Style and Authority in Javanese Muslim Sermons

Abstract

A preacher claims to address others from a position of implicitly superior insight. To support this claim, he plays upon the style and content of his performance to justify the role he takes. We can therefore ask how people evaluate particular preachers' performances, and what sorts of criteria can be seen to inform those comments. In particular, we can see how such evaluations speak for the interests and concerns of the people who make them. In light of recent efforts to deepen our understanding of how hegemonic discourses may or may not constrain the thoughts of the subordinate, it is worth looking at particular sermons and at responses to them to ask whether they do indeed propagate a vision of things that compromises some people's interests to the advantage of others, and whether, if so, that fact arouses resistance in any form among their listeners. In looking at three sermons delivered in a hamlet in Java in 1987,1 see contrasting styles in the way they are constructed and delivered, and in those contrasts, differences in the self-presentation of the speaker as he justifies his claims to his listeners' attention. At the same time, I note variation in how individuals evaluate the three speakers according to their own self-image.

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