- Title
- Wielding the shield of tradition
- Creator
- Wits, Egbert Willems
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This PhD thesis investigates traditional art practices found in Indonesia with a specific focus on rural areas in the district of Magelang on Central Java. By situating traditional art practices within a globalised landscape, I explore the friction and tensions that come with maintaining and practicing non-commercial, community-centred traditions in an increasingly interconnected and market-driven world. Having worked with traditional arts communities in Indonesia for over a decade, I have observed how traditional arts have increasingly become abandoned as they struggle to survive in a competitive environment wherein new forms of entertainment challenge the prominence and role of traditional arts. Exceptions to this situation do, however, exist. Within the rural areas of the district of Magelang, Javanese traditional arts continue to flourish. Taking this as my starting point, I ask: How, in a time when Indonesian traditional arts are disappearing, have Javanese traditional art practices continued to adapt to play an ongoing and significant role in rural communities within the district of Magelang? How have practitioners sought to maintain Javanese traditional arts through a commitment to intergenerational knowledge and practice? To answer these questions, I draw on long-term anthropological fieldwork, which utilised a collaborative ethnography approach in an effort to respond to the need for more inclusive research practices. The fieldwork was conducted between December 2020 and June 2023, a time when traditional arts communities on Java faced a particular challenge brought forward by another outcome of globalisation, namely the Covid-19 pandemic. This research demonstrates how Javanese traditional art practitioners have been able to creatively resist the political and economic forces of globalisation and maintain the future of non-commercial, community-centred traditional art practices. The everyday rural reality that underpins these efforts of creative resistance illustrates the agency and power actors in the periphery have to determine the outcome of global encounters. I argue that within the core of traditional art practices lies a capacity for and acceptance of change, which becomes their source of continuity and preservation. This research provides insight into how globalisation impacts local traditional art practices by showing how practitioners have adapted these practices to remain relevant and attractive and, subsequently, how practitioners and community members in Magelang have strengthened the resilience of Javanese traditional arts and the role they play in rural communities. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates how rural communities have used traditional arts to resist external influences and maintain localised forms of agency and power, generating rural sites of cultural resistance instead of sites of erasure.
- Subject
- Indonesia; traditional arts; globalisation; culture; Java
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1511368
- Identifier
- uon:56486
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Egbert Willems Wits
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 6 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 789 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |