Power and Place in Southeast Asia – serie

The post-1998 surge in local politics has moved the provincial town back to centre stage. This book examines the Indonesian middle class (now 43%!) up close in the place where its members are most at home: the town. Middle Indonesia generates national political forces, yet it is neither particularly rich nor geographically central. This is an overwhelmingly lower middle class, a conservative petty bourgeoisie barely out of poverty and tied to the state. Middle Indonesia rather resists than welcomes globalized, open markets. Politically, it enjoys democracy but uses its political skills and clientelistic networks to make the system work to its advantage, which is not necessarily that of either the national elites or the poor.Contributors include Ward Berenschot, Joseph Errington, Noorhaidi Hasan, Gerry van Klinken, Cornelis Lay, Wenty Marina Minza, Jan Newberry, Amalinda Savirani, Sylvia Tidey, Nicolaas Warouw, and Ben White. Photographs by S. Chris Brown.

What holds Indonesia together? 'A strong leader' is the answer most often given. This book looks instead at a middle level of society. Middle classes in provincial towns around the vast archipelago mediate between the state and society and help to constitute state power. 'Middle Indonesia' is a social zone connecting extremes. The Making of Middle Indonesia examines the rise of an indigenous middle class in one provincial town far removed from the capital city. Spanning the late colonial to early New Order periods, it develops an unusual, associational notion of political power. 'Soft' modalities of power included non-elite provincial people in the emerging Indonesian state. At the same time, growing inequalities produced class tensions that exploded in violence in 1965-1966.

Forgotten People deals with people living at the fringes of the Indonesian society. It describes and analyses their livelihoods and styles of making a living from an insider perspective. While Indonesia has experienced steady economic growth for more than a decade, the livelihoods and lifestyles of poor people and migrants confronted with poverty and insecurity have received less attention. This book describes and analyses diversity in livelihood strategies, risk-taking and local forms of social security (social welfare) of people living below or close to the Indonesian poverty line. It puts two categories of forgotten people at the centre. Peasants, living in remote areas in rural Java, and Madurese migrants craving for a better life in urban and rural East Kalimantan.

In Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia Lee Wilson offers an innovative study of nationalism and the Indonesian state through the ethnography of the martial art of Pencak Silat. Wilson shows how technologies of physical and spiritual warfare such as Pencak Silat have long played a prominent role in Indonesian political society. He demonstrates the importance of these technologies to the display and performance of power, and highlights the limitations of theories of secular modernity for understanding political forms in contemporary Indonesia. He offers a compelling argument for a revisionist account of models of power in Indonesia in which authority is understood as precarious and multiple, and the body is politically charged because of its potential for transformation.