*** Note: There is a post preceding this one that is still being worked on. References to "Kliwon Selasa", "Kliwon Jumaat", and my research assistant will not make sense until you read it. For background - Kliwon Selasa/Kliwon Jumaat are two days when many people go to Parangkusumo [Parangtritis's western side] to do rituals at two sacred rocks there. My research assistant has been hired and his name is Nur. Will finish that post soon. ***
This evening I went with my friend Dewi to meet her lecturer (& friend) Pak Agus. He lives deep in Bantul in one of the areas completely destroyed by the 2006 earthquake. He actually lost his mother and his sister during the quake. All the houses there were new, Dewi told me. She said that the government gave each family 10 million rupiah after the earthquake. That's about a thousand dollars. I didn't know you could build a house with that much money. I guess with gotong-royong anything is possible. [Gotong-royong is sort of like obligatory community service within one's neighborhood. It's a deeply rooted tradition in Javanese society. Think of it as something similar to a barn-raising, except ongoing.]
Pak Agus teaches at a local university - I forget which one it is. He's a thin, balding man with a high pitched voice and a sort of bouncy energy about him. His wife was really nice and his daughter was adorable. She pranced around like she owned the place, wearing a dress covered with Peter Pan characters. We sat on the floor and watched a bit of sinetron [Indonesian tv drama] before Pak Agus got home. Then Dewi and I sat at the table with him and he spoke with her about her research. A few minutes later a plate of steaming hot fried bananas was set in front of me. They were grown by his neighbor, Pak Agus told me. They tasted even better than they smelled - kind of like fried plantains except better and not soggy. I think I'm getting spoiled eating all this fresh food here... The other day at Dewi's house, we ordered lunch from the fish place next door - "the fish place next door" being a dude with a fishing rod sitting at the river that runs next to Dewi's street. Dewi told him what size fish she wanted and about 20 minutes later she went back and returned with a huge baked and seasoned fish. But I digress...
After Dewi and Pak Agus spoke about schoolwork for 20 minutes or so, I asked him a few questions about Parangtritis/Parangkusumo. He told me that he's very interested in that area, but he can't go there because his neighbors will think he's going to buy prostitutes. Haha! Maybe if he was to go with the rest of his family it wouldn't be a problem, he said. But he told me that even if he were to go in the daytime, people would still have their suspicions. Parangtritis/Parangkusumo seems to have an unsavory reputation among people in the Bantul/Yogya area due to all the prostitution that goes on there. He told me that there are prostitutes there not only on the Kliwon Selasa & Kliwon Jumaat nights, and also offered to introduce to a few neighbors of his that often go there in search of sex. Here is the rest of what he told me:
The Kliwon Selasa/Kliwon Jumaat rituals have been going on for generations; they are nothing new.
If people want to secure a new job, get some money, etc, they might go and do a ritual at the rocks at Parangkusumo.
When Pak Agus was younger, during his high school years (he was born in 1960), there were many foreign tourists that visited Parangtritis each year. They've all been scared off by terrorism, he says. This must be, because I saw not more than three foreigners at the beach all day when I was there last week.
There did not used to be many prostitutes at Parangtritis/Parangkusumo when he was young. He says that after a big prostitution complex at Kotagede [an area near Yogyakarta] was shut down by the police, they relocated en masse to Parangtritis. He forgets which year this happened in. I'm going to try to find some archived info about that, either from the Bantul regency government or some sort of newspaper archival source. Hugely relevant to my research. As a result of the influx of sex workers, all the sexual supplement vendors popped up there; in the past there have been vendors there on Kliwon Selasa / Kliwon Jumaat nights but they didn't sell that kind of stuff, he told me.
The girls come from elsewhere in Java, especially Surabaya. He told me that a lot of girls left Yogyakarta to work in Surabaya, and many left there to work in Yogya. Kind of like an exchange program for sex workers, he joked.
Having sex can actually be a part of the doing your ritual there. From what I understood of Pak Agus's explanation, after offering your prayers or meditating at the rocks, you may be divinely inspired to make love with somebody. Doing this would sort of complete your ritual and help to ensure that your prayer will come true. This holds for both men and women, prostitute or not. I need to find out more about this. My research assistant Nur told me something similar - that a girl (we were discussing the prostitutes at the time), if she seeks some sort of material wish or reward, may have sex with a man to help bring about its manifestation. In any case, Pak Agus told me that in the past there were only a handful of prostitutes at Parangtritis/Parangkusumo, and they were mostly involved with people partaking in the rituals. Also, they worked rather covertly. Now they walk around freely in the open, not appearing the least bit wary of being seen, and they are there purely for economic reasons. I asked him if he thought that people might feel the rituals have been polluted by their presence; he said he didn't believe they had any impact. Conversations like this will really help to inform my interview script, which has been drafted but is still in progress.
Also, Pak Agus has offered to help me with my project. He told me he has several friends at Parangtritis and that he'd be happy to take me down there to talk to people. His English isn't advanced enough to interpret during interviews, but if I could go there with him and my research assistant, that would be great. I think he might be an excellent starting point for my snowball sampling and a good general resource. I'm so grateful that the people I've met here in Yogya have been so warm and helpful to me. It's all personal connections... If I was staying in some hotel or hostel I wouldn't have had the chance to meet any of these people and I might be stuck in a traveler's cafe like Via Via every night. That is a scary thought.
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