One of the news stories dominating the Indonesian media lately has been the somewhat tense relationship between Indonesia and its neighbours to the north, Malaysia. The pretext to this squabble was that Malaysia, allegedly, should have stolen an Indonesian dance. Yes, you read right, a dance! To be more precise, the Balinese welcome dance called pendet.
If it is Asian, truly it is Malaysian!
In their promotion of a TV-series titled “Enigmatic Malaysia” Discovery Channel aired images of the pendet dance, and in fact, also images of a shadow play puppet, a wayang kulit. This angered many (or at least a few) Indonesian’s to the degree that some took to streets to protest. On the TV-news we could watch youngsters throwing eggs at the Malaysian embassy while demanding that the diplomatic relations to Malaysia should be discontinued. A few over-enthusiastic activists even began stopping cars in the streets of Jakarta in search of Malaysian citizens. For a foreigner it was somewhat puzzling to observe the seriousness and level of engagement displayed by some of the actors that took part in this dispute over national cultural heritage.
The Malaysian Ministry for Culture and Tourism rushed to explain that they had not made the advertisement, and apologised for the incident. Assumingly, Discovery Channel’s Singapore office was to blame. Also they have publicly regretted their blunder.
Could culture be seen s belonging to a particular state?
In the debate following the pendet dance dispute, securing the national heritage and peoples’ cultural property rights has become a main element in the discussion. Indonesia has already registered the kris (or keris, the traditional dagger) and the wayang (shadow plays) as so called “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. However, this UNESCO system is established to preserve for the coming generations particularly valuable cultural elements that are feared to be in danger of extinction, not to give certain states exclusive copy right to certain artefacts.
The case of the kris could serve as an example of the difficulty of claiming that a cultural artefact belongs strictly within certain national borders. Although the origin of the kris may be traced to Java, undoubtedly, the kris is as Malaysian as it is Indonesian. Indeed, in the heydays of the kris, the territories of the Malay sultanates covered parts of what today is both Malaysia and Indonesia. Cultural practices and artefacts, whose roots could be traced back far beyond the life-span of modern nation states, cannot be said to be the exclusive property of a certain state. Some of the more famous Balinese dances, such as the kecak dance, were actually manufactured into the form it has today in the 1920ies by the German painter/musician Walter Spies. Maybe Germany could claim that kecak is German?
Copyright on Culture
Over the last couple of decades we have seen a growing tendency of “folklorisation” and commoditisation of cultural expressions. Rituals that formerly played a role in the lives of local communities have been extracted from their original context and been turned into entertainment for tourists wanting to experience a bit of the authentic and the exotic. Through the process of transforming rituals into show, culture also gets a price. Those who can display a spectacular cultural performance when advertising a holiday package have an advantage over those who cannot. This is particularly important in the part of the Southeast Asian tourism industry that caters for the European/North American/Australian market segment. When a Norwegian tourist decides one year not to go to Spain for his holiday for the tenth time, but instead ventures off to Malaysia or Bali, he does so hoping to experience something else and something more than a beach, a bar and an international hotel. The added value for a Western tourist lays either in experiencing extraordinary nature, such as coral reefs and clear blue water, or in the sensation of coming face to face with exotic and spectacular cultural displays. It should not come as a surprise that when culture could be transformed into hard cash in this manner, it also becomes an object of dispute. We can see that the same mechanisms come into play here as it does when someone finds oil or gold on their land. As we know, in such situations conflict looms around the next corner. However, both the Indonesian and Malaysian governments have wisely kept their cool amid the pendet dance brawl.