ARI Working Paper Series

In this paper the “sensuous conduct” of some Javanese who live in an urban neighbourhood (kampung) located in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia is described. This Javanese “sensuous conduct,” engaged within a social milieu, is examined as it is expressed in music making, in particular the quintessential country music of Indonesia, kroncong. Kroncong’s rusticity and its reliance on the pastoral are well known in scholarly circles and in the circles of neighbours within which the making of kroncong took place at the twilight of Suharto’s development state and regime. However, the nexus of conceptual frameworks and images with local activities and associations, as well as with structures of feeling and locally experienced affective registers generate alternative intentions and outcomes derived from conventional representations and mediations. This paper cites these conventions of kroncong music, long standing and durable enacted within actual and imagined social lives and relations of people and things that inhabit this kampung that itself is both a conceptual and experiential milieu that has undergone severe social and cultural change as a result of the economic and political crisis beginning in 1997 and 1998 respectively. The social life of Javanese sensuous conduct reveals forms of agency that navigate and occur within labyrinths of exchange among these actual and imagined relations of people and things. I refer to this relationship between making sense and society as the somaphoric organization of social life. The country feeling of kroncong becomes transformed in this labyrinth of deep sound that saturates human existence, metaphorically rendering experience in sensuous terms.