The Belum

Drawing up a mental image of what Ponorogo, a small city in East Java, looked like twenty or thirty years ago feels almost impossible. There are definite roadblocks in such an endeavor. The first is that, when Ponorogoans trace back to the time of their childhood, vastly different narratives emerge. For some, the past was when harvests were bountiful, when the lifestyle of farmer was more respected. For others, the past was a time when ‘we ate only just enough,’ as opposed to now, when ‘we eat enough to be fat.’ For still others, the past might be a time when families were better maintained, when husbands respected their wives and women stayed at home to take care of their children. The second, and perhaps more important roadblock, is that people in Ponorogo don’t seem to think very much about the past. Most thoughts that fill the imaginations of its residents involve the belum (a ubiquitous Indonesian word meaning “not yet”). Most people seem to hold an aspiration that places contentment at some point in the future.

Perhaps the most pervasive dream in Ponorogo is that of the migrant. Her (90% of the time, it is a her) aspirations are wrapped up in the bright lights of modernity. She knows that three years of working in Singapore or Taiwan will be enough to pay the school fees of her children through university. She also knows that the money could transform her humble abode into a tall, grandiose home, the type of house that is quickly becoming a standard in Ponorogo. These migrants often find themselves caught in a cycle. They return to Indonesia with startling amounts of cash, and proceed to spend it, evincing their new middle-class wealth in a community that has come to rely on quick money. With cars, motorcycles, a sophisticated wardrobe. Soon enough, the money dries up and they return abroad.

But it might be more difficult to be a young man in Ponorogo, since the jobs abroad are almost exclusively for women. (Factories, in addition to the informal sector, request female labor, in large part because women are considered more obedient and less likely to demonstrate for pay raises.) For many men in Ponorogo, whose wives or sisters are working abroad, a salary is belum. So is respect in a community that has come to think of young men as indolent and unproductive.

The belum is also important for the network of “professionals” who profit from the migrant’s dream. This string of agents is complex: the recruiters in Ponorogo; the ‘mafia’, often composed of teachers, that persuades young girls to migrate (and in turn takes a cut); the middlemen in receiving countries who “secure” work placements; and the government officials who slice a bit off the top at every step. Without the migrant’s belum, without the perpetual next dream, next act of conspicuous consumption, the waters that nourish this circuited tree of profiteering would dry up. Despite the number of players, the business of migration is profitable for every link in the chain. For instance, the recruitment agencies (called PJTKI, Penyalur Jasa Tenaga Kerja Indonesia) are known to practice potong gaji, or salary cutting; they take up to 50-75% of the worker’s salary for the first 6-12 months of employment. While government officials in Ponorogo claim that protection laws for workers are very strong, the legislation says nothing about practices such as salary cutting. Legal reform plods, since the network of migration opportunists is folded into itself: Many government officials also own PJTKI agencies.

Is the belum a symptom or a cause? Is a life dominated by belum the unintended result of economic forces at work in Ponorogo, or is it a economic system in and of itself, a system of unfulfilled desire? These are the questions that linger as I depart from Ponorogo.

A Nyadran in Jawa Tengah

I felt like an old-school anthropologist, the colonial era scholars who sought to find the most other-able of Others, those most unimaginable in a Western ontology, and “explain” them.

Except it happened completely by accident. My interest in Indonesia doesn’t stem from a desire to trek into the jungles of Papua to “discover” indigenous peoples. In fact, I became fascinated in this country because of how its people think about Islam as a tool of modernity. But nonetheless, there I found myself, in a small city in central Java called Temanggung, in the front row of a gathering of hundreds—called a nyadran.

I was visiting friends in Temanggung, and a small group of us were drinking coffee in the town square. The evening had a quotidian feel about it. It seemed that regulars filled the small park, and I reveled in the santai, sepi (quiet and relaxed) mood of the town, as compared to busy Yogya and frenetic Jakarta. As the time approached ten o’clock, my friends asked me if I’d ever seen Kuda Lumping, what they described as a “traditional Javanese horse dance.” I offered an apologetic “belum parnah” (no, never before) as they informed me that a friend of theirs was dancing in a nearby ceremony. As we pulled into a narrow lane a few kilometers away, I realized that the event was indeed a citywide attraction. Hundreds of motorbikes stretched out in lines like millipedes. Indeed, there were hundreds of people in the audience, seated along stone risers and facing a dirt performance ring. Behind the ring was a stage with an eerie sounding Gamelan set and a coarse singer. Soon after we arrived, a horse dance began, with costumed young men (perhaps 16-20) took on the nature of horses, performing in near perfect synchronism. My hosts excitedly pointed out their friend (he is the costumed performer in the picture I’ve included).

Once the horse dance concluded, a different, more gripping spectacle took shape. A costumed performer, who had been present since we arrived, assumed a sort of master role, as the music intensified and people from the audience spontaneously became kesurupan—best translated as possessed. The friend who’d just finished his horse dance ushered me to the front of the crowd for a better view, as other audience members lost control of their body and were brought, like animals, to the center of the ring. My friends explained to me that no one planned on becoming kesurupan, but that those who allowed their minds to become empty were susceptible to possession by the devilish spirits that had been called to the space.

Indeed, it seemed that those becoming possessed had lost human sensations. Their eyes became milky, and they assumed the posture of tigers and lions, at times rushing at the audience and growling. Those from the highest risers who became possessed jumped inhuman distances to the ground. Audience members within a few feet of me became kesurupan, and others took on the role as caretakers, charged with keeping satisfied the devil inside their peers.

Part of sating these devils involved feeding them. Their appetites are apparently quite multifarious. Some of those possessed were fed whole roses as if they were marshmallows. More shocking were the kesurupan who chewed up and swallowed long fluorescent light bulbs. Given their ease in chomping down on the glass, they could have been eating peanuts. All the while, the master walked around the twenty or so possessed individuals (all men), cracking his whip on their backs and sending shivers up my spine.

It turns out that a ceremony like this one is performed only a few times each year. The one at which I so fortuitously found myself was in fact scheduled intentionally just before the start of Ramadan. Whether this is read as a kind of ‘Muslim Mardi Gras’, when people get all the unorthodoxy out of their system, or as a ritual to ward off evil spirits and facilitate reflection and contemplation during a holy month, perhaps the more important point is that it is situated within a localized practice of Islam. Indeed, as I was told several times that night, the ceremony I witnessed was used by the nine saints who spread Islam in Java as a method of placing the religion in a local context. The nyaderan, of course, is a story seldom told. Usually the accounts of Indonesians harmonizing Islam and local culture involve pleasing descriptions of the pesantren (Islamic boarding schools), which employ teaching methods drawn from centuries of Hindu and Buddhist influence to pass on unique Islamic traditions. Or fantastic stories of the Yogyakarta sultan, publicly celebrating Maulid (Mohammad’s birthday) with a traditional Gamelan ensemble.

While old-school anthropologists wrote about “little” and “big” traditions, it is possible to see the nyaderan as actually neither. The audience members there, my friends included, are not carrying on a “little” tradition while a “big” one (Islam) threatens to swallow it. Perhaps, instead of determining what is errant or orthodox, little or big—a perspective that ultimately marginalizes someone or some idea—those hundreds who came that night embrace multiple affiliations. They are both Javanese and Muslim, and rather than this being a split identity, it is likely understood as joint.