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Welcome to SEATRiP!

  • Friday, June 6, 2008
    12 noon to 2:00 p.m.
    ARTS 335

    Retuning Javanese Identities:
    Musical Choices and Cultural Affinities in a Modernizing Context
    Nancy I. Cooper, University of Hawai`i at Manoa
     
    A crisis has unfolded in Javanese music circles recently concerning an extremely popular fusion of indigenous, colonial-era, and popular genres using electronic instruments. Although innovations and fusions have long existed in Java, none has caused the alarm and vitriol associated with the revitalization and popularization of campur sari in the 1990s. The tuning of gamelan instruments to a ‘western’ scale and inclusion of electronic keyboards breach the limits of prior acceptability, providing lines of demarcation that I use in unlocking cultural factors behind the genre’s popularity, as well as the discomfiture of many musicians. Arguments over traditional gamelan versus campur sari reveal cultural tenacity on one hand and mass appeal of some elements of modernity on the other. Musicians’ responses provide an example of how social actors use their agency variously in maneuvering through an increasingly technological social framework to create alternative modernities.
     
    Nancy I. Cooper is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. Her research focuses on dynamics of gender, ritual, performance, and rural life. Her publications on Java include “Singing and Silences: transformations of power through Javanese seduction scenarios” in American Ethnologist (2000) and “Tohari’s Trilogy: Passages of Power and Time in Java” in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2004). Her current project is a book focused on individual human agency in the face of ongoing modernization, using examples of musical fusion and revitalized rituals in Java. Dr. Cooper also remains active as a singer with Javanese gamelan ensembles.

  • Prof. Tamara Ho was recognized with the Outstanding Faculty or Staff Member Award at the Leadership and Service Awards banquet hosted by Asian Pacific Student Programs on May 28, 2008.

Outstanding Faculty or Staff Award
(left to right) Joe Virata, Director, APSP, Tamara Ho; Judy Lee, Rivera Library

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