The Javanese Kijaji: The Changing Role of a Cultural Broker

Geertz, Clifford. 1960. "The Javanese Kijaji: The Changing Role of a Cultural Broker". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2 (2): 228-249.

One of the most serious problems facing the post-revolutionary Indonesian political elite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population. The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-based nationalist leader- ship more oriented to the international patterns of intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung countries. On the one hand, the activist white-collar nationalists of the large cities are attempting to construct an integrated Indonesian state along generally western parliamentary lines; on the other, the peasants of the Javanese, Sundanese, Achenese, Buginese, etc. culture areas cling to the patterns of local community organization and belief with which they are intimately familiar. Between the two levels of socio-cultural integration,1 the local community and the national state, ties are brittle. The result is, in extreme cases of maladjustment, separatism; in more moderate ones, a passive resistance to central government programs and policies by various regional populations.

The danger of a widening gulf between a metropolitan intelligentsia better able to understand members of similar groups in India, Mexico or the Gold Coast than their own villagers, and a peasantry to whom their own national leadership seems almost foreign is thus quite real. In such a situation, the individuals and groups who can communicate both with the urban elite and with the rural followers of a particular local tradition perform an altogether critical function. It is these groups and individuals who can "translate" the somewhat abstract ideologies of the "New Indonesia" into one or another of the concrete idioms of rural life and can, in return, make clear to the intelligentsia the nature of the peasantry's fears and aspirations. Analyses of the creation of viable nations in Asia and Africa which simply focus on the political elite, as those of political scientists have tended to do, or simply on the peasant village, as those of anthropologists have tended to do, are necessarily incomplete. What is needed, in addition, is an analysis of the links between the two - i.e., of regional leadership. A vigorous, imaginative regional leadership, able to play a cultural middleman role between peasant and metropolitan life, and so create an effective juncture between traditional cultural patterns and modern ones, is in many ways the most essential pre-requisite for the success, in democratic form, of the nationalist experiment both in Indonesia and elsewhere.