POLITICAL CULTURE

 

To most Americans, Indonesia is a little-known, faraway country. Many of us can identify Bali, a small Indonesian island whose colorful Hindu-influenced tropical culture has become an international tourist attraction. Others are aware that, like India, Indonesia is an ethnically diverse country or that a lame majority of its people are Muslim. Some of us have heard of the "Stone Age" culture of such people as the Asmat of southwestern Papua, who carve spectacular ancestor poles and have a history of head-hunting (Schneebaum, 1988).

 

These images are accurate enough, and some of them-like ethnic diversity and the Muslim majority-are truly important to an understanding of Indonesian society and culture. But they are misleading, too, because they predispose us to think of Indonesians as different from ourselves in fundamental ways, as an exotic traditional people half a world away culturally as well as geographically.

 

A better place to start is with what we share. The nation-state of contem­porary Indonesia is a modem culture and society, of the ex-colonial subtype, like the United States. The idea of Indonesia was first conceived by Dutch-ed­ucated young men and women in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their inspiration was the European nationalism and socialism of that period, products in turn of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. The frustrations they felt as a colonized people found expression in a vocabulary familiar to Americans: national independence, personal liberty, democracy, economic development, social justice, and equality.

 

The society they created is a familiar one in many ways. The national capital, Jakarta, and large cities like Surabaya, Medan, and Makassar look like metropolitan areas in other countries. Their upper- and middle-class inhabitants work in government or the private sector and live in single-fam­ily homes or apartments. They belong to associations formed to represent their interests as doctors, lawyers, journalists, engineers, businesspeople, and so on. There is an urban cultural life, with shopping malls, newspapers and magazines, bookstores, movie theaters, and restaurants. The begin­nings of industrialization have created a working class. Indonesian factories produce a range of manufactured goods. Nearly 60 percent of Indonesians still earn their living from small-scale farming, but this number has been steadily declining for decades. Most young people in rural areas dream of fleeing the village. They often aspire to a white-collar job and the accom­panying lifestyle: a private house, a motorcycle or car, consumer goods like TVs, stereos, and refrigerators. They know that schooling is the route to success, and the number of public and private educational institutions from the primary through the tertiary level has multiplied rapidly to meet grow­ing demand.

Their government is also modern. They have a written constitution, the Constitution of 1945, which states that Indonesia is a unitary state in the form of a republic, with sovereignty in the hands of the people.' The con­stitution provides for a People's Consultative Assembly that convenes at least once every five years to elect the president and vice-president and de­termine basic state policies; a Parliament that meets annually and must ap­prove the government's budget and tax bills; a central administrative struc­ture including a Supreme Court and a judiciary; and a regional administrative structure.

 

Among the Constitution's most impressive passages, from an American point of view, are the following:

 

·        Every citizen has the same status under the law (article 27, sub. 1).

·        Every citizen has the right to a job and a life that is fitting for human beings (arti­cle 27, sub. 2).

·        The freedom to associate and gather, express thoughts orally and in writing and so forth will be established by law (article 28).

·        The state guarantees the freedom of every inhabitant to embrace his or her own religion (article 29, sub. 2).

·        Every citizen has the right to education (article 31, sub. 1).

 

These passages have a reassuring ring, but they are not quoted to prove that Indonesia is just like America, even at this level of the nation's formal political contract. Both countries are indeed ex-colonial and staged armed revolutions to gain their independence, which explains many of their values, beliefs, and attitudes today. But Indonesia's founding fathers came of political age in the early twentieth century, not the late eighteenth century. Many of them were hostile to capitalism, which in its high imperialist stage they saw as the cause of the poverty of indigenous Indonesians. They also tended to be collectivist, emphasizing the rights and duties of the nation as a whole rather than its individual citizens, and statist, conferring on the government a heavy responsibility for promoting the general welfare. Again, some passages in the Constitution are revealing:

 

  • Whereas in reality independence is the right of all nations and because of that, colonial rule over the world must be abolished (preamble).
  • The economy is organized as a common enterprise based on the family principle (article 33, sub. 1).
  • Branches of production that are important for the state and that control the means of life of the many are managed by the state (article 33, sub. 2).
  • The earth and water and natural riches that are contained in them are managed by the state and used to the maximum extent for the welfare of the people (article 33, sub. 3).
  • The poor and neglected children will be cared for by the state (article 34).

 

One source of these attitudes was the social position of the Indonesians who dominated the nationalist movement. They were closest to the Dutch, socially, culturally, and physically, and stood to gain a great deal by taking over intact the relatively powerful state institutions the Dutch had built by the early twentieth century. Their position as an educated elite also inclined them to condescend to their own people, viewing them as backward and in need of guidance and uplifting that only they could provide.

 

For some of them, paradoxically, another source was in the tradition of deference to authority positively valued in their ethnic culture. There are several hundred culturally and linguistically distinct ethnic groups in Indonesia, each with its own homeland or area of origin where most of its members still live. In this respect Indonesia is unlike the United States, whose multi-ethnicity is almost entirely the product of migration. Ethnicity in Indonesia thus tends to be more visible and to have greater potential as a basis for new nationalisms than is the case in America. The largest ethnic group is the Javanese, who live in the eastern two-thirds of Java and who make up nearly one-half the total population. The second largest, at about 15 percent, is the Sundanese of west Java. Other large groups include the Acehnese, Batak, and Minangkabau, all of Sumatra, the Madurese to the north of Java, the Balinese to the east, the Banjar of Kalimantan, and the Bugis, a seafaring people of Sulawesi. Papua's one and a half million inhabitants are divided into more than two hundred linguistic groups.

 

Indonesians consider all of these groups indigenous, or part of the Indonesian nation, a status they do not grant to the resident Chinese minority, who constitute only 2 to 3 percent of the total population. Culturally and legally, most of the Chinese are now Sino-Indonesians, speaking Indonesian better than Chinese and holding Indonesian citizenship. As in colonial times, however, ethnic Chinese dominate the modern sectors of the economy and the central business section of virtually every town and city. They are the core of Indonesia's business and also, to some extent, professional, middle class. They do not play a social or political role commensurate with that status, because of indigenous Indonesians' hostility toward them. Instead they often seek protection and support through private, sometimes corrupt, relations with government officials and military officers.

 

Most Indonesians believe that Javanese culture is characterized by a strong tendency to defer to those in authority, to respect hierarchy, and to seek harmony in social relations, all expressed in a style that emphasizes indirection and self-deprecation in speech and behavior. This belief is shared by most Javanese, some of whom view it with alarm as a main obstacle to the creation of a modern democratic society. Others point to it with pride as the chief guarantor of a stable social order. The alarmists predominated during the prewar nationalist movement, the revolution for independence, and the parliamentary democratic period of the 1950s. President Suharto, himself of Javanese origin, made "traditional Indonesian" (read: Javanese) values the cultural foundation of his New Order government. Today, it is once again a major concern of those who want democracy to succeed.

 

The accuracy of this conception of Javanese values is, or at any rate ought to be, in dispute. It is in fact most characteristic of the Javanese heartland, the area around Yogyakarta and Surakarta where the kingdom of Mataram had its center in the seventeenth century. Surabayans and other east Javanese are to this day proud of their own relative "coarseness" and egalitarianism in contrast to the supposedly "refined" and hierarchical central Javanese. Even in the central heartland, where harmony is strongly valued, it is not so obvious that deference to hierarchical authority is universally accepted as the way to achieve it. In the wayang Wit, the famous shadow plays in which Javanese explore the complexities of their culture and the beauty of their language, there are many positively presented characters who defy higher authority in the quest for harmony and many stories in which they get away with it.

 

It may well be that the emphasis on hierarchy is more a product of the colonial period, when the conquered Javanese nobility was preserved by the Dutch as a symbol of indigenous rule, than of Mataram itself. It also can be interpreted not as a genuine attitude of deference, but as a culturally approved strategy or set of linguistic and behavioral tools that individual

 

Javanese use to advance themselves in competition with others struggling up the social ladder. At another level, it should be remembered that the Indonesian Communist party, an organization committed to egalitarian values, won the votes of millions of Javanese in 1955.

 

About 87 percent of Indonesians, including most Javanese, are Muslims. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who studied the religion of Javanese in the early 1950s, divided them into three groups: santri, abangan, and priyayi (Geertz, 1960). The santri are devout Muslims who make a serious effort to pray daily, to attend Friday mosque services, to save for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and so on. The abangan and priyayi are also Muslims, but pre-Islamic Hindu-derived and even older indigenous beliefs and practices play a much larger role in their religious lives. The priyayi were the traditional ruling aristocracy in precolonial and colonial times. They were more influenced by Hindu high culture, brought to the archipelago almost two millennia ago, while the abangan were the common people, more influenced by ancient animistic ideas. With independence, the priyayi as a ruling aristocracy was abolished, but their world view has remained influential.

 

Because these concepts are not census categories, we have no hard data about their distribution. Among foreign observers, there was once a consensus that perhaps two-thirds of the Javanese are abangan and priyayi, while only one-third are santri. In the last two decades, however, there has been a strong trend toward greater religious piety on the part of most Indonesians. In the mid- to late 1960s, the trend was driven at least in part by a widespread fear that a lack of piety might be taken as evidence of Communist sympathies. The government, particularly through the school system, has also been for decades an active promoter of religion. Both impressionistic and survey evidence now suggest that a much larger percentage of Javanese are santri, or at least outwardly pious believers (Liddle and Mujani, 2000). President Sukarno's family was lesser priyayi, while Suharto was an abangan village boy who made good through joining the army. In his last years in office, Suharto appeared to become a pious Muslim, making the pilgrimage to Mecca with his family in 1992. Third President Habibie, raised in Sulawesi of mixed Javanese-Bugis parentage, identifies with the santri community, as does fourth President Abdurrahman Wahid, an east Javanese. Current President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of the late President Sukarno, inherits her father's priyayi culture.

 

The Sundanese and most Outer Islanders are also santri Muslims. Santri culture throughout Indonesia is probably in general supportive of the deferential side of Javanese culture. In mainstream Middle Eastern sunni Islam, the tradition to which virtually all Indonesian Muslims belong, believers are typically exhorted to respect and obey whoever is in power, even if the ruler is a non-Muslim. Santri religious teachers in east and central Java are fond of quoting the relevant Koranic passages about deference to power. These teachers are themselves revered and deferred to by most Muslims. Abdurrahman Wahid, the grandson of a famous teacher in Jombang, east Java, is himself a prominent contemporary example of a traditionalist Muslim.

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CHART A

POLITICAL MAP OF INDONESIAN ISLAM (SANTRI

 

SANTRI DIVISIONS Late

19th century split

 

MODERNIST                                                            TRADITIONALIST

 

Return to Koran                                                            Adhere to one (Syafi'i) of four legal
Catch up with western science                              schools of Sunni Islam Sufism

Urban, traders                                                   Sufism

Strong outside Java                                            East Java-centered

Small tendency to fundamentalism                      Rural, farmers

No tendency to fundamentalism

 

SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS

 

Muhammadiyah (claims 20 million + mbs).          Nahdlatul Ulama (claims 30 million + mbs).

Head during most of 1990s:                                Head 1984-1999: Abdurrahman Wahid

Amien Rais. Chicago-trained.                             Baghdad- and Cairo-trained

Has a history of exclusivism,                              religious pluralist; social democrat

champion of Islamic causes,                               Founder with other NU leaders

anti-U.S., anti-Israel but now more pluralist.           of PKB (National Awakening Party),

Heads PAN (National Mandate Party),             12% of 1999 vote

7% of 1999 vote, a broadly based                       Was president of Indonesia from 1999-2001

multiethnic, mult-ireligious party,

and is chair of the People's Consultative

Assembly.

 

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS

 

Masyumi, 1945-1960.                                         NU as party, 1953-11974

Muhammadiyah within PPP                               NU within PPP (Developmental Unity Party

   (Development Unity Party),                               as part of a forced fusion, 74-84

   as part of a forced fusion, 1974-1984.

 

Today:                                                              Today

PAN (National Mandate Party),                                     PKB, 12%, an NU party but declared open

7%, Muhammadiyah base, but a declared            Most of PPP, 10% of 1999 vote, a formally

open party.                                                          Islamic party

Some of PPP, 10% of 1999 vote.                       Also a presence in Golkar, now no longer a

Most of Golkar, 22%, under the leadership             state party, and in PDI-P

  of Akbar Tanjung, now chair of Parliament.

PBB (Moon and Star Party), 2%, declared successor to Masyumi.

 

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There are other currents among Middle Eastern sunnis, including a kind of militant fundamentalism that has led to revolutionary movements in countries like Algeria and Egypt. These currents have reached Indonesia as well, though they are not a large force at the national level. Rather, the militants represent a small minority within a larger group of modernist Muslims. In Islamic terminology, modernism is a late-nineteenth-century reform movement that urged Muslims to catch up with western advances in secular knowledge and to seek religious meaning directly from the Koran rather than from the medieval schools of legal interpretation dominant at the time. Some twentieth-century modernists have taken the injunction to return to the Koran literally and urge the stoning of adulteresses and the cutting off of the hands of thieves. Others claim that while the message of the Koran is timeless and for all people, it must be reinterpreted in each society by every generation. Indonesian modernists continue to debate these issues, but most of them belong to the more moderate group.

About 9 percent of Indonesians are Christians, including both Catholics and Protestants. Christians, most of whom come from the Outer Islands, have been well educated as a group due to the head start provided by missionary schools in the nineteenth century. Some Muslims resent the resulting overrepresentation of Christians in government and modern pub­lic life generally. Sino-Indonesians are predominantly Christian, Buddhist, or Confucian. Most Balinese are Hindu.