A Religious Thanksgiving

No Thanksgiving in San Diego for me this weekend. Sate replaced turkey and a local restaurant took the place of Rico's burritos in Del Mar. Still, Thanksgiving Day was actually pretty fruitful workwise and gave me an amusing view of the religious complexity of this place. There are six official religions in Indonesia: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism (reinstated to official status in 2000). The meaning of neither Atheism nor Judaism is much understood here , and since my Latin and Sanskrit are non-existent, I fill out forms with a simple "Kristen" ("Very Old Christianity" or "Christianity-minus-Christ" or "Christianity-minus-Religion" are a few ways of looking at it).

My first meeting of the day was with a senior Catholic banker (courtesy of his colleague, my ever generous former host and friend) who had spent time in official positions. He told me of the difficulties of official appointment for non-Muslims in the past 15 years (since the rise of later president Habibie and the incorporation of Islamic rhetoric into official Suharto regime language). The new saliency of religious divides changed previous taboos and brought out preferences for the majority Muslim, often masking other, ethnic or socio-economic biases (against ethnic Chinese or other minority groups).

A generous dose of emphatically non-chauvinistic Islam is what I got from a taxi driver after the meeting. A young Batawi (original Jakartan) with a cap and facial hair, he was delighted at my interest in his beliefs. A rapidly delivered lecture ensued in Indonesian, spiced with carefully enunciated Koranic Arabic. Its melody was very much like previous experiences I've had with young newly religious Orthodox Jews trying to rekindle my inner light or a born-again Christian enlightening me about my savior. The gist of it, as far as I could tell through the gale of words, was that all creatures are God’s doing and He loves them all. We must never be angry at someone for being Hindu or Buddhist or Christian; this is not the Muslim way any more than terrorism is. Of course, there’s the slim chance he was saying the exact opposite and I missed a few negations in there, but considering the audience he was appealing to, I’d say that’s unlikely. Would he say it to another audience? It seemed genuine, but you never know, I guess.

Stepping out of my sermon/ride I went in to one of the many malls in this city to wait for a meeting nearby. Walking in, I was hit by very loud Western style music and saw a crowd of people, some in jilbabs (the local hijab), watching a small troop of young, attractive dancers of both sexes in very little and very tight clothing. So little and tight, I felt too self-consciously Western-male to watch for long; no one else seemed to think much of it. Jilbab-wearing women were moving along with music and everyone seemed very interested in the gyrating dancers.

And on I went to the next door Catholic university to the lab of a couple of linguists who happen to be native speakers of Hebrew with ties to Stanford and as Catholic as I am. I wandered among students practicing karate, laughing at those practicing karate or checking their email below the giant statue of Jesus to find their office for an extremely helpful methodological conversation on the practicalities of experiments across Indonesian ethnicities.

The truth is, though, this is Jakarta, not “Indonesia”. When you ask a newcomer if they’re originally from Jakarta, they may answer “No. From Java [the island Jakarta is on]”. I spent little time here in my last visit, and it’s shocked me how cosmopolitan and modern the city is. That's great for elite work, to which I’ll return late in fieldwork, but it’s not really that useful for my grass-roots research. Luckily, said linguists happen to have a field-station in Padang, West Sumatra, one of the places I was eying for my experiment anyway. Even more luckily, I now have their help and permission to hire their staff – here and in Padang. So it looks like I’ll spend the next few weeks translating material and setting up procedures, then head to two experimental sites – most probably Yogyakarta (Java), one of the two old Javanese capitals that inherited the kingdom of Mataram, and Padang, home of the matrilineal Minangkabau, first vice president and national hero Muhammad Hatta, an Islamic rebellion against the Indonesian republic in the late 1950s and some of the most famous and spicy cuisine in Indonesia.

PS
1. Update on the next door establishment: while it’s not an auto-body shop, I can now report that it does not seem to be gado-gado restaurant either. I haven’t seen any food or tables and there are a lot of young guys hanging out, especially at night. There’s a guard and a general air of “we have a restaurant sign so the police can pretend to believe it when we pay them off”.

2. A view from my rooftop, in terrible lighting: