Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Shame on me or Indonesian education system?

I've been systemizing my unorganized photo stack of around 3500 from the past year into folders and keywords. It's going well so far. I'm at around the halfway point. 

Then i got to the stack of picture from the Dallas museum of Art that I went to last summer and spent time to read the plaques that I took pictures of. They had a permanent (I think) exhibition with Indonesian cultural objects. The plaques that accompany each objects was... fascinating to say the least. It gets me thinking: why was I not taught this in elementary / junior high school? Why did I just learn more about Irian Jaya in a single plaque explaining an Irian house doorpost than the whole time I was in Indonesia? Am I just missing out on something when I lived there or something really is broken here: I learn more about Indonesian culture in TEXAS rather than in JAKARTA.

The picture is not the best since I'm not allowed to use flash and my lens is sloooow. Here's the doorpost in question and it's phallic imagery that depicts vengeance for death of a family member (no, I'm not joking).

So they actually traded other stuff (an ivory spoon) for spices in Malacca too? I thought only Europeans want spices.

Many of these objects concern beliefs other than the eacknowledged five. Are they perhaps discouraged by the government because we're only allowed to be one of the five religions?

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