A month can either be a long time or a short one, depending on how one spends it. I spent the past month doing fieldwork and research across Central Java, skirting between the grand old cities of Jogjakarta and Surakarta. Four weeks of madrasah-hopping does wear one out in the end, even if the highlights included meeting and interviewing such prominent (some might even say notorious) religious figureheads like Ustaz Abu Bakar Bashir and Ustaz Ja’far Umar Thalib.
Being an ardent fieldworker myself, there is nothing I relish more than going back to the field to get firsthand information for my research work back in Berlin. Nothing excites like movement; the gruelling labour of seeking knowledge wherever one can find it entails the sacrifice of the ordinary and mundane. Sleeping in cheap hotels, driving up and down country roads on a motorbike, negotiating all the time with touts and hagglers, typing down the interview at the first internet cafe one finds by the street, even if it means that it happens to be a den of rats and rent-boys.
But what differentiates fieldwork in Indonesia from any other country in the world is the fact that this is the land I consider my real, true home. It’s not just the familiarity of voices, language, manners and customs that quickly dispel any notion of difference. It is some innate, primordial sensibility that defeats the Cartesian logic I had digested along the road to being a social scientist. The rationalist in me says again and again that I am poised on the brink of a dangerous reductivist nostalgia, replete with ham-fisted platitudes and counterfeit nuggets of essentialism. I should not feel this way towards a place that is in fact part of my work. Yet I do. Why?
“You cannot deny your past, Kangmas Farish”, my friend Toha reminded me. “You may be Indo, you may be Peranakan, you may even be a Malaysian citizen; but you are deep down Jawi — Javanese — like us and we can all see that. This place, this land, this is your real home. There is no escaping your fate”.
Fate plays tricks on one, and the happy — or sometimes unhappy — circumstances of geography decide where we belong. Since my childhood I have known of my Javanese-Dutch origins, and torn between two continents and two poles, I have drifted back and forth endlessly. Yet the one thing about being a hybrid of mixed origins is that it prevents the narrowing of identity; and rather opens up the way for new modes of being and existence. I, like many people of Southeast Asia, happen to be the product of generations of inter-racial marriages that began at a time when the concepts of ‘Race’ and ‘nationhood’ were still novel ideas in their infancy.
Southeast Asia is a region with mixed, intertwined and overlapping memories and histories that cannot be denied. Prior to the advent of colonialism this was a part of the world where globalisation was doing its work in earnest, in terms of the transfer of peoples, culture, ideas and capital. This was the Asia prior to the age of Europe, as celebrated by scholars like Chauduri et al.
For Southeast Asia to develop into anything remotely resembling the European Union, a new understanding and internalisation of a sense of shared histories, shared identities and a shared future must emerge from the peoples of the region. Yet today how many Indonesians know anything much about the history of Malaysia, their closest neighbour with whom they share a common border (in Kalimantan)? And the same question can be asked of Malaysians who know just as little about Indonesia next door.
This is why academic research into the common histories of regions like Southeast, South and Central Asia is so important. If Europeans today feel that they belong to a common European continent, it is thanks in part to five decades of educational emphasis on a shared history. ASEAN will never be able to reach the standing of the EU unless and until its citizens think of themselves not only as Indonesians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Filipinos and Thais, but also as ASEAN citizens, emerging from a region with shared history.
So perhaps I am not guilty of essentialist romanticism after all. Hybridity does have its virtues, at least in the sense that it prevents the foreclosure of identity. To that future generation of ASEAN citizens, I wish them well and can only hope that they will be able to live with difference and pluralism as something natural and part of who and what they are.
Prof Farish A Noor is currently visiting professor at UIN Sunan Kalijaga, Jogjakarta and is one of the founders of the www.othermalaysia.org website