Keepers of the Grave: Ritual Guides, Ghosts, and Hidden Narratives in Indonesian History

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122110630
Author(s):  
Kar-Yen Leong
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Ritual Space ◽  
The Dead

The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state’s enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.

scholarly journals SESUDAH 50 TAHUN KITA HARUS BERANI MENGHADAP APA YANG TERJADI

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 332
Author(s):  
Frans Magnis Suseno
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Historical Truth

The author gives a personal account of the 1965/1966 mass slaughter of so-called communists in central Java where he was living at the time, and more generally in Sumatra, Java and Bali. He continues with a detailed analysis. He then calls for fellow Indonesians to face up to the truth of the massacre, which until now has been erased from the collective historical memory of the nation. Kata-kata kunci: historical truth, Indonesian Communist Party, General Suharto, Accepting Responsibility, Reconciliation.

scholarly journals Islamisasi di Kota Surakarta dan Sekitarnya Masa Orde Baru: Sebuah Tinjauan Awal

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Adif Fahrizal
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
New Order ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The City

This article discusses the spread of Islam in the city and the neighborhood of Surakarta, Central Java during the New Order period. The spread of Islam took place through massive Islamic religious activities, such as mass prayer. In addition, the expansion of the number of mosques and mushola (Islamic praying sites) indicates a massive expansion of the influence of Islam in the region. Based on data from newspapers and interviews with relevant informants of the time, this article found out that the spread of Islam in Surakarta was a political agenda set up by the New Order government in order to counter the remnants of Communist ideology, which was withheld by sympathizers of the then Indonesian Communist Party. This article concludes that the massive spread of Islam shaped Surakarta, which had been known as the center of syncretic Javanese culture, to become religious and the government’s fear of Communism could be reduced. However, the process also made a sharp dichotomy between Islamist-based and Javanese-based identity of the city.

The Taman Siswa Movement — Its Early Eight Years and Javanese Background

1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-177
Author(s):  
Kenji Tsuchiya
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Private School ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Dutch Colonial

In July 1922 a small private school called Nationale Onderwijs Instituut Taman Siswa was born quietly at a traditional town Yogyakarta in Central Java. Taman Siswa means literally “Garden for Pupils”. Nobody expected then that this pupils' garden would become a tough ground of resistance to the Dutch colonial Government later in the 1930's. The political climate in Indonesia around 1922 was showing a remarkable uprising of nationalism centering around the labor union movement guided by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Indonesian Communist Party) and Sarekat Islam (Islam Union).

The Civil Governance of Death: The Making of Chinese Political Subjects at the End of Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Huwy-Min Lucia Liu
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Funerary Rituals ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Party State

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

Of Justice and the Grave: The Role of the Dead in Post-conflict Uganda

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 819-843 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaymelee Kim ◽  
Tricia Redeker Hepner
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
War Survivors ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Post War

In the aftermath of war, survivors’ definitions of justice are often in tension with those of governments and international actors. While post-war northern Uganda has been the site of high-profile prosecutions of Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, our research in rural Acholiland highlights how survivors define justice largely in terms of material compensation for both the living and the dead. These priorities are linked to the omnipresence of improperly buried human remains as evidence of physical and structural violence. Mass graves, burials in former displacement camps, and unidentified remains become focal points around which survivors articulate ongoing socioeconomic suffering and demands for redress. A ‘thanatological approach’ that centres the role of the dead and critically explores the possibilities presented by forensic science in a transitional justice context reveals survivors’ prioritisation of reparative and restorative justice despite the international and national focus on retributive justice through institutions like the icc.

scholarly journals "Caine's Stake": Aimé Césaire, Emmett Till, and the Work of Acknowledgment

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey McCall
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Political Work ◽  
State Of The Union ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
French Communist Party

Our reasons for avoiding death are manifold, encompassing among others, motives that are personal, political, and historical. Still, are there ways that we might use words to overcome these common everyday aversions to death and the dead through another modality of language, that of poetry for example? Can the poetic word get us to acknowledge the particulars of death despite the various reasons we have to disavow it? Might we use language not simply grasp death abstractly (or more accurately, fail to grasp it) but instead to realize what death means in its awful particularity? These questions are prompted by Aimé Césaire’s poerty and his prose, and by his elegy for Emmett Till in particular. Through his writings and his political work, one of Césaire’s key aims was to get people to acknowledge what they would prefer to avoid.  Césaire’s work, both his poetry and prose, urges readers to see the things they would prefer not to see and to show us how language stakes us to the world in all its terrifying awfulness and wondrous splendor, despite our desperate attempts to avoid this realization.This essay is divided into two parts. The first part looks at how this problem of alienation and the need to acknowle this alienation motivates Césaire’s writing more generally, focusing on the ten years between 1945 (when his essay “Poetry and Knowledge” is published) and 1955 (when the second edition of his Discourse on Colonialism is published). In order to consider how alienation and acknowledgement work in this celebrated text, I consider related works and their contexts from the period from 1950-1956, including his famous letter of resignation from the French Communist Party. This sets the stage for the reading of Césaire’s Ferraments provided in the second section.  The second part examines how and why Césaire sought acknowledgement for Emmett Till’s brutal murder through his poetry, focusing specifically on his poem “…On the State of the Union” from his 1960 collection Ferraments.

scholarly journals The valley of the fallen: a new El Escorial for Spain

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Queralt Solé
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Mass Grave ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Dead ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Location

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spain has experienced a cycle of exhumations of the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and has rediscovered that the largest mass grave of the state is the monument that glorifies the Franco regime: the Valley of the Fallen. Building work in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid, was begun in 1940 and was not completed until 1958. This article analyses for the first time the regimes wish, from the start of the works, for the construction of the Valley of the Fallen to outdo the monument of El Escorial. At the same time the regime sought to create a new location to sanctify the dictatorship through the vast transfer to its crypts of the remains of the dead of the opposing sides of the war.

scholarly journals The commemoration of the dead in contemporary Asiatic Yupik ritual space

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Oparin
Keyword(s):  
Social Diversity ◽  
The Core ◽  
Ritual Space ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many

Contemporary Asiatic Yupik living in Chukotka (Russia) practise various types of ritual feeding of the spirits. People feed the spirits for specific purposes and at different places. The core ritual of feeding the deceased is an autumn commemoration of the dead (aghqesaghtuq), which is described in this article with examples from Novoe Chaplino and Sireniki. This seemingly simple ceremony is full of nuances, and each family practises it in its own manner. The variability of this ritual and the many models of behaviour within present-day ritual space reflect social diversity. Two aspects, the diverse practices of feeding the spirits and the specific ritual of commemoration of the dead, are key to understanding different social and cultural processes in Yupik villages.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document