Voices of the past : the status of language in eighteenth-century Japanese discourse

In this lively book, Benedict R. O'G Anderson explores the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen from two critical facts in Indonesian history-that while the Indonesian nation is young, the Indonesian state is ancient, originating in the early seventeenth-century Dutch conquests; and that contemporary politics are conducted in a new language, Bahasa Indonesia, by peoples (especially the Javanese) whose cultures are rooted in medieval times. Analyzing a spectrum of examples from classical poetry to public monuments and cartoons, Anderson deepens our understanding of the interaction between modern and traditional notions of power, the meditation of power by language, and the development of national consciousness. This volume brings together eight of Anderson's most influential essays written over the past two decades. Most of the essays address aspects of Javanese political culture-from the early nineteenth century, when the Javanese did not yet have words for politics, colonialism, society, or class, through the early nationalism of the 1900s, to the era of independence after World War II, when deep internal tensions exploded into large-scale massacres. In the first group of essays Anderson considers how power was imagined in traditional Javanese society, and how these imaginings shaped Indonesia's modern politics. Other essays focus on the significance of the incongruences between the egalitarian, ironizing national language through which modern Indonesia has been imagined and the powerful influence of the hierarchical, authoritarian Javanese official culture. Finally, two essays on consciousness illuminate the crucial eras before and after the rise of Indonesia's nationalist movement. One reflects on Javanese intellectuals' phantasmagoric efforts to keep imagining "Java" as the island was overrun by colonial capitalism and absorbed into the huge, heterogeneous Netherlands East Indies; the second traces the transition from old culture to new nation through the autobiography of an eminent Javanese first-generation nationalist politician. Tracing the evolution of an ancient but ongoing Sri Lankan chronicle, Steven Kemper deepens our understanding of the complex role of the historical past in the rise of nationalist movements. Kemper focuses in particular on the Mahavamsa, a Buddhist historical narrative that has been periodically extended over the last fourteen centuries, most recently in 1977 when President Jayewardene assembled a committee of scholars, bureaucrats, and monks to bring the chronicle up to date. Kemper is concerned both with the development of Sinhala national identity and with the impact of historical consciousness on Sri Lankan culture and political life today. He discusses Sri Lankan party politics, ethnic conflict between Sinhala Buddhists and the Tamil minority, and political exchanges between the state, the monkhood, and the laity. Kemper argues that in Sri Lanka the past is made tangible through a set of social practices of genuine historical antiquity--chronicle-keeping, maintaining sacred places, and venerating heroes--and that the nationalist invocation of the past gathers its force from the way present-day circumstances impose new meanings on these practices. By taking up the contention that Sinhala nationalism antedates the rise of nationalist movements in Europe by over a thousand years, Kemper's analysis offers challenging implications for our interpretation of nationalism as a modern European phenomenon. Anthropologists specializing in political development, historical anthropology, and oral and popular traditions; historians of South Asia; political scientists concerned with ethnic conflict; and others interested in the intersection of politics and religion will welcome The Presence of the Past. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Naoki Sakai maintains, a radical change took place in Japanese discourse--the sudden emergence of multiple new possibilities of conceptualizing the world. In this brilliant and searching reinterpretation of the cultural history of the Tokugawa period, Sakai traces this shift across a spectrum of artistic and critical texts from puppet theater to Confucian commentary. He asserts that during this time a new emphasis was placed on textual performance, practice, and communication, and he illuminates its ethical and political consequences. Sakai draws upon the insights of recent critical theory as he explores the historical consciousness of texts and the self-consciousness of language itself. Analyzing the conditions of discourse formation, he seeks to suggest how language may be used to inform historical investigation. He first considers the Confucian philosopher Ito Jinsai's critiques of Neo-Confucianism. Showing how the historical other was constructed and theorized, Sakai discusses key works of visual art, performance pieces, poetry, and wakun, a genre of graphic translation. Finally, he considers writings representative of intellectual movements that began to construct the identity of the Japanese language and culture. Intellectual historians, specialists in Japanese culture, anthropologists working with historical texts, literary theorists, linguists, philosophers, and others interested in East Asian thought will welcome this rich and challenging book.