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Indonesia Sundanese
Although there are many social, economic, and political
similarities between the Javanese and Sundanese,
differences
abound. The Sundanese live principally in West Java, but
their
language is not intelligible to the Javanese. The more
than 21
million Sundanese in 1992 had stronger ties to Islam than
the
Javanese, in terms of pesantren enrollment and
religious
affiliation. Although the Sundanese language, like
Javanese,
possesses elaborate speech levels, these forms of respect
are
infused with Islamic values, such as the traditional
notion of
hormat (respect--knowing and fulfilling one's
proper
position in society). Children are taught that the task of
behaving
with proper hormat is also a religious
struggle--the triumph
of akal (reason) over nafsu (desire). These
dilemmas
are spelled out in the pesantren, where children
learn to
memorize the Quran in Arabic. Through copious memorization
and
practice in correct pronunciation, children learn that
reasonable
behavior means verbal conformity with authority and
subjective
interpretation is a sign of inappropriate individualism.
Although Sundanese religious practices share some of
the HinduBuddhist beliefs of their Javanese neighbors--for example,
the
animistic beliefs in spirits and the emphasis on right
thinking and
self-control as a way of controlling those
spirits--Sundanese
courtly traditions differ from those of the Javanese. The
Sundanese
language possesses an elaborate and sophisticated
literature
preserved in Indic scripts and in puppet dramas. These
dramas use
distinctive wooden dolls (wayang golek, as
contrasted with
the wayang kulit of the Javanese and Balinese), but
Sundanese courts have aligned themselves more closely to
universalistic tenets of Islam than have the elite classes
of
Central Java.
As anthropologist Jessica Glicken observed, Islam is a
particularly visible and audible presence in the life of
the
Sundanese. She reported that "[t]he calls to the five
daily
prayers, broadcast over loudspeakers from each of the many
mosques
in the city [Bandung], punctuate each day. On Friday at
noon,
sarong-clad men and boys fill the streets on their way to
the
mosques to join the midday prayer known as the Juma'atan
which
provides the visible definition of the religious community
(ummah) in the Sundanese community." She also
emphasized the
militant pride with which Islam is viewed in Sundanese
areas. "As
I traveled around the province in 1981, people would point
with
pride to areas of particular heavy military activity
during the
Darul Islam period."
It is not surprising that the Sunda region was an
important
site for the Muslim separatist Darul Islam rebellion that
began in
the 1948 and continued until 1962
(see Independence: The First Phases, 1950-65
, ch. 1). The underlying causes of this
rebellion
have been a source of controversy, however. Political
scientist
Karl D. Jackson, trying to determine why men did or did
not
participate in the rebellion, argued that religious
convictions
were less of a factor than individual life histories. Men
participated in the rebellion if they had personal
allegiance to a
religious or village leader who persuaded them to do so.
Although Sundanese and Javanese possess similar family
structures, economic patterns, and political systems, they
feel
some rivalry toward one another. As interregional
migration
increased in the 1980s and 1990s, the tendency to
stereotype one
another's adat in highly contrastive terms
intensified, even
as actual economic and social behavior were becoming
increasingly
interdependent.
Data as of November 1992
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