Chair: Jeffrey Hadler, Lontar Foundation

It is critical that at this time, when everyone is discussing Indonesia’s future, that Indonesians and Indonesianists come to terms with the nation’s past. Soeharto’s New Order (and Sukarno’s Guided Democracy before it) had a stake in whitewashing Indonesian history. Crude indoctrination (the P4 courses, for example) and red-scare propaganda have prevented Indonesians from grappling on any level with the colonial past. Control over "appropriate" public discourse through the SARA laws (forbidding discussions of ethnicity, religion, race, or inter-group interaction) have kept the study of history and culture bound in a cerecloth of official interpretation and public denials. Yet history, while not discussed openly, has been kept alive in memories, in whispered family stories, and in local lore. With the fall of Soeharto, for the first time in perhaps forty years the seal on history’s sarcophagus has been broken. Memories are being translated into deeds in the form of internecine violence; "unexpected" conflicts—terrible bloodshed in Ambon, the so-called "Ninja" killings in East Java, can all be traced back to historical disputes. History is culture, and it must be constructively engaged and understood.

This panel brings together scholars from diverse disciplines—anthropology, economics, history, and political science—who are committed to re-historicizing the study of Indonesia. Dutch Colonials perceived sudden and inexplicable events as the product of Hidden Forces ("Hidden Force" refers to a colonial novel by Louis Couperus)—mysticism, magic, Islam. But just like the Hidden Forces behind today’s conflicts, they are understandable and comprehensible, explained by historical analysis. Four papers recuperate lost histories, the "hidden forces" of prostitution and women, telecommunications and radio waves, women laborers, and Jewish networks.

Andrew Abalahin, Cornell University

"‘The oldest profession in the world’ is the only one which seems to have escaped history." With the exception of Singapore, Southeast Asia may be the one part of the world to which this 1978 statement of the pioneering historian of prostitution, Alain Corbin, still applies. The general public has perceived the sex industry in Southeast Asian countries as the product of contemporary international mass tourism. Its origins, however, can be traced to the period of European colonial domination. Prostitution, an object of obsessive attention in the urbanizing and industrializing Europe of the nineteenth century, was all the more prominent under a colonialism which introduced massive flows of women-less male sojourners (from bureaucrats to coolies) while discouraging the interracial concubinage arrangements of earlier times. The figure of the prostitute was unique among the "anti-social" types in opposition to which nineteenth-century European bourgeois society defined itself in that the safety of that society demanded not her removal from the public sphere but rather her continued participation, however circumscribed, in the life of the community. This paper offers preliminary results of archival research in Indonesia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States on prostitution in late colonial Indonesia and the Philippines. A comparative study, it follows the rise and fall of a piece of European social technology, the state regulation of prostitution, to the farthest Asian remove from its origins in Napoleonic France. It aims to use the examination of the fate of "regulationism" as a lens through which to consider the larger process which formed modern mass society in both countries.

Joshua Barker, University of Twente

While scholars of Indonesia have analyzed in great detail the conditions under which print media developed in the late-colonial period (e.g. Anderson, Siegel, Maier, Salmon, Adam), only limited attention has been given to the conditions under which various electric communications media emerged (e.g. Mrazek, Lindsay). This despite the fact that the often fleeting and hidden forms of oral communication supported by radio, telephony, and television have arguably had as great an impact on the region’s "discourse networks" (Kittler) as have the more durable paper-based media (Sweeney). This paper provides an overview of the contexts into which each type of electrical media were introduced, examining in particular the technological, institutional and cultural frames that constrained the uses to which they were put. It aims to provide a broad map of Java’s oral electrical "discourse networks" from the introduction of telephony in 1883 until the introduction of television in 1962. Along the way, it points to some of the anxieties and fantasies provoked by forms of transmission that reconstituted the communicative act in two key ways: by separating the human voice from bodily presence and by making ‘live’ communication possible across great distances.

Siddharth Chandra, University of Pittsburgh

Scholarship on colonial history in general and the Dutch East Indies in particular has had little to say about the role of female labor in colonial industry. In this paper, the role of female industrial labor in the Late Colonial Dutch East Indies economy is analyzed. Using detailed data from the Colonial Reports (Koloniaal Verslagen) between the years 1918 and 1924, a comprehensive picture of the role of women in industry is presented. Key aspects of female participation include their disproportionately large presence in particular industries and locations. The economic and socio-cultural reasons for this are discussed. A second set of findings relates to the lower wage women received in comparison to their male counterparts in the same location, industry, and category of job. Patterns of this wage differential are discussed in the context of perceptions of the economic value of female labor. Finally, this study may also be viewed as an empirical labor-class complement to studies of feminist ideas in Indonesia, and in particular, the literature on Kartini, a much-studied member of the Javanese elite in the early twentieth century.

Jeffrey Hadler, Lontar Foundation

Scholars have assumed that Indonesian anti-Semitism is a case of "anti-Semitism without Jews"; that current anti-Jewish rhetoric is borrowed from Middle Eastern anti-Zionist propaganda. This viewpoint is limited. I analyze, for the first time, the history and role of the Jewish community during the period of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. I assess the position of both Dutch and "oriental" Jews in the economic and social life of the colony, discussing the role of Zionism and imperial anti-Semitism, and paying particular attention to the interactions of the Jews and the "native" Indonesians. I scrutinize the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Vaderlandsche Club, an Indies racist organization that channeled funds to and was eventually superseded in the 1930s by the Dutch Nazi Party, and I analyze the particular anti-Semitism cultivated by the Axis during the Japanese occupation.