Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Front Cover, Indonesia, Volume 105 (April 2018)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item Table of Contents, Indonesia, Volume 105 (April 2018)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item Review of Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary ArchiveSpyer, Patricia (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item Review of Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational IndonesiaSysling, Fenneke (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item Editorial Note, Indonesia, Volume 105 (April 2018)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item Review of Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in IndonesiaJones, Carla (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item Review of Jakarta: Drawing the City NearColven, Emma (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Item A Kampung Corner: Infrastructure, Affect, InformalityNewberry, Jan (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)The author explores how the kampung (village) is a form of infrastructure at once material and immaterial that draws on affective histories of community solidarity, even as it has been shaped by and continues to shape modes of governmentality that serve the interests of capital and the state. This article includes three aspects of this infrastructural support. First, the idea of the spectacular city has proven a productive one for urban studies, but lower-class enclaves like kampung would not typically qualify. Yet, the material form of the kampung is part of the spectacle of daily life for these urban neighbors. The role of kampung as key infrastructure for informality is the second aspect considered here. The forms of organization that are used to organize informal labor and kampung community are the products of years of state-inflected governmentality, from colonial to democratic regimes. In the third section, the reproduction of this organizational infrastructure and its relationship to the reproduction of the kampung as a social form is contemplated. These three threads are brought together in a conclusion that explores how these forms of kampung infrastructure are being called upon again in recent plans for playgrounds, for example.Item (Re)framing the Food Waste Narrative: Infrastructures of Urban Food Consumption and Waste in IndonesiaSoma, Tammara (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)This paper reveals the unequal power relations and the tensions between Indonesia’s “modern” food provisioning infrastructures (such as supermarkets) and traditional ones (such as door-to-door vendors and street markets). The research found that modern supermarkets are now commonplace and popular in Indonesia, yet those stores’ practices are known to increase food waste by maintaining stringent aesthetic standards (e.g., imperfect food gets tossed out) and promoting “buy one get one free” offers (thus encouraging consumers’ impulse and bulk purchases). The decline of traditional food infrastructures—such as mobile vegetable vendors (tukang sayur) and wet markets (pasar)—through spatial restrictions and predatory pricing strategies will limit the ability of Indonesians to continue traditional “buy today eat today” practices. A holistic understanding of the spatial transformation and changing consumption patterns in rapidly urbanizing cities is critical to promote contextually relevant food waste prevention and reduction policies in Indonesia.Item Dis/Connection: The Co-evolution of Sociocultural and Material Infrastructures of the Internet in IndonesiaLim, Merlyna (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)The internet was made available commercially to the Indonesian public in the mid-1990s. By 2015, in Jakarta and other cities, such as Bandung and Surabaya, urbanites experienced near-seamless online–offline sociality by logging in and out of social-media accounts on their mobile phones and via free wireless-network access at school, work, cafés and restaurants (warung), and even convenience stores. This article tells the story of the Indonesian internet by looking at the historical development of its infrastructure, especially the internet’s access points. To trace the coevolution of the infrastructure of Indonesia’s internet access points, the author relied on a longitudinal study involving repeated observations spanning a period of sixteen years, from 1999 to 2015. The fieldwork took place in Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya.Item Yogyakarta’s Colt Kampus and Bis Kota Transit Systems: Infrastructural Transitions and Shifts in AuthorityGibbings, Sheri L.; Lazuardi, Elan; Prawirosusanto, Khidir Marsanto; Hertzman, Emily; Barker, Joshua (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)The authors show that the transportation-infrastructure transition from colt kampus (essentially independent drivers and entrepreneurs) to bis kota (state-sponsored and ?organized firms) in the mid to late 1970s provided an occasion for the government and key players (elites) to shift the structures of transit authority in a manner that was consistent with larger political changes taking place in Indonesia in those years, including the “campus normalization” scheme, and attempts to constrict the economic and social activities of ethnic Chinese businessmen. The article draws on the research team’s interviews, participant observations, and archival research conducted in Yogyakarta city from August 2014 to September 2017.Item Infrastructures of Escort: Transnational Migration and Economies of Connection in IndonesiaLindquist, Johan (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)This article argues that antar-jemput (escort) is critical for understanding low-skilled international migration from rural Indonesia to countries across Asia and the Middle East. Antar-jemput forms the basis for the development of a migration infrastructure comprising recruitment, documentation, transport, temporary housing, reception, and physical restraint centered on the “protection,” or perlindungan, of the migrant. Such so-called security measures set the stage for protection rackets. As villagers have increasingly been valued as an overseas labor reserve since the 1980s, a culture of (im)mobility has taken shape, especially for female migrants, centered on the vulnerabilities of traveling alone and the comfort and security of traveling together. From this perspective, antar-jemput offers an entry point for conceptualizing migration infrastructure in Indonesia not strictly as an apparatus for the regulation and extraction of labor, or the management of a particular population, but also as an historically embedded cultural form.Item Internet Kampung: Community-based Internet in Post-Suharto IndonesiaTremblay, Jessika (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)In the shifting terrain of Indonesian internet infrastructure—which has temporally followed the transition from an autocratic regime bent on censoring information access to a democratic government that seeks to accommodate universal access (but without much success)—a new, typically grassroots, internet access model has emerged. The author calls this the “internet kampung.” In 2010, an urban neighborhood in Yogyakarta began to make headlines for its innovative appropriation of the internet for local development. At a time when Indonesia had an internet penetration rate of about 10 percent, totaling around twenty-five million users, this neighborhood, which became known as “Kampoeng Cyber,” boasted to local media that more than 80 percent of its houses were connected. Since that time, local and national media have been enamored with the story of the lower-middle class neighborhood that reportedly overcame obstacles to its socioeconomic development by saturating the neighborhood with internet access. Kampoeng Cyber residents adopted new technologies while proudly maintaining a strong sense of Javanese community sustained by their collective values of kebersamaan (togetherness), gotong royong (working together), and rukun (harmony). By representing themselves as technologically savvy, yet traditionally community-oriented, internet kampungs like this can successfully adapt to the recent neoliberal culture of governance.Item Discipline and Drain: River Normalization and Semarang’s Fight against Tidal FloodingLey, Lukas (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)This article explores how imaginaries of the river and Semarang’s northern neighborhoods shape urban and infrastructural practices. As a collaborative strategy to fight “excess” (of both water and unruly social elements), the normalization of rivers relies on kampung-state relations that have developed around rivers and their management. Normalization also serves residents’ interests, enabling them to overcome social stigma and to fight for urban rights. Although normalization can be a highly disruptive intervention, destroying houses and leading to displacement, many affected residents nevertheless welcome the continuation of normalization efforts. This article provides a genealogy of “normalisasi” in Semarang (and beyond). It makes the argument that modern river infrastructure was and continues to be conceptualized as a cure for Semarang’s former wetlands in the north—a practice begun by the Dutch colonial government. However, this article does not consider river infrastructure as a neat outcome of national schemes. Instead of considering water infrastructure as a product of the “hydraulic state” (a centralized formation of power and knowledge), it observes how national norms, urban imaginaries, and local histories coalesce.Item Where Will the Water Go?Kusno, Abidin (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)The issues of banjir—flooding—have increasingly received attention in a variety of fields, and Jakarta has been a primary case study. Existing studies have significantly contributed to an understanding of the inadequate institutional, organizational, and individual capacities for flood management in a city that is expanding rapidly. They also point to universal forces that exacerbate flooding, such as urbanization and climate change. This essay explores the multifaceted dimensions of banjir, such as how it is culturally perceived, understood, and managed; how it is implicated in knowledge and power; and how it becomes a form of “governmentality” that nevertheless produces critical consciousness among the public about environmental crisis. It emphasizes the productive failure of technology that shapes a particular form of government that is at once uncontrolled and yet responsible for structuring people’s lives and influencing state priorities. In the uncoordinated “absent presence” of infrastructure, banjir allows for the possibility of exchange among people, power, and money.Item Cultures and Politics of Indonesian InfrastructuresBarker, Joshua; Gibbings, Sheri Lynn (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-04)Infrastructures are typically viewed as the material and social forms that allow for exchange over space: the pipes, wires, people, roads, and, in the digital age, cell towers and wireless networks, that connect villages, towns, and cities to wider national and transnational systems, and facilitate the flow of goods in both a cultural and physical sense. Infrastructures are important for social life, not only because they allow for exchanges but because they “mediate” social reality, connecting individuals and localities to wider cultural, religious, and economic networks. The articles in this special issue grew out of a workshop held at the University of Toronto in summer 2016. The cities represented in these studies—Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Semarang, and Bogor—are all on Java, although the kinds of infrastructures they highlight can be found throughout the archipelago. This collection analyzes infrastructures for mitigating urban flooding (Abidin Kusno, Lukas Ley), “escorting” migrant workers to and from their jobs in other countries (Johan Lindquist), accessing the internet (Jessika Tremblay, Merlyna Lim), moving people around cities (Sheri Lynn Gibbings et al.), handling household food waste (Tammara Soma), and informal living and working (Jan Newberry).