Thank you for your comments Pak Daud.
The earlier comments in this thread did address the origins of Javanese art motifs fairly well, & your comments have re-enforced these earlier remarks. In fact, there is a lot of "peranakan" contribution to Javanese art & society, & these contributions can still be found today.
In Bahasa Indonesia the word "peranakan" means a person of mixed ethnic origins, and this can be applied to not only people born of an indigenous mother or father & a Chinese mother or father, but also of a person who has one indigenous parent & one foreign parent, say, Indian, Arab, European. Dependent upon context, this word also has other meanings. But it is true that most people do think of a peranakan as a person who has a Chinese ancestor as well as an indigenous ancestor.
Over the last couple of thousand years Javanese society has been a great recipient & synthesizer of influences from the world outside of Jawa. I read something a long time ago where the author hypothesized that everything in the world moves to the east, but when it gets to Jawa, it remains there and becomes a part of Jawa. I'm inclined to think that this could well be true. I have found original Roman beads in Central Javanese markets.
Jawa takes things from outside of Jawa makes those things its own.
For a current example, language. The dominant society in Indonesia is Jawa, but when Indonesia was formed as country, the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, was adapted from a dialect of the Malay language that was spoken in South Sumatera. This was a logical choice, as for a thousand years or more Malay was the language of trade in South East Asia.
However, many words in Bahasa Indonesia have been borrowed from other languages, and for the last few years more & more words from the English language have been coming into Bahasa Indonesia, currently it seems to have become pretty cool for trendy Indonesians to incorporate not just single English words into their speech & writing, but to incorporate entire phrases in English. We see this quite a bit with TV personalities.
To my mind, this hybridization of the national language of Indonesia is a further demonstration of the Indonesian & Javanese tendency to take things from other cultures and make them their own.
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