Indonesia, Vol. 103, April 2017
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Item Bangka in the 1950's: Indonesian Authority and Chinese RealityHeidhues, Mary Somers (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)“Bangka in the 1950s” looks into a somewhat under-reported period of Indonesian history, especially with respect to the Indonesian archipelago outside of Java. It bases its explorations on the recently recovered ethnographic notes of G. William Skinner's assistant, Tan Fay Tjhion. The author herself conducted fieldwork in this area around the same period, which gives her an intimate grasp of the historical mood of the era. Through the lens of Tan's notes, the article examines the period's deteriorating economic conditions and the turning tide against the Chinese, and how those were exhibited through the dynamics of the community (e.g., internal divisions) and state-community dynamics (e.g., Chinese schools were forced to close and prohibitions against gambling—gambling had hitherto been an accepted social norm for the Chinese—were enforced). Tan's materials illuminate that period of Indonesian history when the mood was turning against the Chinese and economically and culturally restrictive policies were beginning to be rolled out, not necessarily from the political center outward, but from regional military commanders who then influenced the center and other parts of the archipelago.Item Trash, Cities, and Politics: Urban Environmental Problems in IndonesiaDethier, Jean-Jacques (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)“Trash, Cities, and Politics” describes Indonesia's ADIPURA, an environmental program begun in the mid 1980s to focus on waste management, cleanliness and sanitation, and green spaces. The paper discusses the program within the larger context of Indonesia's urbanization and its environmental consequences, from the time of the New Order up to today's decentralization era. The essay describes ADIPURA's continuity and evolution, with respect to central and local governments, law enforcement, financing, and community and private sector participation. It also provides specific data from more than 300 cities, and presents statistics to reveal trends and disconnects and to examine the program's successes and failures. For example, the study found that the program's incentives are inadequate, given Indonesia's regional autonomy and decentralization; that government ministers' credibility may be too weak to encourage municipalities' participation and compliance; and that the program comprises an unmanageable number of targets and is excessively expensive to administer, especially the inspections. The study concludes that ADIPURA is potentially useful to clean up cities, but needs to be overhauled, modernized, and coordinated with other government policies, and further transformed to eliminate actual and potential corruption and manipulation.Item Islamization and Identity in Indonesia: The Case of Arabic Names in JavaKuipers, Joel C.; Askuri (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)A considerable amount of scholarly attention has rightly been devoted to the rise of normative forms of Islamic practice in Indonesia, and to the consequent decline of hybrid, syncretic forms of Islam for which Indonesia, and Java in particular, was once renowned. This article shows that syncretic identities—as expressed in the bestowal of Arabic and other names—appear to be growing at a surprisingly rapid rate. Drawing on a dataset of over three million names from three selected Java regencies, the authors show, with the aid of many graphs, that a dominant trend over the last century is a strong tendency toward Arabization of names, a finding that is consistent with an Islamization argument. However, the largest portion of Arabized names, and the fastest growing name types overall, are ones that are a three- or four-part mix of Arabic and other Javanese, Indonesian, and Western names. The authors discuss the surprising rise of such hybridized names in the context of the political and cultural changes in Java over the last century, as well as even longer-term tendencies toward the mixing and hybridizing of identities in an archipelagic environment.Item Legal Self-Fashioning in Colonial Indonesia: Human Rights in the Letters of KartiniBijl, Paul (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)Focusing on her writings, this article shows how the Javanese woman Kartini (1879–1904) engaged with conceptions of “human rights” that were globally circulating in the early twentieth century, thereby further developing them by critiquing existing and imagining new conceptions of rights, law, and justice. The article and Kartini deal with colonial history and those who were colonized as a basis for re-theorizing the origins of the concept of human rights vis-à-vis European privilege. The central concept of this essay is that of “legal self-fashioning,” which the author develops to discuss how Kartini's writings constructed an emphatic, willful inner life that made her part of what was at the time considered “humanity” and therefore “ready” for individual rights.Item Review of Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas, and ValueFormichi, Chiara (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)Item Review of Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and RepresentationsSamuels, Annemarie (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)Item Review of Visual Cultures of the Ethnic Chinese in IndonesiaCarstens, Sharon (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)Item Indonesian Notebook Reprised: On Historical Accuracy, Multiple Perspectives, and Alternative FactsRoberts, Brian Russell; Foulcher, Keith (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)Item Table of Contents, Indonesia, Volume 103 (April 2017)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)Item Editorial Note, Indonesia, Volume 103, (April 2017)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2017-04)