Idioms of Vernacular Humanism: The West and the East

Abstract

The Sri Lankan‐born anthropologist, Chandra Jayawardena, is a post‐colonial scholar whose work helped shape the direction of Australian anthropology. His passionate concern for social justice is reflected in his scholarly interest in the question of inequality. His initial field research was in the plantations of (then) British Guyana, and his work stands as a landmark in studies of the West Indies, in that it did not fall back on racial and cultural explanations to explore the social dynamics of plantation culture but, rather, drew on the analysis of inequality in classical European social theory. His interest in what would now be called global inequalities led him to plantations in Fiji, and then to the independent pepper cultivators of Aceh, in Indonesia, for further fieldwork. This paper takes up Jayawardena's exploration of what I term ‘vernacular humanism’, through a comparison of his best‐known paper on the West Indies (on the ‘eye‐pass’ dispute) with his unpublished paper on Acehnese rebellion. The Acehnese had been the most resistant of all Indies populations to the imposition of Dutch rule, and presented a different set of colonial relations from that of the West Indies. The paper explores the way in which the differing kinds of unequal relations in the two archipelagoes, which were forged in their relationship to mercantile capitalist expansion, were significant in the development of Jayawardena's theorising of inequality.

Keywords:

• British Guyana
• Aceh
• Equality
• Vernacular Humanism
• Peasant Rebellion

Notes

1. Jayawardena's considerable reputation outside Australia rests very much on his research in Guyana, which is widely cited by current scholars. His Indonesian research is less extensively known.

2. I have recently been working on Jayawardena's unpublished Aceh material, which is held in the archives at Macquarie University in Sydney.

3. Jayawardena's work with Indian plantation workers in Fiji, conducted in between the ‘Indies’ research, is also important in the development of his ideas.

4. A recent paper by Kerkvliet (in press) reviews the history of scholarly studies of agrarian unrest in Southeast Asia, and Jayawardena's preoccupations reflect the trend of the mid twentieth century, when in‐depth studies of particular situations refined understanding of the conditions creating unrest and rebellion, although Jayawardena also remained committed to the grand sweep of history approached through classical social theory.

5. Equality and Inequality was the theme selected for a conference commemorating Jayawardena's work, the papers from which were published as a special issue of Mankind, edited by Bedford, Bottomley and Hamilton (1987).

6. Jayawardena writes of a masculine subject, so it is not possible to ascertain how women were incorporated into mati: as active subjects, or as objects of disputes, or both.

7. In his essay, Jayawardena (1968, 413) goes on to investigate a number of other case studies of conflict, which he sees as indicating the presence of egalitarian ideologies, and he identifies factors that contribute to their emergence.

8. Austin (1984, 251, n. 1), who refers also to Foner's (1973) work on Jamaica, concluded that the frequency of such disputes attests to the lack of power of the working class at the national level. Maurer (1997, 70–71) discusses a similar process of status equalisation.

9. Sukarno claimed that he ‘discovered’ this set of five principles as an autochthonous political ideology for the new nation. The first principle (sila) obliges all Indonesians to believe in God, but the form of worship is dictated by the faith professed by each citizen.

10. In a world where politicians are promoting ideologies that emphasise our essential differences (currently and most frighteningly in the anti‐Islamic Clash of Civilisations discourse), what are needed are gestures on a grand scale that mark out our essential sameness. In responding to the (presumed) Islamic fundamentalist gesture of bombing a nightclub full of tourists in Bali in 2002, the Australian government implemented an airlift of victims who were described by an official as ‘all friendly nationals’. (Interestingly, it was a New Zealand airforce plane that brought out the first Balinese medical evacuees.) The partisan grieving and support for White victims that marked the early official response was a lost opportunity to counter effectively the gesturing to difference inherent in the bombing.