Abstract
Cirebon, on Java’s northern littoral or pasisir, was an important port of transnational exchange in the Indian Ocean region, where Sufi artist guilds devoted to carving and textile industries flourished in the seventeenth century.1 The historic trade routes that we today call the “silk road” carried not only silk and other goods, but also cultural and religious ideas, of which many were linked to Sufism. In western Java, the two most important nodes of transnational exchange were Cirebon, on the cusp of Central Java, and Banten,2 just southeast of Sumatra and the Sunda Strait. Both Cirebon and Banten had mask theater traditions and were home to Java’s two oldest Muslim courts, of which only Cirebon’s remains now. Through these two portals Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Siamese, Central Asians, and Europeans gained access to the interior. In the early seventeenth century, Batavia (Jakarta) was built between them by the Dutch.3
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© 2013 Timothy P. Daniels
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Ross, L.M. (2013). Performing Piety from the Inside Out: Fashioning Gender and Public Space in a Mask “Tradition” from Java’s Northwest Coast. In: Daniels, T.P. (eds) Performance, Popular Culture, and Piety in Muslim Southeast Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318398_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318398_2
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