I have a confession to make.
After a few years of bouncing around as a paper shuffler in my organisation , I went over to the dark side.
I bought a grey pinstripe suit, a pair of rimless glasses, got a short haircut and joined the ranks of the IA.
The reason for my slide into infamy was totally pecuniary. These people got paid unbelieveably well. Probably because not many people were prepared to be universally hated. I didn't mind being hated provided I got paid well enough for it.
What Amuk has said about truth, belief and the nature of man I agree with wholeheartedly.
What he has said about the search for truth I will add to, not because I disagree in even the slightest degree with what he has said, but because what he has said is precisely correct and I believe can be expanded to permit a more complete comprehension.
Modern IA depends heavily upon the analysis of systems.
Anything at all can be regarded as a system. It may be a chaotic system, or it may be an ordered system, but no matter what kind of system it is, it can still be broken into the parts that cause it to exist.
Once the parameters of the system have been identified, that system can be analysed.
Typically the process used to understand the system will consist of identifying inputs to the system, outputs from the system and the internal mechanics of the system.
The identification is accomplished through the gathering of information.
Once the information required to analyse the system has been gathered, analysis can proceed.
Part of the process of analysis is the testing of the system in order to ensure that the conclusions drawn during the analysis are able to be supported in fact. Testing relies upon statistical results extrapolated to represent the entire population of entities which comprise the system.
Upon completion of the analytical process, conclusions can be drawn.
People who are expert in the techniques of IA claim to be able to apply this broadly described process to anything at all, even to entities and processes of which they themselves have little or no knowledge. They achieve this by employing the knowledge of recognised experts in the particular field which they wish to address and which they do not understand.
We could well ask what all this waffling on about systems and analysis has to do with the keris and an understanding of the keris.
If we consider keris culture as a sub-system contained within the broad pattern of a society, or of a dominant culture, then we can apply exactly the same tools of information gathering, analysis and testing to the job of understanding the culture of the keris as we would apply to the understanding of any other system.
There is one particular difficulty in using this approach with the keris, and that is that any understanding which we may reach needs to be constrained within a matrixical description that takes account of time. Thus, if we wish to understand the keris as it is today, it is sufficient to apply our techniques to a chosen window of time encompassing the very near past. We set the limits of our system and we proceed upon that basis.
However, if we wish to understand the keris as it was at some time in the distant past, we need to largely disregard any information gathered that can be attributed to a later period. In this case the matrix would spread as a physical object in the present, and as a percieved object in the past, both past and present being encompassed by the limitations of the three dimensional matrix.
In the gathering of some information, empathy can be regarded as useful tool, but there are other tools in the toolbox, and some are no less valuable than empathy.Like any tool set, it is a matter of choosing the correct tool for the job in hand.
To apply this process to understanding the culture of the keris we begin with gathering information, in order to first identify the limits of the system that we wish to understand, and then to provide material for analysis of the internal mechanics of that system.
As Amuk has said:- To totally understand an icon from a culture, one needs to understand the culture which produced that icon.
The result can be expected to be that upon completion of analysis we might be able to understand the how and the why of understanding within that culture, but we are very unlikely to be able to understand in the same way that members of that cultural group do.
For those of us who do wish to come to an understanding of the keris, no matter within whatever parameters, I would most sincerely suggest that the understanding must grow from an understanding of the parent culture. We should not try to begin study of the keris, and then just bolt on a few snippets of Javanese or Balinese cultural knowledge, rather, we should come at the problem from the other direction:- gain an understanding of the parent culture and then use that as the foundation for attaining an understanding of the keris.
In IA terms, complete the information gathering and testing before trying to draw conclusions.
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