Does the division into abangan, santri and priyayi describe Javanese religious life, or constitute it?

Continuing use of Geertz's framework

Scholarly position

The three terms were used by Javanese themselves before they were written down, and the framework explains real differences in how ceremonies are held, in choice of schooling, and in political alignment through the twentieth century. A division that predicts so much is not merely an observer's construction.

T2 SRC-0221

The objection on composition

Scholarly position

The first two name religious orientations and the third a social position, so the three do not lie on one axis. A priyayi may be santri; a farmer may be priyayi in bearing and not in station. Setting the three side by side produces categories that do not exclude one another, and their later political use treated them as if they did.

T2 SRC-0222

The historical objection

Scholarly position

The sharp abangan–santri split is not a permanent condition of Java but a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Islamic reform, the spread of the pesantren, and later the political antagonism that sharpened it. Before that what obtained was a synthesis in which the two elements were not separable. Applying the framework before the nineteenth century projects a division into a period that had not undergone it.

T2 SRC-0216 T2 SRC-0217