An interesting article.
It is very easy to criticise any writing that deals with the keris. As a general rule knowledgeable keris people from Solo will ruthlessly criticise keris opinions and writing produced by people with a Jogja background, and the opposite is also true. Both will level criticism at opinions and writing produced by people from outside the heartlands of Jawa.
I think I have heard :- "Why don't people learn about the keris before they write about the keris?" more times than I can remember. But when generally held opinions change from place to place, keris group to keris group and even if you cross the road, it is not really so easy to present an opinion, or even well based information, that is acceptable to everybody.
Yes, there are a number of statements in this article that are questionable or inaccurate, but that is only a reflection of my own opinion, which in some respects could be as inaccurate as that which I question.
Certainly, many statements in this article are not attached to a citation. I can understand this, if I write something I have a lot of difficulty providing citations, for the simple reason that most of what I write is the product of either personal experience, often experience over years, of small fragments of information coming together to produce a whole.
Then there is the question of just how good any citation in the matter of keris knowledge is able to be. I do not know of any published work on the keris that I could not write pages of criticism on. Most have been produced by people who have never been a part of the core of keris knowledge, frequently by people who do not speak Bahasa Indonesia, and who do not understand the society or the culture from which the keris has come. Even when a piece of writing has been produced by an Indonesian it is often the case that the Indonesian concerned either does not understand Javanese, or is on the outside of the World of the Keris, looking in through a window.
I just wrote that I could level extensive criticism of every piece of writing on the keris. This was not correct. I do know of one piece of writing, only one, that is above criticism, and that is the landmark publication of Garrett & Bronwen Solyom.
Personally, I am rather hesitant to publicly criticise anybody when it comes to keris opinions, and writing on the keris. We are dealing here with a subject that does not have a solid, universally agreed foundation. Most of that which is accepted as "knowledge" is in fact opinion or belief, and the opinion or belief that we might hold has probably come from somebody else, either in full, or by way of another person's opinions or beliefs.
The article under discussion here seems to have an equal measure of information gathered from other published sources, and information that the writer has sourced from personal informants and personal experience. I have not seen anything quite like this article, and I personally regard it as a useful addition to the keris literature.
|