Organizer and Chair: G. G. Weix, University of Montana
Discussant: Mary Steedly, Harvard University
Jennifer Krier, Harvard University
Rural urban migration, inter island transmigration, and even transnational movement are important features of historical and contemporary Indonesian social life. Nevertheless Indonesian ethnography often assumes isomorphism between identity, culture and place. This paper seeks to explain this unchallenged isomorphism by exposing the relevance of bounded and localized groups in Indonesian political discourse. Focusing on a 1992 seminar on "village development" in West Sumatra, I discuss how elite, Jakarta dwelling Minangkabau intellectuals use the rhetoric of "village" in their plans for regional economic and cultural development. While they question the success of the recent reconfiguration of "the village" to conform with uniform national standards, and argue for a return to the traditional polity (nagari) as the local unit of government administration, these thinkers reify the concept of the Minangkabau as a localized community despite the fact that their own Minangkabau identities are "translocal" and defy regional boundaries.
Danilyn Rutherford, Cornell University
Biak, Irian Jaya, might seem the perfect location to study marginality. Irian Jaya is literally on the edge of Indonesia's map, with a population taken to be far from the national center on a cultural scale. But Biak's history should encourage us to question simple notions
of the marginal. In Biak's entangled relations with its "others," who has marginalized whom?
This paper will examine wor, a Biak style of singing and feasting, in an attempt to trace a changing response to this query. When Biak stood on the frontier of effective colonial control, local people used wor and other practices to transform the traces of their encounters with foreigners into a source of authority and prestige. By making the marks of their submission into the signifiers of their identities, Biakkers both drew upon and denied the potency of distant centers to the west. "Sup Amber," "the Land of the Foreigners," became the frame and the horizon that defined and disrupted the local scene.
A hallmark of New Order Indonesia has been the center's ability to collapse distances and impose a unified gaze. As the government consolidates its control in Biak, wor and other "Melanesian traditions" are being "revived" in an attempt to integrate Irian Jaya into a seamless series of regional cultures. Where wor once served to domesticate codes from Biak's threatening periphery, the Indonesian state is domesticating wor. In New Order Biak, marginality is an effect of power and perspective, not simply place.
G.G. Weix, University of Montana
This paper examines how Indonesians from different parts of the archipelago express an interest in "the international language" and why they share a desire to learn spoken English. Based on fieldwork and interviews in Jakarta and Central Java as well as on correspondence with 140 readers of "Hello: the English speaking magazine" the paper describes the ways Indonesians perceive and apprehend a transnational language in local and national contexts. Given the close affiliation of Bahasa Indonesia with the rise of Indonesia's nation state the paper discusses whether interest in English displaces or strengthens cultural or political centers in the New Order. As the bearers of transnational languages permeate various institutions and settings through media, global economy and tourism, how do Indonesians locate English? What do they perceive as the margins of "the international language" and its discourse? This is part of a larger project to investigate the effects of transnational language in Southeast Asia and what relations are anticipated beyond the borders of the nation.
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