ingredient cultural traditions were suspended in a kind of half-solution

An example of an extended metaphor drawing on a scientific concept,

"Up until about the third decade of this [sic, 20th] century, the several ingredient [Indonesian] traditions – Indic, Sinitic, Islamic, Christian, Polynesian – were suspended in a kind of half-solution in which contrasting, even opposed styles of life and word outlooks managed to coexist, if not wholly without tension, or even without violence, at least in some sort of usually workable, to-each-his-own sort of arrangement. This modus vivendi began to show signs of strain as early as the mid-nineteenth century, but its dissolution got genuinely under way only with the rise, from 1912 on, of nationalism; its collapse, which is still not complete, only in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods."

Clifford Geertz (2000) After the revolution: The fate of nationalism in the new states (first published 1971), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books