An Addendum to Comments on the Balinese/Indonesian word Musyawarah

For people who are fascinated with words, how we borrow them from other cultures and how the meanings of a word changes through time and circumstances, I’m adding an addendum to a discussion in my previous essay.

It has to do with Musyawarah, a word I heard in Java in the 1980s and met again in reading about the decision-making process villagers in Bali use for organizing their many and complex community activities. It reminded me of my time, in the late 1950s, when I was involved with a Mexican-American community from southern Texas newly settled into Wisconsin, a midwestern state. A group of women asked me to help them create a social club, something they had watched the men trying and always failing to do. After our own two failed attempts to hold a meeting, I introduced them to how it is done and how a group makes decisions. The idea is for someone to raise a question or a proposal for the group and begin a discussion, after which, with all views having been presented, the leader would form a statement of what action to take and everyone would vote yes or no. I went on to explain that the majority would win and the minority would accept because in a future vote they might win, but by then no one was listening to me. I was preposing a procedure from my culture, one that simply would not work in my friends’ Mexican-American culture. The approach that did work was closer to Musyawarah. At the time musyawarah was not a word in my vocabulary; I called it talking to consensus. The experience taught me a lesson: the concept of debate and the loyal minority in my culture is not a universal; it is simply one mode of group decision-making. I discussed that here.

Yesterday, talking with a friend about Musyawarah, he said that although he had never used the word, Arabic has Mushawara, and we wondered if the meanings were the same. Surely the word in Javanese derives from Arabic. As early as the 8^th  century Muslim merchants, mostly from India, had sailed to the Indonesian islands to trade and often to marry and settle in, bringing Islam and Arabic with them, establishing Muslim communities, converting the royalty until finally, by the early 16^th century, Islam had replaced the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit dominance.  Mushawara as a word entered the Indonesian languages and was used, somewhat changed, for already existing behaviors the Indonesians had not as yet named.

I went on-line, searching for Mushawara, its meaning and how it is used. This is what I found –

— The Virtual Mosque defines Mushāwara as Consultation. Their translation from the Koran on the meaning of Consultation in private and public life is well worth reading. I summarize, briefly and in secular terms, this view on Consultation — A leader’s consulting with followers should be a standard practice within the family and the community. Consulting with followers makes them feel important and respected, generates good feeling toward the leader, gives the leader information and additional perspectives, allows the leader to better know his followers, and makes followers feel responsible for actions taken.

— In Kerala, India, the Muslim community, about a quarter of Kerala’s population, has an organization of Sunni scholars and clerics called the Samastha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama. (Ulama is Arabic for a body of scholars with specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law and theology.) They call their supreme body and working committee The Mushawara, The Consulate Body. It consists of 40 eminent scholars who are drawn purely on the basis of their Islamic scholarship, religious piety, faithfulness and devotion.

— The Tablighi Jamaat is a Sunni Islamic organization. (Tabligh is Urdu for mission or to preach and Jamaat is Arabic for a Muslim religious assembly) It originated in India and has most of its adherents, numbering in the many millions, in South Asia but is increasingly global. It is a proselytizing and revivalist movement that focuses on urging Muslims to return to orthodox Sunni Islam, particularly in matters of ritual, dress, and personal behavior. It has been called “one of the most influential religious movements in 20th century Islam.” For a Tablighi Jamaat congregation, during a Mushawara (discussion or Consultation), the Shura (consultative committee) decides on all matters, large and small. A Mushawara is held daily. (taken from “Islamic Revivalism: Encounter the Modern World, A Study of the Tabligh Jama‘at” by Jan A. Ali)

— Quoting the Muslim chaplain in a major U.S. Midwestern university —  In Muslim tradition, there is a deeply rooted sense of Mushawara (seeking counsel), and Naseeha (advice). Chaplaincy aims to advise and lead a community, which indeed is the concept of seeking Naseeha and Mushawara. In essence, chaplaincy is an integral part of service to our faith community and while we may not have the same name for the profession, we do have a similar practice in our faith tradition.

— The website of an Islamic financial advisory firm includes a Mushawara meeting in its services, as well as a meeting with Shariah Auditors and guidance from Shariah-Scholars.

And what are my thoughts on this? Apparently, for these Muslims, certain words are so central to their belief system that they must be expressed in Arabic in an otherwise English text. Clearly, Mushawara is one of those words; it is defined, illustrated and explained in the Koran. Nasheeha is less clearly defined.

“Consultation,” their translation of Mushawara, has a number of meanings in English. One part of the definition in my Webster’s dictionary has consultation being the act of consulting. To consult means to deliberate, to consider. Interestingly, though, in old English the meaning was more concrete; it meant to call together, as in gathering the senate (supreme council of the Roman republic) and asking it for advice. I like to search in my etymological dictionary for the origin of words. Consult, and related words such as Consul and council, originated in ancient Rome and had to do with government and formal organizations.

Given this original meaning, Consultation seems a reasonable translation for Mushawara in the Koran. The book is sacred but the activities described for Mushawara are secular; they relate to family and political relationships. They are of the wise patriarch calling upon his subordinates for information and for keeping them engaged as faithful followers.

A later meaning of Consultation was a conference of specialists, e.g. lawyers and medical practitioners, to discuss, decide, plan. Generally, when I use the words consult or consultation, it means seeking the advice of an expert on a particular matter. I wonder how the Muslim groups using Mushawara and calling it Consultation would describe the process of what they actually do and how they interact in their meetings. Is it in the patriarchal mode described in the Koran, or is it in the mode of a leader guiding a consensus-building, free-flowing discussion that includes an exchange of information and ideas?

In Indonesia, to suit the Indonesian culture, “Mushawara” was transformed into “Musyawarah.” In Bali it is a method of decision-making for a system of food production that evolved over the centuries in that particular environment, discussed here. No one individual or family controls the rice irrigation system; it is owned by all the communities and is managed by the landowning families talking to consensus when they gather at the temples to keep informed, make decisions and do the work required.

I had thought of Musyawarah as an effective approach to decision-making for small groups in small communities, but doubted it could be adapted to decision-making for large, complex organizations.  In a paper in the Social Science Research Network Kawamur Koichi argues otherwise.

“This paper analyzes customary practices of consensus decision-making, called Musyawarah-mufakat, as a basis of democratic stability in Indonesia. Musyawarah and mufakat (deliberation and consensus) are a traditional decision-making rule in Indonesia which has often been observed in village meetings. This paper argues that this traditional decision-making rule is still employed even in a modernized and democratized Indonesia, not only at rural assemblies but in the national parliament as well. Furthermore, this consensus way of decision-making provides an institutional basis for democratic stability by giving every parliamentary player, whether big or small, an equal opportunity to express his/her interests. On the other hand, this system of Musyawarah-mufakat decreases political efficiency in the sense that it takes a long time to deliberate drafted laws in the parliament.”

Hmmm. The word Mufakat – Is it Arabic or Indonesia? — —  but enough for now. I could go on forever thinking about the origins of words, and more importantly, about decision-making in modern, democratic societies — but haven’t finished thinking and writing about my time in Bali and what I learned there.

Update –

The friend who said Musyawarah could be from the Arabic Mushawara saw in the paragraph above Mufakat being defined as deliberation and consensus. He suggested I find out if Mufakat is also spelled Muwafakat. And it is. I found on-line “A Dictionary of the Sunda Language of Java” by Jonathan Rigg. In the dictionary — Mupakat, Arabic, Properly Muwafakat, also Mufakat, to agree, to be of one mind, to unite efforts, to form a joint resolution

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Continuing with a discussion on Bali, on mushyawarah and on Balinese art.

I continue to ponder over why Bali is so attractive to visitors, including myself. Jawaharlal Nehru called Bali “the morning of the world” when he visited Indonesia in 1950 and the poet Rabindranth Tagore said, “Wherever I go on the island, I see God.” But Bali is more than a beautiful landscape; the island is something of a Shangri La where outsiders want to live as well as to visit. And how did this come to be? I figured out the basics of Bali’s centuries old social and economic system, outlined here, and the impact of tourism here, then continued reading into the large and never ending literature on Balinese history until I felt I understood something of what made Bali different – and what that difference is, or was. Amazingly, I find myself engaged to the point where I cannot let go and move on to other places where I worked and was involved. I read about Bali and one memory after another occurs to me, of a similarity with another culture here or of a difference there, and I want to get it all down into writing.

For example, I read about how the Balinese organize their irrigation farming and community activities and encounter references to musyawarah, an Indonesian word I heard some thirty-five years ago in Java, and memories from even longer ago than that are revived.

Musyawarah is the name for a social process I first observed in the 1950s, and having no one word for what was happening, described it with phrases and sentences. I was studying the urbanization of a Mexican-American community of migrant farm workers, Spanish speaking, who were taking jobs and settling into a Midwestern city rather than return as usual to their home base at the Texas border. In my second year of being with them, a number of the younger women asked me to help them organize a woman’s social club for the community, and it became quite an experience for us all. Among other things, it was when I discovered my expectations for how a meeting should be run were a product of my Anglo-Saxon culture. In meetings as I knew them, if an issue arose and different points of view were expressed, the members held a discussion, then took a vote and the minority accepted the outcome, the majority view, as that of the membership. In our Mexican-American club, in our early meetings, when we needed to make a group decision we held a discussion and took a vote, after which those who lost the vote walked out of the meeting, emotionally if not physically, without comment, angering the majority and leaving each side with secret, and not-so-secret suspicions.

I could not understand what was happening, so Consuelo, my close friend, explained for me the factions in the community and the older women and their feelings. When I expressed the idea of the minority staying on and maybe later even persuading others to their point of view, it drew a blank with her. Obviously, the concept of the loyal opposition was not in their culture and to save our club we had to work around that fact. With another woman, we devised a set of procedures that suited our Mexican-American women; essentially, every group decision had to be discussed until we all agreed on the same thing. It was a time-consuming, tiresome process and sometimes resulted in an action so innocuous it meant almost no action at all, but we stayed together, had good times together and accomplished good works, such as persuading and helping Mexican-Americans get to the polls and vote during local elections, have their voice heard. It was the first time Spanish was heard in the municipal hall. Unusual for that community, our social club survived for years, for long after I had left.

I called the procedures we invented “talking to consensus.” With some added features it was “musyawarah,” the process for group decision-making used by the Balinese. In later years, I observed the same process being used elsewhere, in other cultures, in tight but stratified groups, as with medical teams. The discussion went on and on and on until finally the decision reached usually was what the top man (almost always a man) wanted anyhow, but at least everyone had a say and was heard, small concessions were made along the way to the hard-to-convince, no one lost face and everyone was responsible for the outcome of actions taken. Musyawarah became part of my personal vocabulary.

Another feature of Balinese society I think about is the way in which foreigners respond to the place of art in Balinese culture. I read here that  “Life in Bali is based on art. It’s so essential that there is no word for “art” in Balinese. It is difficult to explain the relationship that the Balinese have with art to someone who has never seen it. The Balinese carve, weave and paint beautiful objects for daily use – they become objets d’art in the most pristine sense of the word. The Balinese have a kinetic, green, tangible relationship to art.”

But — except for their highly productive agriculture in an unusually benign setting that allowed them far more leisure time for crafts and religious rituals than any other peasant society I know of, the Balinese are essentially like everyone anywhere else. It is a basic fact of life that peoples everywhere and throughout human history have “… a kinetic, green, tangible relationship to art.” Balinese art is folk art; people in all the societies I know and know about have folk art but rarely have a name for the artistic beyond the functional.

Consider early Homo sapiens painting on the walls of caves, c. 30,000 BCE, propitiating the spirits of animals they hunt and incidentally producing great art. In college, in my first anthropology course I was impressed with the beauty of ancient tools used by the hunters, like the Solutrean point in France, 22,000 years ago,

and Clovis points in the Americas 13,000 years ago, beautiful beyond any functional requirement. In Neolithic villages with agriculture and domesticated animals, beginning some 12,000 years ago, craftsmen/women made tools and weapons, pots, baskets, cloth, objects for religious rituals, structures to live in, all useful and many pleasing to the eye. In towns and cities of the past,

a lady’s needlework

women with leisure handled cloth with care and imagination, adding beauty to ordinary useful items, and women today continue those crafts as hobbies, to sew and quilt and do embroidery as a craft and an art. Today travelers collect those lovely items people from traditional societies made for use; we display them in our homes and call them art.  (I wrote here about my collection of women’s artful craftwork. )

Why do I, and other people, find ordinary objects from traditional societies so much more attractive than things we have around us today? Could it be because through long experience with shaping and firing a pot, heating and hammering metal, weaving and decorating fabric, doing a dance, playing a musical instrument, singing ancient songs, performing a ritual, doing ordinary activities within the community, people naturally understood the materials and ideas from which they made things, things that “have stood the test of time.”

We live today in a world of the continually new. When plastics, for example, came on the scene in the 1940s I found things made of it downright ugly, but gradually the nature of the material, its limitations and potentials, became better understood and now some items in plastic, such as a table made in clear acrylic, can be quite attractive. (but most aren’t)

My first encounter with folk art being collected, and sold, was in 1962, in Oaxaco, south Mexico. It was also the first time I was in a traditional peasant village. Ravi and I had driven to Oaxaca with our two small children to visit a friend, an anthropologist doing a study in the villages, and we stayed in the city with a middle-class family from the old urban elite.

They were a family who had centuries-old ties with certain villages, probably a landlord-sharecropper relationship that modernization had severed. Nevertheless, the husband/father knew the villages and used his knowledge and love of the local craftwork to stock his popular tourists’ shop with relatively simple but exquisitely shaped and textured pottery. I was struck by the means through which he acquired the pots he sold. He found in the surrounding villages the potter he considered to be an artist as well as a skilled craftsman, agreed to buy every pot made for him and displayed for sale only those he thought had turned out well. The price and lifestyle differences between village, city and tourist economies allowed him to support the folk artist while running a business to support him and his family.

Balinese village economy remained intact into recent decades and the crafts never ceased being part of the farmers’ lives. Weaving, metal working, ceramics, painting, stone masonry, wood working did not move, as it did in Europe after medieval times, to the city to become the full-time occupations of independent craftsmen organized in guilds. In Bali, a highly developed, centuries old folk art remained in the villages, as if ready for foreign artists in the 20^th century to discover and to set up artists’ colonies around them in Ubud and Denpasar. Here for a discussion of Balinese art after there arrived in Bali new materials and new ideas for creating works of art, plus outsiders to purchase the art.

In my very first hours in Bali in 1978, walking about in Denpasar, near my hotel in Sanur, a boy, maybe twelve years old, came along beside me, speaking English. He had across one arm a pile of paintings done on cloth and was trying to talk me into buying. It was my first time seeing Balinese art and the paintings of pretty girls he showed me I dismissed as overdone and touristy, but two paintings did catch my attention. On the way from Paris to Jakarta I had spent time with family in Delhi and naturally noticed the paintings with Indian themes, one of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, and a second vaguely Indian. When I bought them the boy asked me if I would like to come to his village and meet his grandfather, the artist. Sadly, I could not arrange it. Ravi had the paintings framed and I keep the Barong hanging in my study. (I’ll try to do better photos of them.)

The dance and myth around the Barong is explained here. Here for a touristy but fun presentation in Ubud.

The Barong is a truly ancient myth, a male spirit in the likeness of a boar, a tiger, a serpent or a lion. The lion form is from the Gianyar Regency subculture; Ubud is located in Gianyar and therefore the lion Barong is most familiar to tourists. In an important ritual dance Barong protects the community against a powerful evil witch, Ranga, who is aided by Durga, Indian goddess of death. (I resist the temptation to do a psychological analysis of the myth.) Hanuman is part of the culture introduced through the India-influenced Majapahit Empire, beginning in the 1300s. He is in both the Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Craftwork from traditional societies intrigues me. Over the decades I acquired, besides my collection of fabrics, things of copper, bronze and brass; baskets; some pottery; a few knives; a bow and quiver of arrows; an ancient handmade gun; a Dayak blowgun (but no kris) and other items, not really a collection, just things I enjoy seeing and thinking about. I will comment next on the Bali crafts and folk art.

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