ABSTRACT
This chapter explores embodied forms of politesse through Javanese ideas about dissimulation and avoidance in court dance, and the implications of these ideas for our understanding of identity at the personal, social and national level. Within the colonial court, dancing was an education in techniques of politeness which have been elaborated beyond the more generally instilled patterns of polite Javanese social interaction, and this very specific and select education was able to become an exemplar in ideologies of national identity which were developed after Independence as state policy. At a previous ASA conference, David Parkin asked ‘How far do we now view “meaning” not as given us by signs but as placed by ourselves on and through the objects and acts we see and experience?’ (1992: xiii). The definition of meaning which reifies culture is used by the Indonesian government in a cultural politics which creates difference through the category of ‘Asian values’. My analysis is between political and semantic anthropology, and questions the universalist approach to the embodied nature of communication, and explores how physical action, like speech, is also subject to indirection and dissimulation: we can lie and strategise with our bodies as much as with our tongues. Embodied performances are as vital for imagining society as Gilsenan has suggested are verbal lies (1976: 210ff.).
