The (Re)presentation of 'Traditional' Sasak Villages
Central Lombok, Indonesia
By Karin Bras
Lombok, one of the islands of the Indonesian province West Nusa Tenggara, is developing rapidly as an important tourist destination. In the 1980s the island was promoted as Indonesia's 'second Bali'. More recently, efforts have been made to do justice to the uniqueness of Lombok by focusing on the cultural identity of the Sasak, the indigenous inhabitants of the island. Sasak villages in central Lombok, like dusun ('hamlet') Sade and Rembitan, were made the centrepoints in the promotion of Lombok's cultural identity. The regional government designated the villages heritage sites suitable for the presentation of 'traditional' local culture, with the rice-barn - lumbung - as Lombok's primary identity marker. Regional initiatives to regulate tourism development should be understood against the background of the promotion of tourism by the national government in Jakarta as a strategy to unify and modernize the country. Although foreign tourists are attracted by a large variety of cultural identities, their presentation is not supposed to conflict with the government's emphasis on cultural unity.The Sasak communities have discovered themselves through the tourists' interest in their everyday life. By being looked at, examined, and questioned by strangers, locals have become aware of their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness. The majority of the tourists visit the village on a guided tour. Local tourist guides accompany them and provide information about the architecture and the daily life in the village. Young people, in search for additional income, act as local guides and accompany the tourists during their walk through the village. Their narratives are fairly standardized and reflect the ideas of the regional government about the mediation of knowledge of local culture as transmitted through the formal training of guides. What local guides learn at the government training sessions is supplemented by 'on the job' training which adheres strongly to received historical and cultural facts and figures. As a consequence, the narratives about Sasak villages highlight traditional architecture as an expression of a distinctive way of life; the shape of the Sasak houses and rice barns assumed to be the main features attracting tourists to the region. The tourists are confronted with a strongly simplified image of local village life - a frozen image - that is tuned to the assumed expectations of the visitors. Not much is said about present-day village life. Like travel brochures, local narratives generally leave out tales of economic hardships, internal conflicts, land tenure issues and, of course, the problems caused by tourism.
However, merely transferring standard information about the built environment is no longer sufficient to satisfy the increasingly demanding and volatile tourists. More and more tourists seem to be in search of meaningful cultural experiences and therefore they require a local guide who communicates and interprets 'meaning'. Tales of mundane aspects of everyday life, that describe the daily chores, the joys and worries of the people living in the villages, instead of series of 'dry' facts and figures would be engraved more deeply on the visitors' memories and create a better understanding of the Sasaks' unique identity among the tourists.
For the time being however Indonesian tourism policy strongly favours the standardized narratives which present a static image of village life on Lombok. Regional tourism policy leans heavily on the national state ideology 'unity in diversity', which emphasizes one national culture. At the same time, the great variety of local cultures in Indonesia is precisely what attracts most of the tourists. By presenting a local culture as a static icon - as is the case of Lombok's Sasak villages that are reduced to the lumbung - without focusing on the underlying multivocality and processes of change, local culture is reduced to the size of one state-controlled image. Rather than being neutral reproductions, Lombok tourist attractions and their narratives reflect less the commercial interest of the tourism industry than the cultural politics of the national government.
Karin Bras is Assistant Professor at the Department of Culture, Organisation and Management, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.