One of the questions which have occupied the attention of observers of modern Indonesian politics is the extent to which the contemporary conceptualization and practice of politics shows a demonstrable legacy of colonial and, especially, pre colonial, "traditional" form s.* 1 The legacy o f older social and political forms has also been discussed by students o f other Asian polities, but it seems fair to say that in the case of Java-the "majority tradition" o f Indonesia-the discussion has been characterized by a higher level o f abstraction than has been the case for other societies. In studies attempting to relate the traditional to the contemporary, this has perhaps been due in part to the utility of presenting the former in a dis tilled and firmly characterized form in order to facilitate comparison. Yet a similar level of abstraction, a concentration on theory rather than practice, conception rather than reality, has also marked many studies not concerned to relate contem porary to traditional political behavior but simply to characterize the latter. Clearly the extensive analyses o f C. C. B erg, portraying Javanese political beha vior as the enactment of a periodicity based on the alternation of Buddhist and Vaishnavite kingdoms at predictable intervals, fall into this category.2 Not all writers, of course, have seen traditional Javanese political behavior as essentially the enactment of the developments preordained by a religious schematization made manifest in this world, but even those who have attempted to study in detail the more "practical" side of political life, the administrative and political geography o f the kingdom, have tended to present a picture characterized, to a greater or lesser degree, by a concentration on ideal structures and a depiction of a fixed, perfected, * This is Part I of a two-part article. The second part, which will examine politi cal developments between

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This chapter discusses Indonesian historical writing after independence. At the time Indonesia became independent, knowledge of academic history-writing was virtually non-existent. Indonesian elites then faced the postcolonial predicament of having to adopt Western nationalistic approaches to history in order to oppose the Dutch version of the archipelago’s history that had legitimized colonial domination. Soon after independence, the military took over and dominated the writing of history in Indonesia for several decades. Challenges to the military’s view of history came from artistic representations of history, and from historians—trained in the social sciences—who emphasized a multidimensional approach balancing central and local perspectives. However, it was only after 2002 that historians could openly criticize the role of the military.