Rethinking Linguistic Relativity

Abstract

what's going on.I'm not sure you can ever have a Ja vanese response to Javanese art if you're not Javanese maybe you can if you spend ten years there, but you can't do it by watching a wayang show.So then there's the question of annotations, and trying to figure out how to get the real stuff across.There's a lot of concern about that.RH: You've written extensively on other conceptions of sel£hood, of personhood.A few minutes ago you used the phrase "seU-representation." Do you think that's what they're up to?CG: In that case, not individually, but yes-they're in terested in the representation of Indonesia as a collective self.RH: Do they think of it in those terms?CG: Yes, explicitly.That's what it's all about.They want to establish in foreign eyes, and also in their own, an "fficial cultural identity.RH: Is the desire to have an official cultural identity something that is absorbed from Western ways of thinking?CG: I suppose to some degree it is, but it's very alive in Indonesia, because there's now a civil religion called Pancasila which is an attempt to do exactly that-to create a rather Javanized version of an all-Indonesian culture.There have been debates about this going back to the 1920S and 1930S, between extreme traditional ists-that the new Indonesia should be represented in terms of 2,000 years of tradition-and extreme cosmo politans-who want to join the world of modem socie ties as quickly as possible.That debate continues.Java, of course, has had a couple hundred years of colonialism, more than most places have.For the Outer Islands it's a bit less.The trouble is that there isn't one thing that they all go back to.Some Javanese would like to go back to Majapahit, but the Sumatrans are not too happy about that idea!