Abstract
This introductory chapter elucidates the dramatic changes Salatiga has undergone during its growth from a Dutch settlement, to a modernized “Christian” Javanese city, to its current situation as a complex multi-religious zone characterized by Islamic and Pentecostal revivals at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Aligned closely with this background, this chapter lays out the research methods and theoretical perspectives by starting with an ethnographic puzzle—the prominence of women and minorities in a Muslim-majority neighborhood community—and sets the stage for the ways in which Islamic pieties and Christian identities are contingent and negotiated through inter-religious imaginations and changing gender roles.
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- 1.
More than 21% of the population here profess to Christianity, including Protestantism and Catholicism. For details and sources of the statistics, see the following text.
- 2.
Simply put, “fatwa” means legal opinion and advice from qualified religious scholars of Islam, although its definition and effects remain debated. See M. B. Hooker, Indonesian Islam: Social Change through Contemporary Fatawa (Hooker 2003, 240).
- 3.
On the other side of Indonesia, in Papua province, the Tolikara incident took place in July 2015, in which persecution, committed by the predominantly Christian population within the region, occurred against the Muslim minority.
- 4.
See the Jakarta Post, 2001, September 26, by Slamet Susanto and Bambang Muryanto. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/09/26/suicide-bomber-terrors-church.html. Retrieved on January 5, 2016.
- 5.
In the most general sense, I am asking this question in relation to the question raised by anthropologist Ulf Hannerz over two decades ago: “how do meanings differentially distributed among people relate to one another?” (1992, 9) The theoretical assumption here is that all culture is internally diverse and meanings are always unevenly distributed. My task in this book is to understand the ways in which meanings derived from different religious movements may influence each other.
- 6.
The term “Salafist” is used locally in Salatiga in the twenty-first century to refer to those newly emerging religious puritan Muslim groups who claim to observe more authentic forms of Islam, as opposed to other mainstream Muslim groups. It should not be confused with the late eighteenth-century Salafi-Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, or the partially Salafism-inspired early twentieth-century Islamic modernism in Indonesia.
- 7.
Field notes, February 8, 2010.
- 8.
I define subjectivity loosely as a mode of linkages between self-identity, knowledge, and embodiment that processes the limits and resources of how one feels, (re)acts, thinks, means, and so forth, of themselves in relation to the socially related others and the world. It is not as encompassing as Bourdieu’s outline of practice would allow (Bourdieu 1977), or as unchangeable as Douglas’ primary experience would envisage (Douglas 1973). Nevertheless, I owe a great deal to Douglas’ insights into the human body as inscribing social boundaries, and Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the enduring inclinations and sensibilities, or habitus. I hence see subjectivity as an unfinished, indeterminate project (Biehl et al. 2007) that are based on long-established possibilities, which are themselves subject to unintended change.
- 9.
More research on the probability of statistical anomaly is needed. The agencies that conducted the surveys in 2010 and in 2000 are different. The former is the Regional Body for Planning and Development in Salatiga, and the latter is the provincial government. Unfortunately, the former’s 2000 census and latter’s 2010 census are not available. The national statistics on the Christian population in Indonesia indicate that, for the first time since the 1960s, the Christian percentage of the population has declined, albeit by only a small amount. If the statistics are correct, then the percentage of Christians in Salatiga dropped slightly.
- 10.
The decline cannot be seen as an absolute trend, since between 2001 and 2005 there was a 2% increase in the share of the Protestant population and 2% decrease in that of the Muslim population. More recently, assuming the statistical data are not problematic, the trend has been reversed by a minor increase in the Muslim population and a decrease in the Protestant population.
- 11.
Importantly, these negotiations are not as easily malleable as de Certeau would wish. Indeed, although the city in this book is practiced in its being and practiced in its shifting, these practices are grounded upon or limited by long-term tendencies of cultural dispositions and social sensibilities contested in specific fields.
- 12.
To keep the neighborhoods anonymous, I will not specify the actual number of households in Sinaran and Graha. The Sinaran neighborhood and Graha neighborhood are based on their administrative rukun warga. Rukun warga (“harmonious citizens” or RW) is an administrative unit supervising several rukun tetangga (“harmonious neighborhoods” or RT). In the district that supervises these RW neighborhoods I study, it has on average 893 residents and about 200 households in 2008 (BPS Kota Salatiga 1980–2011). Not every married woman in Sinaran and Graha is a regular participant of the sermon group. Yet, most households have a member of the PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga—Family Welfare Development) or, in the Reformasi era, Pemberdayaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga (Family Welfare Empowerment), which is locally practiced as a married women’s neighborhood organization.
- 13.
This concept of dialogic religiosity can be applied to historical studies of religious movements as well. It could be used to understand the creation of the Israelites’ monolithic God as the religion of a minority flanked by other polytheist states; the birth of Islam as a “Judaism for Arabs” in a time of wars and chaos; the transformation of the term “Hindu” from a reference to those who lived east of the Indus River by those who lived west of it, including the Arabs and the Greeks, to a term that encompasses the enormous local forms of practices as they were conceptually totalized into a system named “Hinduism”; the rise of scripturalism in Islam as a response to the newly “rationalized” European nations after the scientific revolution, whose military aggression posed a serious threat to the Ottoman empire; King Abdulhamid’s admiration of Christianity and the modern education he supported in the hope of reviving Islam; the condemnation by Qasim Amin, the “first Egyptian feminist,” of the veil as the quintessential symbol of the backwardness of the people in the nineteenth century, not because European women had rights to education and democracy (they did not), but simply because a backward, gendered imagery of Egypt is a convenient justification not only for Western domination, but also for indigenous reformation (Ahmed 1992); and so forth.
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Chao, EC. (2017). Introduction: Pieties in Contact. In: Entangled Pieties. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48420-4_1
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