pillars (and the prolonged lead up to danced conflicts), a process of complete evasion in the form of avoid- ance and not-speaking is common – for example in a household I often
visited, this was the only means to allow fifteen siblings to co-habit. Being in place can also mean avoidance, in the sense of maintaining ‘nonrelations’
(Gilsenan 1976: 211). Enforced sociability in Java’s crowded communities tests everyone’s patience. Javanese people are also trained to be fearful (ajrih) and awkward (sungkan) as children: ‘each time that he faces an unfamiliar alter ego, a Javanese individual will either evade the situation and run away, or remain inactive and wait to see how the situation develops’ (Koentjaraningrat 1985:
250). Evasion is one way to maintain dignity and clout. Without these, society breaks down.9Social interaction is performed in an evasive and defensive style to deflect anger which incompetently managed behaviour may incur. When anger is shown and impression management breaks down, Javanese manners rapidly disintegrate. Accusations of hypocrisy (munafik) are often heard, and there are degrees of acceptability about kinds of lies: presenting a false reality disguise; deceit; trickery; gossip. There is a difference between saying some- thing intentionally to be patently false (and verifiable as such), with the intention to deceive and make mischief for someone, and not saying what you think or feel, which is classed as controlling your feelings, not reacting to provocation, not showing your hand, and also not saying how bad things are (i.e. not complaining). Once people break this polite distance, the interaction is no longer à laJavanese culture – though the withdrawal after intimacy and confidence sharing is done in a very distinctive manner, and often dissemi- nated through true and false rumours by gossip, itself a form of generalised indirection.
Figure 9.2 Formal politeness and non-interaction at the exchange of rings in a household in the palace enclave, Yogyakarta, 1983.
Source: Photograph by author.
Court dance in Indonesia
This account of dance describes a historically situated system of skill, tech- niques and discipline. Dancers danced for the sultan’s eye, particularly that of Haměngkubuwana VIII, the last colonial sultan of Yogyakarta, who was famed for his searching gaze and for establishing the norms of what is now classical Yogyakartan dance. He extended ceremonial dancing in the colonial court beyond the ritual frame to the more general sphere of manners and personal development, and supported the foundation of the first dance association (Kridha Běksa Wirama) where court dancers trained outsiders. In this way Javanese court dance came out of the palace as exemplary centre to become a national cultural resource which also serves the diverse interests of particular individuals, moving into dance associations and state academies to contribute to the production of Javanese and Javano-Indonesian identities (Hughes- Freeland n.d.).
As a significant embodied practice, dance is often overlooked as a factor in the construction of national identities, due to the emphasis on language-based rationalities in Western thought. Anderson, for example, has famously suggested that nations are ‘imagined communities’ constructed out of jour- neys and print technologies (1983). At the heart of Anderson’s argument is the claim that languages are not ‘emblemsof nation-ness’, but have agency: the power to generate ‘imagined communities building in effect particular solidari- ties’ (1983: 122). These imagined communities may be given ‘echoed physical realization’ on occasions of ‘unisonality’ such as, in the case of Indonesia, the singing of the national anthem, Indonesia Raya (1983: 132). Anderson’s
‘disembodied’ approach may more specifically reflect his extensive knowledge of Javanological traditions. There is congruence between the priority he has given to spoken forms in the construction of Indonesian and other nation- alisms and the privileging of language in official representations of Javanese culture. For Anderson, the embodied action of dance – and ‘folk dance’ at that – has a merely emblematic status, along with flags, costumes ‘and the rest’
(1983: 122). I would suggest,contra Anderson, that Javanese court dance has become an important part of Indonesian culture precisely because it is more than an emblem. Dancing literally embodies ideas about acceptable forms of behaviour and being. The sense which Javanese people bring to court perfor- mance traditions is constituted by recent history and projective interests:
performance, in Javanese culture, is valued for the futures it allows groups to imagine. But more than this, it also allows groups and individuals to embody present identities. Attempts by Javanese people to make sense of practices such as court dancing orientate identity because dancing starts in the body, rather than writing or making visual or aural images.
As we know, court dancing is an education of the sensibilities and teaches a person how to be Javanese. Today, court dance contributes to the creation of a Javano-Indonesian identity, and is still valued for its power to instil ‘controlled instincts’. Dance can change you, can give you access to practices and to