Buddhist Buda or Buda Buddhists? Conversion, Religious Modernism and Conflict in the Minority Buda Sasak Communities of New Order and Post-Suharto Lombok
This thesis explores the conversion experiences of the Buda, an ethnic Sasak minority in northern Lombok-Indonesia, long primitivized by dominant Sasak Muslim groups for practicing non-religious rituals prior to their formal conversion to Buddhism at the outset of the New Order in the early 1970's. Throughout the twentieth century, the Buda resisted formal conversion to either Islam, the faith of their fellow Sasaks, or Balinese Hinduism, the belief system of their former overlords. When General Suharto's New Order (1967–1998) made the absence of a former religious identity tantamount to atheism and, therefore, communism, Buda Sasaks claimed to be the descendents of ancient Javanese Buddhists and, therefore, born-again Buddhists of a sort. After their conversion, the Buda censored ritual forms of self-presentation from their public Buddhist identity when intelligence agents provided them with new incentives to imitate standardized forms of agricultural practice and depoliticized religiosity to the exclusion of their former, more ritualized, modes of daily life. Buda Buddhists made good beginner moderns as the historical stigma of inter-communal primitivism was steadily replaced by less parochial, and distinctly State initiated, forms of politesse and citizenship. As compelling as state defined modernity was, the fall of Suharto in 1998 initiated major transformations for Sasaks and Indonesians in general. After thirty years of attempting to be citizens of the State, the re-emergence of repressed primordial political groups and vigilante politics pushed the Buda back into their former, marginal, position. Increased criminality and the death of key religious clerics among Lombok's New Order Muslim elite opened the opportunity for a new form of moralist vigilantism to replace the vacuum Suharto's left behind after his resignation. Led by new, charismatic leaders, Muslim anti-crime militias scoured Lombok's countryside and, arguably, precipitated the mobilization of semi-organized Muslim militias during the anti-Christian riots of January 2000. Buda Buddhists were also threatened with attack and, for lack of a vigilante militia; Buda youth demanded that its Buddhist elders revitalize the very trance rituals and decidedly “primitive” military priesthood they had so long endeavored to replace with New Order modernity and Buddhist rationality.
