2.6. Culture, religion and ethnic identity
Along the way the
word “culture” has been used without further explanation. This is
the reason why it receives special attention here. Our respective
culture is not only about language, food style, clothing, and
stereotypical behaviors. Charles Kraft suggests that culture may be
seen as “a complex, integrated coping mechanism, belonging to and
operated by a society (social group), consisting of concepts and
behavior that are patterned and learned,
[including] underlying perspectives (worldview), [and]
resulting products, both non-material (customs, rituals) and material
(artifacts).”1
Much of our sense of who we are, how we live, and how we
perceive realities is informed and shaped by our culture (cultural
conditioning).2
Yet, we are not just shaped by our culture but we also shape our
culture, consciously or unconsciously, by simply living.3
Culture, as Ju M.
Lotman puts it, is “collective non-hereditary memory.4
It is learned. It is also taught. Both learning and teaching happen
in a wide range of methods and experiences. As we are subject to
change, culture is bound to follow, usually in a very subtle way, but
sometimes radically. As in the case of Minahasa: the alteration of
economic, socio-religious life, politics, and of course education
under colonialism has led to cultural change in a society.5
Schouten summarizes it, “There
was an intimate link between colonial oppression and cultural
transformation.”6
As it has been
pointed out before, “cultures...do not neatly coincide with
ethnicities.”7
Despite the differences and similarities of past cultural
practices to what we have today, Minahasans are still Minahasans.
Nonetheless, Wenas, in lamenting the past culture of Minahasa, makes
this point: “[Culture] indeed develops according to the demand of
time, but if we compare Minahasans' culture today with other
sub-ethnic’s in Sulawesi, clearly it has departed far from its
origin.”8
This remark is a signal that the dynamics and changeability of
cultures should be held together with an understanding that
“…cultures largely house human identity and people’s sense of
dignity.”9
It is obvious that
cultural change should be expected. It is not bad or good in itself,
only that its presence has to be measured from the values and virtues
it brings for the well-being of the respective people, their
sense of identity, and their living environment. The
meaning of tradition is derived from this, borrowing Stone's
language, the “proper good or telos” of a practice.10
As practices born out of experiences and passed down from generation
to generation, tradition contains the ideals believed to be good for
the future generations. Hence tradition also involves, as Alasdair
MacIntyre points out, “an historically extended, socially embodied
argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods
which constitute that tradition.”11
As an integral part
of a culture, tradition “that is alive and 'in good order' is never
a static, finished or a once-and-for-all achievement but part of a
dynamic process that is responsive to ever-changing historical
circumstances.”12
Behind every tradition there is a yearning to preserve virtuous
values. The primary task of responsible cultural beings, therefore,
is to conserve and develop the ideals in every tradition and
ameliorate those that operate in opposition to human dignity, life,
and environmental sustainability. Culture is always in the making.
While the push is always there along with human existence, the
direction will always invite human intention and participation.
Newbigin asserts
that fundamental to any culture is “a set of beliefs, experiences,
and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of
things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims
final loyalty (religion).”13
Religion, or opposition towards it, is part of human culture,
yet it is also, in a way, encompassing to a culture.14
The connection
between religion and ethnic identity is captured in the term “ethnic
religion” which represents the overlapping between the category of
ethnic religious system and ethnicity itself. The term “ethnic
religion,” however, is a later rendition, as many ethnic groups
around the world do not have a concept of religion as a separate
category amongst others in a society.15
What is termed as religion is none other than a set of beliefs that
underlies a lifestyle, a code of conduct for communal living.16
This recognition of religion as an integral part of human life and
society poses a strong critique towards secularism, particularly a
form of secularism that insists that religion is a “private”
matter and bears no weight in public issues such as politics. Richard
Mohr and Nadirsyah Hosen recognize that what is adhered to in the
“public” sphere is in itself “at least almost a religion.”17
In the context of
the Republic of Indonesia, religions are given a special place with
the first of its nation-state philosophy, Pancasila: Belief in One
supreme God.18
However, Indonesia is not based on one particular religion over the
others. It is recognized as a 'secular' state,19
but as Mohr and Hosen put it, 'secular' in the sense as Rajeev
Bhargava proposes in contrast to laïcité (French
secularism), and in line with what Charles Taylor describes in
connection to the shibboleth of the French Revolution:
liberty [that is] freedom of religion, equality [that is] no religion has a status of privilege over others, specially as a state religion, and a broad version of 'fraternity': that all 'spiritual families must be heard' and be involved in [the] process of deciding social goals and how they are to be met.20
In this framework
(Pancasila framework), the place of our ethnic religion and its
validity to exist alongside other ethnic and inter-ethnic religions
in Indonesia is affirmed, and the space for dialogue between ethnic
religion and Christianity in Minahasa is provided. Ethnic and
inter-ethnic religions have their place and importance in the
building up of the life and the fulfillment of the aspiration of the
Minahasan people in the context of the multicultural and pluralistic
society of Indonesia.
-------
1 Kraft,
Anthropology for Christian Witness, 38-39.
2 Cultural
conditioning may be defined as a process of assigning meaning to
realities and experiences that provide for the personal and social
identity formation of an individual within a particular society. It
is a process where one will learn the language(s) to communicate
with others, consciously or unconsciously acquire the worldviews to
adhere to, and train oneself on how to express oneself in the
society. In general, it is a process of absorbing the culture
wherein one is found to be a human.
3 As
Jørgen D. Johansen and Svend E. Larsen assert, the “culture
forming process not only develops in directly social situations, but
[it] is also active every time we sense, every time we individually
localize an object, every time we move our body, every time we act,
and every time we react to and affect one another” (Signs in
Use: An Introduction to Semiotics [London: Routledge, 2002],
168-169).
4 Johansen
and Larsen, Signs in Use, 169.
5 See
Chapter Four and Chapter Five.
6 Schouten,
Leadership and Social Mobility in a Southeast Asian Society,
105.
7 Fenton
credits Barth for this point (Ethnicity, 100); Barth
asserts:
“The cultural features that signal the boundary may change, and
the cultural characteristics
of the members
may likewise transform,
indeed, even the organizational form of the group may change
– yet the fact of the continuing
dichotomization between
members and outsiders allows us to specify the
nature
of continuity, and investigate
the changing cultural form and content" (Barth, “Introduction,”
in Ethnic
Groups
and Boundaries, 14
as quoted in Esler, Conflict and Identity in
Romans, 43.)
8 Wenas,
Sejarah Kebudayaan Minahasa, 170 (translation mine). The term
“sub-ethnic” here is used to mean an ethnic group in the context
of Indonesia as one nation-(state), hence in Sulawesi there are
sub-ethnic groups. While the terms “ethnic” and “sub-ethnic”
are differentiated in this thesis, in his book Wenas uses them
almost interchangeably.
9 Bob
Goudzwaard, Mark Vander Vennen, and David Van Heemst, Hope in
Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 154.
10 Stone,
Evangelism After Christendom, 40-41.
11 Alasdair
C. MacIntyre,
After
Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.
2nd
Ed (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222 as
quoted in Stone, Evangelism After
Christendom, 41 (italic mine).
12 Stone,
Evangelism
After Christendom,
41 paraphrasing MacIntyre, After
Virtue,
222.
13 Newbigin,
Foolishness to the Greeks, 3.
14 Hiebert
writes: “In its broadest sense, religion encompasses all specific
beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality and the origins,
meaning, and destiny of life, as well as the myths
[narratives/meta-narrative] and rituals that symbolically express
them.” Here, Hiebert also points out that religions do not
necessitate belief in supernatural beings (Cultural Anthropology,
2nd ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1983], 372) as
quoted in Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness,
198-199); Though religion may not specifically stands for the total
worldviews of a society, as Kraft argues (Anthropology for
Christian Witness, 198-199), the beliefs and practices in it
aspire and inspire a wide range of other aspects of life.
15 Kraft,
Anthropology for Christian Witness, 197; See also Kamaara,
“Towards Christian National Identity in Africa,” 129.
16 In
the case of Africa, this notion is best captured by Eunice Kamaara
(citing John Mbiti) who writes:
Religion and culture were completely
integrated into one whole way of life so
that there was no distinction between what was sacred and what was
secular in traditional African societies. The worldview was also
anthropocentric in that the human person was recognised
as the center of creation and God's steward under whom responsible
management of the rest of the creation
directly lies. There was cultural and religious homogeneity within
each autonomous ethnic group having clear socio-political
governance, educational, health, ethical, and recreational
structures. Besides the general worldview,
each of these social structures had clear guiding principles and
objectives with a lot of emphasis on human rights for every
individual person but only in the context of community (“Towards
Christian National Identity in Africa,” 129).
17 Richard
Mohr and Nadirsyah Hosen write: “In its stronger version,
secularism as [France's] laïcité can almost be seen a civil
religion, safeguarding itself from the threats of competing
religious affiliations.” It aims to “exclude religion and its
personal expression from the public sphere” (“Introduction: Da
capo: Law and Religion from the Top Down” in Law and
Religion in Public Life: The Contemporary Debate, ed.
Nadirsyah Hosen and Richard Mohr [New York: Routledge, 2011],
6-8); Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity?, 9; Cf.
Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology, 372.
18 The
rest are Humanitarianism, National Unity, Democracy, and Social
Justice.
19 In
her other book, Nadirsyah Hosen suggests that Indonesia is neither
secular nor an Islamic state, but rather following the third
alternative – referring to Hollenboch – the Pancasila
based-state (Shari'a and Constitutional Reform in Indonesia
[Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2007], 193).
20 “Foreword:
What is Secularism” in Secularism, Religion, and Multicultural
Citizenship, ed., Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xi-xii as quoted
in Mohr and Hosen, “Introduction: Da capo: law and religion
from the top down” in Law and Religion in Public Life, 8;
Taylor's idea of secularism, however, does not exactly run alongside
the philosophy of Pancasila which assumes belief in one supreme God,
and hence disqualifies anti-theism.
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