Culture, Part VI: Dissemination

Finally, our last lesson, and an up-to-date blog. We cannot keep our culture to ourselves. It is meant to be shared; if something is secret, it cannot remain a part of our culture for very long. Some select group of people must be made privy to the knowledge, and pass it along.

Lesson SIX: Culture spreads, because it consists of the things about ourselves and our people that we desire to share with others. These things can be goods, services, or ideas.

Eastern North America's aboriginal people built vast trade networks that can be traced even today by any trained archeologist, based only on the shape and style of pottery found amid ruins. And thanks to Syifa, and the Borneo custom of bringing back oleh-oleh whenever we go away for a visit home, future cultural researchers will wonder how ROLL TIDE sweatshirts came to be distributed so far away from their original place of origin.

Culture, Part V: Expectations

During my recent trip home, I was really shocked at the price of gasoline - more than $3.25/gallon US in most parts of Alabama. It's normal for gas prices to increase, and for Americans to grumble and complain about them. Olaf, my European friend, reminds me that we are complaining about nothing, as far as people in other Western nations are concerned. What isn't normal in the USA are long gas lines. In Pontianak, the city took to bicycles recently, when a local fuel crisis ensued as a result of an accident (never really explained) that prevented the state petroleum concern from delivering fuel into the harbor terminal. The result was something I hadn't seen since Hurricane Katrina paralyzed the southeastern USA in August 2005: marathon gas lines stretching several kilometers down the highway in front of every gas station. I was glad to be a walking, bike-riding foreigner who didn't have to worry so much, but also concerned that my friends and neighbors were spending so much time out in the heat. I could not believe that the international press had not picked up the story, but saw nothing on CNN or BBC. What I saw was a city of almost a million people, where everyone was leaving work at five o'clock in the afternoon, having dinner in line, and arriving home at around 3 A.M. the following day. Ten hours to get your fuel for the week. I began, at last, to glimpse our own future absent alternative fuels, mass transit subsidies, and a national energy policy for the USA. Folks, this is where we're headed, and you can make book on it... But beyond the politics of the impending U.S. fuel and transportation crisis - "Without Trucks, America Stops!" says the bumper sticker - lies the lesson for cultural studies. Why are people forming a line in the first place? Queuing up for gas or any other goods or services isn't an expectation with which we are born, and doesn't happen by instinct. "Every man for himself" or in other words, a melee, would be the natural state of things in this situation. We form an orderly line based on the cultural expectation that we will do so.

Lesson FIVE: Culture establishes the expected behavior for most any given situation, both positive and negative.

Of course, it's not all unpleasantness, like a terrible gas line. Culture will make you do a dragon dance, too.

Culture, Part IV: Let The Music Play!

After we meet our basic needs for food clothing, and shelter, and augment them with the three more necessary for life in the modern world - transportation, education, and healthcare, we choose the ways in which we express what we want to say. Art, music, poetry, drama, media, entertainment - these things all represent the ways in which we attempt to communicate with one another, as soon as the necessities of life have been attended to.

Lesson FOUR: Culture includes our attempts to communicate, and the messages we send to other human beings, in whatever form.

Culture, Part III: Accumulation

Semester break, like life, is "nasty, brutish, and short." Getting to spend three weeks in America talking with family and friends was wonderful, but not so wonderful was my first experience in the wonderful world of extended stay hotel rates, and the realization that Tuscaloosa, for now, isn't exactly home, even though nearly all my stuff is still there. One would think that being without a family, I would have relatively few material possessions to weigh me down, but this is not the case. When I was preparing to come to Indonesia, I had to vacate an apartment where I have lived for more than 20 years, and had to do it in a very short time. Thus, all my possessions came to live in Unit A534.

I had to spend my last Sunday morning in Tuscaloosa rearranging Unit A534, so that I could reach books and computer software I thought it necessary to put hands on, and longingly survey the warm winter clothing that I was never able to reach, it being located all the way at the back of the damn thing, which is quite full top to bottom, front to back. When I had finished, A534 looked just as much in disarray as when I had begun. And the winter clothes were still beyond reach, unavailable for my three more days in freezing cold Atlanta in February. Last August, I just didn't think about this.

Why is there so much junk in Unit A534? Is it because of indecision, or a misapplication of values - the part of culture that tells us what to leave in, and what to leave out?

Perhaps. But that would ignore another terribly important principle for cultural studies - that of accumulation. Culture is not built overnight, or even over 20 years, the time it takes to accumulate 2000 cubic feet of useless junk.

Lesson THREE: Culture represents the accumulation of lessons learned by countless people we will never meet, and their life experiences piled one on top of the other for many generations.

This, of course, is possible because of sentiment, the idea that value can be assigned to places, things, and thank God, people, giving them value beyond their actual material worth. The paper on which all of my college notebooks are printed might be worth a nickel, but I doubt it's worth even that. The same is true of the couch on which I slept as a boy.

Culture, Part II: What's Always Been There

"If you drink the water from the River Kapuas," says the local legend, "then you can never leave Pontianak forever. You will always come back."

It's quite a pronouncement, but one that I have chosen not to resist. The idea is much older than I am, and I tell people that I will probably always visit Kalimantan every other year for the rest of my life, though I don't feel I should live or work here. But what, really, is the significance of a muddy river?

Plenty. It is around rivers that so much of civilization has grown up over thousands of years, and this is one important thing Pontianak has in common with my city, Tuscaloosa, located at the "fall line," or farthest point upriver (ulu, in Dayak) navigable to barges. Historically, this is where cities were built in Alabama. And like our people, the people of the Pontianak Sultanate depended on their river, an ancient source of water, life, and transportation.

The importance of the river "spills over," pun intended, into the spiritual, as well as the physical world. People today are connected not only to the natural world, but also to their ancestors and each other by the knowledge that they have lived their lives looking at what has always been there for those who came before them, and pray it remains for those who come after.

Lesson TWO: Culture is the source of the meaning we assign to what has always been there, for as long as anyone can remember.













As for me, my culture has changed, because I will go through the rest of my life never quite sure whether to think "Kapuas" or "Warrior" every time I hear "river."

Culture, Part I: The Haunting Past

Rushing to catch up with blog postings so that those long overdue don't spill over into April hasn't been the best thing I could have done, but is necessary. Until completed and up-to-date, this blog is a potential distraction. Currently, there are no time slots available for distractions. And, there is a cross-cultural understanding course that's tanking rapidly because so little was planned in advance, and I had no heads-up that I would be mainly on my own. So, let's "kill two birds with one stone." We can incorporate basic lessons about culture into this blog, and have both the "front burner" and the "back burner" available for planning activities for 18 class sessions each week.


Sound the bell, school's in! Our first basic lesson about culture is that it is a force that drives human beings to create collectively, and what has been collectively created will be left behind for others to discover and analyze. Quite unpredictably, what is left behind takes on a significance for each generation that may or may not resemble what its creators intended. Our mid-year conference in Surabaya came just before my three-week home visit to the USA, and while the timing was great, I was not prepared for the unfamiliar sights we saw while driving through the East Java countryside on the day we were able to escape from duty long enough for sightseeing. Candi (that's CHAHN-dee) are Buddhist-Hindu temples left behind by the Majapahit civilization, an ancient Javanese kingdom that "lost the war" with the advance of Islam at some point during the 14th century. Candi are everywhere in East Java, and an archeological enthusiast would need a month to satisfy curiosity about all the types and variations that exist across the tropical landscape.



Lesson ONE: Others will see what you leave behind. If you know that, and you act on that knowledge, then the ideas you use to decide what to leave are part of what we call culture.




Our outreach reception in Surabaya was warm and welcoming, and probably caused me to talk a little too much about the MLK holiday, which was our theme for outreach this year. Conservative Islamic magazines are letting parents know that when you choose a school for your children, it needs to be one where the Americans have not been giving teacher workshops and spreading "liberalism." At least someone's taking notice ;)

As Slow As Christmas! Part IV: journey

Jakarta will always be the largest city I have visited, and Nahaya village will always be the farthest "off-grid" I have ever been. Located on the Landak River near Ngabang, about 20 clicks off the paved road, it is accessible only by motorbike for much of the year, as the rainy season makes the dirt-track roads too soft for any automobile. The other option is a speedboat, which takes only two hours from Pontianak. This option, I have learned, is only available to the wealthiest persons wishing to go to Nahaya. On the back of my friend's motorbike, the travel time was more than eight hours, with a stop overnight at his mother's native village simply because we could not continue, due to fatigue.

Along the way, you might forget you are traveling through Indonesia by simply letting your mind wander wherever the panoramic views might take your memory. Round the corner and see a hill covered with green vines, and you would swear you were driving through Alabama or Tennessee in the month of June. Off the pavement, the road contains more than enough red clay to be located in Alabama or Georgia. It appears to roll on forever, as hamlet after hamlet that will not be mapped by GoogleEarth any time soon continues to drift past.



I went to Nahaya at the invitation of my friend and student Irwan's parents, who did not believe that a Western guy would actually visit their home. They are rubber growers, and their cabin near the village has no electricity or running water. A nearby stream provides what they need for bathing and washing, while drinking water is bottled. My friend and student belongs to West Kalimantan's Dayak nation, which accounts for about 1 in 4 persons province-wide.









However, Landak Regency (or county) is very much Dayak country.




Ahe, the local language, is related to Indonesian, but not the same. I amused a room full of seventh-graders with my attempts to pronounce its unusual consonants.

During our journey, I was tired to the point of illness and far from anything that might be considered familiar, but never frightened as I thought I would be. Probably, this is because I was never alone. To be as far "off-grid" as it seems to a Westerner, Nahaya and surrounding villages seem to be densely populated, and everyone depends on a vast network of friends and family. We joke in Alabama that the people in another small town "all know each other" or are "all related." Here in the middle of the forest is a place where people have always existed that way. Christmas was two weeks away. If ever you thought you were as far away from another human as you could get, in the next moment, you'd hear Christmas carols on tape blaring from someone's house, probably less than a quarter-mile away. Remote, yes, but with very close neighbors. So, I survived our long journey. My shoes didn't.









Off-grid people socialize on Saturday night the way some of my friends' parents remember from rural Alabama a generation ago. There's an old country store where everyone gathers after sundown, with a TV playing for anyone who doesn't have one at home to watch. There are cans of soup, dried provisions, and soft drinks on a wooden shelf. The three dozen people hanging around may be the only souls present for miles in any direction, but they are all you need. Everyone sits on wooden tables and benches, plays board games, or shoots a game of pool in the room next door until well past midnight, by the light of a loud diesel generator. The only request directed at a visitor from far away - please come back. Don't forget about us.
TIP: If you play pool, do not assume that the game is "8-ball" as it usually is in the States.

Most Westerners know the Dayak as the people of the longhouse, from the endless articles about them in National Geographic and other publications. The Ahe language group only claims one fully operational and still inhabited by their people as a home, not a tourist attraction. I was glad to be able to see it.















A wood sculptor whose studio was located in the longhouse explained through translation how spirituality and the Dayak view of the universe impact upon his art, which apparently has been purchased by collectors worldwide. Much of his explanation flowed from conservative Catholic teaching on human sexuality, which would make sense, given the fact that the Ahe people are nearly all more Catholic than the Pope. But it seemed (appropriate for an artist) highly spiritualized and esoteric. He's incredibly talented, but lost my liberal Western self after a few minutes of explanation.

My most memorable place to see was the cemetery at Mandor, site of one of the worst mass killings ever committed by the Japanese Army during the Second World War - with the mass graves to prove it. While it was a gruesome event to contemplate, the future came to life before my eyes on top of the ruins of the past. My friend and student met two other young men from his home area whom he didn't know before. They spoke the same language, are all into martial arts, became friends in about five minutes, and I think will remain friends for some time. A lot of bad things do happen here, but the Dayak are always there for each other. It simply appears to be their way.



Most young people in the Nahaya area like Western music from the 1980's, and stores sell tube after tube of hair gel, so that they can look like they are ready to go back in time to play in an '80's "hair band." I had serious high school flashbacks. Anyone having any Guns 'n' Roses memorabilia should forward it to me, since it would be a dream come true for Salia, a young teacher who teaches English to 89 seventh graders five days a week.