Organizer: John R. Bowen, Washington University
Chair: William H. Frederick, Ohio University
Sumit K. Mandal, Trinity College
This article explores the making of a Javan Arab community in the emergent plural society of the turn of the century. It examines the settlement of Arabs in Java after the imposition of Dutch rule in l800 until their politico religious awakening between 1890 and 1924. I show that "Arabs," initially part of an ethnolinguistically fluid trading world, became a community awkwardly bound by pseudo racial terms created by the Dutch. I argue that the making of Javan Arabs followed the transformation of the political economy under colonial rule and their awakening in the 1900s.
I turn to the establishment of Javan Arab organizations at the turn of the century. Growing Chinese control of smaller and localized enterprises dominated by Arabs and natives led to sharp economic competition and conflict along ethnic lines. Partly in response to economic competition, then, I argue that these pseudo-racial categories became a self acknowledged reality. The ensuing Javan Arab awakening was characterized by an orientation toward the Ottoman world and a drive for modern Islamic education with Arabic as its medium of instruction. I consider the making of Javan Arabs within the early political, ethnic, and cultural imaginings of Indonesian nationalism.
The history of Indonesian Arabs has been relegated to the margins of scholarship on Islam. This article locates them within significant transformations in Java's political economy as well as the politics of race and Islam under colonial rule.
Tine G. Ruiter, University of Amsterdam
In this paper, I deal with encounters between the Dutch colonial authorities and the formal leaders of two ethnic groups in colonial north Sumatra, the Malay and the Karo Batak. I focus on political encounters in the public arena, and describe some of these encounters in the Malay area in the period of Dutch annexation around 1865, when the Dutch concluded political contracts with the Malay Sultans, and at the time of a renewed political contract in 1938. As a contrasting case, I describe a political encounter in the Karo Batak highlands, annexed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It pertains to the installation of a new Karo Batak chief, Sibayak, in 1935, and the political contract it entailed.
The questions I address are the following: How did the participants present themselves in these encounters? Can we consider these encounters political rituals and see them as "symbolic behavior that is standardized and repetitive" (Kertzer 1988) with references to power relations?
My paper is based on my Ph.D. research (archival research combined with anthropological fieldwork). My Ph.D. thesis on social economic change in the plantation area of North Sumatra will be finished in the beginning of 1995.
Stephanie S. Spencer, Boston University
This paper presents aspects of East Javanese village life and government junior high school experience that bring students into contact with national culture under the late New Order. Ethnographic research in a government junior high school and the local communities it draws from shows that the culture of a government junior high school, and the circumstances of village life under the late New Order, at least, as much as the content of the national curriculum itself, prepare students to accept the ideology of and participate in the programs and bureaucracy of the New Order.
Children born around 1980 in Indonesia are now junior high school students. What kind of society are they growing up in under the mature New Order government? What are these children learning in school about what it means to be an Indonesian citizen in the early 1990's?
In rural East Java, government schools are the primary conduits of national culture to the youngest generation of Indonesian students. Government schools have the most complete sets of government curriculum textbooks: students regularly participate in Monday morning flag raising ceremonies; students are called upon to attend subdistrict ceremonies for national holidays or to compete in district or provisional contests about the national ideology (Pancasila). Their school holidays are filled with school-organized religious or scouting activities. Junior high school students attend a week of training in the national ideology before they enter the first year, and the first month of the school year, August, is filled mostly with activities to prepare for the independence day commemorations on the 17th.
The everyday world that these students encounter in villages is also full of government programs and office buildings-police and army offices, family planning and agricultural programs, farmers cooperatives, the department of religion office, the public clinic, the women's association for family welfare, the post office and the government bank line the streets which these children travel along on their way to school every day. Their electricity is provided by government owned electrical plants. They must have official identification cards by the time they turn seventeen, and now they also must have a citizen's number. Every year since 1983, groups of neighborhood adults have attended neighborhood based training courses in understanding, being inspired by, and applying Pancasila in their daily lives.
Today's junior high school students have lived their entire lives under the late New Order, in which there are only three political parties, in which there are five recognized, official religions, in which ninety percent of school aged children graduate from elementary school where they memorize the five tenets of Pancasila and study the heroes of the revolutionary war. This paper explores what these junior high school students have to say about their experiences in school and their understandings of what it means to be an Indonesian citizen.
Craig C. Thorburn, University of California, Los Angeles
Indonesia is a society fraught with latent social, ethnic and religious tensions, which occasionally erupt into local, regional, or national spasms of mass violence. During his quarter century in power, President Suharto has deftly (albeit sometimes harshly) steered Indonesia down a path of stability and development. The feat of maintaining political harmony in such a vast and ethnically diverse nation as it undergoes wrenching socioeconomic growth is nothing short of phenomenal. This paper focuses on one of the most persistent arenas of tension endemic in the Indonesian political system, that of ethnic identity and local versus centralized control of economic resources. Many of these struggles begin to take on a different cast in the context of an uncertain political climate as Suharto enters his sixth and almost certainly final five year term. While most Indonesia watchers focus on the issue of presidential succession, another generational transition is taking place throughout the far flung islands of the archipelago. As local customary leadership continues to cede power and influence to the ever more confident Indonesian state, a new generation, educated by that state, is coming of age. Traditional institutional arrangements governing access to and use of resources are unraveling, and what is to replace them remains unclear. As Indonesian scholars, NGOs, and indigenous activists gain experience and self assurance, we can expect a growing clamor for a return to greater community control over local resources and economic affairs.
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