Posted in Miscellaneous on 22 April 2009 by cherlyema schurman Butarbutar
well come to my website, I am thankfully to God for rearrange this website
These great collections of spiritual stories and parables. The stories and parables found here are intended to remind you of what’s important in your life. Some of them will make you laugh, some of them will make you cry. They are all intended to make you think.
Let’s learn a lesson in life each day that you live.
Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there, to serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson, or to help you figure out who you are or who you want to become.
You never know who these people may be, your neighbor, your coworker, a long lost friend, or a complete stranger. When you lock eyes with them, you know at that very moment they will affect your life in some profound way.
Sometimes things happen to you that may seem horrible, painful, and unfair at first, but in reflection you find that without overcoming those obstacles you would have never realized your potential, strength, willpower, or heart.
Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by chance or by means of good luck.
Illness, injury, love, lost moments of true greatness, and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul. Without these small tests, whatever they may be, life would be like a smoothly paved,straight, flat road to nowhere. It would be safe and comfortable, but dull and utterly pointless.
The people you meet who affect your life, and the success and downfalls you experience, help to create who you are and who you become.
Even the bad experiences can be learned from. In fact, they are probably the most poignant and important ones.
If someone hurts you, betrays you, or breaks your heart, forgive them, for they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious when you open your heart. If someone loves you, love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but because in a way, they are teaching you to love and how to open your heart and eyes to things.
Make every day count. Appreciate every moment and take from those moments everything that you possibly can for you may never be able to experience it again. Talk to people that you have never talked to before, and actually listen.
Let yourself fall in love, break free, and set your sights high. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself, for if you don’t believe in yourself, it will be hard for others to believe in you.
You can make of your life anything you wish. Create your own life and then go out and live it with absolutely no regrets.
Most importantly if you Love someone tell him or her, for you never know what tomorrow may have in store.
Learn a lesson in life each day that you live. That’s the story of Life.
Here some wisdom
“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”
“Let’s concentrate on a worthwhile goal…That no child be unwanted, that no person go unloved. And let’s not stop smiling at whomever we meet, especially when it’s hard to smile.” mother quote teresa
“It is easy to love those who are far away. It isn’t always easy to love those who are right next to us. It is easier to offer a dish of rice to satisfy the hunger of a poor person, than to fill up the loneliness and suffering of someone lacking love in our own family.”
“How can you love God whom you do not see, if you don’t love the neighbor whom you do see–the neighbor you know and live with every day?”
“The fruit of Silence is Prayer. The fruit of Prayer is Faith. The fruit of Faith is Love. The fruit of Love is Service. The fruit of Service is Peace.”
“The fullness of our heart is expressed in our eyes, in our touch, in what we write, in what we say, in the way we walk, the way we receive, the way we need. That is the fullness of our heart expressing itself in many different ways.”
“Spread love everywhere you go: First of all in your own house. Give love to your children, To your wife or husband, To your next door neighbor. Let no one come to you without leaving better or happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, and kindness in your warm greeting.”
Posted in Edelweis dengan kaitan (tags) Serpihan Edelweis on 18 Desember 2008 by cherlyema schurman Butarbutar
LISTEN CHILDREN
Listen children to a story
That was written long ago
About a kingdom on the mountain
And the valley far below
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stones
And the valley people swore
They’d have it for their very own
So go and lie to your neighbours
Go and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You’ll be justified in the end
Use some uneasy friendships
To help you on your way
And then wake up tomorrow
And do it all another day
All the people chose to gather
Pondered how to move the stones
All the people were united
Except a boy who worked alone
And an old man who had warned them
About the treasure and it’s curse
All the people laughed and pointed
No one thought they’d end up worse
So try and tell your neighbours
Go and meet a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You’ll be justified in the end
They may refuse to listen
So help them on their way
And then wake up tomorrow
And do it all another day
Almost all the valley people
Went in search of buried gold
They found the stones and then they moved them
And made their way down through the hole
They would soon emerge with treasure
As promised beneath the stones
Everyone was fit and healthy
No curse so they all went home
Too late to warn your neighbours
None will be your friend.
But you did it in the name of heaven
You’ll be justified in the end
They all chose not to listen
So you didn’t block their way
And you’ll wake up tomorrow
And do it all another day
We return here three months later
The populations down to two.
What has happened. Where are people
Nothing here seems rich and new
Everybody wanted treasure
It all sparked a civil war
The boy with no greed still was playing
With the man who warned before…
What anthropologists mean when they talk about culture: Conflicting discourses in development
by Leslie Butt – McGill University
Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the results of fieldwork conducted among a tribal community involved in a gender and development project in Irian Jaya, Indonesia. I focus on a particular incident: an Indonesian development worker, well-trained in basic anthropology, turns a story about a tribal woman’s childrearing practices into a derogatory and negative account in a way that fits his understanding of culture. His anthropological knowledge — of spirits, witchcraft, and indigenous beliefs — is built on a static definition of culture and denies the impact of his presence on community healing practices. This paper argues that a more complex understanding of “culture” is necessary. Culture is both process and product, and is shaped by ethnicity and power relations. Development workers who are familiar with a broad definition of culture may be able to provide more appropriate guidance when project recipients are of a different ethnic background.
Unreflective beliefs about people can constrain even the most successful culturally-sensitive health and development endeavours. Those development workers who use ” culture” as a means for health promotion generally do so because they believe that cultural knowledge provides them with a progressive, sensitive and empowering approach to improving health. It is undeniable that cultural beliefs and practice affect health outcomes. However, such an approach does not always garner the success it deserves because of a misplaced understanding of what is meant by culture. The case study about culture in development that I want to discuss revolves around Indonesian development workers from the island of Java who work with tribal peoples in a gender and health development project called CWHI (Children and Women’s Health Initiatives) in Irian Jaya, Indonesia’s easternmost province. CWHI works within national objectives to supplement government health services. Building on the primary health care foundation set in place by the government, CWHI is a flagship programme that has earned the highest praise from its sponsors for its work promoting crop diversification and preventive health measures. I focus on CWHI because it offers a case study of the role of cultural values in shaping the success of a project.
Rather than discuss the cultural values of the target group, an isolated indigenous population in Indonesia’s least developed province, I look at the way CWHI workers talk about culture. I will argue that CWHI workers have been trained to see culture from an orthodox perspective, that of culture as a set of shared meanings. This definition does not take into account that cultural beliefs also build ideologies by means of which certain political and economic realities are legitimated . Through a look at the culture of CWHI, I want to tie the local relations of the project to issues of ethnicity, power and nation-wide development objectives.
A broader contention this paper sets out is that development projects can be understood as extensions of prevailing cultural beliefs that dominate Indonesian politics. The small but significant number of studies on the role of the state in shaping local definitions of culture have unilaterally argued for persuasive, almost coercive molding of cultural boundaries and legitimate cultural expressions by a set of informal and formal national policies. However, this type of analysis has generally been limited to the arenas of cultural production most directly affected by static definitions of culture: textiles, dance, rituals. In this paper, I want to extend these convincing analyses to the arena of development activities, suggesting that a closed definition of cultural practice works as a powerful tool which denies normative ways of learning in favour of a static model that allows more aggressive (and consequently less successful) forms of intervention.
The Setting
Several hundred cultural groups and people from 1,200 different linguistic backgrounds make up the country of Indonesia. Although the population of 190 million is spread out over 12,000 islands that span some 5,000 kilometres, the national agenda for development is built on a comprehensive set of premises that is meant to apply to all its multicultural citizens. Whether the project recipients are tribal peoples just recently brought within the fold of government agencies or rice paddy farmers who have laboured for centuries under Dutch colonial regimes, development objectives are set at a national level and have involved both military and political goals and strategies.
Perhaps due to the broad political goals that founded development initiatives, rational economic growth has characterized Indonesian development policy. Within this economistic approach, control over population growth has been the cornerstone for successful development since the mid 1960s New Order regime consolidated its power: “the rate of population growth is a significant determinant of the success of a country’s economic development efforts” . Improvement in health constitutes an investment in human capital formation that, in the words of one government social law, will allow Indonesians to “become valuable human resources for national development and resilience” . Thus, many development goals center on reducing infant mortality rates, improving maternal health and implementing effective preventive health measures for women and children. The broad ideological position is that if Indonesian families have healthy children, it will lead them to want smaller families.
A wide range of programmes target the effective dissemination of information about birth control; the use of midwives; and pre- and post-natal services for mothers . In order to ensure “high quality” babies, interventions into the care of newborn children include promoting adequate maternal nutrition; nutritional food supplements for the baby; immunizations and breastfeeding. Health achievements under these programmes have been solid and impressive: infant mortality rates have dropped to 68/1,000 live births, and 70% of children are fully immunized. Providing these measures of preventive care in Irian Jaya is no easy feat.
The resource rich province is also perhaps the least developed corner of the world. CWHI serves approximately 200,000 indigenous people in the Jayawijaya district. The district encompasses a large mountain range spanning the length of the island, a place accessible only by airplane and home to treacherous mountains, mud, fog and rain. The sweet potato tuber is the main food source in the mountains, and wild game and domesticated pigs complete the diet. Basic services — schools and health clinics — are still unavailable in many remote regions. Infant mortality rate is exceptionally high: among the Dani tribe of the Baliem valley in the center of the mountains, for example, my figures tally 280 deaths/1,000 live births and can approach 400 deaths/1,000 live births in infertile and arduous regions . Malnutrition and stunting in toddlers is common in regions where food is scarce, and influenza, upper respiratory infection and dysentery are the main causes of death of children under 5. Not only are the highlands of Irian Jaya remote, health conditions are among the poorest.
Projects like CWHI are needed, particularly since density is low, and the distance between a health centre and the farthest point it serves is an average 32 kilometres away . Most tribal people in the highlands have begun to participate somewhat in the complexities of the developing world. Material objects such as clothing, aluminum siding, matches, books and world religions still delight most highlanders, not to mention VCRs, satellite dishes and Michael Jackson. In contrast, the development workers from Indonesia who run this project are all university-educated Javanese. To essentialize the cultural situation: those who provide the care have a rich legacy of artistic accomplishment that includes batik, dance, and pageantry; and traditions sustained by shadow puppetry, the Ramayana, and a legacy of valuing aesthetics and restraint. Malay culture also has a complex set of indigenous beliefs about healing built on oppositions of hot and cold. In contrast, the highlanders of Irian Jaya would still practice warfare if it were allowed; act out complex political relations between enemy tribal alliances; live in small huts built from forest products; subsist on a diet of sweet potatoes and pigs; and have a rich set of beliefs about ancestors that allows them to tie the illness of live persons to unhappy dead ancestors who are exacting revenge on the living. To borrow oft-applied phrases: “Javanese aesthetics and restraint” meets “stone-age warriors”.
It is just such essentializing that I want to bring to your attention. To reduce the Javanese to “aesthetics and restraint” is inappropriate, but to reduce the Dani and other Irianese highland groups to “stone age warriors” when it is those who are in a position of power — institutional, intellectual, developmental — who are making the reductions is to generate a whole set of discourses in development about target populations that I consider problematic.
A Case Study: Educating women about infant health
Let me provide you with an example which illustrates my argument that essentializing cultural traits makes for ineffective development projects. Neli is a new mother from the Dani tribe who has a 4 week-old child. Neli wants to be “modern” and to that end she has learned a great deal about contemporary ideas of child care through CWHI project and other small religious NGOs. CWHI employees are Malay/Javanese in origin and their teachings syncretize modern medicine with traditional beliefs. One of the many Javanese/Malay beliefs Neli has absorbed is that babies must be kept warm at all times in order to stimulate growth.
It is proper, she was told, to bathe your child and to place the child in the direct sunlight for an hour in the early morning (before 9 A.M.) to counteract the cooling effects of the bath and to keep your child warm. It is also important to cover the child with Malay oils to keep the skin moist and to protect the body from cold.
These suggestions directly contradict Dani beliefs. The Dani believe that an infant up to the age of about three months should be kept as quiet as possible, in a cool and dark netbag slung over the mother’s back or hung on a hook inside a cookhouse, during the hot daytime hours. Babies should be bathed in a safe space where malevolent dead ancestors cannot affect the health of the child. These measures are extremely effective from a health point of view: the Dani often give birth to small babies – just over 2.5 kg [5.5 lbs] – but the growth rate during those months where the child is kept isolated in net bags is phenomenal: a child easily adds 1 kg [2.2 lbs] a month during that time, so that a 3 month old baby weighs 6 kilos [12.5 lbs], more than doubling his/her birth weight by the time the child is three months old.
Neli faced a conundrum every time she wanted to bathe her child. Putting a child in the sun will kill it, tradition says, but local health “experts” tell her that putting the child in the sun will help the child grow big and strong. Neli’s husband did not want Neli to expose the baby to the sun because of the dangerous diseases that can come from “overheating” or from entry of the body by ancestor spirits. He therefore told her not to do it at all. This is how Neli dealt with the problem. As learned, she bathed her child every day. She also covered his body with generous amounts of Malay oil, purchased at great expense. However, she increasingly put the water on to boil later and later in the morning, so that when the time came to bathe the child it was closer to noon when the sun, by 11 A.M., was at its hottest. “Will you put the child out to dry in the sun today?” I asked Neli. “Oh no,” she replied, “it is far too hot outside now to do that.”
In effect, Neli made a choice. She kept what she liked from what she had learned — bathing and slathering the baby with oil — and rejected what she didn’t like or what didn’t fit in with what she believed. She also negotiated her choice extremely tactfully, in a way that was designed neither to offend, nor to deny the value of what she had been told was the best thing for her child. It is good to put the child in the sun, she is certain, she just isn’t able to carry out that task.
I liked this story and told it to CWHI workers. This is how the manager retold it to an audience of Indonesian bureaucrats at a health policy meeting several days later: “A woman had heard from us that it was important to give your baby a bath and dry it in the sun. One woman listened to what she had learned but she didn’t listen well and so put her baby in the sun to dry for an hour at 12 noon! We have to be careful about what we teach because they will interpret it wrong. They are very simple people; they have very little intelligence. They need to be told what to do.”
Although CWHI workers have been well-educated about Dani beliefs about illness such as the power of ancestor spirits they do not apply their knowledge to this situation. As one worker named Susana who is known as intelligent and sensitive said to me: “I had no idea that the Dani actually had any ideas about their bodies, or how babies are born, or that they might have ideas about how to keep a baby healthy. I thought the Dani had empty bodies, no content.” While this worker knew that many Dani link sickness to spirit ancestors, she tended to keep this knowledge separate from Neli’s everyday pragmatism. In other words, the health worker compartmentalized beliefs about healing so that it was separate from actual life experiences. She saw culture as static.
Discussion
Cultural knowledge about sickness can be thought of as static simply because it tends to be described as such. In the case of “stone age warriors” like the Dani, ethnomedical practices can be seen as contained by the “pre-cultural” lifestyle they are seen to lead. To see culture as merely a “set of shared meanings” as I argue CWHI employees and other development workers do, makes it difficult to do good development work. It prevents understanding of differences within a group, and obscures the reality that cultural beliefs adapt, grow and change. Abu-Lughod argues that static misleads: “it makes what is inside the external boundary set up by homogenization seem essential and fixed…populated by generic cultural beings who do this and that or believe such-and-such” .
From this vantage point, Neli cannot possibly be intelligent for a static view of culture dictates that she live inside a reactive pre-thinking cultural stage of the “stone age primitive.” I make this point forcefully for I believe that this type of essentialism is used all the time. There is a lack of awareness of the differences between thinking something and actually doing it; and between ideal models of behaviour and everyday actions. And yet, on the basis of my story, who would deny that Neli is intelligent, and that she integrates new knowledge into existing knowledge banks, and that this new knowledge comes from external sources and shapes and is shaped by what she already knew? Why is it all right to downplay the interlocking nature of human interaction when talking about culture? One possible answer to this question is that there is an ideology in place that makes Dani culture appear “natural.” This idea of a “natural” society that has a closed and static belief system, has become a normal way of thinking in Indonesia.
This way of thinking has concrete material practice. Under government influences too complex to mention right here, “culture” in Indonesia is coming to mean the ritualized, public, decorative celebrations that visually distinguish ethnic groups within Indonesia from each other, the “apolitical features of regional identity such as local costumes, dances, handicrafts, and architecture. The state motto of “Unity in Diversity” [Bhinneka Tunggal Ika] spells the message out clearly: to foster and enhance aspects of diversity that reflect custom and tradition, set apart from daily life, and that characterize a group as different from its neighbour, but that at the same time emphasize the unity of the nation because no traditions have preeminence over any other. The Javanese have wayang puppets and palace courtesans; the Dani may have their public displays of artificial warring dances and pig chases, if they so desire, as long as it falls within the normative boundaries of “culture.” “Culture” is “natural,” and it distinguishes ethnic groups from one another.
This interpretation of culture equates tribal with primitive. For example, Irianese, ever since their incorporation into Indonesia in1969, have been denigrated as “stupid” (Papua bodoh) and “backwards” (terbelakang). Aspects of the primitive which Irianese are said to embody are then easily reified. For example, the Indonesian district head proposes that his development goals are culturally sensitive because they include certain “positive” features of indigenous culture such as “environmentalism” and “cooperation” . These qualities are simply reifications of an idea of the indigenous rather than abstractions derived from local practice, particularly if one notes that the Dani and other highland groups are far more famous in the anthropological record for their warring tendencies and for their political competitiveness than they are for any innate spirit of cooperation .
In another example, a national newspaper uses the term “primordialism” to describe any cultural group such as the Dani that places its own local interests above state policies . The primitive Irianese such as the Dani can easily be linked to non-compliance with Indonesian values; this point is relentlessly driven home throughout the country to encourage all ethnic groups to conform to state goals which, as I suggested earlier in this paper, are intricately linked to development.
Conclusion
Comments on the nature of social relations within this development project can lead us to examine the issues in two different ways. The first is pragmatic. CWHI’s flagship status and innovative goals are brought down to earth by inadequate training in the realities of how people think. Indigenous beliefs about witchcraft and ancestor spirits are about what people think. It is ironic that money and time are willingly spent to train CWHI staff to learn how Irianese women garden and why they plant tubers the way they do, and so little energy devoted to learning how beliefs about disease causation are mediated through the influx of new ideas. There is a need to link the essential prerequisistes of good development work –”ethical sensitivity and considerable self-reflection” — to ideas about culture. Ethical sensitivity might productively include an awareness of contemporary debates about development as signifying growth; where people and their communities act as subjects, not acted on as objects; where change includes changes in culture and beliefs; and where “making culture” happens even in the midst of a large development project.
The second analytic direction worth pursuing is the link between CWHI workers’ beliefs and the institution within which they operate. It is beyond the scope of this presentation to discuss what advantages the Indonesian state gains by promoting a reductionist model of culture as dance and dress, or whether the CWHI project leader was speaking conformist language or actually believed in what he was saying when he denigrated Neli’s actions. I argue that this particular project is so disciplined from the outside in terms of national ideological goals that the workers in CWHI are given considerable latitude to execute mandates or to think freely because their actions will have little real impact on the success of the project.
If a static model of culture is in place, as is the case in Indonesia, executing development goals becomes unproblematic, and relations of power and of ethnicity can be acted out without concern. In the case study, the project workers embody the power of the nation. If power were not so thoroughly in the hands of Indonesians, and if ethnic relations were more subtle and complex, as they are in many other parts of Indonesia, the re-making of Neli’s story could be seen as a slip of the tongue. Here, I argue, it is simply a thoughtless act, but a telling one for what it shows us about how power and ethnic bias are given free rein in an unviable but ever-popular idea of what it is that makes up culture.
Footnotes
CWHI is a pseudonym.
Lindenbaum, S. & Lock, M. “Preface” in Lindenbaum, S. & Lock, M. (eds.) , Power and Practice 1993 Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pemberton, J. On the Subject of “Java” 1994 Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Su, Tsing, A. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen 1993 Princeton: Princeton University Press; Spyer, P. “Diversity with a Difference: Adat and the New Order in Aru, Eastern Indonesia” Cultural Anthropology 1996 11(1):25-50.
Tirtosudarmo, Transmigration policy and national development plans in Indonesia 1969-1988 1990 National Centre for development Studies, Australian National University, Working paper no 90/10;
ibid, page 2
Law of the Republic of Indonesia concerning Population Development and the Development of Happy and Prosperous Families 1992 Jakarta: State Ministry for Population/National Family Planning Coordination Board
World Bank, Indonesia: Health Planning and Budgeting 1990 Geneva:World Bank; Government of Indonesia/UNICEF, Situation Analysis of Children and Women in Indonesia 1988 Jakarta, Indonesia.
Smith, I. “The Indonesian Family Planning Programme: A Success Story for Women?” Development and Change 1991 22:781-205.
Yahya, S. & Roesin, R. “Indonesia: Implementation of the Health-for-all Strategy” in Tanimo, E. & Creese, A. Achieving Health for All: Midway Reports of Country Experiences 1990 Geneva: World Health Organization.
Hill, H. (ed.) Unity and Diversity 1991 Singapore: Oxford University Press. Government statistics for the province are much lower: 110/1,000 live births in the most recent census. See Hill, H. Unity and Diversity 1991:40-41.
Manning, C. & Rumbiak, M. “Irian Jaya: Economic Change, Migrants, and Indigenous Welfare” in Hill, H. (ed.) Unity and Diversity: Regional Economic Development in Indonesia since 1970 1991 Singapore: Oxford University Press.
Rosaldo, R. Culture and Truth 1989 Boston: Beacon Press.
Abu-Lughod, L. Writing Women’s Worlds 1993 Berkeley: University of California Press, page 9.
Nazarea-Sandoval, V. Local Knowledge and Agricultural Decision- Making in the Philippines 1995
I use A. Young’s comments on ideologies of institutions. Young argues that “in some institutions, power holders have effective ways of controlling people through surveillance, coercion and rewards, and ideologies are not needed to convince people to behave correctly” (Young, A. “A Description of how Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder [Posttraumatic Stress Disorder]” in Lindenbaum, S. & Lock, M. (eds.) , Power and Practice 1993 Berkeley: University of California Press, page 117). Ideology here is already defined and maintained by government policy, to which NGO’s such as WATCH are closely identified. Government controls the kind and quality of information that is disseminated; thus it is arguable that NGOs in Indonesia do not need to perpetrate ideology (in fact in most instances it is expressly forbidden and NGOs must be based on Pancasila, the government’s formal development policy); they have been presented with one as the price for their institutional presence in the country.
Hall, S. “The Toad in the Garden:Thatcherism among the Theorists” in
Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture 1988 Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Aragon, L. “Multiculturalism: Some Lessons from Indonesia” Cultural
Survival Quarterly 1994 3:74;Pemberton, J. On the Subject of Java 1995
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Spyer, P. “Diversity with a Difference: Adat and the New Order in Aru, Eastern Indonesia” Cultural Anthropology 1996 11(1):25-50.
“The concept of development in Jayawijaya is a good example for Irian Jaya” Suara Pembaruan May 1, 1996.
For example, see Heider,K. Peaceful Warriors 1989 2nd edition, New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston; Koch, K.F. War and Peace in Jalemo 1974
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Shankman, P. “Culture contact, cultural ecology and Dani warfare” Man n.s. 1991 26:299-321. “Tribalism” has been used in other development contexts, with the same intent. See Gietzelt “The Indonesianization of West Papua” Oceania 1989 59:201-221.
Jakarta Post, July 4 1995.
Lindenbaum, S. & Lock, M. “Preface” in Lindenbaum, S. & Lock, M. (eds.) , Power and Practice 1993 Berkeley: University of California Press.
I am indebted here to definitions of ideology proposed by A. Young 1993, and to analysis of levels of control exercised in development agencies proposed in early works of A. Hirschmann.
Poof these relations on the life of the very young.
The Chapterslitics and Power
Political worlds are not solely those of the state and of institutions but are also of the everyday transaction, the family and the home. Politics–the stability, conformity, opposition, strength and fragility of the dominant social order and value system that characterizes it–pervades the everyday (Dirks et al. 1994:4; Bourdieu 1977). Following the key insights of Foucault and feminist scholars, theorists have recognized that “all the relations of everyday life bear a certain stamp of power” (Dirks et al. 1994:4). Being a parent, child, woman, or man involves negotiating questions of “power, authority, and the control of the definitions of reality” (ibid: 4). This day-to-day struggle pervades the life of the young. Cross-culturally, in a seemingly universal fashion, infants are “brought up” by other persons in a social world within which they learn to operate (LeVine et al. 1994; Whiting and Edwards 1988). Thus, infants and adults equally live in political worlds, and thus politics are manifest in every step of the process of conceiving, birthing, and raising a child.
When a woman tucks her child away in a netbag and covers her up with a set of a dozen bags to block out light and noise, how do these seemingly apolitical events shed light on political system? Child care, at first glance, appears to fall outside the realm of politics. Bourdieu partially dissolves this distinction by charting the process by which disjunctures and inequalities in the social order are made natural, where coercion is unseen, and seemingly unnecessary in the taken-for-granted traditions employed to raise a child. Bourdieu terms this process habitus: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1990:53). These acquired dispositions are learned, transmitted, and reinforced through childrearing, education, and other forms of practice that operate at a level of apparent naturalness. For example, it is an unquestioned custom for Dani women to stay in the hut where the infant was born for the first week or so after birth. One root of that custom lies in fears that post-partum vaginal bleeding will pollute pathways and gardens. Another is the chance that ancestor spirits or malevolent wood spirits will attack and enter the body of the baby. Thus the mother loads down her head with a dozen bags, saying this is to “keep out the sun,” and she hides her child from light to keep out the spirits also. These values are not neutral. On the contrary, they are embodiments of gender relations and political hierarchies between humans and ancestors among others and are transmitted to succeeding generations in a myriad of ways.
Bourdieu tags embodiment as key to how acquired dispositions of inequality are transmitted to the younger generation:
Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking …Treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic form, the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. (Bourdieu 1977:93-94)
Bourdieu pinpoints formal and informal education and the acquisition of work and language skills to children from the age of five on as key moments in cultural learning. While data from the Baliem valley support the broad outlines of Bourdieu’s argument, I dispute two points: first, that the rote, durable techniques of learning become important only after the approximate age of five (Bourdieu 1977). On the contrary, I show that children under the age of two in the Baliem valley can distinguish between people on the basis of gender, and can address them using gendered speech, lauk to salute women and nayak for men10. A verbal 18-month old baby knows well the bodily adornment, physical bearing, verbal manners, and objects that distinguish men from women, and he reacts to them accordingly in both physical actions and verbal communication. Thus, the types of
10Dani men, in particular, were insistent that my child Malcolm be able to use the right word when addressing a man or a woman. Malcolm was able to say a much-modified “Lauk,” and he used it to greet every indigenous person we met from the age of 14 months onwards. Men often grew agitated and pointed to their chests and said “Nayak” every time Malcolm got it wrong.
dominance written into body language have found their way into infant interaction; Bourdieu may have limited his analysis by considering relations of dominance as relevant only when the child attains some linguistic mastery.
The second concern with Bourdieu’s formulation lies in the notion that infancy is not of theoretical interest because it is merely a site wherein habitus is reproduced unproblematically. While this might be the case in some cultural settings, women in the Baliem valley, who average only 1.5 live children per woman and who traditionally wait up to six years between births, experience birth and the early life of their child as a crucial time of concern for the outcome of childbirth. Thus childrearing may be mundane, routine, and taken-for-granted, but it is also acutely scrutinized and analyzed because the outcome will have a profound impact on social relations. In other words, infants are sites of prolonged and powerful political struggles, couched in the quiet, patterned nurturing that babies demand.
The issue becomes not whether or not relations of power are part of childrearing but to what extent, if at all, power is separable from the social space of childrearing. Foucault employed the term power to mean a “relation of force” that reproduces itself through seemingly seamless control. Exploring the breadth of power was a key part of Foucault’s explorations of how subjects are constituted. Power is not a thing, an abstract mallet that pounds people into shape; on the contrary, it is everywhere, “not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault 1978:93).
A number of historians and philosophers have used Foucault’s definition of power to explain how institutions are made up of and reinforced through the use of power as a coercive tool or a “strategic relation” with which to constrain and control people, notably through control of their bodies (Feldman 1991; Stoler 1995; Armstrong 1983). Foucault and followers show how discourses, seemingly natural or normal, hold structures of thought and practice (epistemes) over seemingly free and autonomous individuals. Foucault breaks with analysts who vest power only in the hands of the state and argues
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instead for starting analysis with the infinitesimal mechanisms of power so as to see how these powers have been “invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc. by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination” (Foucault 1980:99).
In a challenging application of Foucault’s ideas to New Guinea pre-contact societies, Knauft (1996, 1994) shows that indeed “status divisions could be totalizing, dominating and internalized down to the deepest core, and they could be inscribed in bodies in a profound and sometimes pernicious way” (Knauft 1996:159). Knauft (1994) and Keesing (1982) both show that power and surveillance often operate through the privileged knowledge of senior men. What is most intriguing about these particular claims to the importance of elders and ancestors, however, is that in highland Melanesia the status of these men and their links to ghosts depend in part on their ability to control the outcome of reproduction. Among the classless Etoro for example, Kelly (1993) argues that reproduction is the focus of male political leaders and the cosmologies containing moral evaluations that are produced and maintained by them11. These cosmologies have local merit only inasmuch as they claim to sustain life: “the means and relations of the production and allocation of prestige and moral superiority are…linked to the perpetuation of life across generations” (Kelly 1993:11).
Those with power in highland Melanesia look to infants to validate their claims. They do so, I argue, at least in part because local patterns of morbidity and mortality allow an enormous degree of political power to anyone who claims to control reproduction outcomes. Thus in this dissertation I argue that power is appropriated mostly by men and feeds on the vitally important cycle of human reproduction:
The Etoro cosmological system that comprehends reproduction, the spiritual constitution of persons, and life-cycle transformations, is the central locus for the
11In contrast, class-based societies appear to require a more multi-stranded analysis. See Rousseau (1991) for analysis of residence patterns, relations of production, sexual differentiation and political status among stratified communities in Central Borneo (see also Peletz 1995 for summary).
production of inequality because it constitutes the source of morally evaluated social differentiation. (Kelly 1993:511-512)
Drawing from Kelly, I argue that infants among the Dani play a key role in constructing and validating inequalities because infants are the outcome of reproduction; they are a space where personhood is constituted; and they are a key moment in life cycle transformations. Men and women position themselves differently with regard to infants, however, and a central theme of this dissertation is gender inequality and its intersection between the infant body, cultural constructions of gender, and relations of power. I thus address issues of marriage relations, relations of production, and patterns of gender inequality as complements to the discussion of cosmologies.
In the Baliem valley, the local world of face-to-face interaction changes every day and increasingly reflects the symbols and ideologies of the Indonesian nation-state.12 I thus complement the study of the microcontexts of everyday relations with a scrutiny of prominent attempts by the nation-state to intervene in family organization, to alter infant health outcomes, and to improve infant “quality” (Government of Indonesia 1992). It is becoming a truism to acknowledge that states intervene in reproduction (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995; Stephens 1995), but the impact of efforts to manipulate indigenous families and their reproductive outcomes has not been well-documented in Indonesia. This dissertation explores the stark contrasts between national images of a plump, prospering “normal” infant as the eager recipient of pembangunan or government sanctioned economic development and indigenous representations and imaginings of the child. Used in media to promote family planning and the two-child family, the infant as youngest member of the family connotes an innocence and a pliability that the nation-state manipulates to maximize control over the quality of the next generation: “the regulation
12I use the term nation-state rather than state because of the close association in Indonesia between state operations and boundaries of the nation; political society is too often indistinguishable from civil society and coercive relations pervade both realms (Van Langenberg 1991). Hegemonic relations, values, and practices are protected by an armour of coercion that spans the length of the country and is inseparable from the constitution and maintenance of the nation.
of procreation through state activity asserts control over not only the definition of social being, but also the physical preconditions of social being” (Foster cited in Stephens 1995:29). By denying the political status of the infant and by enhancing the child’s physiological passivity and dependence, the Indonesian nation-state asserts a right to determine under what conditions a child can be born.
Health care policies and practice can be instrumental in efforts to create situations of conformity. One strategy employed in Indonesia is the use of what I term the “normal” infant in health models, a Euroamerican construct with roots in colonial practice and biomedical knowledge that legitimate interventions to improve infant health in order to bring them up to so-called normal standards. Another strategy is the manipulation of statistics to demonstrate that indigenous people are in greater need of intervention. Another is to target family participation in health care through services aimed at infants. I explore the outcomes of these fabrications about the infant and her family, and suggest links between health care and state strategies to bring indigenous people into the realm of the national culture of the country.
The Dani live on the margins of the Indonesian nation-state; they are designated suku terasing, or most isolated tribal peoples. The Dani neither receive the full force of nation-state attempts to constitute citizens out of tribal peoples nor fall out of the realm of intervention altogether. Perhaps because of Dani reticence to participate in the nation-state and perhaps because of the nation-state’s reticence to invest in the Dani, relations between the state and the Dani exist at a stage where distinctions are not seamless and where Dani elders and Dani youth can articulate their history in terms of impacts and can assess when and in what ways they see changes altering their lives. As Knauft argues, these forms of change “have been as cultural and epistemic as they have been political and economic” (Knauft 1996:160), and he proposes it is time to analyze how intrusions from the outside are “actively engaged by indigenous powers that have their own internal legacies of bodily and institutional inscription” within (Knauft 1996: 163; see also Dirks
et al. 1994). This dissertation has the goal to explore the impact of these relations on the life of the very young.
Posted in Edelweis on 4 Mei 2005 by cherlyema schurman Butarbutar
When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. This is especially true in colleges and universities. We are turning out, as if through a mould, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.
Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success. The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere, the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort – this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent un- derstanding of life. With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion. This fear of life, this fear of struggle and of new experience, kills in us the spirit of adventure; our whole upbringing and education have made us afraid to be different from our neighbour, afraid to think contrary to the established pattern of society, falsely respectful of authority and tradition.
Fortunately, there are a few who are in earnest, who are willing to examine our human problems without the prejudice of the right or of the left; but in the vast majority of us, there is no real spirit of discontent, of revolt. When we yield uncomprehendingly to environment, any spirit of revolt that we may have had dies down, and our responsibilities soon put an end to it.
Revolt is of two kinds: there is violent revolt, which is mere reaction, without understanding, against the existing order; and there is the deep psychological revolt of intelligence. There are many who revolt against the established orthodoxies only to fall into new orthodoxies, further illusions and concealed self-indulgences. What generally happens is that we break away from one group or set of ideals and join another group, take up other ideals, thus creating a new pattern of thought against which we will again have to revolt. Reaction only breeds opposition, and reform needs further reform.
But there is an intelligent revolt which is not reaction, and which comes with self-knowledge through the awareness of one’s own thought and feeling. It is only when we face experience as it comes and do not avoid disturbance that we keep intelligence highly awakened; and intelligence highly awakened is intuition, which is the only true guide in life.
Now, what is the significance of life? What are we living and struggling for? If we are being educated merely to achieve distinction, to get a better job, to be more efficient, to have wider domination over others, then our lives will be shallow and empty. If we are being educated only to be scientists, to be scholars wedded to books, or specialists addicted to knowledge, then we shall be contributing to the destruction and misery of the world.
Though there is a higher and wider significance to life, of what value is our education if we never discover it? We may be highly educated, but if we are without deep integration of thought and feeling, our lives are incomplete, contradictory and torn with many fears; and as long as education does not cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little significance.
In our present civilization we have divided life into so many departments that education has very little meaning, except in learning a particular technique or profession. Instead of awakening the integrated intelligence of the individual, education is encouraging him to conform to a pattern and so is hindering his comprehension of himself as a total process. To attempt to solve the many problems of existence at their respective levels, separated as they are into various categories, indicates an utter lack of comprehension.
The individual is made up of different entities, but to emphasize the differences and to encourage the development of a definite type leads to many complexities and contradictions. Education should bring about the integration of these separate entities – for without integration, life becomes a series of conflicts and sorrows. Of what value is it to be trained as lawyers if we perpetuate litigation? Of what value is knowledge if we continue in our confusion? What significance has technical and industrial capacity if we use it to destroy one another? What is the point of our existence if it leads to violence and utter misery? Though we may have money or are capable of earning it, though we have our pleasures and our organized religions, we are in endless conflict.
We must distinguish between the personal and the individual. The personal is the accidental; and by the accidental I mean the circumstances of birth, the environment in which we happen to have been brought up, with its nationalism, superstitions, class distinctions and prejudices. The personal or accidental is but momentary, though that moment may last a lifetime; and as the present system of education is based on the personal, the accidental, the momentary, it leads to perversion of thought and the inculcation of self-defensive fears.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security, and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear. Such a training must inevitably bring confusion and misery to ourselves and to the world, for it creates in each individual those psychological barriers which separate and hold him apart from others.
Education is not merely a matter of training the mind. Training makes for efficiency, but it does not bring about completeness. A mind that has merely been trained is the continuation of the past, and such a mind can never discover the new. That is why, to find out what is right education, we will have to inquire into the whole significance of living.
To most of us, the meaning of life as a whole is not of primary importance, and our education emphasizes secondary values, merely making us proficient in some branch of knowledge. Though knowledge and efficiency are necessary, to lay chief emphasis on them only leads to conflict and confusion.
There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness. Is this not what is actually taking place all over the world? Our present education is geared to industrialization and war, its principal aim being to develop efficiency; and we are caught in this machine of ruthless competition and mutual destruction. If education leads to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, has it not utterly failed?
To bring about right education, we must obviously un- derstand the meaning of life as a whole, and for that we have to be able to think, not consistently, but directly and truly. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. We cannot understand existence abstractly or theoretically. To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.
Education is not merely acquiring knowledge, gathering and correlating facts; it is to see the significance of life as a whole. But the whole cannot be approached through the part – which is what governments, organized religions and authoritarian parties are attempting to do.
The function of education is to create human beings who are integrated and therefore intelligent. We may take degrees and be mechanically efficient without being intelligent. Intelligence is not mere information; it is not derived from books, nor does it consist of clever self-defensive responses and aggressive assertions. One who has not studied may be more intelligent than the learned. We have made examinations and degrees the criterion of intelligence and have developed cunning minds that avoid vital human issues. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
Education should help us to discover lasting values so that we do not merely cling to formulas or repeat slogans; it should help us to break down our national and social barriers, instead of emphasizing them, for they breed antagonism between man and man. Unfortunately, the present system of education is making us subservient, mechanical and deeply thoughtless; though it awakens us intellectually, inwardly it leaves us incomplete, stultified and uncreative.
Without an integrated understanding of life, our individual and collective problems will only deepen and extend. The purpose of education is not to produce mere scholars, technicians and job hunters, but integrated men and women who are free of fear; for only between such human beings can there be enduring peace.
It is in the understanding of ourselves that fear comes to an end. If the individual is to grapple with life from moment to moment, if he is to face its intricacies, its miseries and sudden demands, he must be infinitely pliable and therefore free of theories and particular patterns of thought.
Education should not encourage the individual to conform to society or to be negatively harmonious with it, but help him to discover the true values which come with unbiased investigation and self-awareness. When there is no self-knowledge, self-expression becomes self-assertion, with all its aggressive and ambitious conflicts. Education should awaken the capacity to be self-aware and not merely indulge in gratifying self-expression.
What is the good of learning if in the process of living we are destroying ourselves? As we are having a series of devastating wars, one right after another, there is obviously something radically wrong with the way we bring up our children. I think most of us are aware of this, but we do not know how to deal with it.
Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves. The individual is of first importance, not the system; and as long as the individual does not understand the total process of himself, no system, whether of the left or of the right, can bring order and peace to the world.
