Marriage Age for Girls
Mar 30th, 2010, in Asides, by Ross
How young can girls be married, NU issues fatwa allowing for marriage below the age of consent.
[post removed]
183 Comments on “Marriage Age for Girls”
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Arie Brand says:
Odiniius, you must be a teacher of some sort. Only that can explain the pedantry (and arrogance) of your answer. “Demonstrates only superficial engagement with the critique” Talking about being pompous. On how many of your students’ essays did you write that above the mark you gave them?
And what critique are you talking about?
You wrote: ” Plenty of colonialists “got teams together” and wrote embarrassingly paternalist encyclopedias that were, at base, justifications for racial domination regimes.”
Until now you haven’t come up with a single example. I caught you out before on those blanket statements (see the thread ‘Dutch war crimes’) which only show disdain linked to ignorance.
And as far as “engagement with the critique” is concerned you haven’t shown any. It is easier to dismiss it as pompous and boring – an assessment that gave Colonel Blimp the courage to ask Patung to censor (edit he said) me.
Finally, if you can’t see the relevance of my Schulte Nordholt quote I can’t help you. Reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be your strongest point.
ET, the name of that nineteenth century photography firm was Woodbury & Page.
If anyone wonders about my attitude to Indonesia s/he can find the answer here:
http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=blog/417
In my young years I worked for the Dutch field service (‘Binnenlands Bestuur’) in what is now called Papua. There was a humane and socially constructive regime there that was replaced by a murderous one – all in the name of colonial liberation. Since then I have become rather sceptical about such ‘liberations’.
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Madrotter if I am not mistaken we come from the same place (I am from Schiedam where the railway station is nowadays called Rotterdam West).
About Szekely-Lulofs: happily they translated what I consider to be her best book: Coolie. If that is taken as the yardstick for her performance she didn’t deserve the disdain with which Ter Braak and Du Perron talked about her.
‘Rubber’ I found considerably less interesting. It mainly talked about the planters’ world there: a group of not very interesting people. My memory of it is a bit hazy but I can’t recall that there was much talk there of the sufferings of the local people. In ‘Coolie’ there isn’t either. The main protagonist was from elsewhere and the misfortune that befell him was mainly inflicted on him by work mates and locals.
Szekely-Lulofs was the daughter of a ‘district commisioner’ (the ‘Resident’ Lulofs) so you couldn’t expect an either explicit or implicit condemnation of the colonial set up from her. But interestingly enough it neither came from the other lady authors who wrote about Deli when or after living there: such as Annie Salomons and Carry van Bruggen. Yet both were humane and enlightened people and in the case of the latter even an extremely intelligent and well informed one (did you ever read her philosophical study ‘Prometheus’ which even forced Ter Braak to become a fan of that book – ready to defend it against all and sundry).
Just as an aside: Van Bruggen’s brother was the poet Jacob Israel de Haan who went to Israel in 1919 as an ardent Zionist, was shocked by the treatment of the Arabs there and became a champion of negotiations and peacefully living together with them. For that he was murdered on the orders of the Jewish organization Hagana in 1924.
Well, the human rights sensitivities of brother and sister must either have differed considerably or Van Bruggen didn’t find all that much to shock her.
Yet there were no doubt shocking incidents there. My former colleague at the Erasmus University, Jan Breman, unearthed a considerable time ago the so-called Rhemrev report – an early report (1907 I think) that was drawn up by a prosecutor for the colonial government that provides an account of downright criminal practices there. As far as I know it was never acted upon.
The Deli plantation economy just remained outside the government’s orbit. A good example is the governmental effort to abolish the so-called ‘penal sanction’ (that provided for punishment with the rattan of run away contract coolies). The organised resistance of the planters’ world remained just too strong. Finally they gave it up voluntarily since the US refused to import tobacco produced under such circiumstances ( American competition was behind that move).
That Deli plantation economy provides the blackest page in recent colonial history. But how black was it actually? How common were the misdeeds Rhemrev talked about? Unfortunately the lady authors I mentioned are no longer able to provide an answer.
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ET says:
@ Arie Brand
Notwithstanding the differences of opinion, thank you for the comprehensive list of Dutch literature about the Indies. It will certainly keep me busy for a while.
@ Patung
A suggestion. Wouldn’t it be possible to number each individual post? When threads become very long it would be easier to refer to a much earlier one.
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bs says:
@AB
I find it hard to believe that only those who like your branch of social science are intelligent. The larger part of the posters here have quite intelligent remarks at times.
I myself am more of a natural science person and although not into stamp collecting, I like to read the odd history book every now and then. At one point I had to read some of Geertz stuff in a sidetrack class on etnomethodology. I asked the prof why it was full of prose, to me it dilutes the information density (in science, the more concise is always the better) and makes the text less accessible to others. The prof then made the remark on the woolliness being the only way of differentiation for these writers. They don’t have any models, maths, or grammar theories to refer to.
I’d be reading a lot more of this stuff if the bla-bla was left out, the subjects are often interesting enough.
by the way, groeten uit Vlaardingen 😉
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well i’m from kralingen/crooswijk… what i found so fascinating about szekely-lulof’s books actually were those depictions of the lives of the bule’s living here, how many things have stayed the same, how the lives we bule’s live here are still so simular to those lives lived here in the past. i’m sure most of us here on the forum can tell many stories about the fortunes and misfortunes of our fellow expatriates (and ourselves), i’ve seen many of them come and go, i’ve seen quiet a few people who lost everything here and managed to stay here somehow, without income (and often even a visa) sometimes for years, some of them slowly coming up again, some of them dying terrible deaths.. it reminds me of frankie, a belgium guy who at one time had a succesfull cafe/restaurant, he was a very good guy, an incredible painter who’s works are still all over bandung. frankie lived on the streets of bandung and jakarta for at least two years, surviving without money unless he succeeded in selling a painting again, he used to sleep under the kaki lima’s in jalan jaksa, smoking stoogies found on the street. when his mom died he got a lot of money, 40.000 euro’s started another restaurant, failed (mainly because of his habit of walking around stark naked through the complex where that restaurant was, drunk as a bat.) the money was gone in less than two years and instead of going back to living on the streets again he chose to end it all by drinking himself to death in pelabuhan ratu… well, we all got together and got him cremated (you wouldn’t believe how that goes here, they burn the body with gas from a few gasbottles sometimes throwing a bit of gasoline in the oven his widow got a big sack with ash and pieces of bone) and then brought his remains back to pelabuhan ratu… or jacob, a dutch guy, i didn’t know him well, he was a huge 300 plus pounds guy who died. his dutch family came over for the funeral and the indonesian family of his wife managed to get around 30 jt out of these people. they burried him at a garbage disposal place! so a few days later the guys from the nordseabar dug him up, he was already stinking and leaking and managed to burry him at a proper place…
ehrrr sorry to stray away from the topic so far!
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Ross says:
Great pic, madrotter, coulda used it in Jakarta Suckers!
And yes, reading how those old Dutch geezers carried on is like sitting in Pappa Cafe watching the passers-by, or fellow-customers! Plus ca change… -
hehehe here’s the same guy
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Madrotter,
You seem to experience a lot of weird (and interesting) stuff in your life.
I hope you keep a diary and one day write a book about it, with pictures 😉 -
hehehe, no it’s all in the head, life in rotterdam was a lot more complicated though…
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Just to re-introduce a note of seriousness, I saw this AFP report today.
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Yemeni child bride dies of bleeding after intercourseAFP
April 9, 2010, 11:00 amA 13-year-old Yemeni girl who was forced into marriage died five days after her wedding when she suffered a rupture in her sex organs and hemorrhaging, a local rights organisation says. Ilham Mahdi al Assi died last Friday in a hospital in Yemen’s Hajja province, the Shaqaeq Arab Forum for Human Rights said, quoting a medical report. She was married the previous Monday in a traditional arrangement known as a “swap marriage”, in which the brother of the bride also married the sister of the groom, it said. “The child Ilham has died as a martyr due to the abuse of children’s lives in Yemen,” the non-governmental organisation said.
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The report goes on to describe how thousands of ignorant Islamist women rallied against a reform bill. A smaller number of civilised owmen later rallied to protect children.
Altogether sad reading. -
Odinius says:
Arie,
Your hypersensitivity to criticisms of colonialism is clouding your intellectual judgement, and leading you to overly personalized responses based on rather threadbare straw men. If you’re not going to engage with the points other people are making, then really, what’s the point of continuing the conversation with you?
I asked you if you could confirm your argument by citing scholars working outside a colonial framework. Please also note that this request is not, as I already mentioned, tantamount to declaring any colonial scholarship null and void, but rather a way to use more recent scholarship to determine which parts of said colonial scholarship have been verified, and which were potentially tainted by the aims, means and power relations inherent to the high colonial project.
Without such verification, and compounded by your continued apologia for the exploitative colonial regime, you are inviting skepticism and even dismissal of arguments that may–particularly in this case–be valid.
So you either go ahead and address that criticism in a respectful and engaged manner, or you continue this conversation on your own, to the sound of one hand clapping.
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When I tried to provide spacing to this letter it somehow got sent without being actually submitted. This made it difficult to read. So here is a version with spacing:
Odinius you wrote:
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“I asked you if you could confirm your argument by citing scholars working outside a colonial framework.”You didn’t ask me that. What was at stake was the choice between the information on a historical situation supplied by contemporary scholars, and cited by ET, and that to be found in the 1896 edition of the “Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie”. I argued that the latter bit of information obviously came from a source dating from the time that these marriage customs still held sway. This could be one reason to prefer it above stuff supplied by informants who are talking about a situation in the past they haven’t known at first hand.
One other reason to prefer it was that the Encyclopedia’s information on this point seemed to fit in with that supplied by an anthropologist (Jane Belo) who could – in 1936 – still talk to old men who had presumably known this situation at first hand.
You reacted to this as follows: “Plenty of colonialists “got teams together” and wrote embarrassingly paternalist encyclopedias that were, at base, justifications for racial domination regimes.
Doesn’t mean any given fact in the encyclopedia is wrong, per se, but it’s hardly an authoritative source. I’d rather see evidence from someone working under more current, and less “go go colonialism” anthropological conventions.”There was not just an innocuous request for more and contemporary information here as you are now trying to make of it. You were coming up here with a much broader point. It seemed to me obvious that you declared your preference here for the information provided by ET because it didn’t come from a ‘tainted’ source viz. one of those “embarrassingly paternalistic encyclopedias”, that is one of those sources that supplied information acquired under “go go colonialism” anthropological conventions – conventions that fitted in with the desire to supply “at base, justifications for racial domination regimes”.
Apart from the fact that you still haven’t provided any examples here (unless that Encyclopedia I took as my source and that I bet you never have even seen the cover of has to serve as such) what I objected to was the implicit facile sociology of knowledge you came up with here, namely that knowledge, particularly knowledge acquired in colonial situations, serves power. That was the point I argued against in my answer to your letter. The gist of my answer can be found in the title of Robert Irwin’s sustained argument against Said: “For Lust of Knowing”. Knowledge, even that acquired in a colonial situation, can be “disinterested”. Knowledge and ideas in general do not always serve power. In fact they can be turned against it. The point hardly needs to be elaborated on as far as Western history is concerned but for knowledge acquired under colonial conditions it requires some emphasis.
You chose to dismiss my answer as ‘pompous and boring’ without any further argumentation.
And after this non-performance you had the cheek to come up with this:
“If you’re not going to engage with the points other people are making, then really, what’s the point of continuing the conversation with you?”
A ‘chutzpah’ if ever I saw one.
And one more thing: You want me to react to criticism “in a respectful and engaged manner.” Well it might just be me but this seems a bit rich from somebody who, without any further argumentation, initially dismissed my criticism as ‘pompous and boring’ and who, the very first time that he reacted to one of my letters, declared me to be a ‘troll’.
The ‘chutzpah’ seems to be your preferred rhetorical device.
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John says:
How about get married at 15 years old.
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@ Arie Brand
what I objected to was the implicit facile sociology of knowledge you came up with here, namely that knowledge, particularly knowledge acquired in colonial situations, serves power.
Although your remark wasn’t directed at me, it isn’t merely a question of serving colonialism which is at stake here. Those were the times when ‘Social Darwinism’ and eugenics held sway, also in the times when Belo published her findings. Even generally respected and admired statesmen like Winston Churchill were contaminated with these ideas. This is why I believe that anything scholarly written in that era should be scrutinized and not taken at face value.
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Now it seems that poor Jane Belo, in addition to being suspected of linguistic incompetence might also have been infected with ‘social darwinism’. What next?
The era you now declare to be tainted with ‘social darwinism’ and ‘eugenics’ saw in fact the greatest achievements in anthropology and sociology. In sociology/anthropology Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Malinowski, Evans Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Max Gluckman etc.etc.
These people, rather than providing the ideological underpinning for colonial power over barbarian tribes ‘beyond the law’, did just about the opposite. They emphasized that we were dealing here with cultures in their own right that required attentive study.
In fact to find social darwinists among social scientists you have to go quite a bit further back. Herbert Spencer was the last prominent one I would say.
And what is the point about Winston Churchill? Is he now, in addition to his other qualities, an anthropologist as well?
Indonesianists who know Dutch (do you?) seem in general to have far less qualms about using pre-war Dutch sources than you and Odinius deem advisable.
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BS, on this blog I seem to be surrounded by former neighbours – Madrotter on the East and you on the West. I have good memories of Vlaardingen. Some of my best friends used to live there.
You wrote: ” At one point I had to read some of Geertz stuff in a sidetrack class on etnomethodology. I asked the prof why it was full of prose, to me it dilutes the information density ”
That was a strange question. What else had you expected to be there? A musical notation? Algebraic formulas?
I suspect that you were alluding to what Odinius called the poetic quality of his prose. Yes, I admire it for that but it seems to get up the nose of others. So I remember one Indonesianist refeferring to Geertz as ‘that insufferable litterateur’.
I can’t understand, though, why your professor called it ‘woolly’ and insinuated that Geertz had to write in that way to make his stuff look ‘scientific’. That was catering to cheap prejudices about social scientists I think.
It is true that the prose of many social scientists, especially the German ones, is not very accessible. But it would be a mistake to conclude that there is an inverse correlation between inaccessibility and what you call “information density”. To take a contemporary example: Juergen Habermas writes in ‘barbed wire German’ (‘Stacheldraht Deutsch’) but he has very important things to say.
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Professor Graham Irwin of Columbia University in an article on Dutch sources on Indonesia wrote:
“… the servants of the East India Company had to provide their masters in Holland with minute descriptions of the Indonesian scene, so that decisions taken at home might be based on something better than guesswork. Later, when the Netherlands Indian Government was administering the whole country, its officials had to submit reports on any and every detail of local law and practice that came to their notice. Once again, the subject was that government policy might be meshed with the needs of time and place. On the whole, these tasks were performed more competently by Dutch officials than by those of any other colonial power, presumably because the Dutch officials were the best trained.”
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Before anyone else feels impelled to make the remark, here indeed we have knowledge that was gathered in the interests of power. Should we therefore conclude that it was untrue? If it was untrue it would have defeated the very purpose for which it was gathered viz. to orient government policy to an existing situation. Montagne, said Gellner, was clearly a colonialist working for a colonial government – yet Gellner believed that he got it right as far as his view of Algerian society was concerned. The truth of one’s findings then, said Gellner, does not depend on one’s political virtue.
The reports ordered by the government could also be turned against its policies. For instance, the thorough inquiries into the income and (lack of) prosperity of the indigenous population at the end of the nineteenth century led to Queen Wilhelmina’s remarks in the speech from the throne in 1901 that the indigenous population of Indonesia was the victim of decreasing prosperity and that Holland had a moral duty in the Indies. This led to the so-called “ethical policy” for which Van Deventer had called in an epoch making article in 1899 entitled “A Debt of Honour”. He argued there for a return, in some shape or form, to the Indies of the money Holland had got out of it.
My first mentor in Indonesian affairs, the late Professor Willem Wertheim, was of the opinion that on the whole this ethical policy had failed because it had been overwhelmed by economic forces over which the government had no real control – but that is a topic apart.
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venna says:
How about get married at 15 years old.
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Married with who and for what reason? Money again?
Before exchange it, better read the Yemen case to prevent the same tragedy. Don’t marry her with any man who felt he had to prove his manhood by raping his underage wife, don’t force your daughter to marry a rich man for paying your debt, and make sure her rich husband also pay for caesar surgery. How come they able to do this to their own daughter! Like she’s only a blob of meat that they can sell!http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jFuaD3fLpJLZE3qob6VoJIXUqbJQD9F07VB80
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Arie,
Yes, I do prefer ET’s source, if taken on its own. However, I did prefer your argument on the topic. This earlier comment should have clued you into that:
“Culture” is a collection of institutionalized norms and practices. Nothing else.
You may remember making a similar point? Given that, it seems rather obvious that this:
Doesn’t mean any given fact in the encyclopedia is wrong, per se, but it’s hardly an authoritative source. I’d rather see evidence from someone working under more current, and less “go go colonialism” anthropological conventions.
Quite clearly means this:
I asked you if you could confirm your argument by citing scholars working outside a colonial framework. Please also note that this request is not, as I already mentioned, tantamount to declaring any colonial scholarship null and void, but rather a way to use more recent scholarship to determine which parts of said colonial scholarship have been verified, and which were potentially tainted by the aims, means and power relations inherent to the high colonial project.
Now I’m quite glad you brought up Weber, because his example can illustrate my point nicely. He was a brilliant man, whose insights are still being mined for new and exciting sociological theory. But do you really know anyone who takes him at his word for facts about, say, Chinese royal governance, German nationalism or the Russian Revolution of 1905? For that matter, do you know anyone serious who reads his historical texts and doesn’t take his perspective as a politically active German nationalist into account? Or how his physical and temporal location might have affected his theories of secular differentiation and relentless bureaucratization?
So what do you do with Weber? Throw him out the window? Good god, no. Instead, you read him in a contextually-sensitive manner. You look for how his arguments fit with more recent and factually rich accounts of historical events (and find they often, but not always, do). People who don’t contextualize Weber are, quite frankly, crude sociologists.
People who don’t contextualize scholarly publications as themselves an historical record are, by the same coin, crude historians. Again, does this mean you can discount them completely? Not at all. Plenty of colonial scholarship remains historically valid. At the same time, it’s all potentially tainted by the colonial project–particularly the encyclopedias that were often funded by colonial institutions seeking new avenues for pacification and domination. The question, for many, is not “if,” but “where” and “to what extent.”
Corroborating sources from beyond the colonial pale could easily lead to the conclusions: “not here” or “to no significant extent.”
This is a very simple request. Like I mentioned earlier, unless you are willing to fulfill it, a lot of people are not going to find your argument entirely credible.
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Odinius I think you conflate two different questions here: 1. the question of what Weber – following Rickert – called ‘value orientation’ (“Wertbeziehung”) 2. the question of truth.
I take it that you are familiar with the distinction between ‘value orientation’ and ‘value judgment’ (‘Wertung’) on which Weber’s belief in the possibility of a ‘value free’ (‘wertfrei’) sociology was mainly based.
In answer to the first question one looks at context – particularly the ‘problem situation’ in the discipline the scholar is working in and possible personal orientations that might have to do with her/his biography.
The truth question is, in principle, quite different. One asks to what extent the scholar’s propositions agree with the facts as they can now be ascertained (I know that that ‘correspondence theory of truth’ is not universally accepted but Popper has – following the Polish logician Alfred Tarski – given a to my mind quite adequate defence of it).
It is not always realised that Weber was, initially, trained as a legal scholar (he only started to call himself, rather reluctantly, a sociologist, when – at a later stage – he got a chair in the discipline).
The ‘problem situation’ in nineteenth century German law was set by the struggle between ‘Romanists’ (who set store by Roman law that has, via Dutch-Roman law, also influenced Indonesian law) and Germanists. What Weber was opposed to in the Germanic school of law was the relativistic acceptance of given powers, because these had, allegedly, originated in the ‘Folk Spirit’ (‘Volksgeist’).
If I may quote myself:
“One of Weber’s main concerns was the fate of ‘personality’ in the modern world. It was this preoccupation which informed his sociology and constituted its connecting theme. Essential for ‘personality’, thought Weber, was a constant orientation to certain ‘ultimate’ values – an orientation which was expressed in the rational and methodical conduct of life. This ideal of the personality, which for its realization actually depends on rationalization (because it presupposes a conscious and appropriate choice of means) collides with the products of rationalization, the disciplined and disciplining bureaucracies. It collides, too, with codified law and the institutionalized procedures of its administration. For the West, so Weber seemed to say, there is no escape from these dynamics. There is no such thing as an indubitable hierarchy of values on the basis of which the paradoxical consequences of rationalization could be circumvented or removed. Final peace here could only be the peace of the grave when Man would be , finally and for good, dominated by the products of his own rationalizing activities … Weber would have been the first to recognize the irony of the fact that his anti-historicism can yet only be understood within the context of these times. It is certainly not the least important aspect of his greatness that he could recognize the power of history even there where he sought to escape from it.’
Arie Brand (1982),’Against romanticism: Max Weber and the historical school of law’ Australian Journal of Law and Society. Vol.1
I wrote my Ph. D. thesis (Leiden 1976) on Weber (and Habermas) which was subsequently commercially published (Boom, 1976). You can, if you are interested, find its title in the catalogue of the Library of Congress. I will resist the temptation to list my subsequent Weber publications.
To go from Weber to the humble reporters on Balinese marriage customs: one can’t prejudge the answer to question no.2 (see above) regarding their reports by looking mainly at question no.1. This is also what Gellner was driving at in his comments on the French ethnographer Montagne.
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Let me add to this: to get at the “facts as they now can be ascertained’ does not always mean that one prefers later accounts to earlier ones. One sound principle in history writing is that, in principle, one prefers the sources that were nearest in time (and place) to the events described.
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One sound principle in history writing is that, in principle, one prefers the sources that were nearest in time (and place) to the events described.
Another sound principle in history assessment is to leave history writing to the historians, see what practical lessons can be learned from it and go on with our lives.
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This looks like throwing up the cards when you don’t like the direction in which the game is going.
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This looks like throwing up the cards when you don’t like the direction in which the game is going.
It’s throwing up the cards when the game is going to a draw or nowhere. Nevertheless I learned a lot and that’s what’s important.
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Hans says:
The copy of to day
Yemeni Ilham Mahdi Al-Assi died 13 years old, five days after her wedding. She bled to death after receiving their gender split from her husband.
Ilham al-Mahdi Assi married off last Monday in an “exchange marriages” between two
clans, says human rights organization Al-Shaqaiq. She died on Friday after the
Al-Thawra Hospital in Hajj province north of the capital Sanaa.In September, killed 12-year-old Fawziya Abdullah Youssef and her children after three
days’ confinement. Child marriages are most common among the poorest and least
trained. -
Yes, it is horrible, Hans. I posted the same info on the 9th, but other people seem to prefer debating inscrutable abstractions. A great pity.
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@Arie
Enjoy reading your thoughts on Weber (and likely on Habermas as well), so will check out your book when I’m at the library later this week.
Also glad we’ve moved on to a more genial tone in this dialogue.
That said, I think you eluded my point–that while you certainly can read Weber-the-theorist in the abstract, you can’t read Weber-the-historical-sociologist without taking his own personal circumstances–his spatial and temporal location and his political projects–into account.
His writings on the Russian Revolutions, for example, were based upon a small selection of letters and newspapers brought to him by train or steamer, read and analyzed by a novice (albeit a clever one) in the rather complicated Russian language, and possessed by an urgency to see how the Russian situation might affect his native Germany.
Where he’s sound, and where he’s shaky, can be determined by reading more recent treatments of the Russian Revolutions in tandem with Weber.
That’s all I’m asking here. Do you have other sources that corroborate the enclyclopedia, or that have verified their accuracy?
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Odinius, the main question to be asked re Weber the historical sociologist is whether and where he got it wrong and where he was right. I see these considerations as belonging to what in my previous post I called question 2. When it comes to the problem WHY he got it wrong one has to resort to an analysis of the then existing problem situation and biographical considerations. These fall largely under what I called question no. 1. I should have numbered them differently, because question no.2 should have priority unless one is a historian of sociology or biographer.
But I would like to pick up another point in your previous letter. You referred to my ‘hypersensitivity’ for criticism of Dutch colonialism. Let me explain. I generally blog only about three things: climate change, the Palestinian cause and, occasionally via this blog, the Indonesian colonial past. What keeps me going there? My sense, right or wrong, that on all these three topics many lies have been and are being spread. As far as the last topic is concerned I must add that I have seen, in Papua, Dutch colonialism at its best and that I am keenly aware of the miserable Indonesian record in that place. But let us leave that aside.
The very negative picture of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia does not come from professional Indonesianists who have a command of Dutch. It is mainly a matter of a popular image among the largely uninformed. To give you one example: if on YouTube you search for videos on Jakarta one of the first that comes up offers to guide you in 12 minutes around the place. In those twelve minutes your female guide also touches on the colonial past when standing in front of the old town hall (now, as you know, a museum). Virtually the only things she mentions there are that, in front of the building, people were executed who resisted the colonial overlord and that the building itself had torture chambers. With that Indonesia’s colonial past had apparently been sufficiently characterised.
Let us move to another place in SE Asia and look at the situation there. I have done so before but it can’t do any harm to come up with it again. My wife is a Filipina and I have lived quite a few years in Cebu and we are planning to settle there again. In Cebu there is local pride about Chief Lapu Lapu who slayed Magellan in hand to hand combat. But there is also a spot where you see the statues of Magellan, his chronicler Pigafetta and , yes, Lapu Lapu together in a sort of brotherly fashion. This is typical. There are other things. Many place names in the Philippines date from the colonial era and have been left unchanged. There is, in the first place, the name of the country itself, commemorating the very prince (Philips II) in whose reign the country came to be colonised (and in which the Dutch started their own eighty years war against Spain for national independence). Some of these place names refer back to colonial administrators. One of the main thorough fares in Cebu for instance is called Jones Avenue (though there are fumbling attempts to replace that name by that of Osmena – a local political dynasty). In Manila a similar thorough fare is called Taft Avenue. Etc. You get the picture.
Was the American record in the Philippines all that good? It takes an influential columnist as for instance Conrado de Quiros to remind his readers, almost forcibly, of the American betrayal of the first Filipino revolution (when they first allied themselves with the revolutionaries against Spain and then turned against them) and the horrible war that followed, of that American commander who threatened to make of Samar a ‘howling wilderness’, of the treacherous way in which Aquinaldo was captured etc. It doesn’t sink in.
Go to Malaysia and you get a fairly similar picture.
Now what is the difference with Indonesia? Both in the Philippines and Malaysia the coming of independence did not lead to the removal of the established elite and the coming into place of a new one. In Indonesia it did. And not only that. The leading figures in that new elite had often a history of exile or imprisonment behind them. The information they allowed or brought forth about the colonial era was heavily coloured by that.
In addition there were of course, the seventeen years of conflict with the Netherlands, that followed the declaration of independence, four years nand a bit until the transfer of sovereignty and then another twelve years about Papua.
The personality of Sukarno also has to be taken into account. He was rather fond of political conflagrations – and not only where the Dutch were involved. Think of the ‘konfrontasi’ with Malaysia and Britain.
Add to this the fact that most non-specialists who are interested in the history of Indonesia are not able to read Dutch and you have the elements together for a popular rendering of colonial history that as far as its negativity is concerned has no equivalent in Asia. You have also been influenced by that. We have crossed swords about this before.
Am I right in guessing that you are not actually living in Indonesia? Because if you have access to a library where you expect to find my book on Weber you are not likely to be there. Incidentally, it is in Dutch. My book on Habermas however is in English (The Force of Reason) and I will gladly send you a – free – copy if you so desire.
No I have no other sources about Balinese marriage customs but that is really hardly to the point. Our main controversy was about question no.1 and what priority it should have.
Comment on “Marriage Age for Girls”.
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bs said:
Geertz’ writing is very elegant and poetic for a social scientist, though. Most are bone-dry and jargon-heavy.