Progress Moving Backward: Some Thoughts About the Future of Indonesianist Ethnomusicology
Because the ethnomusicology panel came last in the symposium, I used the occasion to discuss how the presentations by Andrew Weintraub, Marc Perlman, and Sumarsam connected to the broader currents of the two-day event. Chris Miller had already ably identified the central arguments of Andrew's, Mas Marsam's, and Marc's talks, placing them within the context of ethnomusicology as a field. I added a few words on how Indonesianist ethnomusicology fits into an even wider frame of global concerns and necessities. What follows summarizes my remarks, supplemented by a few further observations on the three presenters' contributions.
On the symposium's first day, Rudolf Mrázek warned that the outlook is discouraging for non-Indonesian students researching Indonesian history. He argued that Europeans and Americans should henceforth examine their own past, beginning with introspection: defining their cultural and social identities, and pinpointing their position within both the history and contemporary condition of humanity. As someone who studies the history and present practice of music in Indonesia, I took Rudolf's counsel seriously. In my comments, I reflected on what I have read and thought about American history and modern life, and my own place within them. In doing so, something became obvious—the "elephant in the room" at the symposium on Indonesian studies was America's position and worldwide role today.
During the fifty years I have devoted to studying Indonesian music history and practice, most Americans have grown increasingly reliant on exploitative relationships with places and environments across the globe, including Indonesia. They consume a disproportionate share of the world's limited resources. Simultaneously, "America" has become ever more dominant in Indonesian lives and in shaping Indonesian social structures. I put "America" in quotation marks because this presence involves more than the effects of US governmental and business strategies and activities. It also encompasses the consumption patterns and resource use that the "American Way of Life" displays, and which its adherents and cultural-economic institutions promote worldwide.
Those of us engaged in research and education face the challenge of shaping our work and teaching to foster understanding of these circumstances. In the contexts of our respective scholarly fields, we must correct the imbalances these conditions have generated. America is the most formidable military power (and for now, economic power as well). For half a century, Americans have wielded that military strength in vast disproportion to our population size, typically protecting our economic interests or fighting wars to safeguard them. We have done so either with reckless disregard for the outcomes, or in ignorance of them, and with twisted and deceptive justifications for our actions.
Here I find myself stuck in Format 2 of Don Emmerson's description of Benedict Anderson's 1971 talk (see the political science contributions in this volume). Positioned that way, I must ask: when did imperialism end? Not yet, if we allow ourselves to recognize gluttonous exploitation and consumption of resources as American imperial power in action. Missing from our debate on the role of Indonesian studies in America was our duty to advocate for—to assist in—curbing American misuse of the world's resources (both human and natural). Also absent was our need to build contacts and alliances with Indonesians who are working on a comparable tooling—and in some sectors, a retooling—of Indonesian society toward a sustainable future (someone had to use the term "sustainable" at least once in the symposium).
Equally absent from our symposium was a discussion of demographic shifts (population growth) and how these changes relate to fields of scientific inquiry such as biology, forestry, agricultural economics, and, more broadly, consumption and conservation of natural resources—above all, mitigating and slowing the impacts of climate change. Earlier in the symposium the word "biodiversity" appeared in relation to endangered languages. But the whole complex of sustainability issues—of which biodiversity is simply one part—was missing from every subject we considered, from political science to art history, to languages, to music. We can begin by unpacking the effects of ideological language around "growth," "development," and "modernization" on material infrastructure and education. We can also abandon our reliance on measuring a country's economic and social health solely through growth in its gross national product.
More than seven billion people are alive on the planet today. When I first started playing gamelan in the mid-1960s, the world population was less than half its current size. Indonesia's population was then 104 million; it is now 245 million. Don Emmerson has stated that we are moving into a multi-polar world. Yet we know that, as long as Americans consume forty percent of the world's resources, we have far to go before we become genuinely multi-polar in that regard. Even if China boosts its consumption to forty percent and the US share drops to twenty percent, national and individual disparities in usage will remain. Even if China uses resources no more "democratically" than the US does (though China is developing sustainable energy policies, practices, and technologies much faster than America), the US may still shift the paradigm implied by the "American Way of Life." That way, others around the world might find it "hip" to be sensible rather than oblivious.
Consumption of finite natural resources cannot continue at the rate countries based on unregulated capitalism (including corporate welfare as a feature of unrestrained free-market capitalism) are using them. We require a fairer distribution of usage—a correction of the lopsided situation where far too few people use far too much.
In the short term, at least, we American Indonesianists must direct our teaching, research, and writing toward developing methods for integrating our studies with work that offers and advocates for solutions. We need to set a new course, a Plan B, for living in today's world. American Indonesianist ethnomusicologists should resist the temptation to fiddle while the environment burns. How can they do this? At one point I believed it might mean spending much more time playing and teaching the values of old-style community-based gamelan. Gamelan performance is a renewable resource, a sustainable practice. It fosters community solidarity through an activity that takes time away from consuming finite resources. Why not teach budding leaders in finance, law, and business an alternative to structuring their future around credit swaps, protecting special interests, and maximizing profit? While naı̈ve then, given today's massive environmental crises, economic disparities, and social imbalances, that approach seems even less sufficient now.
Seventy years ago, Tan Malaka suggested that gamelan music might be "terlalu halus untuk perjuangan"—too refined and courteous for revolutionary struggle. (Sumarsam, in his 1995 book Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, includes a section on Tan Malaka's comments, quoting from Rudolf Mrázek's 1972 work on Sjahrir and Tan Malaka.) When Tan Malaka wrote, various gamelan styles were dominant forms of musical expression in many Indonesians' cultural and social lives. In the 1970s, when I read about Tan Malaka's reservations, I was completing my musicology thesis that would help me compete for a music teaching job with a Southeast Asian focus. I assumed I would direct a gamelan ensemble in whatever position I obtained, and I wondered how teaching that music in the 1970s could be useful—not for the struggle Tan Malaka meant, against the imperialism of his era, but against the reconfigured and vastly larger imperialism embedded in the power systems and commerce of my own time. I saw gamelan as offering a sustainable, alternative engagement with another place and people on their own terms. I turned to the writings of other Indonesian revolutionary intellectuals for a view of the gamelan community as a model for social-political organization in Indonesia, and possibly as a model for how countries might interact globally—without domination, contributing to the human family through example, skill transfer, and collaborative play for the common goods of spiritual and intellectual satisfaction. A residue of the 1960s' alternative politics remained in this, and it sustained my teaching of Indonesian ethnomusicology through the 1990s.
Was this enough to expect of an Indonesian ethnomusicologist? Could more be done? Perhaps the scholarship on Indonesian music documented and demonstrated in this panel presented another way to bring about necessary change. Mas Marsam's presentation is a refined study of how a specific set of scholarly issues played out over a particular period in Indonesian history.
It is difficult to say whether this study will lead future scholars to solutions for the problems I have outlined. Perhaps it will, if his work in decentering the focus in Indonesian music history away from Central Javanese and southern and central Balinese gamelan traditions inspires other scholars to concentrate on other regions of Indonesia. Or perhaps, if his emphasis on the vitality of local traditions of expression and community interaction helps to diffuse the concentrations of nation-state power that encourage resource overconsumption, it may advance more sustainable local practices.
Marc's masterful and detailed survey of scholarship on Indonesian music, largely from the past three decades, gives us a picture of the crescendo of scholarly activity since the end of the American war in Southeast Asia. Yet, looking at this abundance of articles covering a wide geographic and stylistic range in Indonesia from the vantage point of today's sustainability problems—environmental crises, economic imbalances, global social inequities—I wonder how much of this has been "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." (This analogy compares trivial pursuits that are oblivious to natural forces. Aligned with the dominance of the military in international relations, perhaps the better analogy is "dancing in the ballroom of the RMS Lusitania.") Perhaps the most deceptively encouraging area of scholarship Marc notes comes at the end of his talk: "the arts have consistently been recognized by the wielders of power as useful agents or emblems of social order." This does not inspire confidence that Indonesian music can serve as an agent for social mobilization, for protest to correct exploitation and imbalances in economics, society, and environment. Instead, it focuses our attention on arts that, more often than not, are "marketed" by, manipulated by, or in the hands of the one percent, not the ninety-nine-point-nine percent—arts that provide entertaining diversions from the need to struggle. What about music "of the people"? Marc acknowledges that studies of Indonesian popular music have grown significantly over the past thirty years. He concentrated his survey on scholarship dealing with more "traditional" Indonesian genres, likely because popular music is the focus of Andy's presentation. Which brings us to Andy's paper on popular music.
Andy provides as sweeping and comprehensive a study of scholarship on various kinds of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indonesian popular music as Marc did for scholarship on traditional Indonesian music. Among the five definitions Andy gives for the term "popular music," the one that comes closest to addressing the struggle to remedy misuse of human and natural resources is "a representation of the aspirations and desires of the 'people,' an abstract grouping together of people in terms of social class and political representation (or lack thereof)." But contradictions arise between this definition and aspects of the other four. For instance, "commodified music emanating from the dominant cultural industry …" may be mass-mediated music that once expressed the aspirations and desires of the rakyat. However, once commodified—in Indonesia especially from the 1990s onward—it largely lost its power to mobilize. In Indonesia, the tradition of socially embedded or socially engaged arts was strong in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, largely due to the close integration of arts with daily life processes, rites, and rituals. As they developed in the twentieth century, social relevance certainly gained traction in the popular arts, in Andy's sense, even while it receded in older traditional art forms examined in Marc's scholarly survey. Those traditional arts, perhaps through being "recognized by the wielders of power as useful agents or emblems of social order," became more and more symbols of a past social order or "classical" forms to be preserved as displays for local and foreign audiences and as high-culture goals for the upper class. But it seems evident from Andy's survey that, except for a few types of music practiced by small numbers of people in a few regions of Indonesia, popular Indonesian music has largely become disengaged from the current environmental crises, economic disparities, and social imbalances in Indonesia and elsewhere. Perhaps we now must assert that Indonesian music is "tidak lagi relevan (or lagi tidak relevan) untuk perjuangan"—no longer (or once again not) relevant for struggle.
Works cited:
Mrázek, Rudolf. Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1972.
Sumarsam. Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.