Birthday Parties in the Kampung and Some Thoughts on the Indonesian Family

Another season of birthdays is here. Sam’s party yesterday started us off. Su is next in three weeks with her 50th, then me almost a month later, Mercedes the next day and then Rebecca about six months later. We no longer have the large lavish parties with a cast of thousands (well dozens anyway), entertainment, MCs, costumes for the kids, closing down the street in front of the house, etc. I was never particularly fond of those monster affairs, but Su and the kids were and so we had them. Strangely enough, just about the time that we were having these, large kids’ parties were becoming popular around the country. Maybe a sign of the developing middle class, conspicuous consumption or just a way to introduce a little excitement into the humdrum daily life of kampung residents.

During one party, a Balinese tour guide led a large group of Danish tourists into the kampung, stumbled across one of our parties and invited himself and his tour group. I was somewhat taken aback to be one of the exotic “others” that was being photographed and videotaped, but my wife thought it was great and led the group up to a favored spot in the festivities so they could see everything and get first grabs at the food.

These days we just have family which gives us quite enough participants considering the size of the family here. This was the first party without Mercedes and Rebecca – I know Mercedes missed it, I’m not sure about Rebecca. She’s as tight-lipped as usual about her activities in Denpasar. So Sam turned 16 and with the end of the school year just weeks away that means that he too will be gone in just a few years. As it is, having Rebecca gone has made the house seem a lot quieter.

Indonesian families have traditionally been quite large; during former president Suharto’s New Order regime, the government aggressively promoted their dua anak cukup (two children are enough) program of family planning. That did bring down the birth rate in the country, but still it’s quite common to see families with three or more kids. In a country with no social security program or safety net for old age, kids still are the retirement program for the poor and working class. Children still believe that it’s their responsibility to care for their parents in their old age. But with salaries the way they are in Indonesia even for even professionals, there’s only so much that kids can give back to their parents.

Some elderly folks will move in with their children, or if the parents have enough space, one or more of the kids will move back home. The parents get some support – financial and emotional – and the kdis get babysitters. For other less fortunate parents, they receive at least one visit a year at Idul Fitri time when everyone around the country does the pulang kampung (going back to the village) routine and the roads, trains, planes and buses are a mass of moving humanity. During these times, the children who have left home bring back presents to their parents and any other family members still back in the kampung. I frequently have people my age proudly tell me that their child has this or that job and that they just sent them some money or gave them a TV when they last visited home.

So, I’m getting to that stage in life now. My first child from another wife lives in the States, my eldest daughter here is away at nursing school and has no intentions of coming back to live at home, my second daughter is hoping to get into the university down south and most likely will never end up living in the kampung either, now Sam is getting close to the age of leaving home while Meredith still has at least another five years with us.

I spent some time last night sitting on the roof, after everyone had gone home, pondering the nature of the Indonesian family, how we fit into that cultural model and what the future will bring. Our kids have been brought up in a mixed home with cultural elements from both the US and Indonesia. It will be interesting how these play out over the coming years.

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Anthropology and the Definition of Marriage

With President Barrack Obama’s announcement that he is in favor of legalizing same-sex marriages, I was fascinated to watch some of the immediate comments from Democrats and Republicans. Of course, one of the first anti-Obama statements was from the head of the Catholic League and fell back on the totally unsupported assertion that marriage must be between a man and a woman. Why? Because it’s always been that way, it was decreed so by God back in the Garden of Eden and it’s the only way to raise children. The head of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, stressed his credentials as a Ph.D. in sociology and argued that Social Science supports his arguments against same-sex marriage. What Social Science? Does he read any recent research? What does anthropology have to say about this?

I’ve been interested in marriage and the family from my early days as an undergraduate major in anthropology. In fact, it was Margaret Mead’s work that first fueled my interest in the field of anthropology and in studies of marriage, family and sex. My rather hastily written Master’s Degree thesis was on marriage and the family in the Caribbean. While not particularly well-written, the research was solid, and I wish that I had access to my section on the definitions of marriage.

An Islamic Marriage in Singaraja Bali

So lacking that I did what any post-modern, 21st Century independent learner does; I started googling the topic. The definition of marriage has long been a topic of interest and debate in the anthropological literature. It was obvious based on anthropological fieldwork that the one male – one female definition of marriage was not a cultural universal. One of the most famous – well, famous for anthropology students – works that discussed the definition of marriage incorporating research from the non-Western world was Kathleen Gough’s article, The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage. She proposed this definition of marriage:

Marriage is a relationship established between a woman and one or more other persons, which provides that a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by the rules of the relationship, is accorded full birth-status rights common to normal members of his society or social stratum.

While this definition has been criticized by a number of anthropologists, it is still, after over half a century one of the regularly quoted anthropological definitions of marriage. A few examples of marriage other than the Nayar that run counter to the monogamous male-female definition of marriage are: the Na of China, the Sherpa, Toda and Pahari of India, the Irigwe of Nigeria, the Lele from the western Congo, the Bari and Yanomama of South America, the Shoshoni of the past, the original Mormons (pre-Mitt Romney) the polygamy of present-era Muslims, Chinese ghost marriages and on and on. The main point being that to claim that monogamous male-female marriage is the only “natural” form of marriage is patently absurd.

A few years ago, Glenn Stanton, director of global family formation studies of Focus on the Family, announced that anthropologists showed a “clear consensus” about the definition of a family as a male-female union. The American Anthropological Association stance, however, based on a statement made in 2004 is that:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

There are many issues involved in the increasingly heated battle over same-sex marriage in the United States: morality, religion, economics and child-raising are some of the main ones. But, as I continue to follow this debate, a few things stand out to an American watching from far away and those are fear, ignorance and prejudice. President Obama’s bold statement should lend some support and comfort to those people fighting for the rights of gay and lesbian couples. The United States needs to join the list of countries that allow same-sex marriage: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and Sweden.

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Free Online Educational Videos: Retirement Activities for the Independent Learner

I’ve been writing about free online educational videos for close to a year now, and, as I wrote about yesterday on The International Teacher, there’s an explosion of learning opportunities hitting the cyberworld right now.

First, there’s an important distinction to be made when discussing educational videos. There are videos of university classes that are available for downloading or viewing online; these aren’t interactive and the non-enrolled student, or the independent learner as I’m going to call people like me, doesn’t get any kind of credit or a certificate or any other type of recognition for following these lectures. Of course, you don’t do any homework, write any essays or take any finals.

The idea is learning for the sake of learning. I’m thinking here about courses like Amy Hungerford’s Yale University Engl 291 course on the American Novel Since 1945. I love the course, and over the past six months or so, I’ve followed about half of the lectures. Or, the Stanford University Human Behavioral Biology course by Robert Sapolsky that I am also following. Another site that offers free downloadable university lectures, animations, lecture notes and online tests is LearnersTV. All of these are sites offer great academic courses and are a joy for the independent learner, but there’s something lacking here unless the IL is really motivated and that’s interaction. I love listening to these lectures, but who do I discuss them with when I’m tingling with motivation and ideas? Well, I can write about them on any one of my blogs, but that’s still not very interactive. So, good stuff but something is lacking.

One more site that offers free instructional vides and DIY projects is 5min Life Videopedia. Most of these videos are not academic, but are great for learning how to do things like installing RAM in your notebook, making strange little arts and crafts, traveling to India and more.

And then there are the online university courses such as Udacity, edX and Coursera that I wrote about on The International Teacher and that award certificates to learners who complete the courses.

So there are lots of options for those of us who are living the retired life be in the tropics or anywhere else in the world with good internet connections.

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Fishing in Kampung Bugis Bali

Took my new boat out yesterday for the first time. It’s a 3 meter rowboat which is perfect for the sea in front of the house. I’ve gone through a number of these boats over the years. The best was the Blue Otter II, which I bought from my old buddy when I lived in Papua; it had a five horsepower engine to go with it. I sold that one years ago to a Russian expat who lived down in Kuta. The original Blue Otter was just like my new boat, but with plastic oars; this one has aluminum oars. It’s a bit bulky, so I have to get someone to help me get it into the water, but other than that it looks like it’s going to give me some fun.

So, yesterday I took it out for the first time along with my snorkeling gear, a fishing pole and my new waterproof digital camera. I’m probably one of the worst fishermen in the world. I lived on the Klamath River when I was doing my anthropological fieldwork and managed never to catch a fish on a river that provided an abundant living for thousands of years for the American Indian tribes that lived in the area. When I moved to Kampung Bugis, right on the Bali Sea, I thought that I would try fishing again.

I have caught a few fish over the years, but more often than not, I come back in empty much to the amusement of my family and neighbors. But, for me, fishing is just an excuse for getting the boat out on the water; rowing around for some exercise; taking a few photos of the kampung, sea and mountains in the background,and doing a little snorkeling. But, what I enjoy most about fishing is that I can sit back in the boat, have a few cigarettes, listen to the sounds of kampung life that drift out across the water and meditate about life. Out on the sea, Bali takes on a lovely glow and the troubles of this sometimes confusing and out-of-balance world just melt away in the glow of the tropical sun. If I catch a fish or two, well that’s just a happy bonus.

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Spring Cleaning in Kampung Bugis, Singaraja

I fondly remember each spring when I was a boy watching my mother take down the storm windows, put up the screens and start cleaning the house – under carpets, behind chairs and the television, on top of the refrigerator and in every corner where dust, grime and mold could hide from view. Spring cleaning – it meant warm weather, sunny skies, school vacations and, of course, baseball.

Here I am in Kampung Bugis over a half century later re-enacting those same actions (well, no storm windows or screens, but plenty of dust, grime and mold), as well as some more 21st century ones like cleaning out old files on the computers, burning home movies onto disks for storage and such. But, for me, this spring cleaning is not just about sprucing up the house; I’m working on cleaning up the mental and intellectual cobwebs and building some new neural pathways. As I wrote in TechTalk yesterday, I’ve started my programming course with Udacity.

And, I’ve discovered more online learning resources that I’m beginning to tap. I read an article in the Huffington Post a few days ago titled, “Why Learning Leads to Happiness.” It notes that:

The benefits of learning and engagement are particularly important in promoting healthy aging. “Your mind is really like a muscle, and using it is a key” to lifelong mental health, Berkman says. There has been a surge in attention to mental exercise as a way of preventing Alzheimer’s disease, for example. While the link between such efforts and disease prevention has not been definitively established, most scientists believe there is a beneficial relationship between lifelong learning and staying socially active with mental well-being and happiness later in life. Older people who become isolated can lose the activities that trigger their minds to engage in enjoyable and stimulating activities.“

The benefits of learning and engagement are particularly important in promoting healthy aging. “Your mind is really like a muscle, and using it is a key” to lifelong mental health, Berkman says. There has been a surge in attention to mental exercise as a way of preventing Alzheimer’s disease, for example. While the link between such efforts and disease prevention has not been definitively established, most scientists believe there is a beneficial relationship between lifelong learning and staying socially active with mental well-being and happiness later in life. Older people who become isolated can lose the activities that trigger their minds to engage in enjoyable and stimulating activities.

I was listening to a wannabe Bali expat explain why he “had” to start one more restaurant in Bali (do we really need any more restaurants in Bali?) and couldn’t just retire here. The reason was essentially that retirement means death and giving up. Building a restaurant (and maybe building some villas (do we really need more villas in Bali?) is going to save him from a long and lonely retirement. All of which made me question whether he was able to get out of his traditional mindset and discover all the amazing (and free) opportunities that are available to people these days – retired, working, students, teachers and everyone else. He just didn’t get it.

So this spring, I’m engaged in some physical and mental spring cleaning. If you want to take advantage of some of the great educational resources available for free on the internet, stay tuned to this blog, as well as the TechTalk and The International Teacher blogs. Happy learning to all.

Posted in health issues in bali, home repairs and construction, life after retirement, life in the tropics, online education, retirement in bali | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment