Along the Spectrum from Indigeneity to Islam: Kejawen Positionings and Practices of Ethical Self-Formation on Java.
In Indonesia, the Islamic revival in the 1970s led to a new interest of Islamic piety and scholarly engagement with it which has shifted attention away from Javanist Indonesians (kejawen). Anthropological scholarship and Indonesian public perception typically associate Javanists with Sufi Islam or as a breakaway movement. However, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in the Banyumas-Cilacap region of Central Java, including participant observation, textual analysis, and interviews, to argue that most Javanists today position themselves along a spectrum between Indigeneity and Islam. I contend that Javanist expressions of selfhood along this spectrum rest upon diverse practices of ethical self-formation. While some Javanists orient themselves and their practices around Islamic precepts and ways of being, others articulate Indigenous positions based on non-Islamic ontologies.
Dylan Renca is a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in cultural anthropology at Boston University. Over the past year, he has crisscrossed Central Java listening to Javanist voices on ethical selfhood, belonging, and multicultural recognition. Dylan’s dissertation fieldwork is sponsored through a 2022 Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship and an affiliation with the Center for Religious & Cross-cultural Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada.