Indonesia, Vol. 106, October 2018
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Item Table of Contents, Indonesia, Volume 106 (October 2018)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Editorial Note, Indonesia, Volume 106 (October 2018)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Front Cover, Indonesia, Volume 106 (October 2018)(Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Review of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital RevolutionWeiss, Meredith L. (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Review of Chinese Ways of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity and Religiosity in IndonesiaCarstens, Sharon (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Review of Follow the Maid: Domestic Worker Migration in and from IndonesiaChan, Carol (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Review of Departing from Java: Javanese Labour, Migration and DiasporaHouben, Vincent (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)Item Inadvertent Ethnography in Propaganda: J. C. Lamster’s Films (1912–13)Ray, Sandeep (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)In the early twentieth century, the Dutch colonial government, working with several private entities operating in the Netherlands East Indies, significantly increased propagandistic efforts promoting solidarity toward their colony. As part of these initiatives, a new organization, called the Colonial Institute, hired soldier-turned-filmmaker J. C. Lamster to make several short films between 1912–13. His films documented various government infrastructural programs, as well as its efforts to promote art and culture. Despite having bequeathed a prolific collection—Lamster made about fifty-five films by himself—he remains relatively unknown. It was only as recently as 2010 that a comprehensive Dutch-language biography was published. Given that Lamster’s films merit further scrutiny, this article has two objectives: to expound the historical and social circumstances in which these films were created, and to impress upon the reader that, despite falling under that broad, often dull, classification of “propaganda,” some of Lamster’s short movies deserve a legitimate place in the canon of early ethnographic film in Indonesia.Item Fear and Loathing: Uncivil Islamism and Indonesia’s Anti-Ahok MovementMohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman; Waikar, Prashant (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)This article seeks to understand and explain the discursive strategies used by far-right Islamist groups to popularize sentiment against Ahok (Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, former governor of Jakarta) and ruin his political career. This paper, which analyses the period when anti-Ahok rallies in Jakarta were common, blends three ideas. First, it discusses and reverses the logic of civil Islam, as put forth by Robert Hefner, to define far-right Islamist groups as uncivil. Second, it links uncivility with majoritarian insecurity and the way in which the politics of fear is used to mobilize majorities against minorities. Third, it discusses how and why uncivil groups use symbolic violence to ideologically attack minorities in order to manage the majorities’ perceived insecurities. Three themes are discussed in this article. First, through Ahok’s ethnic identification, Indonesian Chinese were conflated with China, communist ungodliness, and, thus, a quasi-demonic threat to Islam. Second, Ahok’s rise to the governorship was framed as a dangerous symbol of the perceived ascendance of Indonesian Chinese to positions of political power. Third, Ahok was claimed to be leading the charge of a Christian takeover of Indonesia by co-opting abangan Muslims, such as Jokowi. This paper uses primary and secondary research, including interviews with key leaders of far-right Islamist groups. It concludes with implications for Indonesia’s religio-political landscape.Item Capture from Below: Civil–Military Relations during Indonesia’s Anticommunist Violence, 1965–66Winward, Mark (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2018-10)An enduring debate sparked by the mid-1960s mass killings of suspected Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members is the extent to which the army or civilians were primarily responsible for the violence. This question obscures as much as it reveals: not only were both civilians and army personnel actively involved in eliminating the PKI and executing its members, they at times clashed with each other over the scope of the anticommunist campaign. I argue that due to limited resources, the anticommunist faction of the army was forced to rely on civilians to provide information, legitimacy, and manpower. This provided civilians with opportunities for score-settling and killings outside of military control and without punitive consequences. Using Yogyakarta as a least-likely case for civilian initiative due to the timing of the killings, and its lack of both preexisting militia and prior intergroup violence, I argue that the degree to which the army was forced to rely on civilian communities has been overlooked as an explanation for both the scale of arrests and the number of public-spectacle killings.