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372 POSTSCRIPT TO PART II Here I would like to indulge in a bit of personal reminiscences to put my original work into perspective. I shall be doing so by acknowledging the help of several individuals who assisted or encouraged me in writing my dissertation and the subsequent “Banyan Tree” book in various ways. I would also like to thank those people who have helped me to undertake a brief but fruitful fieldwork for revisiting Kotagede, December 2008 to February 2009. My initial as well as official research topic before visiting Indonesia for the first time was on the social history of indigenous Javanese urban society. I intended to replicate and test Clifford Geertz’s work on the social history of a Javanese town of “Modjokuto” in a more appropriate location. I felt that Geertz’s “Modjokuto” was too shallow in its history and marginal to the centre of Javanese civilization. The town of Pare, which is the real name of “Modjokuto”, was in fact a young frontier town just emerged since the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the growth of sugar and tobacco cultivation. It was inappropriate, according to my view, to be taken as a sample for representing the traditional urban ways of Javanese life. I was planning to conduct fieldwork in Kotagede and Klaten, following Professor Selosoemardjan’s suggestion, to compare “old and new” urban communities in inner Central Java. Kotagede was thought to be a natural choice to study traditional urbanism in Java. The town appeared in history as the initial capital of the Islamized Mataram Kingdom in the late sixteenth century and has continued to maintain its physical and cultural identity until the modern times. The town was much older than Yogyakarta and Surakarta, the capitals of the two principalities tracing their history back to 1755 when the Mataram Kingdom split into two, and then four. Meanwhile, Klaten was somewhat comparable to “Modjokuto” as a new frontier town, developed with the imposition of the Culture System by the Dutch authorities in rural Central Java. However, I had to abandon the plan to do fieldwork in Klaten in the end because the data gathering in Kotagede consumed the entire time (and funds) allowed for me. It was in the course of doing general ethnographic fieldwork in Kotagede that my attention started to turn to the religious life of the townspeople. For, until the early twentieth century, the entire society was ordered to sustain the authority and power of the Surakarta Susuhunate and Yogyakarta Sultanate Postscript to Part II 373 religiously in the framework of Javanese Islam, or kejawen.Then, I encountered the Muhammadiyah, a movement for rationalization, enlightenment and modernization supported by the indigenous bourgeoisie. I began to realize gradually the significance of the movement in transforming the social, political, and cultural make-up of the town. As a result, I did collect a relatively large amount of data on the movement. And, the more did I learn about it, the stronger did my interest grow on it. Indeed, there occurred a shift of my attention in the field, i.e. from studying social history and general ethnography of the town to putting emphasis on the religious life of the townspeople and its transformation promoted by the Muhammadiyah movement. But, I was not quite sure yet whether I should take up the Muhammadiyah as the topic of my dissertation even after leaving Kotagede for Ithaca in 1972. For, I had a good amount of data on many other aspects of the town as well.1 It was after having arrived back at Cornell that I finally decided to arrange and analyse my data along the development of the Muhammadiyah in the local context. For this, David Penny of the Australian National University (ANU), who was visiting Cornell then, gave me a decisive advice: “You have sufficient data to write up ten dissertations, Mitsuo. But, you can and should write only one. So, what is your choice and what is your thesis?” I chose to deal with the Muhammadiyah and present, as my thesis, the point that Islam had been a deep-rooted living faith and the Muhammadiyah was growing stronger in the town via reforming it. Looking back, I deeply appreciate Dr Penny’s advice. Before completing my dissertation, I had to leave for Adelaide to start teaching there in 1974. There I finished writing my dissertation and sent it to Cornell University. It was accepted in 1976. After that, I had to endure a sort...

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