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Indonesia Traditional Political Culture
In the late twentieth century, there were as many
traditional
political cultures in Indonesia as there were ethnic
groups.
Nevertheless, the similarity to the Javanese kingship
model of
Suharto's increasingly paternalistic rule reflects the
Javanese
cultural underpinnings of the New Order. Although
Indonesia was a
cultural mosaic, the Javanese, with more than 45 percent
of the
total population in the 1990s, were by far the largest
single
ethnic group. Moreover, they filled--to a degree beyond
their
population ratio--the most important roles in government
and ABRI
(see Population;
Javanese
, ch. 2). The officer corps in
particular was Javanized, partly as a result of Java's
central
role in the development of modern Indonesia (Indonesia's
five
leading institutions of higher education were located on
Java,
for example), but also because ABRI seemed to regard the
great
predominance of Javanese in the officer ranks as a matter
of
policy. The Javanese cultural predispositions influenced,
therefore, the way the government appealed to the
population and
interactions within the New Order elite.
On Java power historically has been deployed through a
patrimonial bureaucratic state in which proximity to the
ruler
was the key to command and rewards. This power can be
described
in terms of a patron-client relation in which the patron
is the
bapak (father or elder). The terms of deference and
obedience to the ruler are conceived in the Javanese
gustikawula (lord-subject) formulation, which describes
man's
relationship to God as well as the subject's relationship
to his
ruler. The reciprocal trait for obedience is benevolence.
In
other words, benefits flow from the center to the
obedient. By
extension government's developmental activities are a boon
to the
faithful. Bureaucratically Javanese culture is suffused
with an
attitude of obedience--respect for seniors, conformity to
hierarchical authority, and avoidance of confrontation--
characteristics of the preindependence priyayi
class whose
roots go back to the traditional Javanese courts.
Javanism also has a mystical, magical dimension in its
religiously syncretic belief system, which integrated
pre-Indian,
Indian, and Islamic beliefs. Its practices include
animistic
survivals, which invest sacred heirlooms (pusaka)
with
animating spirits, and rites of passage whose antecedents
are
pre-Islamic. Javanism also encompasses the introspective
ascetic
practices of kebatinan (mysticism as related to
one's
inner self), which seek to connect the microcosms of the
self to
the macrocosms of the universe. This adaptive belief
system
defines Suharto's underlying spiritual orientation.
Furthermore,
the politics of Javanism have been defensive, seeking to
preserve
its particular heterogenous practices from demands for
Islamic
orthodoxy. Rather than Islamic political parties, the
Javanese
have often turned to more secular parties: Sukarno's
Indonesian
Nationalist Party (PNI), the PKI, and Golkar.
Data as of November 1992
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