Force against Force: Configurations of Martial Art in European and Indonesian Cultures

Abstract

Sociology of non-European sport cultures is faced by exceptional methodolo gical difficulties. Social sciences (above all quantifying ones) of the western type cannot cope with it, since it is a question here of complex alien structures and one cannot count on universal aspects of the basic categories. That is why a different interdisciplinary approach is needed in the case of Indonesian art of fight "pencak silat", which would continue with an analysis of configurations of the anthropology of culture (Ruth Benedict) of the sociology of civilization (Norbert Elias) and historical structuralism (Michel Foucault). In this way one gets an idea about the art of fighting thas is typical of Indonesian peoples and which is in clear contrast to the historical development of European fencing and boxing. The different exercise patterns reveal most clearly the completely different traditions and ways of socio-cultural development. It should not be permitted to reduce such complexity to a one-dimensional direction in historical development, in the light of which Indonesian forms may appear as "archaic" or "mediaeval". The more so since we live in times when there exists fascination with Asiatic forms of physical culture (Karate, Aikido, Taekwon, Do, Tai, Chi Chuan, Yoga), which is growing in industrial metropolises. And thus the colonial perspective of science about evolutionism becomes doubtful. There is no single modernization. It is a fact well known to all biologists that in the individual development of an organism its phylogeny is repeated with more or less accuracy. (...) And a similar principle can be found not only in the biological, but also in the cultu ral-historical development of mankind. (...) For that reason we see conditions in the social and other cultural institutions of more primitive races of man that the European peoples have gone through during the course of their cultural de velopment and left far behind them. (...) During my journeys through East- and Central Sumatra (1967), for example, I came into areas at the shores of the two Tapungs, the sources of the river Siak, where conditions and institutions re minded me most strongly of Freytag's "Ahnen", the eagerly devoured reading of my boyhood.1