Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama by James L. Peacock (review)

1970 BOOK REVIEWS 439 RITES OF MODERNIZATION: SYMBOLIC AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF INDONESIAN PROLETARIAN DRAMA, by James L. Peacock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. James Peacock, an anthropologist, has written what I suspect will become a minor classic of its kind. On one level, it is a meticulously researched and documented general description of Ludruk proletarian drama of East Java. Ludruk is popular, commercial theater-one of a dozen such forms in Southeast Asia. It is "wildly comic, and often gross" and its audience consists of "whores, gamblers, drunks, and thieves." Based on performances of 82 plays which he saw in and around Surabaja during 1962-63, he describes with authority ludruk's four standard "components": Ngremo, or "rapture" dance; dagelan, or clown segment; selingan , or interlude songs of the sexually ambivalent transvestite singer (all ladruk performers are men); and the tjerita or play. He contrasts ludruk's childish, oral. gel1itally-oriented clown figure with Sernar, the ancient and powerful god-clownservant of Javanese wajang kulit shadow theater. He vividly sets down the gamey reactions of the audience to the transvestite performer's attempts to present a refined image (based on classical female court dance). He gives us opportunities on almost every page to absorb the reality of ludruk's world through a dozen scenarios, scores of interviews with players and audience, translations of jokes and song lyrics, music transcriptions, and twenty-two performance photographs. His descriptions continue throughout the text, so a reader who wants the bare facts about ludruk should be prepared to delve into most of the book's sixteen chapters. Glossary, bibliography, and index are extensive and excellent. On a second level, Peacock extensively analyzes both the form and the Content of jokes, songs, and plays according to categories of "refined vs. vulgar" (alus-kasar) and "modern vs. traditional," (madju-kuna). He finds a movement away from valuing refined behavior and toward valuing modern behavior. When he analyzes the plots of a dozen plays depicting domestic problems, he discovers two types: traditional, in which action is cyclical and in which the original family group is restored to a condition of harmony; and modern, in which the chief character is motivated by a "quest" (i.e., goal) that is achieved and that results in the creation of a new domestic situation. Marriage ofa proletarian girl to an elite boy is the usual "quest," representing upward mobility in the new Indonesian society. Modern plots are gradually supplanting traditional ones. The perceptive analysis is must reading for every theater person working with the drama of non-Western cultures. Yet, the ultimate aim of Peacock's work lies ona third and higher level. He argues that ludruk assists the modernization process in Indonesia by providing its semi-literate audience with examples of "symbolic action," that is, life-acted-out. with which they can empathize and in real life emulate. He here moves past the conventional idea that drama "reflects" society, or even the idea of anthropologists that symbolic acts (which include all arts) "legitimatize" already established values. He sees the symbolic actions presented on the ludruk stage as an active agent of the social process, as much a cause of change as a response to it. Thus ludruk's importance . In addition, Peacock suggests social scientists should study theater as thoroughly as religion or economic systems or social organizations in order to understand how human society functions, something which has not been done to date. The author candidly poinfs out whel'e his work is incomplete or hypothetical, but except for minor quibbles I find the presentation very persuasive. Peacock gives much attention to the form, or structure, of the four-hour sequence of song, dance, and story elements in ludruk. Linking himself with Marshall McLuhan , he condemns the content fixation of most Western intellectuals; if "con- 440 MODERN DRAMA February tent analysis" is an established field of study, he asks, why isn't "symbolic form analysis"? Indeed, why not? It is certainly no coincidence that it is from an analysis of Asian drama-in which form is always important-th,at an anthropologist has here formulated a concept of form as determinant of meaning. In these days when...