Islam, Arsip, dan Arsipelago: Sebuah Refleksi Keindonesiaan

Abstract

The term arsipelago or “archivelago” in this paper literally means the
assemblage of plural archives which have their contextual foundation, i.e.
geographical significance in Indonesia as an archipelagic cultural sphere. Its chief
principle connects to the value of diversity as revealed by the manifests of a
variety of cultural expression. The principle cognates with the nature of
archival survival in the country. There is no single island of an archive, but
there are imaginative islands of archives. The tendency to fold archive as
monotonous through the series of political repercussion should be
provincialized, as the polyphonic voices of the arsipelago unfold the untold
narratives of people. Within this articulation, archives related to Islam(s) and
Muslims in Indonesia have to be rediscovered, after the long period of
negation, partly because of the symbiosis between late colonial legacy and the
perpetual ignorance of Indonesian elites to value archive as power/knowledge.