Identity and Cultural Reproduction Among Tengger Javanese. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

The fall of the Javanese court of Majapahit early in the sixteenth century marked the last of 1000 years of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms on Java, and brought with it the dismantlement of that isl and 's Hindu-Buddhist eccleastical community. Today on this largely Islamic isl and of 90,000,000 people only one population of 50,000 preserves a priestly heritage directly descendant from the earlier Hindu-Buddhist period. That population is a people known as the Tengger, a mountain farming people entirely without courts, castes, or a scholarly elite, but identified in their ritual tradition as heirs to the religious traditions of Hindu-Buddhist Java. The present work is an ethnographic account of Tengger tradition based on nineteen months field research and comparison of historical materials on the area. It seeks to provide an account of Tengger tradition, the institutions which have supported its transmission, and the interpretive problems it has posed for a people who identify themselves as Javanese, but non-Islamic. In particular, it addresses the general question of how Tengger preserved and made sense of a non-Islamic traditin in a Java becoming Islamic. Through the examination of myth, ritual, the priesthood, and the socioeconomic organization of ritual, the study reveals the role of ritual in a larger configuration of status, investment, exchange, and identity which is the social basis of Tengger society itself. The study also examines the sociology of religious knowledge in Tengger, raising the more general problems of how to interpret cultural symbolism. The very social institutions responsible for the reproduction of Tengger ritual also allowed for a peculiar lack of integration between priestly liturgy -- the content of which shows direct parallels with Balinese Sivite tradition -- and popular religious culture, more directly influenced by the changes of Islamic Java. This dual religious culture allowed Tengger tradition a resilence in the face of Islam, but insured that the meanings Tengger have experienced in their tradition have been created and changed in an ongoing interpretive reconstruction of a tradition involved in a changing cultural context.