Autumn 1996
University of Leiden, The Netherlands
Workshop 5

Encompassing knowledge
Indigenous encyclopaedias in Indonesia in the 17th-20th centuries

Work of an encyclopaedic nature, often in the shape of travel accounts and handbooks, constitutes an important genre in the written languages of Indonesia. The writings in question have never received the scholarly attention they deserve, although they are important sources for the fields of cultural and political history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, performance studies, and art.
- What circumstances led to the compilation of encyclopaedic texts in languages of Indonesia such as Malay, Javanese and Old Javanese (Kawi), Buginese, and Sundanese? To what extent, for instance, do they owe their origins to colonial-era interactions with the West? Are the circumstances of their creation analogous to European encyclopaedias during the Enlightenment?
- How can we evaluate the historiographical and ethnographic value of the information found in such texts?
- What is the relationship of these encyclopaedic stories to other genres of Indonesian traditional literature? For instance, we can see how texts such as the early- 19th-century Javanese Serat Centhini accrete other pre-existing genres to themselves, and, probably in turn spawn other texts. Is the assumption correct, then, that texts like the Centhini are central to understanding early colonial Indonesia, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries?
- Are these texts examples of local "canon-formation"? If so, what do they include and what do they leave out? For what reasons?
- How can we understand the complex religious stance of these narratives? Do they reflect the traditional Islamic knowledge of the time - canonical, legal, mystical, historical, literary - for example, as it flourished in Islamic student communities, or pesantrèn? Can two main streams of Islam - one orthodox, the other syncretic and mystical - be discerned in these encyclopaedias? If so, what do we learn about the development of Islam in Southeast Asia over the last three centuries? Do we find here the seeds of the distinction between orthodoxy and modernism in 20th-century Indonesia?
- What do we learn about early performing and plastic arts, literature, architecture, ceremonies, social life, religion and ritual, etc.?
- Are these encyclopaedic narratives, which in many versions are often explicitly erotic, key sources for deciphering the history of sexuality and gender in Southeast Asia? What continuities or discontinuities, then, do we find with attitudes in modern insular Southeast Asia?
- Do we find a paradox in the supposition that texts like the Centhini were compiled at the behest of court elites, but in fact reflect more generally on the situation of rural Java beyond the courts?
- How can we understand them as historiographical sources? What do we learn of pesantrèn life, or of the life of peripatetic, mendicant scholars?
- Is Anderson correct in assuming that, since print capitalism arrived late in Java, there was no special prestige or political position attached to writers in this period, and that therefore myriad specialist-scholars-architects, puppeteers, musicians, dancers, actors, sculptors, smiths, painter, curers, astrologers, magicians, folk botanists, religious teachers, commoners all-were either in service to elite nobles or "'on the road' peddling their specialities on the broader social market"?
- How were such texts and narratives used? Who read them? Who wrote them or the pieces that were incorporated into them? What do they mean to later Indonesian authors and experts?

Scientific objectives
- To address the above topics with a view to understanding the function, role, purpose, present-day use of Indonesian encyclopaedias of traditional knowledge.
- To evaluate how such indigenous compilations are to be understood in conjunction with or in contrast to previous historiographies, which tend to favour European documents and data, or to overlook complex and lengthy indigenous documents.
- To discuss and plan for the necessity of identifying, collating, and preserving original materials and then producing text editions, interpretative analyses, and translations of all or part of this vast body of indigenous knowledge.
- Given the multidisciplinary expertise required to understand the material and the sheer bulk of the materials themselves, indubitably a multi-disciplinary team of experts would need to be convened. The workshop participants could discuss the possibilities of building such a team an how it might proceed in its work.

It is hoped that the workshop will be the first step towards an international collaborative research project on encyclopaedic works in Indonesian languages. This would encompass, first, a translation into one or more European languages of important representative selections of some the encyclopaedic texts, produced by a small team of experts (c. 5 people). This might lead in a later stage to a more ambitious attempt to publish a translation of the entire text of the largest of these works, the Serat Centhini. This would be essayed in conjunction with a current attempt to publish a translation from Javanese into Indonesian that has been started by the Indonesian government publishing house, Balai Pustaka, working with Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.

Initiators
Prof B. Arps (University of Leiden); Dr M. Bonneff (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris); Dr P. Pink (Malaiologischer Apparat, Orientalisches Seminar, University of Cologne) 





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