Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Anthropologist Suwardi Endraswara in The World of Javanese Ghosts (2004) said that Javanese people have known ghosts for thousands of years. One of the things he knows is tuyul, the ghost of a small child with a shaved head who likes to steal money secretly from house to house.
The tuyul narrative in the Javanese mind seems to have attracted the attention of Harvard University student, Clifford Geertz. In 1952, Geertz came to Indonesia to conduct anthropological research entitled the Modjokuto Project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He was specifically assigned to the Modjokuto region to research the people there. Later, the Modjokuto referred to was a village in Kediri, East Java.
While conducting research and 'integrating' with people's lives, Geertz became acquainted with tuyul and succeeded in detailing the description of the ghost in his research.
At that time, Geertz heard a story about three people in Modjokuto who kept tuyul to increase wealth. They are butchers, women textile traders, and traders who have the title of Haji.
The three of them collaborated by visiting several sacred Hindu places. “[Tempat itu adalah] “Borobudur in the West, Penataran in the South, Bongkeng in the East and the tomb of Sunan Giri in North Gresik,” wrote Geertz in research that would later be published in a book entitled The Religion of Java (1976).
When they visited these places, said Geertz, they made agreements with spirits. If the spirit gives tuyul, then in return they will kill people as an offering to the spirit.
Along the way, the tuyul keepers actually entered into an agreement. Take for example a merchant with the title of Haji who lives in the east of the city. He is known to have obtained tuyul through an agreement with a spirit.
In return, every year he must kill four people from various professions and ages so that the agreement with the tuyul does not disappear. Of course, if the agreement ends, the person himself will lose.
“He looked for victims everywhere, even looking for them in Mecca,” said Geertz.
Based on the observations of these three people, Geertz mentioned several characteristics of tuyul keepers, including:
- Get rich or become rich suddenly
- Miser
- Often uses second-hand clothes
- Often bathed in the river with the poor coolies
- Always eat poor people's food, such as corn and cassava, rather than rice
These five characteristics are of course to trick people into thinking they don't have money even though their house is always full of gold bullion. Apart from that, from a social perspective, tuyul keepers also often commit deviations.
They often talk loudly and aggressively. On the other hand, they lack manners, dress like chimneys, and always have unusual habits in sharing their thoughts.
However, a tuyul keeper will experience difficulties when he dies. He would have a slow and difficult death.
Then, before he died, his breathing became short, accompanied by prolonged pain and high fever. In essence, in the process of dying, everything goes very slowly and tortuously.
Still, Geertz said, such a death process is “a fairly small price to pay.” Because, during their lifetime, the tuyul keeper was satisfied with the wealth obtained from the stolen goods.
Apart from the tuyul, Geertz also observed three other ghosts in the masterpiece The Religion of Java, among others memedi, soft, and sad. Thanks to his research in Modjokuto, Geertz became one of the leading anthropologists who specifically researched Indonesian society.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
(mfa/sef)