An interesting, illuminating essay on the Javanese cultural influence on our President

[YoungDemCA]

Some excerpts here from this 2013 essay by Edward Fox (I woudld strongly recommend that you read the whole thing)!

snip:

Unlike most political analysts, I see the imprint of Java in Obama far more than the imprint of Hawaii (where he was born and later went to high school); more than the imprint of Chicago (where he began his political career), and certainly more than Kenya (a highly popular notion that is particularly far-fetched). Indeed, it was in Java that Obama spent his childhood, had his primary education, and where his mother made her career. It was the country where his stepfather and his half-sister were born, and which he visited several times in his early adulthood. Obama still speaks some Indonesian.

snip:

...this formative period entailed more than a process of pragmatic acculturation. In Janny Scott’s biography of Obama’s mother, A Singular Woman, one of her interviewees maintains: ‘This is where Barack learnt to be cool … if you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.’ What the young Barack had to take was being taunted by Indonesian children — his classmates and the children he played with in his Jakarta neighbourhood — for his dark skin colour. At first he was often thought of as an Indonesian from one of the outer (racially Melanesian) islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Yet of this period in Jakarta, Obama’s biographer David Maraniss wrote that the young Barack ‘had become so fluent in the manners and language of his new home that his friends mistook him for one of them’.

The Javanese have a word for this kind of bearing. They call it halus. The nearest literal equivalent in English might be ‘chivalrous’, which means not just finely mannered, but implies a complete code of noble behaviour and conduct. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote some of the most important studies of Javanese culture in English, defined halus in The Religion of Java (1976) as:

Formality of bearing, restraint of expression, and bodily self-discipline … spontaneity or naturalness of gesture or speech is fitting only for those ‘not yet Javanese’ — ie, the mad, the simple-minded, and children.

Even now, four decades after leaving Java, Obama exemplifies halus behaviour par excellence.

snip:

One can see the clear distinction between Obama’s ostensibly aloof style of political negotiation in contrast to the aggressive, backslapping, physically overbearing political style of a president such as Lyndon Johnson.

snip:

Even to seem to exert himself is vulgar, yet he wins. This style of confrontation echoes that first famous live TV debate in the election of 2012 between Obama and Romney, in which Obama seemed passive, with eyes downcast, apparently defenceless (some alleged ‘broken’) in the face of his enemy, only to triumph in later debates and in the election itself.

https://aeon.co/essays/is-obama-the-first-javanese-president-of-the-us

Important things to consider when people criticize Obama as being "aloof" or "cold". President Obama definitely has been influenced in his thinking by a wide variety of cultures, including his exhibition of traits that are identifiably Javanese. In this multicultural and increasingly inter-connected world of ours, it is critical for our leaders to have some awareness and recognition of - and respect for - other cultures.

[tblue37]

1. Fascinating. Thanks! K&R. nt

[no bs joe]

2. Oops, I thought you were misspelling "Japanese"

My bad.

[brer cat]

3. Interesting read.

This does describe him well.

In his classic essay, ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ (1990), the Indonesian scholar Benedict Anderson describes the ruler’s halus as:

The quality of not being disturbed, spotted, uneven, or discoloured. Smoothness of spirit means self-control, smoothness of appearance means beauty and elegance, smoothness of behaviour means politeness and sensitivity.

[yallerdawg]

4. An intellectual exercise...

but I think his mother and her extraordinary life, his grandparents and the multiculturalism of Hawaii had much more influence than that time in Indonesia.

One thing seems to be very consistent - no matter where we go, we bring American with us!