The oldest and most extensive written language of Southeast Asia is Old Javanese, or Kawi. It is the oldest language in terms of written records, and the most extensive in the number and variety of its texts. Javanese literature has taken many forms. At various times, prose stories, sung poetry or other metrical types, chronicles, scientific, legal, and philosophical treatises, prayers, chants, songs, and folklore were all written down. Yet relatively few texts are available in English. The unstudied texts remaining are an unexplored record of Javanese culture as well as a language still alive as a literary medium in Bali. Introduction to Old Javanese Language and Literature represents a first step toward remedying the dearth of Old Javanese texts available to English-speaking students. The ideal teaching companion, this anthology offers transliterated original texts with facing-page English translations. Theanthology focuses on prose selections, since their straightforward style and syntax offer the beginning student the most rewarding experience. Four sections make up the collection. Part I offers several short readings as the most accessible entry point into Old Javanese. Part II contains two moralistic fables from an Old Javanese retelling of the Hindu Pañcatantra cycle. Part III takes up the epic, providing excerpts from one of the books of the Old Javanese retelling of the Mahābhārata. Part IV offers excerpts from two chronicles, the generic conventions of which challenge received notions of history writing because of their supernaturalism and folkloric elements. Includes introduction, glossary, and notes.

In this fascinating study the lives and mores of women in one of the least understood but most densely populated areas of the world are unveiled through the eyes of generations of court poets. For more than a millennium, the poets of the Indic courts of Java and Bali composed epic kakawin poems in which they recreated the court environment where they and their royal patrons lived. Major themes in this poetry form include war, love, and marriage. It is a rich source for the cultural and social history of Indonesia. Still being produced in Bali today, kakawin remain of interest and relevance to Balinese cultural and religious identities. This book draws on the epic kakawin poetry tradition to examine the institutions of courtship and marriage in the Indic courts. Its primary purpose is to explore the experiences of women belonging to the kakawin world, although the texts by nature reveal more about the discourses concerning women, sexuality, and gender than of the historical experiences of individual women. For over a thousand years these royal courts were major patrons of the arts. The court-sponsored epic works that have survived provide an ongoing literary testimony to the cultural and social concerns of court society from its ealiest recorded history until its demise at the end of the nineteenth century. This study examines the idealized images of women and sexuality that have pervaded Javanese and Balinese culture and provides insights into a number of cultural practices such as sati or bela (self-immolation of widows).

In Storytelling in Bali, Hildred Geertz makes a case for the importance of the role of informal storytelling as an engine of social change in Bali in the 1930s. This is a study of more than 200 texts dictated by the painters of the village of Batuan in 1936 to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. It is completed by three years field work in Batuan in the 1980s. The tales reveal a set of strong ambivalences about the magical powers of kings, priests and sorcerers, and about social strains within villages and families. These narratives were related in the daily settings of home and coffee shop and also in the spectacular dance-dramas of the time.

The book contains essays on current issues in arts and humanities in which peoples and cultures compete as well as collaborate in globalizing the world while maintaining their uniqueness as viewed from cross- and interdisciplinary perspectives. The book covers areas such as literature, cultural studies, archaeology, philosophy, history, language studies, information and literacy studies, and area studies. Asia and the Pacifi c are the particular regions that the conference focuses on as they have become new centers of knowledge production in arts and humanities and, in the future, seem to be able to grow signifi cantly as a major contributor of culture, science and arts to the globalized world. The book will help shed light on what arts and humanities scholars in Asia and the Pacifi c have done in terms of research and knowledge development, as well as the new frontiers of research that have been explored and opening up, which can connect the two regions with the rest of the globe.

In the fifteenth century the ritual called the Night af siwa was well-known in South India, more specifically in the Empire of Vijayanagara, which was flourishing at that time. A Javanese poet of those days, Mpu Tanakun by name, who had become acquainted with the ritual, wrote a didactic poem which aimed to make it known and have it accepted in his own country. For this religious message he employed the form of the kakawin, the court poem or kävya of Java, and in imitation of Indian nxxlels he clad his message in the tale of the hunter, Lubdhaka, who despite his sinful existence was able to share the bliss af heaven through the simple fact that - by accident and unawares- he fulfilled the essential elements af the ritual. It is not known whether the poet's efforts met with success in Java itself; his poem did, however, remain known in Bali, the preserver of so many items af medieval Javanese culture. Not only have Balinese priests laid down and elaborated in religions works the ritual which he proclaimed, but the poem has also inspired Balinese artists to make paintings, in former centuries as well as this. And so the story with its religious message from India, by way of the inspiration of a Java nese poet, has beoome part af the Indonesian cultural heritage. Five centuries after Ta.