Feeling your way in Java: An essay on society and emotion

Abstract

This article reconsiders the place of emotion in society. With the example of Java, I argue for an expanded understanding of social sentiments that would recognize a structuring role for emotion beyond the family and the shaping, through emotional practices, of a fluid but crucial level of ‘community’. Using Balinese ethnology as a foil, I contrast the uses of emotion in Java and Bali, drawing, toward the end, upon Bateson's concept of schismogenesis.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• social structure
• Java
• Bali
• Bateson
• schismogenesis

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Eric Hirsch and Mercedes Garcia de Oteyza for their comments on a draft of this paper and to four anonymous Ethnos reviewers for their detailed criticisms.

Notes

To which he adds the following definition: ‘sentiment – an organized system of emotional tendencies centred about some object’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1948:234).

Homans and Schneider claimed they had found an ‘efficient cause’ for the prevalence of mbd over fzd marriage among patrilineal systems in the affectionate relation typically obtaining between maternal uncle and sister's son, suggesting that ‘Where a man finds love in one generation, he will find it in the next’ (1955:38). In matrilineal systems, they argued, the pattern of sentiments was reversed, the f and fz were the indulgent figures, therefore the fzd was the preferred spouse. Rodney Needham countered that only categorically prescribed unions had overall structural consequences: sentiments were neither here nor there (1962:42–3).

Many Southeast Asian societies are, of course, rather tightly structured; and the term should not be taken to signify a scientific class, as it once was, merely an initial directing of attention towards peasant, mostly cognatic, mostly literate societies. On the (now dated) controversy over this issue, see essays collected in Evers 1980.

Keeler (1983) has devoted an illuminating essay to this very question, but his field – south-central Java – is sufficiently different from Banyuwangi to permit a different emphasis. For Keeler, stage fright – or shame – occurs when status is compromised (status being largely constituted in personal encounters). Keeler's analysis is, nonetheless, compatible with that offered here.

The settlement patterns – and intensity of social contact – among people native to Banyuwangi (the so-called Osing Javanese) differ from the sprawling villages of incomers and Javanese further west. In certain respects this limits the generalizability of my findings.

Rukun and similar social values have been heavily promoted, sometimes violently imposed, in the authoritarian Indonesian (and before that, Dutch colonial) state – though they are not, of course, the inventions of the State. In his study of Balinese political violence, Robinson reminds us that a ‘traditional’ harmonious ideal of the social order often serves to mask a history of conflict and oppression (Robinson 1995:306–7).

This is not to say that one's social universe is described by the village. I am referring here to the daily round of casual visiting – dropping in for a chat, to borrow sugar or visit the sick. Of course, as peasants, farm labourers, construction workers, and petty traders, and as pilgrims and political activists, people also roam further afield and engage in different sorts of social visiting. Such encounters across sharper social boundaries are usually more formal and rule-bound; they may be subject to different ideological pressures and draw upon different value systems, though clearly there are overlaps. For example, Idul Fitri visits to village kin and non-local notables or senior kin are alike seen as a ‘paying of respect’ and ‘begging of forgiveness’ or ‘cultivation of rukun’, the external visits differing mainly in degree of formality.

It is worth emphasizing that feelings and personal/physical orientation, as described here, are not primarily linked to a concrete sense of place (as, for example, in a fixed sense of where one is permitted to go or in a symbolic division of space); rather, they are relative to situation and the presence of others. Just as the slametan creates community and mutuality but is, in most cases, deliberately vague and non-local in its symbolic references (Beatty 1999:51), so one finds one's bearings in a fluid social field rather than within, or by means of, a fixed and stable locality. Again, the contrast with Bali (but also with many other Indonesian societies) is striking. Thus, according to Geertz and Geertz (1975:138), ‘the intimate connection between physical space and social groupings is a general characteristic of Bali’. And cf. Boon (1977:100) ‘If pressed to define the central Indonesian notion of adat [custom] in its specifically Balinese context, one might say it is dharma attached to space.’

In the Banyuwangi dialect of Javanese (Jawa Osing), pernah has two unrelated meanings, fortuitously linked in my analysis: (i) kin relation, as in Pernah paran rika ambi wong iku? ‘How are you related to that person?’ (ii) to feel ‘at home’, comfortable (Hasan Ali 2002).

Formal avoidance relations – a somewhat different matter from the milder, kin-based avoidance pattern referred to here – are a common means of preventing conflict progressing into something serious. When two people sing nyapa (Osing dialect: ‘don't say hello’) they peg their hostility at a certain level. Others recognize this negative relationship and respect its norms. This extremely common solution to schismogenesis – a rich source of anecdote and humour – deserves a paper of its own.