How have the Javanese, in the course of history, engaged with their own past? What kinds of past were important to specific communities, and how did they go about retrieving and recording it? And what can these processes tell us about the relationship between these historical imaginations on the one hand and understandings of temporality, textuality, and metaphysics on the other? 

This seminar engages these questions through a preview of two forthcoming books, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan’s The Precarious Past in Premodern Java and Verena Meyer’s Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia. Bringing into conversation sources ranging from medieval, Hindu-Buddhist Java to contemporary Muslim life, the seminar exhibits the plurality of historical paradigms and their significance for the Javanese over time.

Presenters

Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a lecturer of Indonesian history and language at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he is also director of the Indonesia Institute. He is a historian specialising in the premodern history of Southeast Asia, as well as a teacher of Indonesian and Old Javanese language. He has written widely on Southeast Asian history in leading history and area studies journals. He has given public talks, seminars, and national radio interviews on his research, and he has an active outreach program on traditional and social media. He has previously held positions at the Ecole française d'Extrême Orient (Paris) and the University of Sydney.

Verena Meyer is an Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. In her work, she draws on ethnographic field research and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space.  Her first book, titled Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia, will be published this August by California University Press and discusses how Indonesia’s two largest Muslim mass organizations - self-identifying respectively as traditionalist and modernist - actively engage memory as a framework for theological thought and practice. Her second project, funded by the Dutch Research Council, investigates the digitization of Islamic manuscripts in Indonesia, asking how digitization transforms understandings of the meaning and use of writing and textuality. 

Discussants

Ben Arps is a Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He has particular interests in the theory and methods of philology; the theory and methods of Area Studies; narrativity in culture; Islam; audio media and audioscapes; and the relevance of the past in and for the present. His research centres on Indonesia and the Malay world, with a core interest in Java and its diasporas. 

Adrian Perkasa is a postdoctoral researcher at KITLV. His research is about Pranata Mångsa, a Javanese agricultural calendar; Cultural heritage and the politics of knowledge (re)production. Furthermore, his project involves inventorying and researching the histories, practices, and uses of Pranata Mångsa and other grass-roots knowledge about agricultural calendars and seasons in Java.

Moderator

Marieke Bloembergen is a cultural historian and senior researcher at KITLV, and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the political dynamics of cultural knowledge production in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, in relation to objects, non-human species, heritage practices, art, and notions of (environmental) care, and in their local, inter-Asian and global dimensions. 

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is an onsite event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden on Wednesday 17 June from 12.00-13.30 PM (CET).  

Image

Carved depictions of palm-leaf manuscripts and oral teaching, panel 0.79 on the Mahākarmavibhaṅga covered base, Borobudur temple, central Java (built circa 800 CE). Photo: Kassian Cephas (1890/1891). Public domain.

Flyer

PDF version