The Javanese Kijaji: the Changing Role of a Cultural Broker

One of the most serious problems facing the post-revolutionary Indonesian political élite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population. The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-based nationalist leadership more oriented to the international patterns of intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung countries. On the one hand, the activist white-collar nationalists of the large cities are attempting to construct an integrated Indonesian state along generally western parliamentary lines; on the other, the peasants of the Javanese, Sundanese, Achenese, Buginese, etc. culture areas cling to the patterns of local community organization and belief with which they are intimately familiar.