Juliette Sendra and Jean-Marc de Grave: Rituals, Cults, Deprivation and Delegation of Social Attributes. The Becoming of Javanese Ritual Initiation in the Grip of State Logic, 67–83

Abstract

Faced with the general reluctance to consider the political dimension of ritual, we propose here an unprecedented village ethnographic description of Javanese ritual initiation in hamlets of the Gunung Kidul region. This initiation actively participates in the exchanges that occur there: rituals, conflicts, link to non-humans, and exogenous relations. Following an apprenticeship by peregrination, it produces a circulation of men in relation to a principle of matrilocality, which in turn participates in an important ritual responsibility of women. This relationship of intergenerational, intergendered and inter-species complementarity produces a system that is ritually, politically and economically relatively autonomous. The development imposed by the Indonesian state then favors the emergence of collectives carrying exogenous Muslim and progressive ideologies that break this triple complementarity. Groups specializing in security, religious and economic matters thus come to make villagers dependent on them according to what we will call an inverted syndrome of delegation of ritual-political and economic attributes.

[Indonesia, Java, Islam, political dimension of ritual, ritual initiation, intergenerational complementarity, gender complementarity, tiger ancestor, ancestor worship, tourism]