Die Kalang: Eine Volksgruppe auf Java und ihre Stamm-mythe: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte Javas.

• Author: Maier, H.M.J.

It is good to realize that they are still among us: the collectors and compilers who continue their work in sturdy silence. They prefer to spend their days of scholarship in painstakingly assembling data, references, notes, glossaries, indices, and bibliographies on a particular object or theme, arrange these in a convenient and surveyable way, and eventually summon up their courage to present their massive knowledge in a neatly organized publication. Novel arrangements of forgotten data. Neglected niches. Vistas of new possibilities of research. Suggestions of how to extend an exploration. Unfortunately those useful collections and compilations are sometimes supplemented or pervaded with conjectures and speculations of which the theoretical groundwork is so thin that they read like annoying blots rather than exciting elaborations.

Dr. Seltmann's book on the Kalangs of central Java is a good example of this sort of scholarship. It is an impressive book in which all bits and pieces of information that are available on a particular group of people have been compiled and presented. Everything you always wanted to know about the Kalangs, in short, and something more: the data, so useful, so amazing in themselves, are given interpretations and analyses on the basis of assumptions that are hardly justified or explained.

Why make some comparisons and refrain from others? Why this obsession with origins and beginnings? What exactly are the Kalangs: a tribe? a culture? a tradition? a group? Why this hardly noticeable shift in style through the book, from hypothesis to certainty? In how far do the Kalang have a distinct identity? Why speak of the Kalangs, on the one hand, and of the so-called Kalang myth that can apparently be found all over the Archipelago, on the other? How are the tribe and the myth related? What exactly makes the Kalang different from other people on Java? And why follow a diachronic approach, relating data from 1700 that can be found in Dutch archives to data from the 1960s, without further ado?

Kalang is the name of a rather mysterious group of people who have been wandering through the Indonesian island of Java for centuries. They are now (almost) completely assimilated with mainstream Java; also in linguistic and physical terms this seems to be the case. On the basis of the historical information available, Seltmann comes to the conclusion that this assimilation must have been a very gradual process indeed; yet until recently...