Being and place: movement, ancestors, and personhood in East Java, Indonesia

Abstract

This article is about the transformation of the frontier character of East Java and the impact that such a transformation and the migrations that precipitated it have on forms of personhood in a specific locality. Within this context, it enquires into the capacities of human subjects to create place and the capacity of place to create persons. In particular, it looks at the ways in which memories, kinship, and ritual practices are spatialized and the manner in which such practices, once solidified and coagulated into topographies that map social relations, give rise to particular conceptions of place and personhood as mutually constituting and equally fluid and alterable. Résumé L'auteur traite de la transformation du caractère de frontière de l'est de Java et de l'impact de cette transformation et des migrations qui l'ont suscitée sur la notion de personne dans une localité spécifique. Dans ce contexte, il étudie la capacité des êtres humains à créer des lieux et la capacité des lieux à créer des personnes. Il examine en particulier la manière dont les souvenirs, la parenté et les pratiques rituelles sont spatialisés et dont ces pratiques, une fois agglomérées dans des topographies représentant les relations sociales, suscitent des conceptions particulières du lieu et de la personne comme constitutifs l'un de l'autre et tout aussi mouvants et changeant l'un que l'autre.

2008: “Open City” and a New Wave of Filipino Migration to the Middle East

“…Corsin-Jimenez argued that if we point at cases in which a geographical place might mean nothing to people who live there because of their lack of social relationships associated with that place, then space is not, after all "a category of fi xed and given ontological attributes" (2003,140). Perhaps the work of Retsikas (2007) is more relevant to this essay. Perhaps the work of Retsikas (2007) is more relevant to this essay.…”

Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds

“…In other publications, I have traced this 'mixing' to a series of demographic movements that took place throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, movements which are directly associated with the transformation of East Java into a sugar economy by the Dutch colonial power (Retsikas 2007a). In other publications, I have traced this 'mixing' to a series of demographic movements that took place throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, movements which are directly associated with the transformation of East Java into a sugar economy by the Dutch colonial power (Retsikas 2007a).…”

The Sorcery of Gender: Sex, Death and Difference in East Java, Indonesia

“…This is so because, in distinct South East Asian fashion, they are conceptualized as parts of a sibling set (Retsikas, 2007b). The quintessential sibling set is that of brother and sister, or alternatively, husband and wife, who address each other as 'older brother/younger sister' until their first offspring is born.…”

“…It is a collection of neighbourhoods [kampong], administered by different villages [desa]. Alas Niser's current population is made up of migrants and descendants of migrants from other places in Java and Madura (Retsikas, 2007b). These demographic movements were the result of the political and economic transformation of the area during colonial times, and have continued into the post-colonial period, though at a much slower pace.…”

“…In a recent article, I have myself shown how on Java's east coast, 'the moral economy of intimacy', to borrow a term from Amazonian ethnography (see Overring and Passes, 2000;SantosGranero, 2007), has been integral in the transformation of the ethnic heterogeneity of the past into present similitude; and I have emphasized associated processes towards the domestication of alterity (Retsikas, 2007b). However, the truth remains that this picture is one-sided and that anthropological descriptions of convivial harmony need to be complemented by research into the symbolic economy of predation.…”