Unimagined Solidarity — Notes on an Indonesian Funeral

Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson died on 13 December 2015 in East Java, Indonesia. The news spread swiftly — through Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp messages and email — from multiple sources that those who received it considered reliable. Nevertheless, the news was unbelievable, not so much in the sense that the fact was suspect, but in the sense that we found it difficult to habituate ourselves to the fact. In writing about Javanese death practices, Jim Siegel, one of Anderson’s closest friends, started by saying that “[a] person is dead when he has been given up for dead by those closest to him” (Siegel 1983, p. 1). That is, the phenomenology of death includes both biological death and social death. Siegel adds that, in Java, the time lapse between the two is short, sometimes a matter of minutes. With Anderson, this was not the case. He was not given the “hurried, subdued, yet methodically efficient” Javanese funeral (Geertz 1973, p. 146), which would have been too short. Instead, he had an Indonesian funeral, and a unique one at that.

Anderson’s body reposed at Rumah Duka Adi Jasa, a Chinese funeral parlour in Surabaya, starting 15 December. Chinese funerals typically take a few days, and so this arrangement allowed time for family and friends to come to the funeral from the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines and other parts of Indonesia, among other places. The funeral rituals were held on the evening of 18 December, the cremation took place on 19 December, and the ashes were cast into the Java Sea on 20 December. Notes on the events of these days follow.

18 December — Funeral Rituals

I arrived in Surabaya to attend Anderson’s funeral on 18 December. I was neither Anderson’s student nor particularly close to him, but he had been generous to me and we had maintained an intermittent correspondence over the last few years. Since I was in the region, I decided to visit Surabaya and pay him my last respects.¹

On reaching the funeral parlour, I saw the familiar faces of former Cornell students who had studied with Anderson, and I met others associated with him in one way or another, often on a much deeper level than I. These varying degrees of intimacy with Anderson notwithstanding, on this occasion we all shared a sense of horizontal comradeship based on our relationships with him. In such a gathering, people tended to share spontaneously stories of their encounters with Anderson, which in turn found echoes in the experiences of those who were listening. It is these echoes that affirm the solidarity, not only among those who were present in Surabaya, but also among unknown others who can identify with these encounters in their own respective contexts.

Anderson’s funeral was Indonesian, but in an unconventional way. Most people, at death, become religious subjects, because they are accorded religious rituals that facilitate their journey into the unknown. In Indonesia, this is particularly the case, since one cannot live or die as a non-religious subject. The Indonesian political subject is, following the founding state ideology of Pancasila, by definition religious. Moreover, with the purging of the Communists at the onset of the Soeharto era in 1965–66 and into the 1970s, state discipline enforced the religiosity of Indonesian political subjects.

As a result, Indonesian funerals had to be religious, following any of the religions officially recognized by the state. Although Anderson was a foreigner, his funeral had to follow one of the templates offered by the funeral parlour, at least to a certain extent. A Catholic altar set-up was chosen, with Anderson’s framed photograph placed in front of a crucifix and with a white candle on either side. Behind the altar was Anderson’s open casket, marked religiously by a cross and a picture of the last supper.