Reading an Ideology of Time Anthropologically: an Example from Colonial Indonesian Literature
The representation of time in cultures outside Eu-roamerica is a classic anthropological topic, one made even more compelling today as postcolonial theory pushes the dis¬ cipline to study how relations of colonial domination, subor¬ dination, and resistance between societies such as Bali and the colonial Netherlands East Indies have shaped folk ideologies of the social world.1 Even such ideas as there being such enti¬ ties as “Balinese culture” or a “Balinese language” are them¬ selves now open to postcolonialist critique: perhaps older un¬ derstandings about peoples and cultures were themselves part of colonial systems of categorization and political control. Similarly, local time imageries in places like Sumatra, the lo¬ cale for this article, may have been shaped by historical rela¬ tions between local societies and colonial states. Here, I exam¬ ine an instance of this in colonial-era Sumatran print literature.2 I shall first review ritual life and time, and then
Many of the major works by anthropology’s founding figures (Bron¬ islaw Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and so on), as well as comparative studies by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, address issues of time representation. Clifford Geertz’s Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali (1966) continued that tradition. Two essays by E.R. Leach (1961) take a more structuralist approach ; the articles in Bloch and Parry are also valuable. For clear examples of a postcolonialist approach to time thought in Indonesian societies, see Hoskins, The Play of Time, part 3, and Wiener. There is also a bountiful literature on perceptions of time in Southeast Asia in gen¬ eral (Reid and Marr, Anderson).
Especially relevant here are the articles I wrote on the subject (see works-cited list) and my 1997 English translation of the novel discussed here, Sitti Djaoerah. In 1975 I tape-recorded a two night ver-
