The Borobudur Park. (Post-)heritagization in a Buddhist minority lifeworld.

Abstract (English)

The paper explores the recent developments surrounding the management of the Borobudur historical site in Central Java, Indonesia. A hallmark of "cultural heritage" in modern Indonesian consciousness, Borobudur has been recently re-invested with religious claims and renewed devotional significance, also expressed in the proliferation of ritual and eventization on its grounds.
The 8th-century Buddhist stupa was brought to public attention by European academics and colonial officials between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The lengthy restoration of the site that followed has been framed through the lens of heritage and the language of preservation from the start, albeit invested with ambivalent orientalist postulates. The postcolonial Indonesian state inherited the view of Borobudur as a quintessential, open-air showcase of national culture and it encompassed it in a large park-cum-museum project. In 1991, the museum was enlisted as a UNESCO heritage site and it experienced since then an ever-growing influx of domestic and international tourists. However, the Borobudur monument has been subject to different and mutable valorisations on the side of the local Buddhist minority. Although the understanding of the Borobudur Park as a living "religious" site is not an entirely new sensibility in modern Indonesian Buddhism, in recent years this perception has been amplified. This manifested through explicit stances at making Borobudur a functioning religious venue "again" and acts, events and gigs that implicitly re-enchant the stupa with religious salience. The paper traces these recent developments against the backdrop of post-colonial Indonesia, which constructed Borobudur as a culturally relevant symbol in the first place, up to the current surge of religious orthodoxy and identity politics.