Customary Law and Modernization in Indonesia

Abstract

In the innumerable, ever changing manifestations of reality, the realm of events, man has a special position as a behaving and acting being. Through the development of his mind, he is able to overcome the static harmony between vegetative and animal behaviour and to interact with the surrounding world in a continuous dynamic dialectical interplay between his behaviour and his environment. The decisive moment in this dialectical interplay occurs when man, with the capacity of his mind to evaluate continuously the things, relations and occurrences in his surroundings, arrives at decisions in terms of his human motivations and goals, i. e., values. What we call cultural behaviour is nothing else than value-oriented behaviour and the totality of culture is nothing more than the realization of a system of values at a certain place and at a certain time.