The Role of Structural Organisation and Myth in Javanese Historiography

The galaxy of non-indigenous elements confronting the student of Indonesian cultural history has often obscured the fact that, in order to elucidate a valid picture of their role and significance, these elements need to be studied in their own terms, in relation to their own environment and at specific synchronic levels, such levels being but points on the continuum of the historical process. Thus to consider Javanese culture exclusively as a linear (and corrupt) descendant of Indian culture on the one hand, or as perpetually conditioned by a hypothetical indigenous ur-society in the manner of Rassers on the other, leads to a dead end, and has stultified much otherwise useful and impressive research.