Social Analysis

George Kingsley Garbett—Kingsley, to all his friends and colleagues—the Managing Editor of Social Analysis, was involved in the journal in different capacities since its foundation in 1980. He performed the editorial role for the longest period of time, guiding it through various changes of direction. His energy and inspiration are evident in the formation of thematic issues. He always took a keen intellectual interest in the contributions, and the mark of his thought is apparent in many of them.

Facing death with equanimity and with a honed, trained body is an expression of sheer power. When a group of like-minded individuals confronts an oppositional force with equal mental and bodily capacities, whether on a sports field or in a warring conflict, the result is power compounded. Each article in this special section ‘confronts’ such powers. Together they explore several regionally specific projects in Asia in which dying for a cause is seen as a virtue.

This article traces the connections between death and the afterlife as configured through the Malay martial art silat in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Riau Archipelago. The practice and performance of silat are addressed here through aspects of non-material and material culture, including ritual, dance, jewelry, symbols, and art. Silat is designed to transform physically and spiritually the silat practitioner and to remove the fear of death and dying. This transformation is partly accomplished by summoning (berseru) the shadows of the 'potent dead'. However, the contemporary medicalization of death may preclude the possibility of a 'noble death'. To illustrate the disjuncture of 'deathscapes', I compare the agonizing death of a silat master to the cemetery ordeal of his son.

In Nepal, war is a sacrifice. The warrior maintains a direct and unique relationship with the divine, since in warfare he makes a sacrificial gift of his own person, the bali dân—a gift that results in a 'noble death'. The warrior can offer the sacrifice or be offered in sacrifice. In Maoist ideology, death loses its character of reciprocity since the inter-changeability of victims who die honorably on either side of the battle has been eliminated. The asymmetry of death, the one-sided sacrificial nature of the war, is one of the features that distinguishes the People's War from those that preceded it. Through Maoist poetry and Maoist warriors' diaries, this article explores the shift introduced by the People's War from the figure of the 'hero', traditionally attached to the warlike realm, to the new figure of the 'martyr', and shows the apocalyptic nature of the Maoist cultural production.

Since Weber's time, it has been believed that 'enchantment' progressively gave way to secular rationalism and its disenchanted ways. This essay breaks the twinning of enchantment with 'irrationality' in developing the argument that enchanted practices and pragmatic methods co-exist fruitfully in the activities of the LTTE. Circumstantial evidence, arising from pictures and descriptions of hero rituals sponsored by the LTTE, provides the foundation for this argument. It is suggested that the Saivite universe of being has nourished these symbolic compositions. A photograph of Black Tigers paying homage to their dead with guns in the left hand and flowers in the right provides a condensed demonstration as well as a point of departure for this suggestion. It is a moment of conjunctiveness that has the potential to fuse past, present, and future, thus achieving 'fusion force'.

This article explores emerging ascetic orientations toward utility and death in India. It chronicles the activities of an innovative organization that campaigns for cadaver donations for the purposes of organ retrieval and dissection by trainee doctors. This would entail dispensing with cremation, a mode of cadaver disposal newly characterized as wasteful. In order to counter 'cremation-lack', the asceticism of cadaver donation is accentuated by the organization. The group thereby reinterprets classical Hinduism according to the demands of 'medical rationality'. This produces a novel 'donation theology' and additionally serves to demonstrate the 'asceticism' by which all voluntary donors of body material are obliged to abide.

Based on a case study of Israeli men's friendships, this article examines the inter-relations between the experience of male relationships in everyday life and established representations of fraternal friendship. We delineate a script for male bonding that echoes ancient epics of heroism. This script holds a mythic structure for making sense of friendship in everyday life and places male relatedness under the spectral ideal of death. Whereas various male-to-male arenas present diverse and often displaced expressions of male affection, we contend that sites of commemoration present a unique instance in which desire between men is publicly declared and legitimized. The collective rituals for the dead hero-friends serve as a mask that transforms a repudiated personal sentiment into a national genre of relatedness. We interpret fraternal friendship as a form of private/public identification/desire whereby the citizen brother becomes, via collective rituals of commemoration, the desired brother.

The essays in this forum offer sharply focused and critical perspectives on the consequences, both intended and unforeseen, of reform in Indonesia since the resignation of President Suharto on 21 May 1998. Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, a huge archipelago of fascinating diversity and complexity, is now poised to assume a leadership role in Southeast Asia, with China on the rise and the moribund Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) coming back to life (Sheridan 2005).

It is remarkable how few Westerners know that Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation (after China, India, and the United States), or that Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other country. These basic facts should be enough to establish Indonesia’s importance for current world affairs. In this essay, however, I argue for paying attention to the life-worlds of gay and lesbian Indonesians. While this might seem an unconventional topic, these Indonesians’ lives provide valuable clues to how being ‘Indonesian’ gets defined and to the workings of nation-states more generally. They teach us how heteronormativity—the assumption that heterosexuality is the only normal or proper sexuality—plays a fundamental role in forming nation-states as “imagined communities.” In Indonesia and elsewhere, nation-states are modeled on a particular archetype of the nuclear family (husband, wife, and children, with the nation’s president as parent). In line with this model, nation-states often portray themselves as made up not just of individual citizens but of families, which almost always are assumed to be nuclear families despite the staggering range of family forms found in the world’s cultures. Restricting the family model to the heterosexual couple has been a key means by which the idea of the Indonesian nation (and other nations) has been promulgated and sustained. Thus, rather than see the exclusion of homosexuality as a latter-day response to an encroaching global gay and lesbian movement, this exclusion is most accurately understood as a point of departure by which the idea of ‘Indonesia’ comes to exist in the first place.

In July 2003, a lavish award ceremony was held at a five-star hotel in Jakarta. At the Polygamy Awards, as it was called, the financial sponsor and master of ceremonies, a wealthy entrepreneur named Puspo Wardoyo, handed out awards to several dozen Indonesian men who, in the view of the selection committee, had upheld the high moral and religious standards needed to be a successful polygamist. The idea of the ceremony was to bring polygamy and its practitioners out of the closet, so to speak, and to celebrate polygamy’s virtue as a respected Islamic tradition that should be a source of pride rather than shame for both men and women. Puspo Wardoyo, the jovial president of the Indonesian Polygamy Society (Masyarakat Poligami Indonesia), had embarked upon a highly publicized crusade to popularize polygamy. Although legal with some restrictions for Muslim men in Indonesia, polygamy had a social taint to it that Puspo and others like him wanted to see erased. “A man who can afford it financially and who is of good character has the duty to have more than one wife. Polygamy is the most praiseworthy of actions … I want to spread the polygamy virus,” he commented in a magazine interview.

In imagining Indonesia’s future, its character as a country with the world’s largest Islamic population emerges as a critical issue. In the post-Suharto period, some commentators have seen the emergence of Islamist politics as a threat to newly attained freedoms. No sooner had women been freed from the constraints of ‘state ibuism’, i.e., the official policy promoting the role of wife and mother (ibu) of the New Order (see Suryakusuma 1996), which endorsed patriarchal familism as a cornerstone of authoritarian politics, than they faced a new kind of patriarchal authority in the demands for the enactment of shari’a as state law. For example, during her 2005 visit to Australia, Indonesian feminist commentator Julia Suryakusuma raised the specter of Islam as the greatest current threat to gender equity and to women as social actors in civic life, whose rights in the domestic sphere are now protected by the state. The growing influence of Middle Eastern Islam in Indonesia, evidenced by funding for organizations, translations of publications, and the increase in Islamist rhetoric, has caused alarm among many observers. This apprehension draws on the stereotype of the Middle East as the source of all that is ‘bad’ about Islam, taken as an undifferentiated whole. But this view of Islam fails to acknowledge debates within Islam and diversity in Islamic practice, not the least of which are the varieties of Islam that can be found throughout the Indonesian archipelago. These diverse practices have emerged as local communities and indigenous polities responded in distinctive and often unique ways during the long period of Islamic conversion, beginning from the thirteenth century.

Indonesian is the national language of the world’s fourth most populous country. Although it has 200 million speakers, it is little known beyond its borders and a narrow circle of area specialists. To reduce its obscurity in the global scheme of things, I will show here how it has developed into an unusually national but ‘un-native’ language. A brief sketch of the language’s history highlights commonsense ideas about language, identity, and nationalism that the Indonesian case does not fit, further reinforcing its uncommon aspects.

Indonesia is in the midst of a publishing renaissance. The number of published titles doubled in 2003 to a sum greater than any year under Suharto. Titles unimaginable 10 years ago now line bookstore shelves: books about Marx, books by and about ethnic Chinese, and books with the words ‘sex’ or ‘homosexual’ and ‘Islam’ in the same title. In 2000, the publisher of Nobel Prize–nominated author Pramoedya Ananta Toer released a special Emancipation Edition of the previously banned Buru Quartet, named after the island on which the Suharto regime had imprisoned the writer for almost 14 years.

The collapse of the 33-year-long military dictatorship of President Suharto in 1998 was closely preceded and followed by outbreaks of ethnic conflict and violence across the country. This violence quickly attracted the attention of scholars, far more so, ironically, than did the mostly ‘quiet’ but equally destructive violence of Suharto’s long and oppressive rule. Anthropologists and other social scientists have since produced an extensive literature on the outbreaks of ethnic violence in Indonesia (Anderson 2001; Hüsken and de Jonge 2002; Wessel and Wimhöfer 2001), especially Sulawesi and eastern Indonesia (Acciaioli 2001; Aragon 2001; Klinken 2001; Spyer 2002; Vel 2001), and its historic antecedents (Colombijn and Lindblad 2002; Nordholt 2002; Wadley 2004). The following analysis will focus on the violent conflict between Dayak and Madurese that broke out in Kalimantan in 1997 and flared up sporadically during the years that followed. Whereas outside observers, including this writer, reacting against ‘new barbarism’ media accounts, tended to attribute this conflict to the political-economic legacy of Suharto’s New Order regime, the Dayak themselves attributed it to cultural differences with and offenses by the Madurese. This indigenous explanation, claiming ‘agency’ at the expense of political inexpediency, poses a challenge to scholarly conventions of representation.

Indonesia’s New Order was among the most repressive and violent states of the twentieth century. During Suharto’s period of rule (1966–1998), the state was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of as many as a million or more of its own citizens and the incarceration of many more. While the worst of this violence occurred during the pogroms against communists in 1965–1966 and during the long occupation of East Timor, the whole New Order system of rule was constructed on what Benedict Anderson (2001a: 13) has described as a “vast machine of state violence.” This machine left behind a dangerous legacy that must be better understood if it is to be overcome in the years ahead (J. Bertrand 2002; Colombijn and Lindblad 2002).

Indonesia seems perpetually condemned to “live in interesting times,” as the famous Chinese curse goes. The past decade has seen the country attract global notoriety as a land of recurrent economic shocks, ethnic conflicts, terrorist bombings, separatist rebellions, and natural catastrophes. Political authorities have appeared too corrupt and inept to respond effectively. Thus, when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), a retired general, scored a landslide victory in Indonesia’s first-ever direct presidential election in September 2004, the political rise of a military man was widely portrayed as a small blow for stability in a highly unstable nation.

Chinese businessmen in Indonesia still want to come [to Australia] for safety for their families, especially their children. Right now many Chinese in Jakarta fear violence, because commercial grudges are actually being settled by attacks on them. Recently, a famous Chinese businessman in Indonesia was shot dead even though he was guarded by men from KOPPASUS [an elite counter-terrorist army unit]. He was killed by men due to some business grudge … I do not want my son to do business in Indonesia because of the violence. He could make a competitive tender for a government or other contract, but then find that someone bears a grudge against him for being underbid and decides to hurt or kill him. One never knows.

To speak of ‘asylum’ is to speak of an intense fear released upon arrival in a sheltered place of calm. With political asylum, both the fear and the subsequent calm are politicized, because the origins of fear are typically understood to be identified with a state apparatus, and the umbrella of shelter is defined by the territorial boundaries of another nation-state. Seeking asylum involves more than escaping trouble in one’s homeland. It links that trouble to government and severs a connection between homeland and nationality. Defection, an extreme variant of asylum, is a politicized trade of nationality. However, in any asylum request, one’s prior nationality, if not repudiated altogether, must be placed in abeyance until such a time that the state apparatus of one’s homeland no longer persecutes dissent. Even so, rarely do those granted political asylum reclaim their prior nationality and return to their homeland once the conditions of persecution have vanished.