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“Clerics are no longer cultural brokers” |
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Jakarta Post, Leiden, Wed 9 Dec 2009, Opinion
Muhammad As’ad argues that the overwhelming rejection of the Indonesian Ulama Council’s (MUI) call to ban the recently-released Hollywood movie 2012 is only the most recent case of a wider historical trend. In the Soekarno era, clerics were influential ‘cultural brokers’ (Geertz, 1960) among mostly uneducated rural populations; during the Soeharto regime, MUI as a government institution supported strong restrictions on information flow in the name of national stability; since Soeharto’s fall in 1998 however, rising education levels, free press and the internet have enabled most Indonesians to decide what is right and wrong for them without guidance from cultural brokers.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/12/09/clerics-are-no-longer-cultural-brokers.html
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