Organizer and Chair: G. G. Weix, University of Montana
Discussant: Robert Hefner, Boston University
The New Order era has produced a reinvigorated sense of the Indonesian nation state's political and economic center. At the same time, regional and cultural groups throughout the archipelago have experienced different kinds of marginality. These papers will discuss the identity of local politics and/or the politics of locality within the framework of debates about cultural marginality as it is linguistically or historically created in specific places, contexts and regional relations. Through a comparative discussion of Sumatra, Riau, Java, Sumba, and Biak the panel can contribute to a contemporary understanding of cultural and political locality as it is or is not at issue in theories of marginality and modernity in Southeast Asia today.
Suzanne Brenner, University of California, San Diego
In the imagined transition from "tradition" to "modernity," some locales become the targets of modernization and development, while others become sites of nostalgia, remnants of a past era that are seen as peripheral to the present one. While the transition from tradition to modernity is usually assumed to be linear and unidirectional, this paper examines a community in urban Java that has been gradually transformed in the opposite direction-from a place that exemplified "the modern" in the early decades of this century to an anachronistic bastion of "tradition" in the l990s.
The paper looks at the process by which Laweyan, a neighborhood of Solo, Central Java, has evaded the city's ambitious modernizing plans, thereby ensuring its own marginalization and serving as an uncomfortable reminder of the occasional failures of development. It investigates the reasons that members of the community stubbornly cling to the past in a city that is otherwise plunging headlong into the future. Laweyan exemplifies "marginality in the center"-a marginal place in a region that is generally thought of as a center of development in Indonesia.
Muhammad AS Hikam, East-West Center
The paper examines the process of political marginalization of the grassroots populace following the emergence of the hegemonic state under the New Order and the way in which people resist it. Based upon fieldwork in Cilegon, Banten, West Java province, the paper has two objectives: first, to explain the extent to which the New Order state has been able to penetrate and at the same time marginalize some members of society, as experienced by indigenous working class people in Banten. In this case it is important to understand how ethnicity, religion and local traditions play important roles in the deployment of state power and in contributing to the process of political marginalization of these workers.
Second, the paper examines the way in which these local workers are trying to recover and maintain their political space as well as to resist both the marginalization and the state's claim to their obedience. In this respect, everyday politics and resistance represent an important mode of political action for the grassroots people in the absence of political institutions which are genuinely capable of accommodating and channeling political demands from below.
Kate Hoshour, Harvard University
This discussion focuses on the relationships between state-directed population movement, the politics of identity, and the goals of "nation building" in Indonesia. Drawing on recent field research in a transmigration site in Riau, this paper critically examines the political aims, rationale, and effects of Indonesia's transmigration program. Current development discourse and practice are analyzed to elucidate several major assumptions structuring the conceptualization and implementation of the program. This discussion emphasizes the implications of large-scale resettlement for the politics of ethnicity as observed on the local level. The articulation of differences based on ethnic categories in the site are analyzed in relation to state directed allocation of valued resources on the basis of these categories.
Webb Keane, University of Pennsylvania
What does it mean to think of oneself as bearing a "local culture?" A look at Sumba (eastern Indonesia) suggests that people's perceptions and interpretations of their situation are not unmediated products of objective circumstances. This paper considers some of the terms in which concepts of "the local" are being constructed as seen in Sumbanese attitudes towards the national language, Bahasa Indonesia and problems of translation. People's ways of using language can bear implications that work at cross purposes to what they explicitly say. Some Sumbanese state that the most important forms of local speech are untranslatable. For others translatability from local to national language is a source of authority. However, the practice of translation may have effects that ultimately undermine the very authority they wish to claim.
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