Makam bung tomo biography

Abstract

Death represents sovereignty and through it people negotiate their existence, concludes Claudio Lomnitz (2008:496) in his history of Mexican death. This conclusion holds true for the politics of death in the city of Surabaya, Indonesia, but only if death is understood in topographic and genealogical terms; or, in other words, in terms of land and one’s ancestral/genealogical connection to it. Through a discussion of the politics of land occupation and of the production, commemoration, and denial of death in post-colonial Surabaya, I present a ‘topogenic’ history of death as an instructive way of understanding state–society relations in that city. Throughout the article, I ground that history in the kampong’s social institutions of the communal meal and prayer (slametan) and the guard (gardu) as vehicles for the expression of an inviolable topogenic sovereignty.

Based on fieldwork in the mid 1950s near the East Javanese town of Pare, Robert Jay (1969:111) referred to the ‘posthumous bond’ between living and dead residents as ‘strong and real’, and as the basis of a village community that is most realized during the communal meal, or slametan. Clifford Geertz (1960:11), Jay’s contempora

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