17 - The Ordering of Generations: Change and Continuity in Old Javanese Kinship

Summary

Introduction

This brief communication is intended to offer a few simple observations on old Javanese kinship. In 1977, when I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, I had the good fortune of spending a considerable time with the noted scholar P.J. Zoetmulder, who was then in the process of completing his massive dictionary of old Javanese. In the course of various informal discussions, the question arose of whether it was possible to construct from among the entries in his dictionary the structure of the old Javanese kinship system. The question was not simply a philological one of tracing the changes that have occurred in the Javanese words used to refer to particular categories of relatives, but rather the more anthropological question of investigating whether a coherent terminological system could be established for old Javanese relational categories as a whole, and whether it was possible to compare this configuration of relationship terms with that used by Javanese today. This exercise seemed particularly relevant to the study of Javanese history because, since the time of W.H. Rassers, there have been persistent suggestions in the published literature on Java (see Bertling 1936 as an example) that the kinship and social organization of ancient Java was markedly different from that of the present day. Therefore, with typical enthusiasm, Zoetmulder searched his entire collection of file cards and produced for me all of the entries that he could find that related to kinship. Zoetmulder's dictionary has since been published and is generally available. It is nevertheless appropriate that I acknowledge that the initial analysis on which this paper is based was undertaken with Zoetmulder's unpublished notes and thoughtful assistance.

Old Javanese and modern Javanese

Methodological difficulties abound in attempting a comparison between old Javanese and modern Javanese particularly on account of the problems involved in specifying the two targets for comparison. For his purposes Zoetmulder defines old Javanese as the language of the earliest Javanese literature which was produced on Java between the 9th and 14th centuries, and thereafter was preserved on Bali where it has continued in use to the present day.