Warung and 'Warung'

my kind of warung by wikipedia

I've surfed on google image for 'warung' but it takes time and some key word changing to find the one that I look for. I wan't an image of a rural retail business.

Once I read a book about culinary heritage of Bali. The book said, warung was the most important agent of it. In warung, modernity first reached far-far-away regions. It stood as the branch of city life since we can start our take off from stones to soaps right there.

In another way, I think warung symbolized capitalism ethic in it's very first scale. In this place, abundant material from the nature processed into many kind of food, from snacks to dishes in order to add the value. It's also the symbol of raising service sectors in rural society.

Last thing that I will mention, as showed by that book, warung was a point to meet. In this place, private tea time in every house's veranda go public. It became important when everyone in a region not only conduct their work in their society. By the time, growth of suburban providing much choices in occupation. Since the society goes separately in work, they socializing in another room. One of this room is a beautiful evening chit-chat at warung.

Warung in the meaning of point to meet transformed physically, but I miss it's moral economic value in the recent form. As a point to meet, there comes cafes. Some of them write down the word 'Warung' as their lable. Not only words, they also tried to present the whole atmosphere there by decorating their place with yesterday stuffs and selling yesterday foods. They provide everything provided by the real warung at those old times. But what I called as moral economic value can not be replaced. Still. Although they also selling yesterday modern things.

 

some 'reconstruction' of warung by sewamobilsolo and jenzcornet

The real warung still exist. We can easily met them in a corner of a narrow urban street, or in a side of vast and deserted rural street. They are surviving change of economic trends nowadays. It once symbolized the proto-capitalism ethic by seeing everything around as capital and processed them to add value in order to gain more profit. But just like being stagnant for decades, they now symbolized a subsistence economy. Compared to recent creative small scale business, they were too static. Some reason, like in the case of fighting 'hutang', was something that I consider as it's burden. The concept of 'hutang' to most of people in our society is different than 'credit' provided by banks. Hutang was not a part of business. It is a social obligation, and when accompanied by limited capital, it leads to a collapse. Warung for decades had faced this and survived. But, it happened to be wrong when the rage consuming ethic as provoked by capitalist goes trough people's mind and warung should be the one taking them on it's shoulder.

Warung was a small remnant of how life goes in previous time. Since it was a part of common people's life, most of them didn't legally registered, and started to left, in some future years, we might unable to see them anymore. I don't know, I will be glad if someone tells me another more optimist but reasonable seeing, but I feels like in it's from that I used to know, this business can not stand any longer. It just happen when I googling about them and can not easily find the kind of warung that I pointed to.

Not as an historian, I am now standing as a bystander, the one who once lived the glorious age of this business. So rather than a historical writing, this is a report. Maybe in the future, someone who want to know find it's a little bit hard to not confused with warung and more recent form of a place to consume and socialize named 'warung'.

Well, Neoclassic was not Ancient Rome although it came in effort to recall them back.

edited from old writing in the mid 2016

I don't know what happen
 but it isn't that hard now to find 'my kind' of warung in google.

Well, happy for that.