ID Nugroho, The Jakarta Post, Jember
From outside, the house on Jl. Sumatera, Jember, East Java, looks modest.
Its front veranda is not spacious and just large enough for two motorbikes. A signboard is stuck on the upper right-hand wall. It reads: ""Group Concerned with Regional Culture and Tourism -- Kompyawisda"".
Kompyawisda is a non-government organization concerned with the development of culture and tourism in East Java.
This is the cultural ""workshop"" run by Dr Ayu Sutarto, a cultural activist and also a lecturer at the School of Literature of Jember University.
""It is my modest workshop where my friends and I in this group work and discuss cultural affairs in East Java. Of late, modernization has started to erode the culture of this province,"" he told The Jakarta Post, which met him last week.
Usually addressed as Pak Ayu, this man is inseparable from cultural development in East Java. Since the 1980s, Ayu, born in Pacitan on Sept. 21, 1949, has been engaged in cultural advocacy work. In 1985, for example, his book entitled The Legends of Madura was published.
Since then, Ayu has published many more books, all related to cultural affairs in East Java. They include Sudirman: A Simple Man, A Great General (1986), Queen Kilisuci: A Story of Reog (1988), English-Indonesian Special Dictionary (1990) and Revealing the Struggle involving Art, Politics, Islam and Indonesia, to mention a few.
His interest in culture was deepest when he chose the Tengger ethnic group in Mount Bromo as the focus for his dissertation at the University of Indonesia.
For five years, Ayu, awarded a scholarship from ILDEP at Leiden University in the Netherlands, lived on the slopes of Mount Bromo. ""My doctorate degree, which I earned with distinction, belongs to the Tengger people,"" he said humbly.
His research on the Tengger also won him first prize in the selection of manuscripts on humanities held by PT Balai Pustaka in 1997. In the same year, his research came out as a book entitled Legend of Kasada and Karo of the Tengger People of Lumajang.
Having spent many years dealing with the cultural affairs of East Java, Ayu has a good grasp of East Javanese culture, which is often treated unfairly. This has prompted him to continue in his efforts to defend it.
""Government policies neglect the cultural side and therefore create new problems that are more complicated and harder to solve,"" said Ayu, who used to teach Javanese language to Surinamese in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
The ""Green Revolution"" during the New Order period is a good example of how the government neglected the cultural aspects in carrying out its policy. That program, which sought to improve agricultural production through the use of superior seedlings and factory-made fertilizer, raised farmers' earnings but created dependency.
When the prices of superior seedlings and factory-made fertilizes eventually increased because of economic pressures in other parts of the world, the farmers had to bear the brunt.
Unfortunately, the farmers were no longer accustomed to using ordinary seeds and organic fertilizers. ""Things would have been different had the government maintained a good grasp of cultural matters,"" said Ayu, recognized as one of the 15 highest-achieving lecturers in the country.
If the government took culture into account, it could make use of the character of each ethnic group to encourage culture-based development programs.
East Java, for example, has 10 distinct cultural groups, he said. They are Mataraman Javanese (around Kediri), Panaragan Javanese (Ponorogo), Arek (Surabaya), Samin (Bojonegoro), Tengger (Mount Bromo), Osing (Banyuwangi), Pandalungan (Jember), Madura Island, Madura Bawean (Bawean Island) and Madura Kangean.
Each has its own character, which the government can make use of in its development efforts. ""The Tengger people appreciate nature very much, so in agriculture they could provide an example of a superior agricultural projects without the use of factory-made materials,"" Ayu said.
Unfortunately, he said, the present government did not seem to understand the significance of these cultural traits. In many cities throughout the country, for example, the government prefers to set up malls, believing that would be the best path to modernization, rather than encouraging community activities related to the arts.
""Malls have sprung up and taken over the green spaces. Even towns or city squares, which should ideally serve as areas for model cultural development projects, have also been converted into market places for vendors and transvestites,"" he deduced.
