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Originally Posted by ariel
Alan,
I found myself in front of the computer and felt that I had to answer you.
Yes, there are as many collections as there are collectors, and we all have our own ways to engage in this mild form of insanity. I can imagine a person whose ethnographic interests lead him to collect weapons of the culture of his original interest. I may even know one. But I bet that for every such sequence of events there are 1000 people who started as collectors and only later on began digging into history, ethnology, beliefs erc of the original owners of his wll hangers. You yourself, - what would have happened to you had it not been for your politically-incorrect uncle? :-)
As to the degree of involvement... I still find it mildly amusing to see perfectly normal Mid-Western guys trying to act Persian, Japanese ( ninja, here I come:-)) or Indonesian as if they have a hope in the world to pass for the legitimate inheritors of totally foreign traditions. Perhaps you, who spent a lot of time in Indonesia, may feel some understanding and involvement with the Javanese "society and culture", but for the rest of collectors it is a pretend game. As you have seen from the answers, most people here prefer to maintain their sanity and be "involved but not committed": the difference between the chicken and the pig in the process of creation of scrambled eggs and bacon:-)
So, I am perfectly happy to leave all esoteric functions and fearures to the native collectors of all ethnic swords: it is their patrimony and they are the legitimate owners of it. Most of us are just outsiders and enjoy purely military, historical, metallurgical or decorative components. More than enough, to my taste.
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You bring up an interesting point, Ariel: outside versus inside. I suppose you are correct in assuming that the masses of collectors outside of Indonesia operate on the outside. I myself fall somewhere in between the two extremes as my family is of mixed Dutch and Indonesian descent; but as I was born in Holland I'm sure I fall more on the outside than on the inside of it all. Even so, I have a greater familiarity with Indonesia and Java than the average collector (although I imagine that, especially in Holland, there are many collectors with a similar background to my own).
For me, collecting keris started as an interest to learn more about it beyond the usual stories, and as I started to explore and read, it soon turned into a starting point to dig deeper into Indonesian history and culture. It's allowed me to learn more about symbols and world views that I've been familiar with on a superficial level since I was young but am only now starting to understand on a deeper level. I suppose for me collecting keris is also somewhat of a personal journey in that regard.
I've always had a vague and rather incomplete knowledge of Indonesian history, touching mainly upon the broader strokes of the existence of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, the coming of Islam, the Dutch colonial period, the Japanese liberation/occupation, and finally independence. Delving deeper into these broad categories has always been somewhat of a daunting task but I find that the keris allows me to do just that. Perhaps because it is one of the, if not the, Indonesian symbol pur sang (or rather Javanese but to me - even if incorrectly - the two overlap to a significant extent). It's existed since ancient times and has undergone continues changes since then; changes that reflect the period and associated cultural values and world views that it was made in. It's a portal into Indonesian history and culture throughout the ages, a focal point, an eye in the storm of historical change.
While within the keris community outside of Indonesia not many people will have a similar motivation for collecting keris, I do feel it is a motivation for at least a part of the community. This likely also holds true to a certain extent for people with other cultural backgrounds (e.g. an ethnic Japanese collecting katana or an ethnic Chinese collecting calligraphy scrolls). There are collectors on the outside, on the inside and everywhere in between.