Making do in the imagined community: Domesticity and stateformation in working class Java

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Authors Newberry, Janice Carol, 1957-

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MAKING DO IN THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY:

DOMESTICITY AND STATE FORMATION IN WORKING CLASS JAVA

by

Janice Carol Newberry

Copyright © Janice Carol Newberry 1997

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

1 9 9 7

DMI Number: 9806817

Copyright 1997 by Newberry, Janice Carol

All rights reserved.

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2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have

read the dissertation prepared by Janice Carol Newhprry

entitled Making Do In The Imagined Coimnunitv; nomesticity and Stare

Formation In Working Class Java

and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation

requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Pcu ^/ / f /y- ) Date

tidte

f - ' f - n

K. ark.^hair

(O^ames Greenberg

Jane Hill Date

Mark Nichter Date

Date

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

^ )c - / f / 9 7 Dissertation Director Datfe

Thomas K. Park

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted m partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the Universrty Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations fi^om this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation fi-om or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or m part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED:

4

ACKNOWLEDGIVIENTS

This research was supported by two grants from the Southeast Asia Comicil and a grant from the University of Arizona Graduate School. I would like to thank the Lembaga nmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI) for permission to conduct this research, and the American-Indonesian Exchange Foimdation (AMINEF) for all their support of Steve Ferzacca and I throughout the course of our origmal fieldwork. My special thanks to Dr. Tonny Sadjimin at the Clmical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unity (CEBU) at Dr. Sardjito General Hospital in Yogyakarta, Java, who agreed to sponsor my research, and to all the great staff there, including particxilarly Dr. Yati Soenarto and Nurwicaksono. My research was greatly enriched by the invaluable help of my research assistant and Uttle sister, Mei Sugiarti, who translated more than just language for me.

My work in Java would not have been possible without my friends and neighbors. My very special thanks to the family of Ibu Suyono, to the Soebagio family, to Mei Sugiarti and her family, and to Joan Suyenaga and Suhirdjan and their wonderfiU children. Lani and Rio. All of these families received Steve and I with much love and hospitality. I thank them all for their unselfish friendship and all the great food and laughs. They were my first and best teachers about what "homemaking" really means in Java.

On this side of the world, I would like to thank my committee, including Jim Greenberg, Mark Nichter and Jane Hill, who served without complaint despite my winding path to the Ph.D. Thanks especially to Tad Park, who could not possibly have been a better supervisor and mentor. He believed in me when I could not.

My family has been my bedrock in life as well as m scholarship. It is no coincidence that I write about family and community having being raised by a raucous family in an Ozark community that feels far from imaginary. To the other members of the fearless four, my mother, sister and niece, I dedicate the pages that follow on the work of women in holding the universe together.

Thanks also to my cousins Barbara and Lester Ruggles whose unselfish contribution of equipment helped assure the success of my project.

But finally, this dissertation is dedicated to the one who is dedicated to me. Thanks are too little for my partner in all this, Steve Ferzacca. This dissertation is a contemplation not only of community and family life, but of the partnership that made it possible. It was Steve who told me that Java would be an adventure that we would share, an adventure unbounded by the island or our time there.

5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF HGURES 8 ABSTRACT 9

CHAPTER ONE; BU SAE GOES TO AN ARISAN II

CHAPTER TWO: METHODS 35 THE DINGHY DEPARTS 35 BECOMING A HOUSEWIFE 40 SEEING AND BEING SEEN 41 REPRODUCING SUBJECTS 48 SEEING HOUSEWIVES 50 REPRODUCING HOUSEWIVES 55 DOING FIELDWORK AMONG HOUSEWIVES 60

CHAPTER THREE: PEOPLE AND PLACE 73 NEIGHBORS 73 ORDINARY PEOPLE 80 JAVA AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION 86 HISTORY OF KAMPUNG 100 KAMPUNG RUMAH PUTRI 115 DEMOGRAPHICS 123

CHAPTER FOUR: MAKING HOUSEWIVES: PKK AND THE KAMPUNG "VILLAGE" 138

PICK: GUIDING THE PROSPEROUS FAMILY 139 STATED COMMUNITIES 147 THE FLOATING MASS 169 STRUCTURES OF FEELING 174 STUDYING WOMEN IN SOUTHEAST ASL\ 176 COLONL\LISM AND CLASS 180 PRACTICING PKK IN THE KAMPUNG 185 KANCA WINGKING 196 SRIKANDI AND SUMBADRA: THE MODEL WOMAN 199

6

CHAPTER FIVE; THE HOUSE; KAMPUNG AS BUILT WORLD AND LIVED MEMORY 205

GHOST STORIES 205 OUR BACK DOOR 207 'INSIDE, OUTSIDE, ALL AROUND THE HOUSE' 216 HOUSE, HOUSEHOLD, HOME 233 THE HOUSE 234 HOUSE AS BUILT FORM 237 HOUSE AS KINSHIP 252 HOUSE AS BODY AND SYMBOL: GENDERED SPACE 263 PLAYING HOUSE 276

CHAPTER SIX: THE HOUSEHOLD: REPRODUCING THE COMMUNITY 284 WITHIN AND BETWEEN 284 THE HOUSEHOLD 292 HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS 294 KAMPUNG REPRODUCTION 305 OVERDETERMINATION OF REPRODUCTIVE LABOR 317 AGRICULTURE AND UNEMPLOYMENT 318 URBANIZATION, FEMINIZATION, AND EDUCATION OF THE LABOR FORCE 325 PKKANDLKMD 333 THE INFORMAL SECTOR, COTTAGE INDUSTRIES, AND MULTIPLE OCCUPATIONS 335 CLASS AND STATUS PRODUCTION 341 FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND LABOR IN MANUFACTURING ... 345 THE LOGIC OF MAKING DO 352 STATE-SPONSORED REPRODUCTION 356

CHAPTER SEVEN; THE HOME; DOMESTIC SPACE 368 DOMESTIC ANGELS OR CULT FOLLOWERS 370 DOMESTIC SPACE 374 MORAL SPACE 381 FIXING DOMESTIC SPACE 385 POLITICAL SPACE; MORALITY'S GUARD: NATION'S PILLARS 393 COMMUNITY SPACE: SOCIAL HOUSEKEEPING BY COMMUNITIES OF WOMEN 403 KAMPUNG SPACE 410 BCAMPUNG HOMES AND HOUSEWIVES: REAL AND IMAGINED 426

7

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE GOOD TERRORIST 430 THE GOOD TERRORIST 442 IN THE SHADOW OF THE KRATON 445

APPENDIX A: MAPS AND FIGURES 447 APPENDIX B: EIUMAN SUBJECTS APPROVAL 485

REFERENCES 487

8

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Census interview 448 Figure 2.2 Questionnaire for aduh women 451 Figure 2.3 Questionnaire for market women 456 Figure 3.1 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1956 458 Figure 3.2 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1765 459 Figure 3.3 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1790 460 Figure 3.4 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1824 461 Figure 3.5 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1970 462 Figure 3.6 Occupations represented in the Lingkungan Rumah Putri, 1985/86 129 Figure 3.7 Occupations represented m Rumah Putri and Langit Ayuh samples 133 Figure 3.8 Level of Education m Rumah Putri and Langit Ayuh samples 135 Figure 4.1 Structure of PKK from national level to local oflSces 463 Figure 4.2 Schematic of the local structure of PKK 464 Figure 4.3 Schematic of local levels of government m rural and urban areas 465 Figure 4.4 Women's self concept and its components 466 Figure 4.5 Women's self concept and its components (continued) 467 Figure 4.6 Women's self concept and its components (continued) 468 Figure 4.7 Women's self concept and its components (continued) 469 Figure 4.8 Women's self concept and its components (continued) 470 Figure 4.9 Women's self concept and its components (continued) 471 Figure 5.1 Kinship chart for extended Cipto family 472 Figure 5.2 Plan of Cipto compound 473 Figure 5.3 Sketch map of RT Barat 474 Figure 5.4 Rassers's plan of a Javanese house 475 Figiu-e 5.5 Plans of three types of Javanese houses 476 Figure 5.6 A simple house plan 477 Figure 5.7 Plan for a more elaborate house 478 Figure 5.8 Plan of the Yogyakarta Kraton 479 Figure 5.9 Schematic for the Kabyle house 480 Figure 5.10 Model of the Tshidi house 481 Figure 6.1 Numbers of PKK teams in the city of Yogyakarta 482 Figure 6.2 Statistical profile of Indonesia 483

9

A.BSTRACT

This dissertation is based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban,

working class neighborhood or kampung. Research concentrated on the work of women

as housewives and mothers within the community and specifically on their roles within the

national housewives organization, PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahateraan Keliiarga, or

Support for the Prosperous Family). One of the central arguments of this dissertation is

that to be a good citizen m Indonesia is to subscribe to a particular gendered idea of

community — community that is virtual, incremental and cumulative. PKK and the system

of local governance are analyzed as residues of Dutch colonial control, Japanese

occupation, and post-Independence infi"astructural development. It is argued that state-

sponsored domesticity and community have been overdetermined by a government that

seeks to absorb excess female labor dispossessed by changes m agricultural production, to

ameliorate the bottleneck in employment for the young and educated, and to support

under-employed males. Women's work as community social workers as well as mformal

sector workers helps support unemployed and under-employed family members, while

simultaneously keeping the cost of reproduction low and providing low-cost

infrastructural improvements. Moreover, fieldwork shows that the structures of

governance, social control and state ideology become lived practice when used as

resources by local women to make do within their specific lived communities. Domestic

space as it is mapped by kinship practices, economic production and reproduction, and

kampung morality are used to show that the domestic is implied within the community as

well as vice versa through the daily reproductive work of women which involves them in

flows of resources and labor between and within households. The contributions of this

research include refocusing attention on the inconsistencies, cleavages, and contradictions

m the center rather than just on the margins. The effects of this refocusing emphasize the

quotidian over the aesthetics of Javanese court culture and bring the gendered facets of

cultural power into view. State formation was and is a cultural project producing not only

the "state" as an idea and a set of practices but the citizen and the poUtical culture within

which she moves.

CHAPTER 1

1 1

BU SAE GOES TO AN ARIS AN

Perhaps foolishly, I had offered my house as the meeting place for the local PKK

(Pembinaan Kesejahateraan Keliiarga) meeting. Little did I know that this seemingly

ordmary meeting of housewives, just one of countless neighborhood meetings, would

figure so prominently in my understanding of the shifting political alliances in the

neighborhood. Because while I was attending to my guests, fi-actures m the fragile

bedrock of community were being attended to as well.

PKIC, often ironically punned as Perempiian Kiirang Kerja or "women without

enough work to do," but more literally translated as "Support for the Prosperous Family"

is an organization of the Indonesian government aimed at and staffed by housewives to aid

in the government's health and development programs. While PKK's structure is the

mirror image of the national government, with President Soeharto's wife at its head and

the wives of the appropriate oflBcials leading at each descending level, this meeting was of

its most local unit, the RT. The abbreviation RT stands for rukim tetangga or harmonious

neighbors, and it is the smallest active unit of government, usually comprising about 20

households in this area of southwest Yogyakarta, a central Javanese court town. At this

meeting, the adult women of these 20 households were to gather and conduct some

perfunctory business, exchange news, and conduct the monthly credit lottery or arisan\

The presumption of a fimctioning local community is implicit both in PKK and in

the Republic of Indonesia's administrative structure. And this is a community very much

in the sense of Toennies' gemeirischaft (1957). The two lowest rungs of government

administration are staffed by unpaid ofiBcials who are popularly selected rather than by

civil servants. The men who typically hold most of these positions are presumed to take

these offices because of their sense of duty to the community and because of the

longstanding presence of mtemal community governance and a venerable tradition of

community (J. Sullivan 1992; Fumivall 1948;Breman 1980, 1988). Similarly, PKK is

conceived to be a local-level organization for the good of neighborhood communities.

Both PKK and the lower levels of the government administrative structure are presumed

to be community level structures that are suited to "traditional" forms of cooperation

(gotong royong) and mutual support {tolong-menolong) derived from rural Javanese

cultural traditions (Bowen 1986).

The PKK meeting held at my house illustrates the multi-vocality of "community" in

one urban, working class neighborhood and how they are experienced by one woman, my

1

A typical PKK arisan runs over the course of several months. Every month each participant makes a contribution, and then lots are drawn to see who takes home the collected amount. Arisan actually serve as saving associations because each women eventually receives in one lump sum all that she has contributed. Rotatiog credit associations are a widespread phenomenon, occurring throughout Latin America and Africa. Although participants may take assigned turns in receiving the booty, my Javanese neighbors particularly enjoyed the element of luck {keimtiingan) involved m the lottery-style selection.

neighbor, Bu Sae. Her actions resonate with informal, formal, local, and state-level

definitions and redefinitions of community and provide a means to introduce the issues

involved m the negotiation of cotmnunity in Java, the relationship of community to the

institutionalization of domesticity, and the connections of both of these processes to the

ongoing formation and reproduction of the Indonesian state.

At this particular meeting, as I only came to understand much later, there would be

several knportant differences fi"om a typical neighborhood PKK meeting. First, of course,

was the locale. Before using my house, this meeting had been held jointly with the

adjoining neighborhood association to the east, despite government directives that each

section meet individually. But since my arrival in this working class, urban neighborhood,

or kampiing as they are known, the two sections had split unhappily over money and

shared goods. Each RT typically owns mats, glasses, dishes, and other items necessary for

holding ceremonial dnmers or slametan, and women in the kampung repeatedly told me

that this kind of cooperation is fundamental to community life and well-being. The

diflScuhies ra this kind of sharing were illustrated vividly m the messy break-up of the

sections after one group refused to divide the goods equally with the other.

So at this first individual meeting for the unit in which I lived, a smaller group of

women met under the leadership of the wife of the local section chief or RT. As his wife

she was expected to serve as the head of all the women's activities within the RT. Other

women attending ranged fi-om the widow living alone in a single room where she earned

her living by cooking for others to the retired government worker who ran the household

14

of her dead husband, which still included eight of her adult step-children.

Another apparent difference at this meeting was the introduction of a new, richer

credit lottery requiring a contribution of 5000 nipiah, or US$ 2.50. Arisans are a

fundamental part of PKK meetings, and for many women, the main reason they attend.

Like the sharing of ritual goods, the circulation of money and credit are not part of any

government program but a persistent element m community Ufe. Still, this new 5000 rp

arisan was a httle out of the ordinary, just one mdication of the emergence of more

"middle" class incomes and lifestyles in the kampung and their contradictory effects for

community. The usual kampung-variety arisan contribution is 500 or 1000 rp. While

5000 rp was not beyond the reach of most of the women at this meeting, it was clearly

easier for some than for others to contribute that amount to the credit lottery once a

month.

But it was not until my close neighbor, Bu Sae, came slowly toward the door and

perched on the threshold, halfway in and halfway out, that one of the biggest changes in

this meeting was made manifest. Her attendance touched on issues of kinship and family

enmity, economic and social jealousy, and finally the formation and deformation of

kampung community. And although I did not fiilly reahze it at the time, her presence sent

shock waves through the room.

The effect of Bu Sae's presence and some of her experiences in the kampung

provide a means to understand the context within which urban working class Javanese

women live. Her experiences illustrate the meaning of community in one urban, working

class neighborhood and also how the continuous reconfiguration of community by state

and citizen alike have connections to both domesticity and state formation.

What I saw during my time in the kampung was that the model structure for

community provided by the Indonesian government and illustrated by PKK is both

accepted and reformed in the lives of kampung residents to produce communities of

practice and sentiment that are meaningful to them Both kinds of community, if we can

even speak of discrete types, are inflected with a nostalgia for a largely imagined tradition

of authentic, rural Javanese community (Breman 1988). The tension and movement

between communities of design and those of practice and sentiment has everything to do

with the emergence of the modem Indonesian state, which is revealed as both the cultural

process and product that marks particular forms of identity, family, and gender roles as

legitimate. It is no comcidence that this is occurring at the same time that a broadly based

middle class is appearing m contemporary Java. This presumed tradition of

communitarianism and cooperation is also central to the Indonesian's government response

to critics of its human rights abuses. When questioned about its excesses m East Timor,

Aceh, and elsewhere, the government responds that the mdividualism niherent m human

rights claims is not part of Asian society. The locus of rights is not the mdividual but the

community. By depicting the Indonesian nation as communitarian, the government

regulates its citizens mtemally and projects itself externally as no admirer of the West but

rather the enlightened protector of values so clearly lost in the decadent West. The

Indonesian nation models its citizens, as it models its relations with other nations of

16

Southeast Asia and the developing world, around the ideal of community.

One of the central arguments of my dissertation will be that to be a good citizen in

Indonesia is to subscribe to a particular gendered idea of community. Community that is

virtual but also mcremental and cumulative. The contributions of this research include

refocusing attention on the inconsistencies, cleavages, and contradictions m the center.

The eflFects of this refocusmg emphasize the quotidian over the aesthetics of Javanese

court culture and bring the gendered facets of cultural power into view. By reconsidering

the linkages between gender and the meaning of community in the formation of the nation-

state, my dissertation will also re-engage a central preoccupation of social science since

the time of Morgan, Maine, and Durkheim at least, and that is the relation between

conmiunity and state.

The negotiated relevance of community for both the state and the people is

evidence for a creative, make-do, homemade (ComarofiFand ComarofiF 1992; Levi-Strauss

I966[1963]) culture-in-the-making (Fox 1985; Sider 1986), which I contend is also state-

in-the-making (cf Corrigan, Ramsay, and Sayer 1980; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Abrams

1988). In this process, the experience of the "Javanese villager" comes to stand as the

figure of the ideal of citizen. And as community is fashioned and refashioned as the way

to live properly as an Indonesian, the ideal community comes to have particular classed,

ethnic, and as I will argue, gendered contours.

My thesis here is that the idea of community and its resonances with an ideal,

agrarian past and with the values of cooperation and consensus [whatever its actual

antecedents (see Chapter 4)] have come to play a significant role in Indonesia. That is,

built within the ideology of state rule is the notion of community. But community as a set

of practices and beliefs does not just exist within the state: it is central to the experience of

most Indonesians, perhaps particularly Javanese.

In the pages that follow I will look at various contours of community revealed

through government programs and the daily lives of working class kampung dwellers. My

argument in its simplest form is that what constitutes the state in Indonesia, in part,

comprises a tacking back and forth between the ofiBcial governance of community and its

reproduction through the practices of its inhabitants. This simple argument is based on a

much more compUcated set of theories of how this actually happens. The theoretical

argument will be embedded in the chapters that follow, but a brief exposition of its

genealogy is necessary to set the stage. First the argument and then its theoretical

imphcations.

The antecedents of the community and the idea of community are various and

cumulative for Java, and a fixller description of this will be presented m Chapters 3 and 4.

A bare outline of the process begins with the challenge to the historic presence of an

egaUtarian cooperative peasant village on Java, long the received wisdom on rural

Javanese life (Breman 1980, 1988; J. Sullivan 1992; C. Geertz 1963; Wolf 1957).

Regardless of what preceded Dutch colonial rule, the era of the Dutch saw the imposition

of a local hierarchy that placed an elite bureaucracy above local headmen who were

presumed to serve the interests of an undifferentiated mass of peasants (Breman 1988; C.

18

Geertz 1963, 1965; Koentjaraningrat 1967; J. Sullivan 1992). Then diuing the British

mterregnum the idea of the village as a distinct social entity was introduced along with

some of the first attempts at its administration (J. Sullivan 1992). The village community

was reinscribed and elaborated under Japanese occupation, when the shell of local-level

community administration including security patrols and housewives organization was

introduced (C. Geertz 1965; J. Sullivan 1980, 1992; Guinness 1986). Variations of these

same administrative structures persist to this day and were reinforced during the period of

national radependence when well-meaning activists again insisted on the reaUty of rural

community life by promoting grassroots development based on presumed traditions of

cooperation and mutual support (Schulte Nordholt 1987). These programs, as well as the

vigorous women's organizations of the time, were later taken over by the government,

stripped of their political (that is to say, revolutionary) content, and used as modules for

change in national development, including the prominent role for women in programs such

as PKK (Suryukusuma 1991, 1996; Wieringa 1988, 1993). The reality of the rural

community was further established in social science studies of the 1950s which ratified the

process of modernization and touted ~ through research for Western audiences — the

wisdom of egaUtarian, cooperative peasant communities (C. Geertz 1963. 1965; Jay 1969;

Sullivan 1992) and the nuclear family (H. Geertz 1961).

The development of the idea of the rural village community shares many

correspondences with the development of the urban kampung in its transformation fi"om

port city ethnic enclave to court town guild neigliborhood to urban slum (these

19

developments are addressed in Chapter 3). These connections and contradictions between

the myth of rural homogeneity and the reality of urban differentiation have come to be an

abiding part of kampung life, which retains both a sense of rural nostalgia and a practical,

urban survival ethic. The mutual constitution of urban and rural administrative units has

produced this mixed and hybrid nature, as will be discussed in the pages to follow.

Whatever its antecedents, it is clear that there is a good bit of adaptive bricolage,

nostalgia, and invention of tradition in the ideal of community on Java. Community is now

reinstantiated through government administration which prescribes how communities are

defined and how they will fimction. And more and more fi-equently this is connected to

ideal notions of the family, of gender relations, and of domesticity. Nonetheless, the

community is lived on Java through various forms of redistribution, kinship, and exchange.

Indeed, community is practiced on Java.

The mismatches between these ideal forms and the way kampung dwellers live

creates a continuous negotiation that is perhaps made clearest now that a middle class is

emerging (Kahn 1991; Robison 1996) as a challenge to these conventional ideas of

reciprocity and mutual self-help. Despite or perhaps because of its growing

contradictions, the community on Java and for Indonesia is over-determined (Althusser

1971; Eagleton 1991). Not only does the Indonesian government use it as a form of

political control and social development, it has great advantages for the control and

allocation of labor — especially as the Republic of Indonesia moves toward export-

oriented mdustrialization and labor-intensive manufacturing. The government's

20

positioning of housewives as the pillars of the conununity and the promoters of

community development has very modem advantages. For example, these programs take

advantage of the non-waged housework and informal sector mcome-generation of women.

It is no coiticidence that the massive unemployment of female agricultural workers due to

innovations such as mechanical rice hullers and improved rice varieties (Cain 1981; Stoler

1977; White and Hastuti 1980) has had a profound impact on the models of domesticity

and community valorized by the government. High male unemployment in Java is also

partially ameliorated by female non-waged, informal sector work which allows households

to survive and keeps formal sector wages low.

Community has many advantages for kampung dwellers as well. Java is

overpopulated, unemployment is rife, and although costs of living remain quite low, wages

are low too. Community life often works to spread burdens, redistribute wealth and allow

marginal households to survive. And despite healthy cynicism about government

directives, most kampung dwellers extol the virtues of cotmnunity life.

In essence, I am arguing that it does not much matter where the idea of community

came from, whether there was indeed a tnie peasant community (whatever that means) in

Java or not. What is important is its continual reproduction as a social form of great

significance both through the official propaganda and programs of the government and

through the everyday practices of the popular classes in urban places. It is neither one nor

the other that is more responsible but the movement between the two. The theoretical

connections impUed in this argument are numerous. Only a brief sketch will be offered

21

here to be fleshed out and connected m the following chapters.

This dissertation is an argument about state rule. It is a consideration of how this

rule is produced m the struggle between the requirements for political and economic

organization by the government and the lived experiences of the working class. It is

fundamentally an argument about ideology, how it is produced, contested, reproduced,

and lived. It is also fundamentally about culture and the relationship between ideology and

culture. The argument requires a consideration of what the state is, how it works

ideologically, how this necessarily mcludes contradictions and implies a relationship to the

ideologies of the working class, how this has significant effects on forms of reproduction

and production, and how this is ultimately a cultural project that is virtual and realized,

projective and retrospective, processual and residual.

What I am suggesting is that state rule is manifest not only in the rules, regulations

and ordinances of the government but also in nationalist discourse on the ideal citizen and

family and most importantly also in the ways people actively come to understand

themselves and their experiences. The state is formed in a long-term historical process of

making sense of given historical, political and economic structures that is accomplished

through a creative but consummately practical bricolage (Levi-Strauss 1966[1963]).

Much of the influence on my thinking has come from British social historians and leftists

who have spent time lookmg at the long-term emergence of bourgeois cultiu"e power in

the formation of nation-states in Europe and England (Corrigan, Ramsey and Sayer 1980;

Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Thompson 1963, 1067; Williams 1961, 1973; Willis 1977).

These scholars have focused not only on the emergence of particular sets of productive

relationships but on the concomitant advent of particular categories of social being and

identity that are gendered and classed. Working from notions of state power occasioned

by reconsiderations of ideology by Poulantzas, Althusser, Gramsci, and others, these

authors also look to the formation of political subjects and the manufacture and

maintenance of the consent to be ruled: active consent as Gramsci would have it (1971).

This work has been elaborated in two important ways. The first is the arguments

around the idea of the separation of civil society and the state as objects of study,

intervention, and experience and the attempt to socially re-embed the state in society, that

is, to in some sense to retimi to the Durkheimian idea of the state as "the very organ of

social thought" (1958[1904]). Arguing agamst the separation of the state out of and

above civil society, both in theory and in practice, diverse scholars have sought to

characterize the state as a cultural form that implies not only bureaucracies, legislation,

and governance but the agreement to be ruled and the social practices that maintain rule.

The majority of this work has focused on the emergence of the modem nation-state in

Europe where civil society was created as a necessary opposition to the state

conceptualized as the public sphere, ia order to eflFect the organization of particular form

of production ~ capitalist, that is — without the appearance of state organization."

Arguments about the relative autonomy of the state from the mterests of the ruling class

originally provoked the concern with the isomorphism of the state ideology and state rule (Althusser 1971; Gramsci 1971; Poulantzas 1978).

23

By reconceptualizing the state as a cultural process rather than as a political

institutiott that exists somehow outside of society, scholars have looked to the long-term

emergence of cultural forms attendant on the advent of capitalist production. Corrigan

and Sayers (1985), for example, consider the "long making of bourgeois civilization" over

many centuries in terms of cultural forms and their reproduction in relation to the state:

"A central dimension~we are tempted to say, the secret—of state power is the way it

works within us" (Corrigan and Sayer 1985:200). Even further, however, the emphasis on

the simultaneous making of bourgeois civilization and the emergence of the modem state

(and its study) shows the "double makmg" of ruler and ruled. Modem state formation was

and is a cultural project producing not only the "state" as an idea and a set of practices but

the citizen and the political culture within which citizens move. The influence of the

Annales school in the emphasis on long-term state formation is evident (Braudel 1980), as

is the efifect of Foucault's analysis of power (1978, 1979).

Feminist scholarship, like that of Pateman (1988), is the second outgrowth of the

renewed attention to the state. Pateman has substantiated the assertion that the most

powerful ability of the state to coerce has come to reside m the restrictive concepts of

body, person, family, gender, and their consignment to a voluntaristically defined private

sphere (Pateman 1988 ; see also Cohn and Dirks 1988; Cotts 1977; Foucault 1978, 1979).

The continued importance of much of the feminist scholarship lies m identifying the role of

the state in controlling and manufacturing the very private sphere from which it is, by

definition, separated. As I will show in the chapters to follow, the emergence of the

24

domestic sphere and notions of appropriate family form, sexuality, and gender roles are

integral to the emergence of the modem Indonesian state, and a focus on them exposes the

effects of international politics and economy on everyday lives and reveals the mundane,

reiterative forms of power often neglected m other treatments. As the Comaroffs argue:

Existing forms of domesticity and the dominant social order m which they are embedded depend, for their constmction and reproduction, on one another (1992:293-4).

That is, the coincident emergence of forms and ideologies of community and family along

with the development of the contemporary Indonesian nation represent the long-term

evolution of forms of rule, social relations of production and consumption, and

significantly of common sense within a given historical, political, and economic

environment. Viewed in this fashion, this process is both specific enough to account for

the peculiarities of the Indonesian experience and general enough to show the outlines of

the development of the nations of the Third World, periphery, hinterland, and so on. It is

my aim, then, to consider the nexus of community, state, and domestic relations that

provides the context for considering women's and men's roles in Java.

Still a crucial connection remams unexplicated, and that is the relationships

between culture and ideology in this examination of the state and its connection to the

household/community nexus. The conclusions m Chapter 8 deal more extensively with

just these issues, but some introductory gestures towards tlie problem are appropriate.

Terry Eagleton begins his 1991 on ideology book with six possible ways to define

ideology. The first and broadest might be

25

the general material process of production of ideas, beUefs and values in social life. Such a definition is both politically and epistemologically neutral, and is close to the broader meanmg of the term 'culture'. Ideology, or culture, would here denote the whole complex of signiifying practices and symbolic processes in a particular society; h would allude to the way individuals 'lived' their social practices, rather than to those practices themselves, which would be the preserve of politics, economics, kinship theory and so on (Eagleton 1991:28).

Eagleton notes that this first definition of ideology is broader than the sense of culture as

"artistic and intellectual work of agreed value," but narrower than its definition as "all of

the practices and institutions of a form of life" (ibid.,:28). For Eagleton, ideology "is not

coextensive with the general field of'culture', but lights up this field fi^om a particular

angle" (ibid:28-29).

The relationship of ideology to culture and their coextensiveness is a particular

problem for anthropologists, one that I cannot hope to solve finally here. Instead I hope

to offer a specific reconciliation of ideology and culture as an example of how ideological

struggles are peculiarly cultural in Java. Culture as it v^all be used here is not just the

residue of behaviors, the suites of symbols, ideas, and values of a particular people, but

also the way people extend themselves and their understanding to make sense of their

lives.

My approach to this work is couched in a theoretical argument about the nature of

culture as well as the formation of the modem nation-state: that is, that culture is

essentially and inherently processual — it is the long-term making of sense by a particular

people at a particular place in a particular time, as suggested above. People adjustmg,

adapting, livmg by making use of the old, creating the new, and dealing in continuous

26

recombinations as they render, configure, and structure their worlds (Levi-Strauss

1966[ 1963]). The consolidation of state power — in any setting — likewise involves the

making of sense regarding the constitution of authority and the consent to be ruled. The

genesis of the conventional, middle class in the formation of the state produces the

unquestioned, the typical, the mvisible culture (Rosaldo 1989) and identity of the nation-

state.

The idea of culture-in-the-making formulated by Fox (1985) suggests the

processual and virtual concept of culture I intend. Fox himself mixes Bourdieu's habitus

(1977) with Althusser's (1971) recognition of the equal weight of cultural beliefs and

material circumstances in the extension of state power. Fox combines the work of

Gidden's (1979), particularly his remarks about Althusser's structuraUsm producmg social

actors that are "structural dopes of... stunning mediocrity," with an attention to practice

and the strategic use of history m contemporary class struggles between dominant and

subaltern classes (e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Here is an extended quote fi^om

Fox.

The culture of any single time is a selective construction fi"om the debris and standing structures of the past ~ contemporary mdividuals and groups take pieces, not the pattern, of the past and form them mto new social arrangements. They do so as they gain consciousness of their material conditions and interests and work to further them. There are no traditions of the past except those that enter into consciousness m the present. Traditions therefore only constrain social action when they become tokens in ongoing conJfrontations between groups m society, struggling to unpress their beliefs, their cultural "traditions" as dominant (1985:197-198).

I propose to use the concept of culture-in-the-making not only to capture its processual.

27

pragmatic, and experiential aspects but as a means to recuperate culture as lived over its

more recent manifestations as a textual and literary fashion. I mean as well to recover the

idea of popular culture as the lived experience of the popular and working classes rather

than media and performance alone. Raymond Williams mentions these two senses of

culture, on the one hand the "known meanings and directions, which its members are

tramed to" and on the other, the "new observations and means, which are offered and

tested" (1989:4)." Although "some writers reserve the word for one or the other of these

senses," like Williams, 1 "insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction"

(ibid). Culture then comprises not only the recognized forms and traditions of a society —

so often the sole focus of ethnographies of Java ~ but also the creative way m which they

are modified and used. So I argue here that culture and the state share a critical dynamic;

they both comprise a sediment of former action as well as creative, current action. The

state is not only rules and remains of legislation, lawmaking and giving, and governance, it

is the successfial projection and reproduction of rule. This is a cultural process evident

among the working class people of Yogyakarta, whose everyday making do and practical

lives are of as much interest as the historical residues and sediments they use in the

process.

Two other issues are related here. The first is the long-standing one of

reproduction. Not only does reproduction go centrally to why there is such a thing as a

"state" and popular classes and culture that can be argued over but the issue of

reproduction serves as a mean to connect the reproduction of the household, a central part

28

of the Indonesian state project, to its other important goal, the reproduction of

community. Chapter 6 deals whh reproduction, but it is important to note that

reproduction in all its senses is a critical part of this work, and it is made so by the failure

of most theorists to adequately define and analyze social reproduction. I will argue as

Henrietta Moore has, and Meillassoux before her (1981), that

we cannot hope to comprehend the workings of households or the links which bind them to larger-scale institutions and processes unless we take into account what have been termed the relations of reproduction, and cease to think of them as being necessarily secondary to relations of production (1994:88).

Moore goes on to say that the feminist deconstruction of the household has "neglected to

point out... that consideration of relations reproduction is crucial to an understanding of

political and economic instftutions beyond the household" (ibid.,89). In both feminist and

Marxist writing in anthropology there has been a "tendency to treat social reproduction as

though it is simply synonymous with the reproduction of the household" (ibid.). The full

character of kampung life, I will argue, cannot be represented without understanding some

of the linkages between the reproduction of the household and the making of community

and of the state. The argument develops across several chapters and culminates m

Chapter 8 where it is suggested that state policies regarding appropriate family form are

related not only to community but to the reproduction of the labor force necessary for the

Indonesia's planned development, made clear not only in its five-year plans but in its labor

history and policies.

A second issue is that of the opposition and complementarity between the city and

29

the country. As mentioned above, the idea of the village community came to have weight

in Indonesia not only in the administration of both urban and rural areas, but in popular

and governmental ideas of what Indonesian life is. The mutual constitution of the city and

the country is quite clear in Java, and indeed it works in much the same way in the

relationship between the inner and outer islands as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Just as

the conventional idea that the state somehow rose out of and separated from civil society

at a certam point seems dubious now, so the claim that complex social forms and cities

evolved out of rural areas can no longer be accepted without question. Rather than seeing

the city as a new phenomenon differentiated from a rural past, focus has shifted to how the

countryside was created at the same time as urban centers appeared ~ in other words,

how the countryside was created just as much in response to the needs of the city as the

city resulted from the needs of the countryside (WilUams 1973).

Cultiu*e-m-the-making goes to the heart of the several issues just presented: to the

issues of the popular classes and their culture, to issues of social reproduction, and to the

making of the city and the country. All are processes comprised within the state where it

is understood as the complex mutual constitution of political and economic and cultural

power m state-level societies. Both culture and the state, in their makings, are products of

the longue duree (Braudel 1980) and are both processual and residual, projective and

retrospective, virtual and realized. Although I believe the process is similar in all societies,

state-level or not, my particular emphasis is on the urban workmg class within nation-

states. The historical outlines and the contemporary adaptabihty of community and its

30

efifects for gender were evident in the PKK meeting at my house, to which I now retum.

Bu Sae had historically followed the PKK meetings in the neighborhood unit west

of the one m which she actually lived; she followed neither of the RTs involved m the

recent split although by all rights she should have. Her husband, in fact, had served as the

head of the other R.T to the west for many years. According to Bu Sae, she followed the

other section because it was more active and accomplished than her own. For most of the

time she served as the head of the female activities in that RT. her home was found in the

center of the neighborhood unit she did not choose to follow. Her defection was obvious

and spatially difficult, as she was put in the position of holdmg meetings and celebrations

in the middle of one section of the neighborhood for the residents of anotlier. Because

such meetings are public ceremonies and those attending usually arrive in large groups,

there was abundant visual evidence of her mixed loyalties. Although she was apparently

not prohibited from doing this, opinion in her own section ran against her for crossing the

lines of state-sponsored community. This situation was fiirther complicated by two

factors. The first is kinship.

Many members of this woman's extended km live in the RT where she resides; a

kinship map of this family reveals immediately the problems of the presumption of a

nuclear family in Javanese culture (H. Geertz 1961; see Chapter 5). Within the two RTs I

studied most mtensively, only two households fit this model at all. In fact, working class

Javanese social and economic life is structured around extended kin, and nuclear families

are rarely functional on their own. The ease with which a woman works outside her home

31

is directly related to how many extended kin live with and near her. As for Bu Sae, she

was raising one of the children of a poorer member of her family two doors down, within

the section she did not follow. While the birth family liked the material advantages offered

to the child, there was social jealousy within the family and tension over the airs Bu Sae

was perceived to put on. Members of her family looked to her for help, despising

themselves and her for having to ask.

Because she crossed out of her own R.T, Bu Sae was often helping those other

than her own family, a fact not lost on her needier relatives. Nonetheless, this woman's

role as a social barometer and a family resource was an important one, which is the second

factor to be considered.

Bu Sae was relatively successful by this predominantly working class kampung's

standards. She was a wonderful example of the modernizing Indonesian ibu.^ She valued

development and its improvements and worked hard at improving her family's material

conditions in a variety of formal and informal ways. She was supportive of kampung

improvement programs and open to new ideas, but she also guarded traditional social

etiquette based on hierarchy, respect, moderate behavior, and emotional control.

Bu Sae showed this same mix of modernism and tradition in her money-making

activities. For example, she ran the PKK shop attached to the local market. Bu Sae and

Ibii is the Indonesian term for mother and is also used as the honorific for all adult females. It is often shortened to "bu" m daily discourse. The term "ibuism" has been used by Suryakusuma (1991) to describe the importance of the mother in national ideology.

32

Other like-minded women pursued the establishment of this store by gaining government

credit. In contrast to this rather new-styled entrepreneurialism, Bu Sae also makes ends

meet in an old-fashioned way by cooking and selling peanuts out of her own kitchen and

selling ice from her icebox, an appliance that is relatively rare in the community. As a

modernizing ibu, she is a success by government standards and those of the New Order

era, but not all of the attributes of this ideal type are valorized in the kampung.

The scuttlebutt after the meeting at my house was that Bu Sae never came to her

own section's meetings when they were combhied with the unit to the east and had clearly

shown her loyalties to the section to the west of her residence ~ where she should stay.

Some jealously suspected that it was the rich arisan that had brought her. Even her own

kin were deeply suspicious of her motives m attending this meeting. Other neighborhood

boundary disputes have had similar consequences. Despite the relative newness of these

boundaries and kampung dwellers' ambivalence toward them, the state-sponsored

community structure is saUent for kampung residents. Still, if Bu Sae were poorer, less of

a moral barometer, and less obvious in her disdain for the failures of her original

neighborhood section, most would be forgiven. As for Bu Sae, when I questioned her

about coming to the meeting, she responded that because of the split, the new location

was closer and therefore more convenient. I believe it was also her close relationship with

me that allowed her to brave the crowd. Still, her crouching on the threshold was the

literal embodiment of how tenuous her position was at the meeting.

Bu Sae's position at the arisan and in the kampung suggest some of the limits of

33

PKK and the neighborhood associations, but also the eflFects of kinship solidarity and

social jealousy. Her actions m crossing RT lines and the consequent negative reactions

show that these divisions do indeed mean something to kampung residents. Yet, Bu Sae's

membership in her own kin group and her influence in guarding kampung morality clearly

illustrate that there are other communities that do not correspond precisely with

communities of state design. For example, Bu Sae had lobbied for consensus among

women across section boundaries to rid the neighborhood of gambling at a nearby house,

and with her considerable social capital she was successfiil (see Chapter 7). Such

morality plays are only effective within a common community of practice and feeling, and

it is no coincidence that women's power in social life often works along moral lines.

Tlie experiences of Bu Sae illustrate how the lines of community are virtual and

intersecting, whether state-sponsored or practically defined. The splitting of combined

RTs, Bu Sae's historic allegiance to another RT section, and the subsequent anger toward

her show both the salience and malleability of state-drawn lines. Yet, Bu Sae's

relationship to her extended kin, her middle class aspirations, and her role in kampung

morality indicate the presence of other outlines of community.

Indonesian women have been placed in a unique position at the forefront of

modernizing development, while locked in old work pattems only partly consistent with

new ideologies and stationed at the moral boundaries of community, that fractious entity

that is formed by lines drawn from both inside and out. Some of the coordmates of state-

sponsored domesticity suit the activities and lives of kampung women, but their

34

patchwork employment practices, the spreading and sharing of burdens, and their

dependence on extended kin do not match the ideal woman of the house. The lines of

state-sponsored community mark financial, reproductive, and social space in the kampung

in ways that mean something to rts residents. Yet, the lines of kinship and neighborliness

have their own financial, social, and reproductive meaning which may contradict state

boundaries. In all cases the Unes are fluid, so a woman who deserts her coiruiiunity on one

level may defend it on another, and her choices are only clear in this context of the shifting

meaning of community.

By enacting morals fi'om an imagined rural past to negotiate changing social

conditions, Javanese kampung dwellers are involved in an active process of culture-in-the-

making (Fox 1985; Sider 1986), which draws on the same historical sources as the modem

Indonesian state. In the case of both community and domesticity, kampung residents

rework previous residues of precolonial and colonial structures and their representations

with current state directives in ways that make sense of their own daily lives.

35

CHAPTER 2

METHODS

The image of the self projected in women's memoirs and autobiographies reveals a need to sift through their lives for explanation and understanding. The female autobiographical intention is often powered by the motive to convince readers of the author's self-worth, to clarify and authenticate her self-image (Tedlock 1995:275).

THE DINGHY DEPARTS

I went to the field confused. There was, of course, the much discussed and

overly romanticized confiision of cultiu'al disorientation and student self-consciousness.

But there was also the bewilderment, the stupefaction, of having come to the field at the

time in anthropology when I did. I had been 'posted' to the field ~ postmodern,

poststructuraL post-textual, post-narrative, post-science, and on and on, at a difBcult time.

The worm had turned and few of my fiiends felt confident about how to "do" fieldwork.

There were those who militantly insisted on a traditionalist fi-amework of measurement

and structured mterview with a formally designed plan. And there were those who felt

fi-ee, if not entirely confident, to pursue a modified program of travel and adventure with a

personal journal as the most formal of mstruments.

So it was with some chagrin that I came to find myself sitting in my house m an

36

urban neighborhood in Yogyakarta, Central Java, hosting a meeting of the national

housewives organization, confounding my expectations as both an ethnographer and wife.

My choice to do fieldwork in Indonesia with my husband, Steve Ferzacca, on his

fellowship money, had been partly a decision based on economic and logistical realities.

An opportunity to do fieldwork in Afiica seemed less and less likely because of project

problems, and my research on peasant communities could be transferred to Java without

too much damage because of the historical similarities between Java and Mexico (Wolf

1957) where I had initially planned to do fieldwork.

I did not make this decision to be part of a fieldwork couple easily. The weight of

the unhappy history of married couples m anthropology was no small obstacle. I knew

without being reminded ~ although indeed I was ~ about the phenomenon of the husband

who is the centerpiece of the field experience, using the wife as aide de camp, later

discarding her to go on to anthropological fame and a trophy wife. Languishing m

academic obscurity, the first wife's msightfiil work is overlooked until the posthumous

publication of her fieldwork reveals her as the brilliant one of the pair. Facing fieldwork in

the 1990's I was caught between this history and the exhortations of feminist colleagues

that a choice to go to Java with Steve was the equivalent of long-term academic suicide.

My initial decision was compounded by my ultimate positioning in the field: I became a

housewife.

We have all been aflfected by those singular moments of fieldwork characterized by

fear, confiision, and epiphany: running fi-om the cockfight, watching the dinghy depart.

37

seeing the green snot ooze over drawn arrows, and so on. It was humbUng but no less

transforming when my own fieldwork began, not with our arrival in Java or even with our

residence in the kampung, but with my first walk down the street, grocery basket clutched

in hand, to do my own shopping. The absurdity of my terror at accomplishing the most

mundane of daily tasks was not lost on me. After all millions of Javanese managed to feed

themselves every day. Surely, I could manage it too. But at the same time, there was an

immensity to the walk down the gang (alleyway) to the neighborhood market that I did

not understand even then. I did realize that my daily shopping required me to walk the

two short "blocks' to the Rumah Putri market. On the way, I would have to greet and

converse with many of my neighbors, some on their way to or from the market, some

doing yardwork or laundry, some walking babies, some selling out of small waning (food

and/or dry goods stalls). I would then have to enter the market and negotiate not only

what I was gomg to get, but from whom, for how much, and then carry the whole batch

back home under the watchfiil eyes of my neighbors and cook it. At every step I would be

involved in sets of social relations that determined not only the success of my fieldwork

but in many real ways our survival in the kampung.

As a committed follower of all rules, it was no small dilemma to be faced with a

welter of unknown codes. Somehow the one-on-one mterview seemed vastly preferable

to this long walk to the market. I became something of a joke to my neighbors, who

delighted in piiming me against the nearest fence and questioning me thoroughly about my

plans for dinner, the ingredients required, the method of cooking, and so on. And the

38

return from the market meant that the purchases m my basket were thoroughly inspected,

to assess the amount of money I was spending as well as what was for dinner.

The intense scrutiny of trying to keep house caused me some of the greatest

discomfort I have ever experienced, but it also afforded a perspective on daily kampung

life not often available to those fed by others. Not only did the fact that we ate nasi

(cooked rice) and not roti (bread) help to convince our neighbors that we were trying to

fit in and live like them, but cooking also involved me most directly in the social e.xchange

system of the kampung. My fieldnotes include a reference to feeling vindicated by my

choice of cooking after a discussion with Bu Sae about the number of foreigners in

Yogyakarta m which Bu Sae noted that only I chose to cook for myself (fieldnotes,

December 3, 1992). The way my cooking was treated was also one of the clearest

illustrations that the domestic and private is quite public. I was quizzed repeatedly and

publicly about my cooking, and my failures were the regular stuff of neighborhood gossip.

For example, my first attempt at sharing food was kindly accepted only for me to hear

later that I had used the wrong ingredients and added too much sak. Another time, I

shared some sambal tempe goreng — a sweet, hot mixture of tempe (fermented soybean

cake), tamarind, and sugar cooked with hot peppers ~ only to have the report come back

that it tasted like empiyang, a peanut candy.

Any day that I failed to cook was noted by my neighbors. The oppressiveness of

constant kampung facework (Gofl&nan 1959) was compounded by being judged on the

house I kept. Doors were left open m tlie kampung unless people were sleeping, not

39

home, or just rude. So like my market basket, my house cleaning was very public and

subject to scrutiny. But beyond our need to eat, there was a very social compulsion to

make certain that the other ibii (adult women) did not think I was doing a poor job of

feeding us, and specifically, taking care of Steve. This worry was no small one, smce I

witnessed the critical social importance attached to this abiUty when other women came

under community scrutiny and were accused of keeping poor house. I knew, as the

keeper of household books so to speak, that we paid socially every time we answered the

standard mau ke mana (where are you gomg) with "out to eat."

Cooking in Java requires shopping each day, if you have money, because there is

little or no refiigeration. I will offer no complaints about my two kerosene burners since

they were more than most people had, and at least I had an electric pump for water. But I

was overwhelmed with the feeling every morning that the first things in my day would be

cooking rice and boiling water. Not because this task was arduous but because it must

always be done. It was the sheer relentlessness of housework. Indeed, the key thing for

me was the realization that the work of feeding your family, when not supported by labor-

saving devices, packaged food, and take-out restaurants, is the central feature of life. All

else becomes secondary, especially when that work falls completely to you and/or your

resources are limited m some fashion. It was these kind of diflSculties that I experienced

first-hand and saw m the lives of others that lead me to think not only of how one must

give a good account of one's self but about how difficult it was to be a credible housewife

(Garfinkel 1967) in the kampung.

BECOMING A HOUSEWIFE

We had arrived in Indonesia in May 1992. Steve had received a Fulbright

fellowship to do research on chronic diseases and then" treatment and he was to be based

in Yogyakarta, the provincial capital of the Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarata (DFY; special

area of Yogyakarta), the special province associated with the sultanates of Central Java.

The DFY figured prominently in nationalist struggles, and the sultanates of Surakarta and

Yogyakarta have come to stand not only for nationalist opposition to the Dutch but for

the florescence of Javanese court culture, for example, the arts of shadow puppetry

iyvayang) and Javanese orchestra (gamelan). Central Java is also known for the poverty

of its countryside where both irrigated and dry rice are grown. So while Steve would be

looking at health practices across clinics and hospitals in Yogyakarta, I hoped to do work

in the Javanese countryside on peasant communities. Specificially, I had planned to

consider the evidence for the so-called closed corporate peasant community (Greenberg

1981; Wolf 1957) in Java and the formation and persistence for such communities in the

Javanese countryside.

In Yogya, Steve and I set up an oflBce at the CUnical Epidemiology and

Biostatistics Unit (CEBU) of the Rumah Sakit Sardjito (Sardjito Hospital). This public

teaching hospital connected to Universitas Gadjah Mada served as our official sponsor.

Steve's work required his collaboration with the doctors of the hospital, and so the

connection to CEBU was very helpful. I hoped to take part in their vigorous rural

research program as a means to begin fieldwork in the areas outside Yogya. Eventually it

41

became clear that both of us would be held at some remove from the actual research being

conducted. The obstacles were coitipounded by the heart attack of our main sponsor and

the restrictions on work in the countryside during the time of the election. In frustration, I

decided to change the focus of my work to my own neighborhood in Yogya. The results

of my choices in fieldwork ramify not only m the research that I did but m the ethnography

that follows from it.

SEEING AND BEING SEEN

Barbara Tedlock, in her Works and Wives: On the Sexual Division of Textual

Labor (1995), discusses the incorporation of wives in their husbands' fieldwork. citing the

infamous examples of Margery Wolf Elizabeth Feraea, Daisy Dwyer, Carobeth Laird, and

Edith Tumer, to name but a few. She notes the tendency for these hidden ethnographers,

who typically supported their husbands m a variety of ways in the field, to produce

ethnographies in the narrative mode rather than the expository mode of the heroic male

anthropologist. These wives produced writings, whether strictly ethnographies or not.

that focus on the firustrations of fieldwork, that are fragmentary, disconnected, not strictly

chronological, and that are often more personal and marked by conflicts between the

personal and professional. According to Tedlock, women more often emphasize their lack

of rapport, the bad faith of fieldwork, their unprofessionalism and unpremeditatedness, in

contrast to male writers who tend to construct more coherent, linear accounts that admit

no confiision or contradiction.

42

The different styles of ethnographic writing, Tedlock seems to suggest, come from

the different fieldwork experiences of husbands and wives but also what might be called

some kind of feminine sensibility in writing. My own experience contradicts this model in

many ways and suggests first that experimental ethnographies emphasize fragmentation,

reflexivity, and conflict but still founder on unacknowledged gender inequaUties. Equally

important, the critical job of household reproduction and women's part in household

management remain under-theorized and often unmentioned, not only in terms of the

practicalities of fieldwork but m terms of ethnographic analysis because researchers find it

1) boring, 2) of secondary importance, or 3) troubling. My own experience illustrates this

rather too vividly.

To begin with, Steve, m contrast to the husbandly ethnographers criticized by

Tedlock, consciously attempted to incorporate me in his ethnography. He explicitly deals

with my presence in the field, our household situation, and the effect of our relationship on

his own work. Unfortunately, this attempt to be more forthcoming about the personal

reahties of his own fieldwork yielded paradoxical effects. Let me begin first with a

passage from Theron Nunez's Mexican research quoted m Tedlock:

"One day, after ahnost fourteen months in the field, I rode my horse mto the plaza and dismounted in front of the cafe." There he heard the story of the arrest of a woman he knew for cursing a man who had told her to sweep debris out of the street.... "Upon hearing the fiiU story of Dona Augustina's dilemma, I remounted my horse, galloped across the cobblestone plaza, reined up sharply in front of the town hall, dismounted, and entered, my spurs janglmg as I walked....! was angry and arrogant" (quoted m Tedlock 1995:273-4).

And then a quote from Steve's dissertation:

43

One day as I was standing with a neighbor woman who was the local maker and seller of the health elixirs known as jamii that people drink on a daily basis, we watched my wife as she walked off down the lane to an interview. Bu Jamu jabbed me in the side with her elbow and said that my wife really did fit in here m Java ~ that she could tell my wife liked Javanese life. I asked her how could she tell. She turned to me and with her arm raised pointing down the lane toward my wife she exclaimed, "Look at how fat she is!" I turned to Bu Jamu and chuckled, "Don't tell Mbak Janice she's getting fat." Looking perplexed Bu Jamu turned and walked back to her house (Ferzacca 1996:72-73).

Comparing the two quotes one can easily see the difference between the dauntless male

ethnographer of 1970s and the more sensitive, domesticated male ethnographer of the

1990s. Nunez appears as the heroic male ethnographer, not only bravely challenging local

authorities but domg so in the name of woman wrongfully accused and from horseback

no less. Steve's account shows the more homely side of fieldwork. He is described as

chatting with neighbors and fondly watching his wife. But the second quote drawn fi-om

Steve's work, and repeated at job talks, is reminiscent of Elizabeth Femea's self-portrait in

the field: "They talked loudly about me, indifferent to my presence or possible

comprehension" (1965:46-47). As Tedlock notes Feraea's description of how the harem

women she worked among saw her breaks down any unified, authoritative speaker ~

"shoes (horrible); my skin (white); my husband (not bad); my skirt, visible when I sat

down even though I keep my abayah around me (good wool, but too short): and my cut

bangs (really strange, quite awfiil in fact)" (ibid.). As Tedlock puts it: "The self sees, it

sees itself seeing, it sees itself being seen, and it parodies itself' (1995:269). But in my

own case, the quote fi"om Steve's dissertation does not spUt me into protagonist and

narrator, as Tedlock describes for Feraea's, but Steve's postmodera ethnography describes

44

him watching the Javanese watch me.

My trouble with this portrayal is the lack of control over my own representation,

which puts me m a position not dissimilar from that of any ethnographic subject, although

I was part of the husband and wife team of ethnographers. I at least have the tools to

msist on the acknowledgement of the unsaid. Still, this portrayal of me filtered through

my husband's ethnography represents not only the specific dilemma of my own fieldwork

and its presentation but goes to some of the issues of my ethnography, such as the

reproduction of the housewife as a role category.

Despite years of work on gender and anthropology and the emergence of a

gendered division of labor, the eflfects for fieldwork remain only half-acknowledged. The

female ethnographic voice of the late 1980s is as heroic and singular as the male voice of

the preceding decades (LaVie 1990; Boddy 1989; Tsing 1993; Behar 1993), and more

easily ignored mundane worlds still remam hidden m plam sight. A colleague in the field

at the same time as Steve and I reported her fiiistration at not being able to sit with men in

the road in the middle of the night. She was certain that she was missing important

information. After my time in kitchens and front stoops watching food, gossip, and

support flow in and out, I'm not so certain, but I find it revealing that a female

ethnographer in the 1990s is still convinced that the men in the middle of the road still are

the real ethnographic thing.

The contradictory eflfects of this unresolved gender tension in fieldwork and

writing were clearly played out between Steve and me. While Steve's ethnography is

45

experimental in some sense, devoted to portraying the sensual experience of living m a

Javanese city m the 1990s and dealing with the hybridity of medical practices there, his

portrayal of me in his ethnography — while more sensitive than the male ethnographers

singled out by Tedlock ~ fails to overcome some of the basic problems of husband and

wife research, i.e., how to do full justice both to each ethnographer and their contributions

and to their collaboration.

Setting up house in the kampung meant that Steve and I had to struggle with more

than the division of labor in research, there was also the division of labor in our house.

Both of us assumed roles not entirely consistent with those we occupy in the US. I did

not and do no consider myself a housewife. Steve and I have always split housework, so

the shift in the field was a difficult one, especially for me. My decision to do fieldwork in

the kampung meant that Steve's share of the load devolved to me as he spent most of his

days outside of the kampung, working out of the hospital. My conscious choice to live

and work as a housewife was not always comfortable for me or for Steve. There was

pressure to appear to occupy traditional kampung roles within the house. Any time Steve

washed the dishes was the occasion for many comments.

Our discomfort m being a model couple was increased in our roles as temporary

Catholics and as non-drinkers. Chapter 5 describes our hosting of a CathoUc prayer

meetmg, although eventually we became lapsed CathoUcs, which was behavior more

consistent with our neighbors anyway. Most devout Muslims do not drink, and alcoholic

beverages are not consumed by most people in the kampung, although over time it became

46

clear to us that there was more drinking going on around us than we had originally

thought. Still, while those working m some parts of the world must be able to hold their

liquor, we were under some pressure not to drink at all.'

Finally, m terms of our identity as a couple within the kampung, it was necessary

that we convince our neighbors that we were not just rich orang asing (foreigners). Most

Indonesians believe that Westerners are quite well to do. Steve and I had to overcome

this not only to justify our living in the kampung and our mterest in being part of the

kampung, but to get past the perception that any social relationship with us would

eventually become one of benefactor and client. Most importantly, however, we had to

establish that we did not need a maid or pembantu. We had originally hired a young girl

from the desa (countryside) to be our cook and housekeeper because we did not plan to

work out of the kampung and because it was expected that we would support a Javanese

since we had enough money to do so. Unfortunately, our experience with employing a

housekeeper was not a good one, partly because of our own class backgrounds and partly

because we did not want complete responsibility for her as was expected. for example,

she had become involved with one of the neighbor boys (whether willmgly or not) as

1

By the end of fieldwork, I had come to understand that not only did our neighbors know that we, or at least Steve, did drink alcohol, but they accepted this about us. One reason for this is the popular beUef that because drinking alcohol makes one hot (patios), people from cold {dingin) places can drink with impunity, while those from hot countries cannot drink because it is dangerous to become too hot. More importantly perhaps, one of the lessons I learned about community and community membership is that once you are known and accepted much is excused in terms of deviant behavior (although there are clearly limits to this).

47

appeared possible, we would have had to answer to her parents for this and pay for all

costs associated ~ wedding included. It was when we dismissed her that I assumed the

role of housewife alone, and as part of that role, we had to convince our neighbors that we

could not afford and did not need a housekeeper.

The difficulties with husband and wife ethnography have become clearer since we

returned from the field. Steve has consistently and self-consciously included me in his

ethnography and his analysis of Java. I figure prominently not only in his personal

experience but m his research. But like the metaphor of the mirror in so much feminist

analysis (MacKinnon 1983), I serve to reflect for Steve issues of culture and conflict. My

quibble with Steve's ethnographic representation is the unacknowledged division of labor

within our house that made his work possible, as well as my own. That is, Steve was able

to work out of the clinic and return to a kampung "home" because of my work as a

housewife. Moreover, while his references to his wife grant him the aura of enlightened

awareness of the problems of past couples, any mention I make of him does not grant me

the same cachet. Indeed, by acknowledging that 1 worked as a housewife as part of a

husband and wife team, recreating a very middle class ideal, my own work is immediately

suspect.

My choice (and let me emphasize that it was my choice) to do participant

observation as a housewife has also netted me several insights into the perception of the

housework as a field of study, from the worried condescension of some colleagues and the

marginalization of my work by others to the representation of this work by my distaflF side.

48

I want to argue here that these reactions reveal just how critical it is that we continue to

consider the centraUty of reproduction and domestic production to human social life

despite our society's notions of its unimportance.

REPRODUCING SUBJECTS

As a couple we fitted categorically into the neighborhood in ways that aflForded us

easy acceptance. And it is clear that two ethnographers are able to "see" much more. For

Steve and me this was often as simple as comparing notes to find out that one of us had

read the verbal signals in a conversation and the other the nonverbal signals only to come

to very dififerent interpretations of what had transpired. Then too. our work was

complementary m many ways. While my own work tended to be socially embedded in the

neighborhood, Steve was fi-eer to see difference across sections of the city in his clinic-

based research. So the very middle class Western model of husband outside the house and

wife inside was central to how we did our fieldwork. The importance of the faiformation I

gathered by staying in the neighborhood, and in fact apprenticing as a housewife, for the

completion of Steve's work challenges the notion of the partial or muted view of women,

whether as subjects of ethnography or ethnographers themseK'es (cf Ardener 1975;

Keesing 1985). That is to say, the holism of my work based out of a house in the

kampung, looking at a whole way of hfe, served as a touchstone for Steve's own

peripatetic ethnography, even as it reiterated the middle class ideal of woman at home and

man outside the home. The interesting thing is that it is Steve's experimental etlmography

49

that could be characterized as fragmentary, not strictly chronological, personal,

disconnected, and marked by conflicts between the personal and professional. Perhaps

this is what Catherine Lutz means when she suggests that the postmodem theorist is not a

feminist but a drag queen, or in her words "the postmodern is a man in woman's clothing"

(Lutz 1995:257), or as de Lauretis describes it, "the 'flickering' of the posthumanist

Lacanian subject, which is too nearly white and at best (fe)male" (1986:9). This is not to

pillory my husband m his attempt to represent the digointed nature of fieldwork. 1 only

point out that the luxury of no attention to the requirements of daily life that seems

characteristic of many postmodern ethnographies is often the result of an unrevised

practice of gender asymmetry. Perhaps another example is in order.

One afternoon I got word that a near neighbor had become dizzy and taken a spill.

She was an older woman and so the fall was of some concern, in fact it was originally

reported that she had had a heart attack. As is expected between close neighbors, Steve

and I made an evening call. We were visiting and hearing that the spell was not that

serious when Steve pulled out his notepad and pen and got ready to take notes. I was

appalled and quickly kicked his ankle to get him to stop. As I have thought about this

scenario in the months afterward, I have come to see that our differing responses had

much to do with the way we were doing fieldwork. While Steve was comfortable in his

role as ethnographer and note-taker, quickly in and out, my work thus far had been about

establishing community ties and trust, about becoming embedded in the community, about

being not only researcher (although that was part of my identity) but neighbor. For my

50

own work, I had to worry about the repercussions of acting in this disinterested way.

Steve could walk away from the situation with "data," while my own success in fieldwork

was based on my ability to come back as a neighbor again and again. This constant and

contingent reinforcement of kampung relationships resembles Keeler's description of the

inappropriate use of a final thank you by Javanese speakers (Jv., matiir miwiin) m

transactions (Keeler 1984). That is, matur nuwun signals the end of the relationship, while

many social relationships are extended through the unsaid thank you and the implied need

to recompense the largess of a friend. By saying "thank you" one suggests that the

relationship is over and no fiiture exchange is unplied. My fieldwork in the kampung was

successful in so far as I was able to keep such relationships open and ongoing. It was this

work that provided Steve with access to the kampung data that he used in his dissertation.

The success of his fieldwork was therefore dependent to some extent on my success as a

household manager and community member. My identity as a housewife made his work

possible, much like Tedlock's incorporated wives. As a subject of his ethnography ~ as he

now is of mine — I am able to perceive my subjectivity directly. It was my discomfort with

his representation that compelled me to deal with the issue of subjectivity.

SEEING HOUSEWIVES

The voyeurism, the act of looking, is the act of othering. The people who are studied and examined begin under the gaze of the anthropologist, but as the narrative develops they are increasingly specified, brought under the control of the anthropologist, and become the property of the anthropologist. They become in the end an extension of the male self^ its looking back at it, reflecting it at 'twice its

51

normal size' (Moore or de Lauretis).

Being watched, as I was by Steve and our neighbors, rather than seeing for

oneself has been suggested to have a role in gendered subjectivity. Lacan (1977) offered

the imago or mirror stage of human psychic development in which the self is seen as

whole but experienced as fragmented. Nancy Chodorow (1978) reworked Lacan in her

object-relations theory so as to explain the development of gendered identity. Feminist

theories have considered women's sexual objectification as part of male viewing of

pornography (MacKinnon 1983). In all these, subjectivity as the result of mirroring is

central to the emergence of self and identity. John Berger suggests yet another step; men

see women, who experience themselves as watched and who then come to watch

themselves (1977). Here is a long quote from Berger.

According to usage and conventions which are at last bemg questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a women is different in kind from that of a man.... A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her.... To be bom a woman has been to be bom, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of theu" mgenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being spUt into two. A woman must continually watch herself She is contmually accompanied by her own image of herself... She comes to consider the surveyor and surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thouglit of as the success of her life. Her own sense of bemg in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. One might simplify this by saying: men act; women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the

52

surveyed, female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight (Berger 1977).

Although I read this long before I went to the field, I did not fiiUy understand its

meaning until I experienced being a housewife who plays a secondary role in her husband's

ethnography while also bemg the housewife/ethnographer of her own writing. That is,

much as Berger says, my experience of fieldwork included the split self of surveyed and

surveyor, but not only was I watching myself be watched, I was watching others too. And

as I served to refract the inwges of the neighborhood for Steve, my own sense of being

watched gave me some insight into how our neighbors might have felt ~ not just as people

who were studied by us but most particularly how women feel as mirrors. Javanese

housewives, in their roles as mediators m community and national development, m effect

mirror social relations to the state apparatus but also serve to refract state directives to the

local community. While the comparison of my personal experience of fieldwork and

ethnography with that of Javanese women as mediators of state and community relations

would appear to dislocate and confuse the level of experience considered, I will argue in

later chapters that the two levels are indeed related in ways that light up the connection

between the personal and the pubUc. Javanese women are subjected to higher levels of

conventional government surveillance than men because of the need to control population

through their bodies, for example. This heightened surveillance of radividual women was

played out m the community in the surveillance of their abilities as housewives by other

neighbors (Chapter 4). So my own seeming double subjectivity finds a parallel in the way

53

Javanese working class housewives have been split into watchers of one another, and

perhaps more importantly, of themselves.

But beyond this, the perception of being watched, and watching yourself be

watched, but also watching others, as I did in Java, had much to do with the identity I

created in the katnpung and the development of my personal social relations.

Identification is not single or simple. Identification is a relation, part of the process of becoming a subject, and it involves the identification of oneself with something other than oneself so that subjectivity is constituted through a series of such identifications (de Lauretis 1984:141).

And so, my understandings of what it means to be a housewife in Java were very directly

aflFected by how I figured in Steve's study, along with how I did my own. Just as, I argue,

the experience of being a housewife in Java for the female residents of the kampung has

eflFected and is afifected by the social relations of community.

Yet the critical role of intersubjectivity, the self created m social relations, has not

been well translated into theories of subjectivity in anthropology. Moore (1994) contends

that issues of gender identification and subjectivity continue to be under-theorized in

anthropology, being based typically on older theories of childhood socialization.

Anthropologists thus tend to see gender identity and subjectivity in overly rigid ways,

reifying western dichotomies and losing sight of the possibility of multiple subject

positions.

Do any of us really believe that we identify wholeheartedly with the dominant gender categories of our own societies? It often seems that the problem for anthropologists, as for social scientists in general, is to explam how dominant discourses and categories get reproduced when so few people are prepared to

54

acknowledge that they support or believe m them (Moore 1994:51).

And this is the other insight from my own position m the field as object in Steve's

ethnography, subject of my own, and objectifier of others (presuming that this process is

mescapable m the act of studying others): that is, that my identity sUpped between all

these positions. I was at once a researcher studying housewives and a housewife (at least

during fieldwork) in my own marriage — at least insofar as I maintained Steve and myself

in the field as a fimctioning household ~ which estabUshed not only my own gendered

identity in the field but Steve's as well. Not only did Steve's use of me in his ethnography

give me the experience of what it might be like to be an ethnographic subject and the

consequences of ownership and control, but my own position as an extension of Steve

meanwhile reproduced the conventional gender roles in a western heterosexual marriage.

So indeed my position was never singular.

It is equally certain that at different times most individuals will be asked to act out a variety of these subject positions and will have therefore, to construct themselves and their social practices in terms of a competing set of discourses about what it is to be a woman or a man....Thus, the enactment of subject positions based on gender provides the conditions for the experience of gender and of gender difference, even as those positions may be resisted or rejected (Moore 1994:56).

And these multiple subject positions also concern the issue of reproduction introduced in

the quotes above. That is, why are roles that are at least partially disagreeable reproduced?

For example, in Java, I reproduced in my daily life the category of experience termed

housewife ~ one that I do not necessarily feel comfortable with in U.S. At the same time.

I was able to contest this role inside my own home, sometimes vehemently. Still, the

55

gender trouble I experienced among my own cultural cohort helps show how

uncomfortable and incompletely integrated roles are nonetheless reproduced. Likewise,

the women I worked with m Java reproduce the PKK ibu even while this role does not

apparently match their feelings or aU of their experiences. They are quite capable of

cynicism about their roles m the organization known as "women without enough work to

do" while effectively fulfilling their positions in the organization, and thereby reproducing

the category of community-oriented housewife and as I will show m subsequent chapters,

producing a new type of gendered subject position in modernizing Indonesia: the

underemployed female as mother of the country.

And so despite my own anger, confiisions and discomfort at some parts of ray

fieldwork, I do believe I gained some perspective on the double bind of Javanese

housewives. This is not to say that I am in the same position as the Javanese people I

studied, but that my own double subjectivity has given me some insight into the

reproduction of roles one is not completely comfortable with and the unease of watching

while being watched.

REPRODUCING HOUSEWIVES

As I came to see and as I will argue in the pages to come, Indonesia's national

economic policy depends m large part on the unacknowledged labor of "housewives," and

in many ways the logic of this relationship is the same as that in the production of many

ethnographies. The contradictions m my field position follow from a failure in the West to

56

solve our own dilemmas about household reproduction and it is reiterated m the "familiar

overvaluing and overestimation of production in relation to reproduction" (Moore

1994:88).

So m my own work I have chosen quite deliberately to reverse the transit

documented for other wifely ethnographers by Tedlock (1995:271): "a silent wife-

ethnographer may undergo a metamorphosis, moving from housewife and participant

informer to active, professional, ethnographer." I am an active, professional ethnographer

who chose to work as a housewife and participant informer, and my own positioning in

the field reveals some of the postmodern male and female ethnographers to be

unreconstructed in their treatment of the household and its continued relegation to a

woman's world. This is evident m Tedlock's own description of Ruth Behar whose field

site was the kitchen table built by her husband and who, "like the Norwegian ethnographer

Marianne GuUestad in Kitchen Table Society, evokes her kitchen table" (1984). But

Tedlock goes on to say that "neither of these women is an innocent housewife whiling her

time away" (1995:280). In this ethnography I propose to challenge the existence of any

innocent housewife, not just by self-consciously adopting that position myself but by

suggesting that those who either disiniss the housewife or romanticize her fail to

understand her role in social life. I have come to see that avoidmg the reproductive work

of women (and by this I mean housework and not factory work which has garnered so

much attention recently through the work ofOng [1987] and Wolf [1992], for example)

because of fears of academic marginalization reproduces the error of most traditional

57

anthropology, that is, the assumption that this work could somehow be sorted out of the

web of social life. So while I did not initially go to the field to work as a home-based

ethnographer of housewifery, I stake that claim now.

My attempt to pass as a housewife was no different than if I had chosen to

apprentice with a sorcerer or a puppetmaker, except m the lack of prestige associated with

it. After all, I am not a "housewife" when m the US, and chores around our house are m a

constant state of negotiation — who is cooking, who is cleaning, who is paying attention.

The difiBculty I had m giving a credible account of myself as a wife and homemaker was

not that different from the difiBculty of the women m the neighborhood, although they had

less room for failure. This notion of passing, of giving a credible account resonates with

the ethnomethodologist's notion of accountability;

When I speak of accountable my interests are directed to such matters as the following. I mean observable-and-reportable, i.e. available to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling. I mean, too, that such practices consist of an endless ongoing, contingent accomplishment; that they are carried on under the auspices of and are made to happen as events in, the same ordinary affahs that in organizing they describe; that the practices are done by parties to those settings whose skill with, knowledge of^ and entitlement to the detailed work of that accompUshment ~ whose competence, ~ they obstinately depend upon, recognize, use, and take for granted ... (Garfinkel 1967:1).

I take this idea of accountability, not just because it dovetails so nicely with the

ethnomethodologist's "theme of tacit or'taken for granted" understandings" (Giddens

1995:237), but because it offers a micro-level tool for understanding the connection

between everyday action and the production of conmion sense, as well as the connection

to the earlier discussion of subjectivity. Whereas my broader theoretical perspective is on

58

the long-term emergence of a working class culture, this perspective does not necessarily

provide a technique for relating the emergence of this culture to everyday interaction. That

is, while the notion that 'the working class makes itself is appealing, how that is

accomplished at the level of the individual is usually left to the imagination in the

retrospective treatments such as Williams' (1961). I would like to suggest here that it is in

the everyday accountability between kampung dwellers that such common sense is built up

and modified, and for that reason the ethnomethodologist's frame is a usefiil one. And the

ethnomethodologists emphasis on credible accounts and on facework (Garfinkel 1967:

GoflBnan 1959) can be related to the more recent work on subjectivity. For example,

Wendy Hollo way's idea of investment (1984), which falls somewhere between emotional

commitment and vested mterest. It is individual women's engagement with and investment

in particular subject positions among "several competing, possibly contradictory

discourses on femininity and masculinity" that works to reproduce dominant cultural

discourse even as these same individuals may stand at some remove from the discourse

itself.

It is important to recognize that investment is a matter not just of emotional satisfaction, but of the very real, material social and economic benefits which are the reward of the senior man, the good wife, the powerfiil mother or the dutiful daughter in many social situations (Moore 1994:65).

For example, as I will suggest in the chapters to come, the oflScial discourse on ibu nmah

tangga or housewives is a relatively recent one with a clear aflBnity with middle class and

Dutch ideas of a woman's proper place. Its entrance into a national dialogue and its

59

dissemination to the most local level through the national housewives organization, PKK,

has forced women to pay some heed to its message. While the historical and class contents

of this category, housewife, are limited, they are now taken to apply to all women,

regardless of their family or occupational status. In other words, those working class

Javanese women with whom I lived and worked were trying to pass too. Like me, they

were daily involved in giving a credible account of themselves m terms of the commonly

understood oflBcial role of women and mothers, although tellingly this has to be balanced

contmuously with the other modes of kampung membership and gendered identity.

I do not want to push the similarity of my position to my neighbors too far

however. Clearly the stakes were different for them While management of face was

critical to my ability to complete my fieldwork and was the most diflScuIt thing I did, it

was of limited duration and my incompetence threatened only my little ethnographic

project. In contrast, those women unable to give credible accounts of themselves as

household managers as well as PKK workers suffered not just the stmg of gossip but the

very real cut of not receiving mutual aid and community support. Holloway calls the

accounts given by individuals "fantasies," which are nonetheless linked to power and

agency in the world.

This explains why concepts such as reputation are connected not just to self-representations and social evaluations of sel^ but to the potential power and agency which a good reputation proffers. The loss of reputation could mean the loss of livelihood, and the lack of good social standing can render individuals incapable of pursuing various strategies or courses of action (Holloway 1984:66).

Moreover, I will argue that it is the incorporation of the tics and tremors

60

necessitated by attempting to conform to the PKK ideal of womanhood that makes that

policy manifest in daily life. Only when women feel compelled to acknowledge this

discourse or to gesture to it by acknowledging its credibility in their daily accounts does it

enter the realm of common sense and the daily life of culture (Goflfinan 1959). That is,

PBCK becomes real m everyday life when kampung women feel embarrassed about their

non-attendance or non-conformity to the extent that they maintam their reputation by

apologizing, temporizmg or avoiding the behavior m the first place. My neighbors were

managing accounts in more ways than one, and I presented myself as an apprentice trying

to give a credible account of myself as a housewife too. This is in keeping with Garfinkel's

recommendation of "paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention

usually accorded extraordinary events,... activities whereby members produce and manage

settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with member's procedures for making

those settings 'account-able'" (Garfinkel 1967:1). My methods and my fieldwork came

to be focused on the the ways m which kampung women unself-consciously, unreflexively.

uncritically go about producing accounts of themselves as credible women (ibid.). And so

I apprenticed as a housewife, cooking, shopping, and cleaning.

DOING FIELDWORK AMONG HOUSEWIVES

It was in trymg to act the part of a housewife, a role that was uncomfortable to me

at home and nearly overwhelming m Java, that I learned the most about the complexities

of reproduction, the delicacy of social relations, the treachery of family, and the

61

immutability and density of daily routine. The daily routine of women in my neighborhood

was to get up before dawn, to cook water and rice for the day and buy food for breakfast

or reheat last night's leftovers. As other household members left for school or work, most

women who did not have a structured job went to the market to shop and then returned to

cook the food that would be eaten the rest of the day. I followed a modified form of this

routine. I spent the mornings cooking, shopping, and cleaning and then did interviews in

the afternoons with my assistant, Mei Sugiarti. My early evenings were typically taken up

with PKK meetmgs. I quickly found out about the meetings at the RT and RW level. As I

made it known over and over that I was interested in meetings, I found out about more

and more types.

As I established that I was serious about shopping and cooking for myself my

nearest neighbor spent some time mentoring me. She initially showed me the most reliable

and honest sellers at the market, and her patronage of me served to protect me from the

worst extortions. She would frequently walk to the back of my house to find me cooking

and then literally take the spoon away from me and cook for me. It was from Bu Sae that

I learned through harsh repetition that cicipan meant 'taste it.' The rough and unforgiving

manner of mstruction ~ I was never allowed any illusion about the success of my efforts ~

was not just for my benefit. I would later watch at a communal cooking session as even

middle-aged women were berated by older women for their incompetence. My fiiendship

with Bu Sae and her daughter gave me some of the closest experience with the

reproduction of gendered roles in the kampung. Bu Sae literally taught me how to be a

62

housewife m Rumah Putri.

My relationship with Bu Sae allowed me another forum for fieldwork ~ the PKK

waning or shop. Bu Sae along with some other enterprising kampung women had sought

government aid to build the small concrete building at the edge of the kampung market.

The PKK warung specialized in the processed and packaged goods not sold at the market.

There was a backroom in this structure, whose total dimensions could not have more than

6 sq m In this back room, credit was extended to market women and repayments were

made. Bu Sae worked the front counter with the help of a young woman, and two other

PKK stalwarts took care of the credit operations in the back. Because of my friendship

with Bu Sae, I was allowed to wander m and sit next to her on a low stool in the door

between the two rooms. This excellent position allowed me to watch the purchases going

on at the front and the financial transactions going on at the back. It was here that I

leamed the centrality of commerce to the daily lives of most women in the kampung.

Although there were women in the kampung who were wealthy enough to send servants

to do their marketing, the majority of kampung women shopped and cooked for

themselves.

What took longer to establish was my mterest in being part of the neighborhood

exchanges. Although we were often alerted to large-scale events of importance such as

fimerals, ofiScial holidays, weddings, and so on, I had more difBculty becoming part of the

daily network of support among women. And in fact, I was never truly successfiil in this

endeavor. The women I knew understood better than I that the stakes were too different

63

for me to be truly engaged. They did over time encourage me to take part m the arisam

or rotating credit lotteries at meetmgs, but at a low level. There were those people who

sent us food, and little by little we were included in wedding mvitations, but few people

really engaged us m exchange relationships. It took some persistence to be allowed to

rewang or help at neighborhood slametan or celebrations. At first, I was invited as a

diversion, a pleasant enough oddity and was not really included in the labor. It is an honor

to be involved such a relationship, to be trusted to be asked to come and help a woman or

a family prepare for a celebration. Over time and through the work of Bu Sae I was

mcluded more and more in these communal work sessions, which were perhaps the most

revealing of the issues of interest to me, that is, who cooperates with whom, along what

lines do resources and labor flow, what networks result fi-om these cooperative acts. By

being involved in helping, not only did I find out what was required of women in these

labor groups but I could keep track of who attended whom in these situations.

It was at the rewang, in the PKK warung, at the meetings in neighbor's living

rooms, at the pasar, and in the narrow gangs of the kampung that I learned the most about

community. But my housework was supplemented in very important ways by the formal

measiu"es I used. AJthougli the census and structured interviews I completed with

kampung women served mostly to mtroduce me to the community, they did establish

some broad patterns of residence, household composition, sex and age profiles,

employment, birth, etc. Before outUning the formal methods used, I should note briefly

the circumstances for the interviews.

64

I began my interviewing at the pasar and in the Rumah Putri kampung at the same

time. I employed an assistant for moral support and to help with my still sketchy Bahasa

Indonesia, the national language of mdependent Indonesia. Steve and I had thought long

and hard about field assistants. There was some expectation among people at the

Universitas Gadjah Mada, our ostensible hosts and sponsors, that we would use their

students. After much deliberation I chose to work with Mei Sugiarti, who until she began

working with me worked as a waitress in a restaurant and bar on a tourist street in Yogya.

I chose her exactly because she was not a college student, despite my misgivings about her

youth. Mei was fi-om a similar background to most of the people m the kampung, and 1

thought at that time that Mei's presence would be less jarring. I assumed she could move

in the kampung world more easily than a university student who might well be from a

wealthy family and thus unable to relate to the people of the neighborhood. As it turns

out, my initial judgments were correct m many ways but the effect of Mei on my

informants was the opposite of what I would have expected. Mei was mdeed a kampung

girl. Thus, she knew much better than I the waters that we would have to negotiate to get

through the interviews. She knew the price to be paid for transgressing kampung morals

and culture and thus often edited remarks for me and from me.

What was so surprising about Mei's effect was the censure she received from many

kampung dwellers. As it turns out, Indonesians are the subject of such strict surveillance

on the part of their own government that the notion of being interviewed, counted, and

surveyed was nothing new. In fact, every graduating university student in the social

65

sciences does some kind of fieldwork, and it was not a new experience for my neighbors

to be scrutinized and studied, sometimes by their own children. If I had used a college

student, it would have made more sense to the people m the kampung. Mei, as a high

school graduate with a background m waitressmg (a career move we did not mention

often m the kampimg), was immediately suspect as a kampung girl who had gotten above

herself A university student would have been understandable to the neighborhood, but

another wong kampimg (kampung person) seemed inappropriate. If I wasn't usmg

someone specially educated or from another class, why then didn't I use someone from

Rumah Putri? As I grew more adept at Bahasa Indonesia with some Javanese, I began to

realize the great difficulty Mei had with some of the women interviewed. Still, m

watching Mei negotiate her identity in the kampung I gained more insight into kampung

community and its boundaries than I did through many of my more measured mstruments.

It was the awkward fit of Mei in Kampung Rumah Putri that helped me to

understand some of the dynamics of insider and outsider. The unexpectedness of her

position and indeed her unsuitability provoked responses that I don't think I would have

gotten otherwise. So although it might have been wiser to use someone from the

university, Mei and I in our awkwardness defined kampung boundaries by stumbling over

them.

I used a variety of more formal methods during my 15 months in Java. My first

step was to do a census survey of the immediate neighborhood. I had originally planned

to do a 100% survey of the entire RW, but I quickly abandoned that idea when I realized

66

that would be all that I would accomplish. I decided instead to do the two RTs that

comprised the neighborhood where we lived. These are the smallest administrative unit of

the Indonesian government (see next two chapters for fiill description of government

units). The area covered was approximately equivalent to two linear city blocks. The

houses that fronted on the gang, or alley, that ran through the middle of this area are

included, plus some of the houses behind, but the flill depth of the block would have

included other RTs. This area was chosen not only because it corresponded to two

particular administrative units where I spent most of my time, but because these two units

had a history of cooperation and they exhibited an apparent unity that did not always

include surrounding blocks. I do not represent these figures as representative of the entire

population of the kampung, of Yogyakarta, of Java, or of Indonesia; in fact, most of my

statistics were done on a hand-held calculator. In all, I completed interviews in 41 out of

45 households in Rumah Putri (Chapter 3 includes a discussion of the demographics of

these households). I do take them to suggest some of the kinds of lives that were being

lived in the shadow of the kraton (the sultan's palace) in 1992.

I wanted some comparison for this admittedly small sample and since part of my

argument deals with the relationship between rural and urban conceptions of community, 1

expanded my interviewing to a nearby kampung, called here Langit Ayuh, where 13

households were surveyed. 1 discovered this kampung on walks in the area and was

surprised by its very different character despite its proximity to Rumah Putri. Langit Ayuh

is a smaller kampung limited in extent by its location on top of a hill circumscribed by rice

67

paddies and rivers. This area lies outside the city limits of Yogyakarta proper, and it

retains a rural flavor in that rice fields border its north and south sides. I mcluded Langit

Ayuh for reasons of comparison since the two kampimg differ not only in their history but

in the character of their mhabitants and the nature of their cooperation.

The census interview itself (Appendix A; Figure 2.1) was designed to get at

summary statistics on household mcome and class in addition to mformation on the age,

sex, education, religion, marital status, and employment of the residents. The mstrument

used paid specific attention to kin relations within the household. One of the problems for

this kind of questionnaire, particularly in a densely populated urban kampung, is the

definition of "household." I was aware before I began fieldwork that Hildred Geertz

(1961) and others had identified the nuclear family as the ideal for Java. Based on my

preUminary impression m Rumah Putri this was not the case, so in my mterviewing I did

not oflfer any definition of household to those mterviewed. I hoped instead to get some

sense of how they defined it themselves. That is, were all those living inside one set of

walls defined as a household; was there some distinction between married and unmarried

children or income earners vs. the unemployed; or were there shared quarters but a sense

of separateness for those who lived together based on some criteria unclear to me? As it

turned out, kepala keluarga, or head of the household, is a term easily recognized by

those I interviewed, because the Javanese, and mdeed most Indonesians, are accustomed

to being counted and measured by their government. The kepala keluarga of the family

was thus defined before I arrived. Nonetheless, in many cases, even though a single head

68

of household was defined, married couples livmg within an extended family dwelling were

defined as separate entities by participants. It was unclear to me whether this was

customary usage or the reflection of a significant distinction to household members. A

widowed woman, for example, was designated as head of household although she might

be dependent on others. Issues of the household and its definition are taken up m later

chapters.

The final section of the census mterview was an attempt to get at household

resources, mcome and class in the event that direct questioning about income proved

difficult, as it did. This quick summary of household resource measures, completed by

Mei and me, included for example: was there a car, a motorcycle, a bike; did they use oil,

wood, or charcoal to cook: did they have electricity; how many rooms were there m the

house; what were the building materials used. Although these measures were posed as

questions, ofl:en the answers were based on our own visual inspection. I was gratified to

discover later not only that these measures have some salience for kampung dwellers but

that similar measures have been used by demographers of Indonesia.

In addition to the census information, a longer semi-structured interview was

conducted with each adult female in the house (adult being defined here as bemg married

or having children or being the sole or main breadwinner of a household). This mterview

covered issues of family, childbirth, and employment, as well as questions regarding

involvement m the government management of the kampung (see Appendix A, Figure

2.2). This questioimaire was influenced by my recent experience working on a maternity

69

leave project through the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My niitial goal was to

understand the role of women in the formation of kampung community, but I understood

those roles, at the time I began interviewing, to be in tension with their roles as workers

and mothers. The interviewing I had done with new mothers in Madison and Milwaukee

had shown them often to be in real distress about the choices between childcare and

career. I was eager to understand if women experienced this same guilt about their roles

as workers versus mothers. I presumed at that point, that the nationalist ideology and

government programs emphasizing motherhood and the role of mothers m community

mamtenance would figure in their accounts as well. As it turns out. this was not the case.

So in addition to basic statistics about education, religion, and marital status, each

woman defined as a head of the household or spouse of the head of the household was

interviewed in depth using a semi-structured instrument. The questions covered, besides

the numbers of children bom, their experience of childbirth and early childcare. The

present career or education status of the children was also recorded. One part of the

interview covered daily routines, and each women was asked to recount an average day in

terms of duties and times. This section of the interview, along with questions about their

involvement in kampung management and governmental support groups, did not prove

particularly worthwhile. The answers gotten tended to be pat, repetitive, and formulaic.

Although I did get some notion of the outlines of a typical day and a general sense of how

many women were actively involved in kampung management, I came to understand this

most vividly by living it myself

70

In contrast, although the answers were often partial and misleading, the questions

about current and previous employment were very revealing. It was a rare woman who

had not had three different jobs m her lifetime. The combination of information on

childbirth and employment proved to be the most powerful information generated by this

interview other than the informal conversation that accompanied it. It was these

interviews, conducted early in my stay in the kampung, that introduced me to the people

of my neighborhood. And because I was new and green, I could make awfid social gaffes

with some impunity. As time went on and I began to get some sense of just how awfiil

some of these encounters were for the Javanese, it became diflBcult to do them. I also

began to feel that the patterns that were going to appear m my data already had appeared,

and I became mcreasingly involved in other aspects of my work, such as attending endless

meetings and interviewing groups of women at these meetings.

The final quantitative instrument used was a very brief census-style interview of

the women who worked at the local market, located just within the boundaries of Rumah

Putri. These women came mostly fi-om surrounding rural areas. The general outUnes of

their lives (see Appendix A, Figure 2.3) provides another point of comparison for the

women of Rumah Putri. Indeed, it was the class comparison between urban kampung

women and rural women that provoked my interviews with the market women. These

mterviews were quite short and mainly covered age, education, residence, marital status,

and children. A brief summary of the goods they sold was made, and then they were

asked about how they arranged help, childcare, and credit.

71

These formal, quantitative instruments constituted my early fieldwork. They

provided a means to enter the community and define myself as interested in a particular set

of issues which served to have people return to me with fiuther relevant information and

to call me when they thought something mteresting to me was happening. As my time m

the kampung went on, my methods diversified and became less formal. For example, I

began early on to attend the local meetings of PKK and Dasa Wisma (see Chapter 4 for a

fuller description of these entities). These meetings are monthly, but they occurred at

various levels fi-om RT and RW up to the level of Kecamatan and Kotamadya (city) so it

is possible to attend meetings weekly and sometimes nightly if more than one kampung is

mvolved. For the most part 1 only observed these meetings, although in my own

neighborhood I participated more fiilly, contributing to the social fimd and the arisan or

rotating credit lotteries. Typically, after attending a particular level of meeting in an area

one or more times, 1 would usually ask permission to tape the meeting. These tapes have

proved only marginally helpfiil because these meetings are characterized by a cacophony

of sounds. There are many women talking as once, children running through the house or

crying in their mothers laps, and the background noise of the kampung and often the

evening call to prayer.

I also attended PKK meetings at higher levels, including a meeting at the highest

level in the city. I had planned at one point to use these meetings of a group of women as

a focus group interview. Figuring that 1 had a captive audience, I asked a handful of

questions regarding the role of women in Indonesian society and the goals and meanings

of PKK. The questions rarely produced the type of cumulative group sharing envisioned

for focus-group interviews. In fact, the dynamics of the group revealed much about the

nature of hierarchy in these meetings. Although some groups would unbend and talk

more, typically the members turned to the chair to answer for everyone. This deference to

the one in authority is a characteristic of Javanese hierarchy and was well illustrated m

these meetings.

The methods I chose for my research were the result of a complex mix of my own

academic history and a particular moment in anthropology. My early work as an

archaeologist and a cultural ecologist lead me to include some systematic, quantitative

measures. But my last years m graduate school saw a sea-change in methods towards an

emphasis, not so much on how you got the information, but how you managed it once you

got home. It was with some anxiety that I attempted to reconcile my twin influences: I

was part of the generation of anthropologists that saw statistics instituted as one of the

two languages required for a Ph.D. but I was also affected by the school of

anthropologists who thought that "just hang out" was appropriate advice for research

methodology. Indeed, my cohort has been the one caught out with verrigo in the dizzying

shift that has taken anthropology from cross-cultural arbiter to the object of study itself

Despite the failures of some techniques, I would not abandon the census work that

I did but neither can I deny that some of my very best work came from my everyday hfe in

the kampung as a housewife/researcher.

CHAPTER 3

73

PEOPLE AND PLACE

NEIGHBORS

Women complained that their everyday responsibilites kept them from visiting and travelling as often as they wished. With limited opportunities to travel, women have less access to markets and less ability to forge political connections. They have more difficulty claiming experience atid bravery (Tsing 1993:128).

Travelling is a common theme in ethnographic writing; crossing borders has

become the trope of the 90s it seems, with particular effects for women (Anzaldua 1987;

Lavie 1990; Tsing 1993). For the housewives of Rumah Putri leavmg the kampung

describes the boundedness and identity of the community and reinforces the relationships

within a sharing network of kin and neighbors. Despite Tsing's characterization of

Meratus women, the mundane acts of visiting the sick are political acts that do accord

women experience and do require some bravery.

There were many occasions when women of my neighborhood travelled together

outside of the kampung. Although often coordinated in conjunction with the local PKK

sections, ^'isits to ailing kampimg dwellers, at home or in the hospital, were apparently a

longstanding responsibility of adult female kampung members. Hospital visits were a

typical reason for gomg outside the kampung. To leave the kampung, for women

74

particularly, was something of an endeavor, requiring not only that household work be

completed or postponed and that children be consigned to someone's care but that

transportation be arranged. Taxis were expensive, and private cars rare. Typically,

women would gather to walk to the edges of the kampung and take the city bus together.

On rare occasions they arranged to rent, at a reduced fare, a neighbor's van, usually kept

for tourist use. Travelling in groups was one safe way for women to leave the kampung

and cross the dangerous, unfamiliar city.

On one particular late afternoon, a group of women gathered in the gang in front

of my neighbor's house just next door for a trip to the public hospital on the other side of

town. The sun was still bright, challenging the cahn of the women who had bathed and

changed to take this excursions. All the women who were gathered had on dresses, and

all had the freshly powdered faces of those recently out of the mandi (bath) with the extra

touch of lipstick for this special occasion. Most clutched a small purse and a handkerchief

or package of tissues. More women arrived until the group numbered around six,

including me.

When the fiill contingent had arrived, we walked slowly down one of the gang

leadmg out of the kampung, greeting neighbors still sweeping the front of their houses or

sitting on their porches and doorsteps. This part of the early evening m the kampung is

marked by the slow transition into evening. In Bahasa Indonesian as well as Javanese, the

day is broken into pagi (morning; Jv. ngoko e^r/AArama enjing), siang (afternoon; Jv.

75

awan/siyang)^ sore (evening; Jv. sore/sonten), and malam (night; Jv. malem)}

While most language textbooks attempt to denote the specific times of the day that

correspond to these divisions, it is more appropriate to mark them by the movement of the

smi and by the activities associated with it. That is, pagi is associated with the coolest

part of the day and so with much activity and work. Siang is the hottest part of the day.

and typically the time when kampung gang are deserted. Sore begins generally after the

sun has relented some of its fierceness and was marked m Rumah Putri by an increase in

neighborhood activity. Those people who worked outside the kampung were usually

home by the sore, and having rested were preparing to bathe. In this slow twilight, those

waiting to bathe or those in charge of sweeping the gang in front of the house were

outside. During this time, neighbors caught up on news and shared gossip. People

disappeared to eat and bathe before returning to ngobrol (chat, tell lies) again. Devout

1

Bahasa Indonesia (Ind.) is the post-mdependence national language, based on Malay. Javanese (Jv.) is the language spoken m Central and East Java (Sundanese is spoken in West Java, and primarily Bahasa Indonesia and Batawi are spoken in Jakarta). Javanese language has several registers. There is a gross distinction between krama and ngoko that correspond to the opposition between a/us/refined and kasarlcozxsQ. This opposition, which can also be glossed as distance versus intimacy, may also be used to characterize behavior. Keeler adds madya as the third of the speech levels in Javanese that are defined by the use of several vocabulary sets. This distinction is then complicated by the existence of two other vocabulary sets not linked to a specific speech level: krama andhap and krama inggil. "Krama inggil (literally 'high krama') mdicates great respect for one's interlocutor or a third person. Krama andhap and krama inggil can be used when speaking in any of the three speech levels. They are not used solely in the speech level krama. They may occur along with a krama equivalent. So, for example, omah is ngoko for 'house,' griya is krama, and dalem is krama inggil" (Keeler 1984:xix).

76

Muslims could be seen heading to the mosque. Children were dragged m to bathe only to

reappear with clean clothes and neatly combed hair. This break between the workday and

the night, which may also include lounging and visiting m the gang, but now also includes

television watching, is characteristic of all Javanese towns I have been m, but its

importance to creating a neighborhood is clearest in the kampung.

So there were many to witness our slow walk down the gang as we left the

kampung. We were asked repeatedly badhe tindakpiituii (Jv.; where are you gomg) or

for my benefit, mau ke mana (Ind.). By this time, I was used to the evasions and half

truths that answered this question and to the slow leisurely gait that Javanese use,

especially fireshly bathed women. Everyone we greeted and were greeted by was well

known to the other women in the group. After all, the core of the group were members of

a family with a long history in the kampung.

First, there was Bu Sae, my neighbor to the west. She was the 50-year-old mother

of four, who worked m the local PKK warung and whose husband worked m a pharmacy

downtown. He was now a pegawai negeri (civil servant), as so many Javanese are,

although he did not test and compete for the job as is usually done. Instead his job was

categorized as civil service after he had held it for many years. Although the wages for

pegawai negeri are notoriously low, the positions are coveted because of the pensions that

begin at an early age and are equivalent to something like half the original salary. Three of

Bu Sae's children stiU lived at home. The oldest had already married and moved to a

nearby town where she taught school while her husband worked as a lawyer. The second

77

child worked alongside his father at the pharmacy. The two youngest had not yet found

their livelihoods although both were out of high school. There did not appear to be

enough money for college after the first daughter. The youngest daughter was taking

computer classes while the second son whiled away his time gambling.

Also in the group was Bu Apik. She was married to the one of the sons of the

older couple in the house to our east, the parents of our landlord. The father of this family

was related to Bu Sae as a cousin through their respective mothers. Bu Apik's husband

was the fourth of ten children. He and Bu Apik lived with their three children in a small

extension of the larger family house. Oiu- landlord, the second daughter of the main

house, was one of only two children of this family living outside the kampung. Bu Apik

sold jamii^ traditional Javanese tonics and medicines, as did her mother. She, with the

help of her husband, made the jamu early in the morning before selling it at the local pasar.

Later in the afternoon, after the market closed, she would make more to be sold in the late

evening at a stand that her mother had started outside the kampung near the closest

entrance to the kraton (the sultan's palace). Her children, all still in school, helped with

the small warung that was opened in fi^ont of their house in the afternoon from where Bu

Apik sold treats and iced drinks. Bu Apik's husband had no form of employment,

although he picked up odd jobs in the neighborhood including washmg the cars of a

retired jetideral (general) who lived on the main street into the kampung.

Bu Cilik was also along. She was the wife of the sixth child of the main house.

This son had been raised by another member of the extended family, an example of the

78

Javanese traditon of anak angkat (literally, lifted child) in which a child of a large and poor

part of the family is raised by relatives who are childless or at least have fewer children and

perhaps is better oflf. As m most cases, this son knew of the arrangement, and by moving

between residences throughout his life, he had benefitted from having two sets of parents.

He worked as a pegawai negeri driving for a local hospital, a job arranged through the

ofBces of the man who owned our house, a son-m-law of the main house. Like many

lower level civil servants, this son only rarely reported for work and mstead spent time

pursuing side jobs through a puppet-maker in the neighborhood. Bu Cilik, his wife,

worked as a seamstress inside her home. She had worked on a piecework basis for a

Spanish woman who contracted for handbags and clothing from women in the

neighborhood, which she then sold overseas. Over the course of my time in the kampung,

Bu Cilik moved to sewing outfits for the wooden puppets of another puppet-maker m the

kampung. She and her husband had three boys, all still in school. They lived in a small

brick house they are building in front of the main house. Not long before we arrived in the

kampung, Pak Cilik had been selected to serve as the new Pak RT, and so as his wife, Bu

Cilik had to become the new Bu RT. Neither feh comfortable with their new

responsibiUties.

The only remaining daughter living in the mam house did not ikut (follow). She

typically remained aloof from such female activities for a variety of complex reasons, but

at least partly because of her family position. She was the only married child living in the

main house, and she and her husband and four girls make up a large part of this house.

79

although there are three unmarried sons living m the house as well. Bu Tri was

unemployed although she too had done piecework for the Spanish woman. Her children

were still quite young, however, and she tended to follow the main family's pattern of

underemployment and unemployment. Her husband was at the time of my fieldwork one

of only two fiilly employed men in the main house. He worked as a sopir (driver), while a

younger son worked as a clerk in a store. The two remaining males and the father of the

main house did not work, although the father was retired from the army with a pension

and occasionally cooked empiyang (peanut candy) out of his kitchen to earn other monies.

Two other daughters of the main house lived in the kampung. The third daughter

was divorced and had retumed to live near her parents with two of her three children. She

worked at a large downtovm hotel and regularly contributed to the main house. The fifth

child was widowed during our time m the kampung after her husband had suffered a long

illness. She had no obvious employment and lived nearby with her two school-age

children. Neither of these women would be going with us on this day. The elder would

be at work, and the younger had ties to other parts of the kampung.

Other women would follow as well, including the seamstress down the gang, the

former Bu RT who cooks small snacks out of her own kitchen, and the young mother who

cooks for her husband's workers who make fiberglass statues out of their home. But the

central group of women typically mcluded these related women who typify the various

lifestyles, occupations, and positions of the kampung. Although the most wealthy of the

kampung were not represented, this group otherwise illustrates the various socioeconomic

positions and relations typical of the neighborhood.

80

ORDINARY PEOPLE

In the earliest morning a clean white lighthouse on an islet was seen ahead, and as the sun rose, bluish mountains came up from the sea, grew in height, outlined themselves, and then stood out, detached volcanic peaks of most lovely lines, against the purest pale-blue shy: soft clouds floated up and clung to the summits; the blue atui green at the water's edge resolved itself into groves and lines of palms: and over sea and sky and the wonderland before us was all the dewy freshness of dawn in Eden. It looked very tndy the "gem" and the "pearl of the East," this "Java Major" of the ancients, and the Djawa of the native people, which has called forth more extravagant praise atid had more adjectives expended on it than any other one island in the world (Scidmore I986[I899]: 17).

The people I worked and lived with were ordmary. They were not dancers,

musicians, mystics, or court people. They were not the movers and shakers of the modem

Indonesian nation-state. They were not the desperately poor. They were not the essential

Javanese peasant toiling in a rice field. They could not have been less noteworthy,

certamly in terms of the usual Javanese ethnographic subject. They were not marginal;

they were not outUers. They were and are the innards of Java and of Indonesia. These

people, the working class citizens of a kampung in Central Java, have profound

importance for what Indonesia is today and where it is gomg. It is their very normality,

typicaUty, ordinariness ~ and thus relative ethnographic invisibility (Rosaldo 1989) — that

makes them of mterest to me. They are the everyman and everywoman of modem

Indonesia ~ memorable for their sheer commonness.

I have called them working class partly to distinguish them from the desparate

81

poverty of the the central downtown slums but also to distinguish them from the "middle

class," a misleading term in Indonesia. In the decades foUowing Independence, the middle

class and bourgeoisie were mmute and lacking in any political or economic power

(Robison 1996; Appendix D includes selected statistical data on Indonesia). Moreoever,

Indonesia never developed a large land-owning class. Despite rapid economic growth m

the 1990s, "the middle class and the bourgeoisie have not yet established their ascendancy

as socially dominant forces autonomous of the state" (Robison 1996:81). Robison goes on

to discuss each of the segments of the middle class: the upper middle class, the populist

lower middle class, the bourgeoisie, the indigenous petty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeosie

(the Chinese conglomerates), the larger indigenous capitalists, and the "family," by which

he means the Suharto family." The professional and managerial middle class constituted

only 3.9 percent of the population in 1990 (ibid.). The remaining categories of the middle

class represent small numbers of well-to-do people. In contrast, Robison describes the

"populist lower middle class," which is taken as equivalent to the working class here, in

the foUowing way.

A much-neglected and underresearched category of the middle class is the sprawling mass of clerks, teachers and lower-level civil servants which often

No description of the political economic context in Indonesia would be complete without mention of President Suharto's family. According to Robison, the most important component of the indigenous bourgeoisie are the business groups associated with the "Soeharto" (alternative spelling) family. "These business groups embrace banking, trade, transportation, television, construction, manufacturing, automotives, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and agribusiness" (1996:96). The concessions granted to family members have sparked some of the strongest attacks on the government's corruption.

82

intersects with the petty bourgeoisie and, in the countryside, with the smaller landowning families. This army of minor official and private sector clerks has proliferated with the development of modem capitalist society (Robison 1996:88).

The kampung folk I worked with correspond closely to this description, although the

kampung also includes large numbers of poorer folks who work in the mformal and

service sectors. Yet, the class composition of Indonesia is changing. The beginnings of a

more broadly based "middle" class prompted Robison's analysis as it did the preliminary

remarks on the anthropology of the emerging middle class in Southeast Asia (1991).

Although Robison argues that Indonesia lacks a true middle class m the sense of a class

stratum that is able to influence the state and push for social reforms, there has been

tremendous growth in consumption along with the appearance of middle class lifestyles

among a large portion of the population. These changes are served to introduce new

forms of dijBferentiation in the kampung along with new tensions (see Chapters 7 and 8).

The current invisibility of these working-class denizens of the kampung results in part

from their position within Javanese society and the role of Javanese culture within the

larger Indonesian nation.

The diversity in Indonesia's ethnic and linguistic groups and its environments and

economies lends itself to caricature. A thumbnail sketch of Indonesia would include its

lingering poverty, the density of its population, its MusUm majority, its ruraUty and the still

important proportion of the economy devoted to agriculture, and of course its amazmg

numbers: 17,000 islands ~ 6000 inhabited, 250 distinct languages, over 300 ethnic groups.

Its history would have to mclude the layering of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism: the

83

effects of maritime trade and population movements; colonization by the Dutch, the

British, and the Dutch again; occupation by the Japanese; national independence followed

by one of the bloodiest "coups" in modem history; and a steadily growing post-

independence economy within an authoritarian pro-development regime. It is no accident

that the imagined communhy (Anderson 1991) was a concept bom out of this prolific and

diverse place. How does one encompass the tree dwelling Kombai of Irian Jaya, the

elegant court cultures of the Javanese, and the piratical Bugis without doing damage? For

the ethnographer the answer is easy enough: stick to your focus, area, people, or pomt.

Yet to truly begin to understand the Javanese and their role in Indonesia, it is incumbent

on us to have some understanding of Indonesia as a whole. Since part of my argument is

that the Javanese have come to stand as a metonym for the greater Indonesian national

culture, the relationship of Java and particularly Central Java to the rest of Indonesia is of

some importance.

The differences between Java and the so-called outer islands can be stark. Indeed,

the split between civilized and savage, between core and periphery, that had been so

discussed for the differences between First World and Third is reiterated and reproduced

within Indonesia. Java is the seat of refined national culture, the rice bowl of Indonesia,

the site of its most extreme poverty, the most densely populated island in the archipelago

and the world, and the birthplace of many national heroes and leaders. The term "outer."

as applied to the islands other than Java, Bali and Madura where 62% of the population of

184.3 million live on just 7% of the land, captures some of the e?ctremities represented.

84

There are the break-away provinces of Aceh and East Timor, the Muslim tnatrilinies of the

Sumatran Minangkabau, the ravaged rain forests of Kalimantan nee Borneo, and the black,

hitam, "savages" of Irian Jaya. These extremes are the necessary antipodes to the

centeredness of Java, as figured both by ethnographers and the Javanese for whom

moderation is key. While Java is home to the densest poverty, the outer provinces of

Indonesia have some of the highest mcomes on the "Wild West" fi'ontiers of the

government's transmigration policy and the timber mdustry. There are areas where the

notion of poverty in the western sense carries little weight such as the eastern islands and

the unsettled areas of Irian Jaya. The Muslim majority of Java and Sumatra is contrasted

with the Hindus of Bali and the syncretic animisms of other islands. The elaborated court

costumes of the central Javanese courts contrast with the penis balls^ and tattoos of

Kalimantan. Slash and bum in old growth forests continues in outer islands while Java is

nothing so much as one large, manicured garden.

Ethnic stereotypes abound m Indonesia, where nightly television often includes

documentary-style programs on the different "cultures" of Indonesia, providing citizens

with a way to understand themselves. But these pictures and ideas of others are always in

"The most graphic demonstration of the strong position women enjoyed in sexual matters was the painful surgery men endured on their penis to mcrease the erotic pleasure of women. Once agam, this is a phenomenon whose dispersion throughout Southeast Asia is very striking"(Reid 1988; 148). Reid goes on to note that the "most draconian surgery was the insertion of a metal pin, complemented by a variety of wheels, spurs, or studs" into the penis, a practice found in the central and southern Phihppmes and parts of Borneo (ibid., 149).

85

relation to what it means to be Javanese. For example, the Sundanese people are

considered to be open and friendly, their women loose, but this is in contrast to the

Central Javanese. The kasar (coarse, unrefined) quality of East Javanese speech only

makes sense in terms of the refined or alus quality of the language of Central Java.

Sumatra is considered to be peopled with rough and rowdy people whose Islamic

practices border on fanaticism, and again this is a caricature carved m antipodal relief of

the moderation and syncreticism of the Javanese.

Yet, to be Indonesian is to be Javanese m some sense. A prominent man from

Flores, an island east of Java, told me that in order to succeed as he had, both politically

and financially, one must be able to behave like a Javanese. His western-educated

daughter was less sanguine, frequently announcing her irritation with the Javanese and

their prominence in national life. This is a not infrequent complaint in Indonesia, where

several break-away provinces are fighting for independence. The people from these

provinces are said to consider the successfiil but aggressive national family planning

campaign to be genocide for all but the Javanese.

If the primordial Indonesian of postcards and govenmient posters is the peasant

fanner herding ducks or carrying a pole with two long baskets, then a Javanese urbanite

seems a contradiction. The city dwellers of Jakarta do not even consider themselves

Javanese, even those whose parents were bom in other parts of Java. Still it is the

confrontation between urbanites in Yogyakarta, Central Java, and the common

representions of Javanese cultiu"e that suggested to me some interestmg insights into state

86

formation, cultural citizenship, and the reinscription of rural Javanese tradition in

Indonesian urban social life.

JAVA AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC DVIAGINATION

Java is the most powerful and populous of the thirteen thousand islands in Indonesia's archipelago. The history ofJava is a fascinating and complicated one, layered with Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the spread of Islam, three and a half centuries of Dutch colonial nde, occupation by the Japanese, a war of liberation from the Dtdch, and a postindependence massacre of Communists and alleged Communist sympathizers.... Clearly, I cannot do justice here to the history of Java (Wolf 1992:31).

Java intimidates. Its language, art, social structiu-e, cosmology and ritual are as

fecund in their proliferations as the rice terraces that figure so prominently. No matter

what the lack of fit for agriculture, Geertz's idea of involution (C. Geertz 1963; cf

Alexander and Alexander 1982; Breman 1988; Collier 1981a; Kahn 1981; Kano 1979)

certainly captures a sense of the complexity in a culture whose language registers number

five, its calendars three, whose wayang stories are in the hundreds with casts that are

innumerable, and whose social strata are counted variously but may be as many as six or

as few as two (Koentjaraningrat 1989; C. Geertz 1960, 1965).

In contrast, ethnographies of Java seem to come in only two types: either a

consideration of the intricacies of court and elite culture as expressed in language (Siegel

1986; Florida 1987), politics (Pemberton 1994), wayang (Keeler 1987) or in some

contrast, an ecological treatment of the rural poor (Stoler 1977, 1981; White and Hatusti

1980; Hart 1986; Hardjono 1987; Hayami and Kikuchi 1982). The classic ethnographies

87

of 1950's (Jay 1969; C. Geertz 1960; R Geertz 1961) were a combination of both, and

perhaps no ethnographies smce Jay's The Javanese Village and Clifford Geertz's The

Social History of a Javanese Town have been as holistic/ In many ways this division in

ethnographic treatment, like the representation of the outer islands versus Java and Ball is

a reiteration of the longstanding theories of political authority and the state for Indonesia

and southeast Asia. There is, for example, Stanley Tambiah's galactic polity.

I have coined the label galactic polity to represent the design of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographic, and political-economic features. The label itself is derived from the concept of mandala. which according to a common Indo-Tibetan tradition is composed of two elements — a core (maada) and a container or enclosing element (!a) (Tambiah 1985:253).

Geertz (1980) has proposed the theater state for the nineteenth century Balinese polity.

but his conception has wider appUcation and coincides in some ways with Tambiah's work

as Tambiah himself acknowledges (ibid.,316-317). Geertz's theater state is based on an

exemplary center.

By "Doctrine of the Exemplary Center," I mean the notion that the king's court and capital, and at their axis the king himself form at once an image of divine order and a paradigm for social order. The court, its activities, its styles, its organization, its whole form of life, reproduces, albeit imperfectly, the world of the gods, provides a visible Ukeness of an mvisible reahn. And because it does this, it also provides an ideal toward which life outside the court, in the kingdom as a whole, ought properly to aspire, upon which it should seek to model itself as a child models itself upon a father, a peasant upon a lord, a lord upon a king, and a king upon a god (1980:38).

A recent and very notable exception is the encyclopedic volume of Koenjaraningrat, Javanese Culture (1989).

88

While Geertz is concerned specifically with the prescriptive eflfects of court ritual ~ how

"power served pomp, not pomp power" (1980:13), Tambiah seeks to explam not just

cosmological schemes made real m Southeast Asian kingdoms but their relations to and

constitution of political process.

Still, despite Tambiah's criticism of Geertz for separating expressive from

instrumental action, both scholars seek to explain the relationship between an exemplary

center (Geertz) and its satellites (Tambiah). And the key is the center which serves as a

perfect mmiatiu'e of the cosmological order but also as a projection for the wider social

order. The state, the still center, serves as both a model of and a model for power, which

flows outward from the center m diminishing strength. Geertz writes of "sinking statuses"

as distance increases from the center, and for Tambiah, "the satellites reproduced the

features of the center on a decreasing scale in a system of graduated antinomies"

(1985:323).

The city of Yogyakarta is itself taken to be an exemplary center by its inhabitants.

The center of the city and the axis of the cosmological order based there is the Yogyakarta

kraton, still occupied by the royal family. Originally built in Kota Gee, a few miles from

the present-day kraton, the palace and grounds today serve as the central pivot of the city.

The kraton Ngayogyakarta, as it was called then,' was designed based on Indie principles

and cultural referents. At the center of the kraton was the residence of the king along with

5

The name Ngayogyakarta derives from the Sanskrit Ayodhya, the capital city of Rama in the Ramayana epic.

89

his queens, concubines, and royal retainers. This inner reahn or nucleus was a miniature

replica of society at large. The layout of the city around h; was based on a cosmological

blueprint that mcluded buildings, walls, gates, and temples in measured relationship to the

four cardinal directions. Again, the physical structure of the city replicated this logic of

the universe, standing as the micro-cosmos for the macro-cosmos. The conjunction of the

inner realm of the kraton and the outer reahn was the large field to the north of the palace

known as the alun-altin in which stood two sacred banyan {beringin) trees (Rutz 1987;

Sternberg 1971; Ferzacca 1996). Like the sinking statuses described by C. Geertz (1980),

power and potency are presumed to be strongest at the center of the kraton near the sultan

or king. As one moves away fi^om the kraton, status is thought to decline.

Ethnographies of Java tend to reproduce old models of Southeast Asian societies

and polities, mimicking the notion of matidala m their representation of subjects — one

either does an ethnography of the center or of the margins. There is a tacit acceptance of

the centrahty of the Javanese culture, people, and history to Indonesia as a place and as a

concept. And perhaps no place signifies this more than central Java. Homogeneity,

consensus, and convention are presumed to rule in the center as models for the rest of the

society, while resistance, negotiations, back-talk, and confiisions are the stuff of the edges.

These trends in ethnographic writing are implicit in two recent ethnographies that

ironically are planned to break out of the straight jackets of the typical ethnography of

Java and the outer islands: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsmg's In the Realm of the Diamond

Queen (1995) and John Pemberton's On the Subject of Java (1994).

90

Tsing's ethnography is not on Java but on the Dayak people of the Meratus

Mountains in South Kalimantan. Her subtitle, Marginality in an Oiit-of-the-Way Place,

signals her understanding of the position of the Meratus Dayaks not only globally but

nationally, for Tsing's marginality also refers to the centralizmg power of the national

government ~ the very Javanese national government. Early in her ethnography Tsing

characterizes the Meratus as hillbillies. "In this book I explore the making of an

Indonesian margmal culture" and

my focus on marginality involves a choice to formulate a perspective on culture and community that stands m contrast to those perspectives commonly found in both popular imagery and classic ethnography (1995:7).

She suggests further that "in contrast to the self-generating solidarity basic to most

ethnographic accounts of community,... Meratus describe community formation as a state

project that they could fulfill or frustrate" (ibid.,8).

Tsing's insistent characterization of the Meratus Mountains as the margin where

the contradictions and confusions of state power are betrayed eflfectrvely defines Java, in a

backwards fashion, as the still center of unquestioned state and cultural power. What

remains tacit in her "marginal" perspective is the centeredness, the coherence, the stability

of the core, that is, Java.

This book turns attention from political centers to political peripheries. Where most studies of the state situate themselves where state authority is strongest and examine the project of rule from the perspective of the center, I look for where state authority is most unreliable, where the gap between the state's goals and their local realization is largest, and where reiuterpretation of state poUcies is most extreme (Tsing 1995:27).

91

It is in out-of-the-way places by definition that "the instability of political meaning is easy

to see" (ibid.,27), she seems to say. That the center is Javanese is suggested by her

description of the role of other ethnicities in a display at the Indonesian Museum that

shows "the nation as an elite Javanese wedding with ethnic minorities represented as

differentially dressed guests. The image suggests that minority groups are 'invited' into the

nation as long as they bow to Javanese standards" (ibid.,24). She cites Pemberton on how

the "New Order has promoted a nostalgic 'Javanese culture,' to promote stability and

dispel the disarray of pre-1965 nationahst politics" (ibid.,24). What remains unquestioned

in Tsing's description is just how seamless the working of power is in the center.

Pemberton's On the Subject of Java considers the construction of the subject that

is Java. He positions his work in contrast to a "form of essentialized cultural accounting"

that he says is

especially characteristic of ethnographies of Central Java, where analysts have meditated at great length on models of the exemplary center, hierarchical systematics of language and etiquette, ritual structures of cosmological balance, and similar formulations of orderliness so quintessentially cultural m then apparent durability (1994:8).

Pemberton desires instead to understand how "culture enframes poUtical will" particularly

as it is evinced m the New Order regime of President Suharto. The New Order's usage of

traditional values bears an "acute sense of social stabihty." He writes that this emphasis on

an authentic, traditional, Javanese culture "operates to recuperate the past within a

fi^amework of recovered origins that would efface, for the sake of cultural continuity, a

history of social activism fi-om the late 1940s to the mid-1960s" (1994:9).

92

Pemberton's focus is on culture, but more specifically, "refashioning Foucault," the

culture effect, by which he means the effect of culture on the production of knowledge and

extension of power. Pemberton goes on to say that he does not wish to indict

anthropology as colluding in repression but "to recognize in anthropology a particularly

appropriate site for exploring these impUcations" (1994:10). And he notes, this is "not

simply a matter of power imposed from above but a far more pervasive effect produced

through the customary appearance of'tradition' itself particularly through practices now

recollected and executed through New Order Java as mstantiations of'traditional ritual'

performance ..." (ibid., 10). And this indeed is one of Pemberton's foci: ritual

performance- His book is divided between a consideration of archival material on the

Surakarta court and an "ethnographic" consideration of village spirits and wedding

ceremonies.

Pemberton is describing the use of so-called "traditional" ritual forms to

accomplish the goals of the national government. For example, independence day

celebrations for August 17 {tiijuhbelasan) are conducted m the manner of a slametan or

ritual celebration. The tendency for the Republic of Indonesia to use social forms

identified as traditional as a means to accomplish very contemporary ends is the subject of

Chapter 4, particularly as regards community-level domestic programs.

Pemberton's attention to the pohtical power of cultural forms is a refreshing

change for ethnographies of Java whose characterization of both power and culture have

tended to be flat and one-dimensional. He provides ample evidence that the New Order

government's recuperation of origins and traditional culture has had powerfiU effects

poUtically. He notes Geertz's classic description of slamet, the wished for state where

nothing happens (Pemberton 1994:15; C. Geertz 1960, 1973) and suggests that "the now

common interpretation of slamet as a Javanese key to cultural order coincides almost

perfectly with New Order discourse" (Pemberton 1994:15). He is at his strongest when

he points out the correspondence between ritualized action and the needs, goals, and

dictates of the New Order government.

The strength of Pemberton's critique is diminished by his focus on elite culture ~

and at least half the time on how it is revealed in archival documents. His more

ethnographic work on weddings and ritual cleansing rites in the village does not really

treat the experience of the popular classes either. The material on wedding especially

seems to have a priyayi focus.® Moreover, by failing to discuss the different roles, stakes,

and experiences of rural people by class, Pemberton once agam champions elite center

culture by accepting their vision of a homogeneous and undifferentiated countryside.

Pemberton, like so many others today, is searchmg for contradictions and

resistance, although he notes the difiBculties of locating a resistance and then reifying it in

contrast to New Order cultural authority. At the center of his work is Pemberton's notion

of an identifiable culture or set of traditions. In his descriptions, Pemberton's idea of

Priyayi is a term referring to the bureaucratic elites made up of old court retainers and the bureaucrats who worked for the Dutch (C. Geertz I960, 1965; Sutherland 1973; Koentjaraningrat 1989).

94

culture seem particularly supple.

I am interested in that which presents itself as a manifestation of what is assumed to be, in New Order and anthropological discourse alike, local culture; an object of ethnographic desire that no sooner discloses its contradictions — local to whom, for whom? — than it bypasses such contradictions m the name of culture. The book thus is fimdamentally concerned with what might be unrecognizable as "tradition," with whatever might possibly threaten, even exceed, the ever-extending discursive boundaries circumscribing "Javanese culture" or, perhaps, any formulation of culture as such (Pemberton 1994:11).

Yet, the effect of Pemberton's approach is to produce a concept of culture that is either

Voltairean in its emphasis on elite high culture and its forms of ritual and ceremony or

distinctly archaic in its insistence that culture is custom.

Like Tsing, Pemberton notes that the possibility for contradictions exist at the

margin. And despite his acknowledgement that state power is intimately involved in what

is cultiu-aL he still apparently believes there is some place, some pomt, "at the margins,"

where contradictions and other original forms of tradition appear. He says

To write toward what I referred to earlier as the edges of cultural discourse thus may very well be to have abeady begun writing toward a history of the present or, more precisely, toward an issue of origins where the very distinction between culture and history is itself displaced (1994:25).

Pemberton seems to hold some hope that there is a time, a place, a point, when culture can

be understood outside of politics. One could easily take issue with Pemberton's apparent

evolutionary division between the time when culture and history are one and the time

when state power insinuates itself m the marking of cultural value (although this is not

Pemberton's intent it seems), but the more important issue is the presumption that there is

a point at which culture is divorced from power. When, one might ask, are culture and

95

history separate in any meaningfiil way?

Furthermore, his emphasis on literate court cultiu-e and on the most public and

customary of practices suggests a fairly pinched view of what is cultural. Indeed, in his

focus on the "cultural enframement" of politics m the New Order, he replicates the very

idea of the theater state, where state power extends and expands itself in cultural ritual

centered at the sultan's palace. State power is intimately tied up with the trappings and

ritual fetishism of the court.

Pemberton, like Tsing, posits either directly or by unpUcation a still center of

culture and power which may only be understood in its constructedness from the margins.

While Pemberton searches backwards m time, Tsing works outward m space, but both

seem to use as a central pivot the seamless cultural monolith at the center. This locating

of resistance and contradictions at the margins, overlooks the processuaL virtual nature of

culture in the center too. While Tsing acknowledges the importance of practice that

combines and recombines elements m a playflil parody that characterizes a marginal

culture, Pemberton's notion of practice is as moldy as his notion of culture. Comparing

practice with event, occasion, and observance (1994:16), he misses the creative use of

cultural elements by all Javanese, even those living m the shadow of the sultan's palace, the

kraton, where people are "poets of their own actions" (de Certeau 1984).

Although both Tsing and Pemberton are domg innovative work, both ultimately

fail to escape from age-old models that are orientalist and evolutionary. They are not

alone. As Tsing notes:

96

I am fortunate to be able to draw from a rich literature on political culture in Indonesia. Scholars have long been fascinated by Indonesia's Indie (and Islamic) heritage and by the self-consciously concentric models of power.... Furthermore, a number of scholars have shown how the postcolonial Indonesian state has structured Javanese notions of stratification and potency into its program of rule... (1995:22).

There is Uttle question that the modem Indonesian state has made use of a rich variety of

cultural materials in its manufacture of rule or as Pemberton describes it "the conditions of

New Order cultural discourse, conditions demanding that origins be repeatedly recovered"

(1994:24-25). But several questions remain. Is this in any sense, a new phenomenon?

Pemberton and others clearly assign the blame to the post-Independence governments of

Indonesia. But did not Dutch colonial rule depend profoundly on cultural power? And is

there any reason to beheve that power deployed m the kingdoms that spawned the

exemplary center model itself was any less cultural? When indeed is power anything but

cultural?

The problem with Pemberton's analysis is, of course, his narrow definition of what

is cultural. His definition denies culture to a vast number of Javanese, those who do not

take part in any of the rituals he describes or who are not connected to the kraton or

courts. What are we to make of their lives and their "culture"?

As Raymond Williams says, "culture is ordinary: that is where we must start"

(1989:4). The lives of the ordinary working class in an urban kampung challenge

representations of a smgle Javanese Culture and redirect the ethnographic gaze away from

the court and elite, literate culture but not towards the outer island margins. Instead this

97

ethnography is extraordinary only m its very ordinary focus on the ordinary people just

outside the kraton walls.

Ordinary culture recaptures some of the emphasis on the culture of the popular

classes implied by the phrase "popular culture." It seems that at some point, the effects of

the theoretical trend towards histories from below (e.g.. Wolf 1982), everyday acts of

resistance (Scott 1985), and the effects of globalization on the ground have led effectively

to a spUt between two ever-differentiating branches of thought about popular culture that

were originally unified in the work of Raymond WiUiams (1958). On the one hand are the

textual, interpretive, media studies analyses of popular culture, where culture is

understood as and through the various representations popularly consumed: television

shows (Gitlin 1991), romance novels (Radway 1991), and popular films. On the other

hand are studies of working class life and the experiences of the popular classes from the

older cultural studies (Willis 1977; Thompson 1963).

What has been lost in recent social theory is the emphasis on the working class and

its struggle with common sense. Habitual daily practices and experience from nursery

school to fimeral parlor have been left aside as elite intellectuals focus on the aesthetics of

power and not its quotidian expressions. Moreover, these mimdane expressions of

popular culture produce their ideological justification in common sense. Popular culture,

then, when understood as the everyday culture of the popular classes reveals the socially

embedded character of ideology. A key part of the socially embedded character of

ideology is the weight it gives to practice and the practical. Ideologies are not received

but made in the course of life. The work of Giddens on structuration (1984), Bourdieu on

habitus (1977), de Certeau (1984) on the practice of everyday life all revoh/e around a

very practical view of culture and its relation to ideology. Ideologies are made and

remade through a cultural process, whose meaning is particularly distorted in Pemberton's

view of culture as "customary practice" (1994:13).

The working class denizens of an urban Central Javanese kampung then are

significant in their insignificance. These are the people around whom and through whom

the poUtical culture of the modem Indonesian nation-state is built. Through their growing

economic power ~ nothing still compared to the Jakarta-based "middle class," and in their

literal and figurative position as "Javanese," these are some of the people who are making

and bemg made by the Indonesian state. Their daily lives, their reconfigurations of and

adaptations to state directives and programs, their very survival charts a map of poUtical

and cultural power that betrays significant contradictions m the very center of the

Indonesian state: m the cultural heartland of Yogyakarta. These working class folk are

central to the success of the current state project but as marginal in many ways as Anna

Tsmg's Meratus.

These are people whose children are only now making it through high school,

whose houses mclude some electricity but who still cook on kerosene stoves, whose

entertanmients may likely include TV but for whom the average montly wage is not US$

50.00 (see below), who dream of a car but drive a motorcycle if they are lucky, who live

in extended households that mclude sibUngs, grandparents, and others to help make ends

99

meet. They are no longer starving but they do not have assets beyond televisions and

motorbikes.

The contradictions for them in the state-making project of modem Indonesia are

many, as is described in the chapters that follow. They must cobble together several jobs

in order to survive. They must glorify the nuclear family while they attach family to their

households to add income, share reproductive tasks, and save money. The women must

work as unpaid neighborhood development workers, as the mothers of the nation, while

they do informal sector, low-wage work out of their homes. They must uphold and

perform the New Order's community values through neighborhood organizations and

meetings while they deal with the jealousies and fractmes that come from the difierential

impact of rising mcomes experienced in close quarters. And in this particular kampung,

where the only wayang performed is for the tourists, they must negotiate what it means to

be Javanese in the shadow of the kraton.

Neither Pemberton's literate traditions and upacara (ceremonial) ethnography nor

Tsing's marginal poetry does justice to the complexities in the center. The theater state

and the noandala are fimdamentally tied up with the "idea" of the state and the extension of

power culturally, notions not mcompatible with my focus here, but not enough attention

has been paid to how the state is formed through the "everyday practices" of its citizens,

nor has enough attention been paid to how the ideology of the still center is maintained

despite the contradictions that are posed to it in its very heart. For these reasons, and

others that will become evident, the very ordinary, very central Javanese who live outside

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of the printed word, the fihn frame, the wayang screen, the walls of the palace are the

people I chose to work among and who, m many ways, chose me.

EOSTORY OF KAMPUNG

The meaning of the term kampung seems uncomplicated to those who use it; its

limits are self-evident, but to talk about kampimg in Java is more than to talk about an

urban neighborhood although that is perhaps its simplest referent. As I began my analysis

of the kampung and began to try to explain it to others I realized that kampung exist on a

number of levels: as a structure of feeling (Williams 1977), an administrative unit, a set of

streets and houses, a social unit, a group of people living in close associaton, a lifestyle, a

class, and a space where all of these combined. Although the word itself does not gloss

the meaning of both people and place, as does pueblo for example, it does resonate with

place, class, and people. Picking apart its significance proved to be a diflBcult part of my

work, and it remains unfinished here. The history of its usage presented here is the barest

indicator of its complexity. Its meaning has described a transit from ethnic enclave and

wealthy neighborhood, to royal guild areas and protectorates of nobles, to village-like

native quarters and conduits of administrative and political control, to walled-in slums and

cohesive urban community. In some fashion, all of these historical residue remain within

kampung culture and administration.

The Tjina, or China, atid the Arab kampongs, are show-places to the stranger in the curious features of life and civic government they present. Each of these foreign kampongs, or villages, is under the charge of a captain or commander.

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whom the Dutch authorities hold responsible for the order and peace of their compatriots, since they do not allow to these yellow colonials so-called "European freedom" — an expression which constitutes a sufficient admission of the existence of "Asiatic restraint." Great wealth abides in both these alien quarters, whose leading families have been there for generations, arid have absorbed all retail trade, and as commission merchants, money-lenders, and middlemen have garnered great profits and earned the hatred of Dutch and Javanese alike (Scidmore 1989[1899]:37).

A 1948 New Century Dictionary's definition of compound refers to the Malay

word kampong, meaning enclosure, and then provides this definition: "In the East Indies,

etc., an enclosure containing a residence or other establishment of Europeans." Likewise

its first meanings m the precolonial and colonial era in Java and surrounding islands were

associated with the neighborhoods of foreign trading populations (Chinese, Arab. South

Asian, Persian, and other Southeast Asian) in port cities along Java's north coast and in

other places (Graaf and Pigeaud 1984:172; Pires 1967[I512-I5I5]:173; RafiQes

1978[I817]:83; Scidmore I989[1899]:37). "Harbor towns contamed mercantile

communities of mixed ancestry, dwelling in wards of their own and maintaining more or

less fiiendly relations among themselves" (Graaf and Pigeaud 1984; 172). Deepening

Dutch occupation reinforced this trend. In the sixteenth century, as the trading port of

Jacatra became the city of Batavia, its planner, Jan Peterzoon Coen, "began to lay out a

new town on the model of a fortified European city" (Cobban 1967:48). Ethnic enclaves

developed m a fashion reminiscent of a medieval Dutch city with a network of canals and

"stuffy tightly packed and many storied houses" (McGee 1967:49) designed "to recall the

images of Amsterdam in the minds of Europeans" (Cobban 1976:49).

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Farther inland, a mix of defined foreign and indigenous residential areas was

present in native areas such as the fourteenth century Majapahit kingdom, although the

Chinese and Moorish neighborhoods were not yet called kampung but instead pacinan and

pakojan, respectively (Pigeaud 1962:477). RafQes in the nineteenth century noted that

Chinese dwellings {ttmafi gedong) doubled as residence and place of business and were

built of brick, m stark contrast to the "native" dwellings of rattan and bamboo (Raffles

1978[1817]:90). He felt at the time that "the Chinese karapongs may always be thus

distinguished firom those of the native" (ibid.).

The Malay word kampung is generally taken to mean 'village' but in Java it is more commonly applied to urban entities, to parts of tomts and cities. Initially, it meant 'compound', most typically the walled yards, gardens, atid residences of well-to-do families (Reid 1979:5) and it was long used thus in Yogyakarta for the residential compounds of princes, nobles, and other digtiitaries. In fact, the Sultan's palace itself was once recognized as a complex of kampimgs. Yet today the majority of Javanese take kampung to mean primarily something akin to 'home community' while a better-off and more genteel minority tend to interpret it more decisively as 'slum.' (J. Sullivan 1992:20).

For both the inland "native" capitals and the cosmopolitan port cities, kampung

appear to have been associated with urban centers. Yet, urbanism was not a

straightforward phenomenon on Java. Early travelers noted the blurred boundaries

between city and country. Thus Raffles observed "an assemblage or group of numerous

villages, rather than what in European countries would be called a town or city" (ibid.,92).

and according to Anthony Reid, early European arrivals to the coastal cities of Southeast

Asia remarked that the boundaries between "city and countryside seemed almost non­

existent" (1988:240). This may explain why despite its early usage as the walled-in

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residential comounds of well-to-do families of various ethnic identity (Reid 1988), the

Malay usage of kampung means village.

Perhaps the lack of a clear distinction between rural and urban accounts for the

relatively low rate of urbanism despite "at least fifteen hundred years" of urban civilization

on Java (H. Geertz 1961:2). Despite the blurring of boundaries, there was a long history

of urbanism in Southeast Asia. There were large cities in Southeast Asia before the arrival

of Europeans which were the result of mdigenous pushes towards urbanization. After the

16th century, however, new forms of urbanism were the result of outside mfluenes. As of

1930. 3.8% of the Indonesian population was classified as urban, and by 1961, the

percentage was 14% (Ricklefs 1981). By 1971, the percent was 17.3, climbing to 30.9%

by 1990 (Biro Pusat Statistik 1992).

Yet another uifluence on the meaning and weight of kampung comes fi-om its

association with the occupationally stratified neighborhoods associated with the sultanates

of Central Java and their palaces. The followmg brief history of the relationship between

the Yogyakarta sultanate and the surrounding rural areas suggests that mdeed the division

between rural and urban was a vague one, with the kampung outside the kraton walls

serving as a mediating buffer between the sultan's palace and the areas around it.

The Sultan's palace was built after the Giyanti Treaty of 1755 (Koentjaraningrat

1989; J. Sullivan 1992) when the separate sultanates ofYogyakarta and Surakarta (Solo)

were estabUshed. During its construction, enclosing walls were built as fortification

around various court structures includmg the living quarters of queens, concubines.

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servants, the military, crafts people, artisans, and musicians. These living quarters were

referred to as kampung according to Sternberg (1971:82), and the occupationally

differentiated areas of this "town within a town" (Rutz 1987:74) were named for their

specific fimction or duty m relationship to the Sukan. So for example the abdi dalem or

servants to the Sultan who were responsible for palace lamps {silir) lived in a kampung

known as Siliran.

Although the areas outside the kraton walls may have retained a distmctly rural

flavor, kampung associated with the Chinese merchant community (Pacinan) developed

along the north-south road to the north of the kraton. This area eventually became the

famed Jalan Malioboro, favored shopping spot for tourists and the busiest street m

Yogyakarta. These early kampung outside the walls were also associated with specific

occupations or services offered. Their early fimctions are likewise shown m the names

they carry to this day: "Pajeksan — the place of the palace prosecutors {Jaksa)\ Gandekan

~ home of the court heralds {gafidek)\ Dagen ~ the woodworkers' quarters {undagi);

Jlagran — the stonemasons' quarter (Jlogro) (J. Sullivan 1992:23; Selosoemardjan 1962).

In addition there were kampung associated with mihtary encampments and several other

ethnic enclaves for people such as the Bugis fi"om Sulawesi, South Asians, and later Dutch

colonials. Separate kampung existed for Muslim ofBcials and those who helped take care

of the mosque and for the "'descendants of Muhammad'-- the Sayid or in Java 'the Arabs',

though none inhabit Sayidin these days" (J. Sullivan 1992:23).

John Sullivan suggests that m addition to an association with ethnic and

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occupational difference, the mtemal administration of kampung was established early on as

a consequence of the tax farming of the surrounding countryside. The riagara refers to

the exemplary center described earlier and comprises the Sultan's palace and the area

within the walls of the kraton. The area outside the nagara, known as the mgaragiing,

was not administered by the court but instead was split among princes and high nobles

(patuh) whose control over their lands or kabekelan was mainly confined to tax fanning

through their professional bekel (tax collector and manager; Geertz I960, 1965:

Koentjaraningrat 1989; J. Sullivan 1992). The nobles themselves were required to live

within the kraton or nearby on lands granted to them by the king. In part this '•'honor"

resulted from royal fears that these loosely aUied nobles could quickly become potential

competitors (cf. Adas 1981), and thus they were not permitted to live outside the nagara

because of the danger they posed as potential rivals to the sultan. They relied instead on

their bekel to see to their lands. Sullivan reports that

certain powerful bekel maintained ofiBcial compounds {kampung krajan) in the city, so possibly patiih honoured their more eflBcient tax-gatherers with these kampungs for much the same reasons their king honoured them with residences close to the royal presence (J. Sullivan 1992:24).

For this reason, Sullivan believes that kampung m Yogya have always existed as "elements

of a rational administrative plan and de facto units of a state system" (24), despite the fact

that the kampung outside the kraton walls were considered the same as all the surrounding

countryside and had no formal administrative structure and no tax base to provide it.

These kampung were expected to be self-contained and to govern themselves mteraally.

106

J. Sullivan goes on to suggest that this was easily accomplished in those kampung owned

or run by military and court personnel, and for others administration and the selection of

leaders was accomplished through musawarat Ian miipakat or discussion and consensus.

This "original Indonesian democracy" has been valorized recently through its

incorporation in government ideology but its roots are Islamic. The notion is that rather

than using a system in which each person casts a vote, a process of discussion and

consensus allows all to discuss community issues from which a consensus then emerges.

The important thing here is that:

In economic terms, the nagaragung had the general fimction of sustaining the realm as a whole, while the kampung sphere had to sustam the capital, producing and distributing the myriad goods and services demanded by its denizens and their crucial political, economic, and cultural functions (J. Sullivan 1992:25).

The nagara and its nagaragung are represented as two concentric spheres, the

former surrounded by the latter. Yet, the area of kampung outside the kraton walls served

as buffer and mediation between the countryside strictly speaking and the court proper.

This nested configuration lends credence to observations of no absolute or discernible

division between rural and urban spatially, or as it happens administratively and

sentimentally.

The streets of Solo describe the boundaries of vast residential neighborhoods. Alleyways that run off the main streets penetrate these neighborhoods. The architecture of the residential areas manifests strong concern for safety. Its distinguishing feature is the prevalence of walls that surround houseyards, occasionally reaching twenty feet in height The purposes of these walls are description ofproperty boundaries and protection against thieves atid whatever else undesirable might enter. They help to achieve the tone of calm and security that often prevails inside Javanese households. One might specidate that they

107

work to create the same tone on the street. Javanese neighborhoods, especially those in the center of the city, are not homogeneous. They contain the places of the wealthy and the noble as well as the shanties of the poor, and also, often, small factories, repair shops, and other businesses. The walls, then, hide what they protect, and they protect a great variety. To someone who is not familiar with the neighborhood, what is behind the walls is unknown. They create a pervasive sense of a "somewhere else" of the sort we have already seen in speaking of the theater, a pleasant mystification. The walls may physically exclude the passer-by, but they include him within the psychic ambiance of Javanese hierarchy. These walls can create the same effect whether seen from within or without (Siegel 1986:125-126).

Over time tlie city of Yogya grew through expansion and accretion. The kampung

outside the walls expanded with growing numbers of state fimctionaries, courtiers, and

their servants, and the kraton served to attract various producers and service-producers.

Over time this growth led to what J. Sullivan calls the "vulgarization" of the kampung.

Wfth this growth came a perceived vulgarization of kampungs; at some stage they lost their original cachet and gained their present-day caste [sic] as residential quarters of the 'little people' (wong cilik); 'home communities' m the view of the wong cilik themselves, 'slums' in the view of many 'big people' {wonggede) (J. Sullivan 1992:25).

Sullivan notes that there is not much evidence for how such a transition occurred since the

court chroniclers had little interest m urban kampungs. He suggests the change in the

nature of kampung was a function of changing relations between the kraton and kampung

as new kampung emerged based not on fimction or occupation but merely on residence.

As such kampung lost their "genteel connotations," and eventually, those who lived in

kampungs became known as wong kampung, "which, m elite circles translates as 'slum

dweller* and in kampung circles denotes membership of a revered community" (ibid., 26).

Another argument is that during the time of his reign. Sultan Hamengkubuwana IX

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(1940-1988; Selosoemardjan 1962) desired a direct relationship to his people and thus cut

off the retainers, ministers, and administrators who stood between him and local residents.

The establishment of a one-to-one relationship between ruler and ruled is reminiscent of

the establishment of the liberal state in Europe, the expansion of the democratized middle

class, and the foundation of a very "modem" form of political attachment (Moertono

1968; Selosoemardjan 1962; Ricklefs 1981).

The association of kampung with urban poverty and benign rusticity was evident

among the Dutch colonialists as well. Karsten in a I920's report on town development in

the Indies reported that

the population of the towns, and more especially the masses, who are still three-quarters agrarian m their thinking and their needs, are not yet participating with a fixll will m urban life, but rather attempt to find expression for their rustic simplicity within an urban setting (cited in J. Sullivan 1992:31).

Various reforms subtly changed structures of administration as well as sentiment for rural

areas and their urban reincarnations, the new kampung. For example, during the British

interregnum of 1811 to 1816, Thomas Stamford RafiQes, Lieutenant-Governor of Java,

launched a comprehensive modernization of traditional property rights and land-tenure

practices (J. Sullivan 1992:29; Fumivall 1976:67-78). It was Raffles, according to

FumivalL, who consolidated the position of the village as the basic rural administrative

unity outside the kraton, although this process was begun before his tenure and continued

after the end of British rule.

Two other important "moments" in the development of kampungs were the

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successive elaborations of administration outside the kraton by the Dutch and then the

changes made during the Japanese occupation. It was during the liberal period of reforms

by the Dutch that an attempt was made to standardize administrative structures m the rural

areas and also in urban kampungs, yielding two efiFects: I) the constitution of units that

were not commensiu'ate m size but in power, and 2) the establishment of a level of

administrative power that was two-faced. It was during the reforms of 1917 and 1918

that a fundamental disjuncture between power oriented up and that oriented down was

established.

As before, the kampung chiefs were neither formally appointed nor paid and owed their positions primarily to their social ranking, popularity, or other personal entitlements to deference. They needed the approval of the assisten wedono and their superiors but they also needed the approval and backing of the kampung members who selected them They had to secure that civil order was maintained in their neighbourhoods and to assist with other bureaucratic chores ~ securing and providing information, passing on government directives ~ but they were also expected to speak for kampung members, and to mediate for them with higher authorities (J. Sullivan 1992:33; see also Dipodiningrat 1956:39-40).

The schizophrenic nature of kampung administration and authority was reniforced

during Japanese occupation begiiming in 1942. The Japanese imposed on Java a system

similar to one long used in Japan that defined neighborhood associations and used them as

the shell for defense and community work (Benedict 1946; Bestor 1989). Under the

Japanese, kampung (renamed a~a) administration was elaborated and smaller units were

mtroduced, the tonarigumi. These smaller units were an entirely new level of government

and the first to be used across urban and rural areas alike (J. Sullivan 1992:34). At this

point, kampung chiefs, still informally selected and unrenumerated, were called on to

110

maintain civil order and serve the state but under threat of severe punishment and as a

means to help the Japanese in their flagging war efifort. While the elaboration of kampung

structure made them unequivocally units of urban administration, they maintained their

janus-faced quality because as Falconeri noted for the same units in Japan, their leaders

served two masters (1976:35): their neighbors who selected them as leaders and those

who recognized their position as representatives of their communities to higher political

authority.

Van Niel (1979) shows that the political character of the kampung was not always

related to official administration. For example, kampung were sites of political foment

during the nationaUst era.

As the twentieth century progressed these kampung areas became more organized, more crowded, and generally more improved through pathways and better construction materials, but there remained a pohtical and social hiatus between them [Indonesians] and the big mortared and stuccoed houses of the Europeans and Chinese on the main streets. In the kampung there developed a sense of community and view of the world which found expression in many of the concepts of the Indonesian awakening of the tweritieth century (1979:118).

Kampung also served as political hotbeds during the 1965 killings following the coup that

removed Sukamo from power (see Chapter 4). An early informant of Steve's reported

that three Yogya kampung were especially unportant in staging the killings of alleged

communists. He also proudly reported his own part in the killing of atheists, that is to say

communists.

During our own fieldwork in May and June of 1992, we witnessed firsthand how

political campaigns were organized at the kampung level. At the entrances to many

Ill

kampung, banners and other displays were hung to announce kampung support, often for

parties other than the government's own ruhng party, Golkar (Ferzacca 1996).

In Kampung Rumah Putri's own historical development, the presence of a Catholic

church just outside its boundaries provided kampung residents with a way to oppose

Dutch Protestantism. Kampung neighbors explained the higher number of Catholics in our

area as the result of a sympathetic priest (romo) who protected local residents from the

Dutch. Kampung have thus always had a distinctly political character, especially when

combined with the working class sentiments of its faihabitants.

TTie outgroup arid the general distinction tend to be described by kampung people in rather simple spatial and economic terms. The outsiders, who mainly, though not exclusively, inhabit the better streetside homes in the neighbourhood, are classed as rich by the kampung which tends to view itself as not-rich if not exactly poor (which has unpleasant connotations in the kampung). While it is generally true that kampung people are poorer than most of their on-street neighbours, and packed into the spaces behirui the on-street buildings, it is impossible to separate the two groups neatly on spatial or income lines (J. Sullivan 1992:20).

The modem kampung is typically associated with the lower-class. Patrick

Guinness (1986) reiterates this division in his work on kampung in the center of Yogya.

Guinness describes an opposition between so-called streetside society associated with the

larger, more elaborate houses of the Dutch and the Chinese and the domain of the lower

class wong cilik m the smaller crowded neighborhoods behind them. Nancy Sullivan

(1994) emphasizes the self-definitions of wong kampung who set themselves oflf from

wong gedongan (gedong means house and refers in this instance to larger, masonry houses

that line larger streets). Guinness along with John and Nancy Sullivan have done work on

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urban Yogya kampung; both the kampung studied by Guinness and the one studied by the

Sullivans are located near the downtown area of Yogya and are poorer and more densely

populated than Kampimg Rumah Putri.

John Sullivan describes the downtown kampung he studied as "a middling,

unremarkable, unheroic sort of place" (1992:42). Kalasan, as he describes it, is known for

its proximity to the busy Jaian Malioboro, Yogya's famed tourist strip. John Sullivan's

description of Kalasan captures the density of its population and the cramped quality of

urban spaces particularly in downtown Yogya where kampung houses are "packed into the

spaces behind the buildings fronting the main streets" (J. Sullivan 1992:44). In Kalasan

there are

major arteries feeding a labyrinth of lesser alleys threadmg through the body of the block, gradually dwindling to a web of dim dirt paths that can only be traversed single file with shoulders brushing the walls to each side (ibid.).

Yet, the downtown kampung which are more densely populated with higher levels of

poverty share with Rumah Putri the association with the popular classes and a working

class spirit of "us against them."

My own neighbors in Rumah Putri describe kampung life as better than life in

other parts of the city. People help one another in the kampung, they say, and if someone

else does not have enought to eat, there are neighbors who will share with them. Chapter

4 treates these feelings and their contradictions m more depth. For now it is enough to

note that the sense that kampung are the place for poor people, and are better for that fact,

was evident in the daily conversations of the kampung. At the same time, in other

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contexts, the description wong kampung (kampimg people) meant the dismissal of these

enclaves as slums and refiiges of the disenfranchised and dangerous.

This capsule history of the term kampung (by no means exhaustive since the word

has been used for some time throughout Southeast Asia) shows that it includes notions of

separation by ethnicity, occupation, and class. Its modem meaning m urban contexts such

as Yogya and Jakarta retains some of its polysemy. For example, wong kampung person

can suggest humbleness and community spirit or h; may connote poverty and a clannish

mward attitude towards others. It equally calls to mind notions of rural consensus and

cooperation and of hotbeds of political fervor among the disenfranchised: devout

MusUms, the unemployed, the unwashed. Kampung Ufe evokes a safe haven from the

pressures of modem life and an emphasis on old patterns of mutual care and attentiveness,

but it likewise suggests a narrow and suspicious watchfiihiess by neighbors and kin. While

wong kampungan, or in other words people with a characteristic kampung mentahty,

carries pejorative cotmotations for those who live in newer suburbs or in suburban

housings areas known as perumahan, for its inhabhants, kampung resonates with the

sense of safety, neighborUness, and home. What remains most strongly in both accounts

and is contmually reproduced is the sense of boundedness, of external differentiation but

internal homogeneity, of a truer social formation with nostalgic resonance of the village,

and an oppositional culture — a politically and morally valent difierentiation between inside

and out.

Yet, as Ferzacca points out "the absence of the kampung in historical and

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ethnographic studies of Java, and for that matter, elsewhere in Indonesia ... is

conspicuous" (1996:45). Ricklefs (1981) m his History of Modem Indonesia, a

standard guide to Indonesia's past, does not mention kampung and neither does

Koentjaraningrat (1989), Indonesia's own pre-eminent ethnographer. Community with its

significance for both ethnographers and kampung dwellers is more easily located, so that

Robert Jay (1969) can speak of "Javanese villages" and the "neighborhood" without using

the term kampung (Ferzacca 1996). And Selosoemardjan in his 1962 Social Changes in

Jogjakarta can define kampung in a footnote only as a dwelling place of the lower classes.

This lack of interest in kampung is mteresting in light of their enormous mfluence on the

lives of most urban Javanese.

What is unportant m the development of kampung as social institutions is the

association of kampung with particular moral sentiments. Once the domain of foreigners

and eUte, kampung have come to be associated with lower class neighborhoods known as

much for their poverty as for their political positioning; at times barely controlled sites of

political pacification and at others the seat of political revolution and oppositional culture

and occasionally the staging area for conservative and reactionary grassroots politics. And

always they have been the point at which popular politics and state control meet^. As I

will argue in these pages, kampung are the places and the spaces where the creation of

political culture and its citizens can be seen with some clarity, because not only are

7

Ruth Benedict noted this kind of local community politic oraganization across the East (1946).

115

kampimg one of the places where local power must be reconciled with state power, but

the working class faihabitants of the kampung in their adjustments and adaptations to this

reconciliation reveal the class contradictions emergmg rapidly in Indonesia today (Kahn

1991).

The rest of this chapter will be taken up with a description of Kampung Kumah

Putri and hs particular history.

KAMPUNG RUMAH PUTRI

The DrV or special area of Yogyakarta is one of the most densely populated areas

in Indonesia. In 1990, the average density was 919 persons per square kilometer, second

only to Jakarta where the average was 13,939 per km2 (Biro Pusat Statistik 1992:24).

Although there are other towns within the DIY, Yogyakarta is the capital and by far the

largest urban center (Abdullah et al. 1985). According to the national census, the

percentage of people living m the DIY's urban areas has increased from 16.4% to 44.4%

between 1971 and 1990 (ibid.)

The city itself is situated on the fluvial volcanic plain below the foothills of Mount

Merapi, an active volcano. The dense population of the city is supported by the year-long

cultivation of rice through irrigation (^sawah). Swidden agriculture (ladang) is used in the

higher areas near Merapi.

Yogyakarta is known as kota mahasiswa, or city of students, because of the

number of colleges in the area, particularly Universitas Gadjah Mada, the oldest and

116

second largest public university in Indonesia. Yogya is likewise known for its performing

arts, such as gamelan (gong-based orchestra), wayang (shadow puppets), and dance, as

well as its craft industries of silver and batik. The Yogya kraton actively supports such

court arts. For this reason, Yogya is a frequent destination for tourists as well.

If you arrive m Yogya, at the main railroad station or at the airport and ask to be

taken to Rumah Putri, your request will ahnost certainly be understood immediately. If

not, you must only explain that it is near the southwest comer of the sultan's palace and

your driver will know where to go. Although Yogya is filled with kampung, the locations

of established kampung are a matter of common knowledge critical to understanding the

social map of the city. Kampung Rumah Putri is not the most well known area of the city

by any means, but it does form part of the established memory of most city dwellers.

Kampung Rumah Putri, by all definitions, is anchored at its northeast comer by the

intersection at the the southwest of the Yogyakarta kraton. This busy intersection sees

heavy traffic south to the productive agricultural areas of Bantul and north towards the

city center. The east-west road is likewise a large, heavily trafficked one which serves as

part of the bus routes around the city with connections to main routes out of the city.

Rumah Putri is generally known by outsiders as the home kampung of the famous healer,

Bu Dewi, although she has moved her practice and home to another part of the city. Most

of the city's becak (pedicab) drivers know Rumah Putri as a spot on a well-defined tourist

route that mcludes a daily wayang performance and a puppet maker's shop in the

kampung.

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For its residents, Kampung Rumah Putri has a number of official coordinates, and

kampung insiders are proficient and facile in using the various definitions of the kampung

known as Rumah IHitri, depending on the context. For example, the name Rumah Putri is

used for two ascending levels of administrative units, the lingkimgan (sub village unit) and

the keliirahan (village unit). The name Rumah Putri was also used for the nikun kampung

(RK), a defunct administrative unit with a contmued resonance that adds to the confusion

about the name and the limits of kampung commiuiity.

Neither the general area known to outsiders nor the official definitions of

lingkungan and kelurahan entirely correspond to the area defined by residents as Rumah

Putri, who are nonetheless aware of both the official definitions and the vaguer definitions

of outsiders. ECampung Rumah Putri is often identified by its residents with its presumed

connections to the kraton witnessed by the decaying structure at the end of our street.

This relic obviously had once been a large, imposing house of royal design within a walled

compound. Popular opinion was that the name of the kampung comes fi"om this house,

and it has been variously interpreted as evidence for a direct connection to the kraton."

According to an official history of the area (Salamun 1989/1990), Rimiah Putri was the

seat of a Nayaka, a high ranking cabinet minister, in 1755. Reportedly this minister along

with several others were under the supervision of a Biipati Nayaka Lebet, responsible for

The name given for the kampung here is not the actual one and so cannot be directly

translated here. The flavor of the name is retained, however, in Griya Putri.

118

the city ofYogyakarta in contrast to the larger state (ibid.). The Nayaka for Rumah Putri

was in charge of finances and expenditures.

The house associated with the Nayaka was built for his daughter during the reign

of Hamengku Buwana VH (1877-1921), according to her great grand-daughter, who still

resides in the kampung. Smce succession was supposed to run through the males

(although this is not always true in Java by any means), the story goes that the house was

given back to the kraton on the Nayaka's daughter's death. Other residents reported

various versions of this story, and the royal connections of the kampung figure

prommently in all accounts.

According to some kampung residents, early inhabitants were abdi dalem^ the

loyal servants of the kraton responsible for everything fi-om serving tea to lighting lanterns

(abdi dalem come in all ranks, and presumably those living m the kampung were lower

ranking servants). One older woman, Bu Tuwa, recalled the days when these abdi dalem

were a common sight, m their traditional batik, walking through the kampung on the way

to the kraton. Back then, she said, people used polite Javanese, saying mongo, mongo to

those passing by, which can be translated in this instance as 'please, go ahead,' as a

response to someone asking forgiveness for passing in fi-ont of someone else (mongo is

polysemic and serves as one of many markers of a distinct Javanese form of politeness).

"Now it's all ayo, ayo, ayd''' (the coarse, ngoko equivalent), she complained.

Several kampung residents reported their own royal connections, typically through

relatives who worked as abdi dalem. We were introduced early on to Pak Mongo who

119

volunteered to teach us Javanese including the highest level, krama inggil, the register

commonly used at the kraton. He was able to do this because he too had served as an

abdi dalem at one point. His abilities were the object of much pride on the part of his

relatives. Loyalty and pride in the kraton are typical of Yogyakarta. and as in many

kampung, its royal connections, however tenuous, are critical to how Rumah Putri is

understood by its residents.

Whatever the actual events leading to its construction and the nature of its

connections to the kraton, the kampung grew around it m an area that blended into rice

fields to the west and south. [Figures 3.1 through 3.5 illustrate the slow growth of the

kampung over time.] The development of Kampung Rumah Putri does not figure in

oflBcial histories but it appears to have followed fi-om its position between the sultan's

palace and the greater countryside. In addition to the numerous abdi dalem, early

residents of the kampung were mvolved in agriculture, mixing court and countryside m

their daily lives. It is reasonable to suspect that this kampung provided a place to keep a

foot m both worlds, agricultural as well as crafts and service industries.

Although the administrative units identified with Rumah Putri and its kraton

connections have meaning for residents, the limits of Kampung Rumah Putri for its

mhabitants are, m the final instance, ineffable. In many ways, kampung means for them

home community with connections both to particular histories and to state-level cultural

currents of Javanese and Indonesian history. And while administrative units structure the

limits of kampung, as I will show in coming chapters, networks of exchange, suppon.

120

family ties, face to face relations, and habitual use define kampung limits as well. My own

social cartography of the kanq)ung expanded along with my experience there.

In our new house, with all the attendant anxieties and frustrations. The last J days have been some of the hardest we've had so far. Although we have had a miracidous amount ofgreat, good help, the hours of decision-making, shopping, negotiating, and tratislatingfrom desires and worries to decisions to Indonesian and thru friends to Javanese has been a tremendous strain (fieldnotes, 8/9/1992).

Coming mto Kampung Rumah Putri for the first time, Steve and I had no real

concept of kampung and kampung life. We were just looking for a place to live in a part

of the city away fi-om the community of expats and wealthy Indonesians in the area around

the hospital where Steve would be based. Although neither of us planned to do fieldwork

per se in the neighborhood, we still hoped to Uve m a typical Javanese area away fi^om tlie

mtemational influence of the campus.

We found Kampung Rumah Putri originally because we had been directed to a

good contact there, a fiiend of a fiiend who would become a close fiiend and contact of

our own. Entering Rumah Putri along its wide main street, I had no impression of the

dense neighborhoods I had glimpsed down the narrow alleys and gang that lead off the

main streets in the center of Yogya. After passing the public meeting house and the

market near the entrance Rumah Putri, we could see that the houses along its main street

were large and permanent, made of concrete with permanent tiled roofs, and with space

between neighbors. Our overall impression of the area near our firiend's house was of a

calm and peacefiil neighborhood. Clearly, this area was less congested than the

neighborhoods downtown and its lanes and alleys were shaded by many trees. Although

121

most of the roadways were much narrower than that from the mam entrance, the kampung

was crossed by several roadways that were wide enough for a single car. Unlike the more

densely packed kampung m the center of Yogya, described by Gunmess (1991), J. Sullivan

(1992), and N. Sullivan (1994), Kampung Rumah Putri seemed more rural and there were

areas of open space absent from the downtown kampung. In fact, there was an open

space across from the rental house with a substantial growth of papaya and bamboo.

When we were shown the prospective rental house itself our most prominent

impression was that it was a new house in an established neighborhood. It had tiled floors

and an indoor well and W.C., amenities we had not really expected but were pleased to

find. We were aware that the house was nicer than those around it, and we could not help

but notice the difference between this house and the house of the owner's parents next

door, because on our first trip to see the house we had walked through the parent's house

to its back door so that we might see the back of the rental house. We could not ignore

the cement floor in the front of their house that gave way to a packed earth floor in the

back kitchen area nor the thin bamboo walls of the back part of the house which opened

onto the open space between the two houses. The parent's home was m stark contrast to

the daughter's new house. Still, at that time Steve and I were planning on doing our

fieldwork outside the kampung and were only mterested in livmg as comfortably as

possible without opting for the expat lifestyle common to the north part of the city. We

had no notion of the social implications of the construction of our house and how it would

came to play a part in our lives in the kampung.

122

Living in the kampung became of a project of learning to see it differently, of

learning to see the social sediments manifest m the houses, lanes, doorways, comers, and

open spaces. Just as I would come to understand the significance of both the social and

physical architecture of our own house, I would come to see the neighborhood in a

different way: I would be forced to see it not from the outside in but the inside out. It

would no longer seem like a nice, shady middle class neighborhood with permanent houses

along wide streets, mstead I would see the complex network of paths running behind and

between houses that led past small lean-tos of bamboo that housed large families. I would

no longer be able to see the cement-walled house of the seamstress at the end of the street

without also seeing its one-roomed bamboo extension that housed a widower relative and

his two children. Although his bare dnt front-yard of approximately 5 sq m ~ larger than

the actual shelter and taken up with the family well and his becak, the means of his

occasional livelihood ~ was at the comer of two main gang, I Uterally did not see his

dwelling and had no idea that three people lived there.

My social mapping of the kampxmg and my ability to see what was before my very

eyes developed along with my social relations and experience in the kampung. As time

went on, I came to know how many people lived in small nooks and crannies in and

around these homes ekeing out marginal incomes and making do. I was no longer able to

not see the tiny kerosene Ughts at night that revealed the numbers of people pressed into

small areas of the kampung. As my census mterviewing continued I stopped feeling

surprised to find a tiny home with a family or perhaps a single woman in a place I had not

123

even identified as habitable. The open spaces of my hiitial impression gave way to a

complex cartography of larger homes and yards with smaller homes accreted aromid them

like so many barnacles. In many ways, this pattern reiterates the wong cilik versus wong

gedhe or wong gedhongan (gedhong meaning building in the sense of a permanent cement

structure) pattern mentioned by the SuUivans and Guinness, but instead of the larger

homes lining the outside boundaries of the kampung, the interior of the kampung revealed

a pattern of larger homes with smaller homes crowded around and in-between them. This

pattern of occupation suggests not only the complex mix of lives hidden behind large

houses m Kampung Rumah Putri, but it reiterates metaphorically the reality of urban life

hidden by government rhetoric of ideal community life.

DEMOGRAPHICS

The city of Yogyakarta is the capital of the special area of Yogyakarta {Daerah

Istimewa Yogyakarta^ DIY) which is equivalent administratively, if not in size, to the other

provinces of Java. Self-ruling during the Dutch colonial era and the period of Japanese

occupation, the DIY was recognized by the independent government of the Republic of

Indonesia after the revolution. The city lies portentously between Mount Merapi, an

active volcano, and the boiling south shore of Java, bordering on the Indian Ocean.''

Legend has it that the sultan of the Yogyakarta kraton must yearly combine the male

power of Merapi with the female power of the south sea, embodied in Ratul Kidul, the queen of the South Sea. Their union, sexual and spiritual, occurs m underground tunnels

124

As mentioned earlier, the DIY is one of the most densely populated areas in

Indonesia. The only area that is more densely populated is the new super city of Jakarta.

The Yogya area continues to grow; 16.4% of the population were considered urbanites in

1971, growing to 44.4% in 1990 (Abdullah et al. 1985).

Below the level of the DFY administratively is the city (kotamacfya), subdistrict

(kecamatan), village district (kelurahan). As mentioned earlier, a fiill description of

administrative units is presented m Chapter 4, but for the moment it should be noted that

the most local levels of government are, m descending order, the kecamatan, kelurahan,

lingktingan, nikim warga (RW), and finally nikim tetangga (RT). The RW and RT are

the neighborhood units staffed by unpaid coimnunity members. Beginning with the

lingkungan, administration falls to civil servants. The Kelurahan Rumah Putri is made up

of three different Ungkimgan covering 70.4 hectares. The lingkungan is made up of 5 RW.

Each RW contains approximately 5 RT, dependmg on the population size. These units,

the kelurahan and below, are the levels of administration most known and appealed to by

kampung residents.

Statistics gathered at the level of the kelurahan and lingkungan showed 13,720

people in the kelurahan m 1990 and 5210 in the lingkungan.'" My own sample covered

below the palace which connect Merapi to the sea, so the story goes. The reproductive power thus combmed accounts for the endurance of the sultanate. Legends such as this are cotimion throughout Southeast Asia (Reid 1988; Peletz 1996).

10

The kampung-Ievel statistics presented here are fi^om internal administrative reports for the Kelurahan compiled and distributed by the Panitia Lomba Pancamarga Pendidikan

125

some 196 inhabitants in two adjoining RT. The popluation m these areas is relatively

equally divided by sex; of the 13,720 residents of the kelitfahan, 55% (7561) were male

and 45% (6159) female. In my own sample m Rumah Putri, there were 88 men (44.9%)

and 108 women (55.1%). There were 3128 heads of household {kepala kelitarga) in the

kelurahan; 2177 of these heads are male, 951 are female. The number of household heads

at the level of lingkungan was 2542 in 1985/86. Forty families were headed by a male or

by a male/female couple, and 7 families were headed by single women.

Kampung Rumah Putri was relatively densely populated, with approximately 74

people per hectare in the kelurahan. The average number of people per household m the

kelurahan was 4.4, dropping from 4.9 in 1985/86. In my own smaller sample, the

household size was 4.78, while the average family size was 4.17. Although these figures

conceal some variation in family make-up across my sample, 88.5% of families and 80.5%

of households had 6 or fewer people. In contrast, the downtown kampung Kalasan

studied by Norma SuUivan and John Sullivan is the most densely populated area in the

city. In the kecamatan of Kalasan where they worked, the level above kelurahan, 26,000

Masyarakat, Kelurahan Griya Putri, Kecamatan Mantrijeron, Kotamadya Dati II Yogyakarta. As with the national statistics, the mformation from the 1985/86 is more complete than that from the 1989/90 census which is being released slowly. Therefore, some data available for 1985/86 are not available for 1989/90. Additional statistical information is from a 1990 report on health activities associated with PKMD {Pembarigiman Kesehatan Masyarakat Desa, Development of Rural Health) in the Kelurahan Griya Putri. Many researchers feel that Indonesian statistics, despite the fervor involved in their collection and distribution, are often speculative and poUtically advantageous. Only very summary statistics are presented here because of some glaring discrepancies in numbers across years and units.

126

people live in 2500 houses, most around 30 sq nx

According the 1985/86 report for the Kelurahan Rumah Putri, of the 70.4 ha of

land, 7 ha were used for sawah or wet rice agriculture, 52.85 ha were used for house

yards, 1.5 ha were used for publicly owned garden land, 2.25 ha were devoted to

cemeteries, and 6.8 ha devoted to roadways. The average land owned by each household

was 276 m2.

As to housing, the 1985/86 census reports 567 permanent buildings in Lmgkungan

Rumah E\itri, 61 semi-permanent, and 18 were classified as bamboo {gedeg) or as

emergency {danirat) or temporary. Of the households m Lingkungan Rumah Putri, 370

had private wells, 29 used public wells, 38 had pumps, and 70 had some mdoor piping. As

to toilets, 701 families had their own and 21 used publicly provided toilets.

The 1990 figures for education" at the level of kelurahan are as follows: 136 (1%)

have not yet gone to school or are unschooled, 360 (2.6%) have not graduated from

elementary school, 4758 (34.7%) have graduated from elementary school, 4741 (34.6%)

have graduated jimior high school, 3427 (30%) have graduated high school 158 (1.2%)

11

These figures for education were generalized in their translation. Indonesia's school system is only recently standardized and during the time of the Dutch several different types of schooling were in place depending on class, race, and location. For the purposes of presentation here, various elementary schools have been combined with the current SD or Sekolah Dasar, which begins after TK or taman kamk-kanak^ the equivalent of kindergarten. The various technical and professional akademi degrees post-high school have been combined as well to distinguish them from the lower Sekolah Menengah Pertama (SMP) and Sekolah Menegah Atas (SMA), rougly equivalent to junior and senior high school respectively, and the higher college degree (SI).

127

have gone to a professional school or academy, and 140 (1%) have pursued college

degrees.

In 1985/86 at the level of kelurahan, 79% (9872) of the residents were Muslim.

17% (2154) Catholic, 3% (376) Christian/Protestant, 22 (0.2%) Hindu, and 28 (0.2%)

Buddhist. In contrast, the numbers at the level of lingkungan show a slightly higher

percentage of Catholics (26%, 1178) and lower percentage of Muslims (71%, 3138). No

numbers were available from the 1989/90 census.

Figure 3.6 shows a breakdown of occupations represented in the Lmgkungan

Rumah Putri from the oflBcial 1985/86 census; similar figures were not available for

1989/90. Two things should be noted about these data. First, the categories of work are

taken from the census and were not altered in their presentation here other than their

translation. Consequently, categories may seem to overlap. Second, several categories

showed a several-fold increase in magnitude between the years 1984/85 and 1985/86, the

two years presented in the census report. The reasons for these increases are mysterious,

particularly given the short time period between the two counts.

The statistics available from these locally produced government documents are

problematic but provide a general demographic picture of the kampung that is reinforced

by my own census work on nearly 100% of two adjacent RTs. My sample covered some

196 inhabitants in 41 households structures with 47 families.'^ This population is

12

The distinction between household structure and family is based on a self-identification by those interviewed as to head of household. Kepala keluarga or head of household is

128

relatively equally divided by sex: there were 88 men (44.9%) and 108 women (55.1%).

Additional census data was collected from a nearby kampung, Langit Ayuh,

distinguished by its more recent development, its small size, and its location just outside

the city limits of Yogya. In this siuvey, the diflferent demographics are apparent. In

Langh Ayuh, a much smaller sample of approximately a third of the inhabhants was done;

64 people were counted m 13 household structures containing 15 families with 26 men

(40.63%) and 38 women (59.38%). The average household size was 5.33, while family

size was 4.57. Due to the small sample size, it is impossible to judge the meaning of the

difierence in household and family size, but it is likely that Langit Ayuh is attractmg rural

people who are bringing family along in a form of chain migration. Open-ended interviews

with residents support this suggestion. In contrast, Rumah Putri's residents have typically

been m the kampung much longer. While the average time in residence was 6 years in

Langit Ayuh, h: was 25 years m Rumah Putri. Moreover the residents of Langit Ayuh tend

to be younger: the average age is 25 m Langit Ayuh but is 30 in Rumah Putri.

My smaller sample diflFers from the larger lingkungan and keluharan population in

terms of religion. There were 113 (57.7%) Muslims and 83 (42.3%) Catholics in my

Rumah Putri sample. The much larger percentage of Catholics is partly a fimction of the

one of the categories regularly counted and used in ofBcial survey and data collection by the Indonesian government. As such it not only has ofiBcial standing but is understood commonly by kampimg members. On rare occasions, I designated a nuclear family within a larger family dwelling without the self-definition of the family. The distinction between house and household will be treated at length in Chapter 5.

129

Figure 3.6 Occupations represented in the Lingkungan Rumah Putri, 1985/86.

Farmer 18

Farm worker 20

Husbandry 30*

Handicraft industry 48*

Seller 462

Industry 14*

Doctor 14

Nurse/nurse's aid 49*

Health worker II

Teacher 240

Civil servant (including retired)

526

Military 146

Factory worker 10

Midwife 10

Barbers 19

Becak driver 41

Woodworker 76

T ailor/ seamstress 42

Tire repair 10

Auto repair 8

Bicycle repair 8

Car^icycle seat 3

* - denotes a category that mcreased by more than 100% between the years of 1984/85 and 1985/86.

130

historical development of Kampmig Rmnah Putri and partly a fimction of kinship. There

is a large Catholic church just outside the entrance to Rumah Putri. We were told that a

very popular priest dimng the era of Independence had shielded kampung residents from

the retixming Dutch. The effect of his benevolence was a higher number of Catholics than

in the general Javanese or Indonesian population. Indeed, the number of Muslims in the

larger kelurahan is also lower than in the general population where it tends to be nearer

90%. The even higher concentration of Catholics in the particular area of the kampung

where I lived is partially explained by the presence of several related Catholic families.

The numbers from Langit Ayuh are more in line with the national averages: 54 (84.4%)

Muslim, 5 (7.8%) Catholic, and 5 (7.8%) Christian. The populations of both Rumah Putri

and Langit Ayuh were ethnically homogeneous. Only one person from the combined

samples was not ethnically Javanese.

My niformation on housmg shows that 22 structures had masonry walls, 13 were

constructed from bamboo, 7 from a combination of masonry and wood or bamboo, and 4

of wood and bamboo (one structure was not recorded). Presumably the use of masonry

for aU or part of a house would make it permanent or semi-permanent accordmg to official

categories and kotongan or setengah tembok (half-walled) according to local usage.

Wood and bamboo are likely considered semi-permanent as well. The thirteen bamboo

houses presumably are considered temporary, corresponding to the gedeg style:

woven bamboo walls, triple-pitched tiled roof on four stout pillars set in raised, compacted earth floors; they are actually attractive, comfortable places to live in Java's steamy heat, when not too crowded and in good order (J. Sullivan 44).

131

A comparison of percentages between the much larger Imgkungan population and my

own smaller and more refined sample is risky. Still it is interesting that while 12.2% of the

lingkungan population were classified as either temporary or semi-permanent, 51% of my

sample could be so classified. Whether this comparison holds up or not, the area I lived in

clearly had many more bamboo houses than others, while some areas had few or no

masonry houses. The difference in percentages is also a testament to the spatial

diflferentiation by class within the kampung. The area of my closest work was an average

subsection of the wider kampimg which had areas with quite large and elaborate houses as

well as areas of very small and poorer shelters. In general, the larger kelurahan area

becomes poorer in appearance the farther south one goes. The proportions fi-om Langit

Ayuh resembles those fi-o'm the lingkungan data: 11 of the 13 houses surveyed were at

least partly masonry, while only 2 were built of bamboo and wood.

There was no sawah land within the areas I covered in Rumah Putri and Langit

Ayuh, although there was sawah nearby. The majority of land was taken up with houses

and house yards, although both kampung included at least one large open, public area and

at least some space devoted to public gardens. The average size of household structures

in Rumah Putri (reported by the inhabitants) was 91 m2 (meters squared), ranging

between 9 m2 and 300 m2. The average house yard size was 178 m2; the smallest yard

was 9 m2, and the largest was 750 m2. The average structure size in Langit Ayuh was

64.3 m2, with structures sampled rangmg fi-om 25 m2 to 108 m2. The average house yard

size was 188 m2. The minimum for house yard was 63 m2, and the maximum was 400

132

m2.

In contrast to the ofiQcial statistics, my own work provides more indicators of

socio-economic status. For exatnple. Figure 3.7 shows the distribution of occupations

from my own mterviewing.By combining the two samples and collapsing some of

internal categories into civil servants and military (8), professional including nurses,

teachers, and clerks (31), formal sector industry (35), informal sector industry (29). and

housewives (29) a clearer picture of employment in the kampung is revealed. Still, the

distinction between formal and informal is arbitrary at best. Diane Wolf defines the

mformal sector as trade and services (1992:45). Yet, in Indonesia informal sector work

cannot be defined merely on the basis of low wages, lack of protection, unstable

employment as these characteristics hold true for most employment. For my purposes, I

have used informal sector work to comprise predomiaantly itinerant and/or home-based

work, whether in manufacturing, trade, or services. In my own sample then, I mclude

within the informal sector the home-based industries such as fiber-glass statue making, the

warung and food stalls, the seamstresses, the masseuses, the sellers who are typically

itinerant and home-based, and the batik workers who do home-based piecework. Those

identifymg themselves as bunih/karyawan (laborers) were mcluded in the formal sector

although often their work is in informal sector mdustries. Likewise, servants were

classified as formal sector although this category may include neighborhood women doing

13

Chapter 10 deals at length with the structure of employment nationally and locally, with particular attention to female labor.

133

Figure 3.7 Occupations represented in Rumah Putri and Langit Ayuh samples.

OCCUPATION Rimiah Putri Langit Ayuh

TOTALS

civil servants 3 (9.4%) 2 (2.2%) 5 (3.9%)

home industry 1 (3.1%) 9 (9.8%) 10 (7.8%)

teacher I (3.1%) 8 (8.7%) 9 (7.0%)

nurses 0 (n/a) 2 (2.2%) 2(1.6%)

seamstress 1 (3.1%) 3(3.1%) 4(3.1%)

warung (food stall) 2 (6.3%) 6 (6.2%) 8 (6.2%)

housewife 10(31.3%) 16(16.5%) 26 (20.2%)

v^aswasta (private sector) 3 (9.4%) 1 (1.0%) 4(3.1%)

buruh/karyawan (laborer/worker) 6(18.8%) 9 (9.8%) 15 (11.6%)

military 0 (n/a) 3 (3.1%) 3 (2.3%)

clerk I (3.1%) 14(14.4%) 15 (11.6%)

professional 0 (n/a) 5 (5.2%) 5 (3.9%)

batik 0 (n/a) 3(3.1%) 3 (2.3%)

seller I (3.1%) 2 (2.2%) 3 (2.3%)

servant/household help 1 (3.1%) 2 (2.2%) 3 (2.3%)

driver 2 (6.3%) 4(4.1%) 6 (4.7%)

service 0 (n/a) 2 (2.2) 2(1.6%)

mdustry/small and large outside kampung 0 (n/a) 5 (5.2%) 5 (3.9%)

credit seller 0 (n/a) 1 (1.0%) I

TOTALS 32 97 129

134

informal work for another woman.

Not unexpectedly my information on wages is sporadic. Many of those

interviewed did not choose to share this information or offered figures that greatly under-

reported actual earnings based on other signs of wealth such as household goods, and so

the information on household mventory offered below may be a better indicator of the

status of most kampung people. For Rumah Putri, across 30 households reporting wage

niformation, 237,000 rupiah (equivalent to $118.50 m 1992 US$) was the average

monthly wage. Considering this data for the 33 families reporting, the average drops to

Rp 215,800 (US$ 107.90). Because of the effect of combining mcomes in large extended

households the average figure per household and family may be misleading. When

averaged across wage earners only the figure is Rp 129,500 (US$ 64.75). The wages

reported per individual ranged between Rp 25,000 to Rp 320,000. The modal income

reported in Rumah Putri was Rp 200,000 or US$ 100.00, but breaking the figures mto

increments of Rp 25,000 reveals a modal income between Rp 26,000 and Rp 50,000, that

is between US$ 12.50 and US$ 25.00. Wage information fi-om Langit Ayuh shows lower

wages generally: an average wage per person reporting of Rp 83,800 (US$ 41.90), an

average per family of Rp 100,600 (US$ 50.30), an average per household of Rp 125,750

(US$ 62.88). National statistics on wages show a slightly lower average daily wage of Rp

450 m Yogyakarta and Rp 635 in Central Java, equivalent to Rp 13,500 and 19,050 per

month, respectively (ELO 1989).

As to education. Figure 3.8 shows the levels of education among residents of both

135

Rumah Putri and Langit Ayuh.

Figure 3.8 Level of Education in Rumah Putri and Langit Ayixh samples.

Level of Schooling

Rimiah Putri not in school

Rumah Putri in school

Langit Ayuh not in school

Langit Ayuh m school

none* 7 (6.5%) 13 (14.8%) 4(11.1%) 7 (25.0%)

TK 0 (n/a) 6 (6.8%) 0 (n/a) 2(7.1%)

SD 31 (28.7%) 27 (30.7%) 16 (44.4%) 7 (25.0%)

SMP 21 (19.4%) 19(21.6%) 8 (22.2%) 5(17.9%)

SMA 24 (22.2%) 16(18.2%) 5(13.9%) 4(14.3%)

Akademi 19(17.6%) 2 (2.3%) I (2.8%) 3 (10.7%0

College 6 (5.6%) 5 (5.7%) 2 (5.6%) 0 (n/a)

TOTAL n= 108 (55.1% of

Rumah Putri san^le)

n = 88 (44.9% of

Rumah Putri sample)

n = 36 (56.3% of Langit

Ayuh sample)

n = 28 (77.8% of Langit

Ayuh sample)

* for those in the "m school column," this figure reflects babies not yet of school age

In Rumah Putri, 5 of 47 families, or 10.6%, own cars, 19 (40.4%) own

motorcycles, and 27 (57.4%) own bicycles. There are 40 (85.1%) radios, 33 (70.2%)

televisions, 8 (17.0%) iceboxes, and 2 (4.3%) telephones. Twelve families (25.5%) lease

their homes, 27 (57.4%) own them, and 7 (14.9%) live in houses belonging to a family

member (1 is unknown, 2.1%). Twenty-seven homes (57.4%) have their own toilets.

Twenty-eight homes (59.6%) have cement or tile floors while 14 (29.8%) have dirt floors

and 4 (8.5%) have a combination of dirt and permanent flooring. All but 5 (10.6%) homes

have electricity, although the wattage is typically 450 or less. Two homes (4.3%) have

136

gas stoves, 38 (80.9%) use kerosene, 5 (10.6%) use charcoal, and 5 (10.6%) use wood.

The numbers from Langh Ayuh are similar.

Inteviewing in both kampung suggests the relative lack of young adult men and

women proportionally. This pattern is partially explained by the general trend for young

men to leave the kampung in search of employment and more generally pengalaman or

experience. This trend holds true for many females as well. Witness the two young,

educated women in my neighborhood who had both left to pursue careers, one as a

laboratory technician and the other as a kindergarten teacher. In both cases, however, the

young women were called back to their natal home to take care of aging parents. Both

women were the youngest female sibling of the family.

Comparing length of residence in the kampung is revealing. Of the 47 families in

Rumah Putri, 4 (8.5%) were headed by single women bom m the kampung, 5 (10.6%)

were headed by a man or a woman who moved in, 13 ( 27.7%) were headed by a couple

who moved to the kampung together, 10 ( 21.3%) were headed by couples both of whom

were bom m the kampung or moved there as a small child, 6 (12.8%) were headed by

couples with a female with longer residence m the kampung, and 9 (19.1%) were headed

by couples with a male with longer residence. Of the 47 families, 29 (61.8%) were headed

by people who were bom in the kampung or moved there as small children.

So the typical resident of Rumah Putri, understood partially in contrast to the

residents of Langit Ayuh, is likely to have lived in the kampung most of his or her life.

S/he is a Muslim, although in this case with many CathoUc neighbors. He or she lives in a

137

family of four or more people. He or she has some schooling although generally not past

jimior high school and works at an informal sector or a low-wage manufacturing job

making something less than US$ 70.00 a month. S/he lives on in small house that s/he or

a family member owns and that is at least partially of bamboo, with access to water and a

toilet. S/he probably enjoys radio and sometimes TV and uses a bicycle to get around, if

not public conveyance. S/he shops at the local pasar and cooks on a kerosene stove.

The people of Rumah Putri belong to what Robison (1996) calls the popular lower

middle class of Indonesia, made up of clerks, teachers, and petty wage earners. And as

Robison says, this is a class fraction that is often overlooked because they do not belong

to the wealthy middle class nor to an inapoverished rural class of peasants. It is because

they have been overlooked, this class that makes up Indonesia's invisible cultixre (cC

Rosaldo 1989), that they mterested me.

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CHAPTER 4

MAKING HOUSEWIVES: PKK AND THE KAMPUNG "VILLAGE"

The 'Tiousewife" or ibu nimah tangga as a social category is a relatively new

phenomenon in Java. Her presence in the kampung and m Java has much to do not only

with the administration of locahties and infrastructural development, but with prevailing

ideas of about gender status and changes in this ideology along with the development of a

middle class. Over the course of the next chapters, the role of the domestic community in

kinship as made manifest in the House, in exchange and production as manifest in the

Household, and m morality as manifest in the ideal Home will be considered. The

ideological, spatial, and material components of these "structures" will be described in

order to consider the confluence of the domestic realm, the community, and the state with

reference to gender, and the working class particularly. This chapter presents, m

anticipation of this discussion, the background of PKK, local community administration,

and women's associations. To understand PKK and its role, not only in household

139

regulation, but in the maintenance of local commimities, hs position as an articulation

between local administrative structures and women's political and social organizations

must be considered alongside its own evolution as a quasi-public organization directed at

household management. The connection between these programs and the poUtical cultiu^e

of Indonesia, the cultural ideal of women, and the experience of Dutch colonialism and

bourgeois and priyayi notions of the housewife will also be explored. This analysis will by

its very nature include consideration of the nature of sexual asymmetry and female status

in Java, as well as Southeast Asia. And fiuther, the overview of local administration will

likewise by necessity engage the literature on the nature of the autonomous village and the

difference between the country and the city. A brief outline of PKK, its history and

programs will be used as the springboard to an analysis of the its related programs.

PKK: GUIDING THE PROSPEROUS FAMILY

It may indeed be possible to live in Java and not know the significance of PKK but

it would be impossible to live there and not be aware of its presence. It seems that every

village hamlet entrance and every urban kampung walkway is emblazoned with a PKK

plague, outlming the ten principal programs of PKK {10 Program Pojok PKK). The list

breaks down in the following way:

I) comprehension and practical appUcation of Pancasila';

t

Pancasila, literally five legs, is the state ideology of Indonesia which includes five principles that are used to guide aU oflBcial action: monotheism, nationalism, humanism.

140

2) mutual self help; 3) food; 4) clothing; 5) housing and home economics; 6) education and craft skills; 7) health; 8) development of cooperatives; 9) protection and conservation of the enviroimient; 10) health planning (read as family planning).

The very prevalence of this list of ideal female domestic activities may render it invisible to

some, and in fact the level of PKK activity in any given locale varies in terms of a complex

mix of factors; for example, the relative wealth of the area, the history of PKK

organization, and the personality of the local PKK leaders. Yet no place should be

without PKK and its programs by a government decree of 1971, which extended this

successfiil program to all of Indonesia after its original genesis m Java. The origins of

PKK were more humble, however.^

PKK, Pembifjaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga, began as a 1957 home economics

seminar held m Bogor, West Java (the following discussion follows closely Suryakusuma

social justice, and democracy. In 1983, legislation was introduced requiring all political parties to adopt Pancasila as their sole ideological basis (Azas Tiinggai, Robison 1993:44). 2

Before beginning a description of the origins and evolution of PKK, it should be noted that the sources on PKK are not consistent, mcluding the government's own publications, and the majority of women involved in PKK are similarly fiizzy on the details. It is clear that PKK has gone through various bureaucratic shufflings, and a completely accurate pictxu-e of these shifts is probably impossible given the contradictory sources. Still the general outlme presented here is in agreement with most sources consulted, although Julia Suryakusuma's 1991 article appears to be the clearest presentation of the general chronology of events around the development of PKK.

141

1991; cf. Gerke; 1992; Wolf 1992; N. Sullivan 1994; Wieringa 1993). The seminar was

conducted by the Education Section and Community Nutrition Institute of the Ministry of

Health (Suryakusuma 1991:56). Based on a mimeograph from the government's Ministry

of International Affairs, Suryakusuma notes that

[b]etween 1960-1962, an mterdepartment committee which included the Ministry of Culture and Education, the Ministry of Agricultm-e, the Ministry of Manpower, Mfaiistry of Religion, Mmistry of Internal Affairs and a nmnber of female figures compiled a list of education topics which they considered appropriate for a developing society. This was how the ten programs of PKK were originally conceived (ibid.).

The Governor of Central Java included PKK as part of regional development

efforts in the mid- 1960s. Originally, PERTIWI, one of the first organizations for wives of

government officials, was given the job of promulgating PKK and its principles. Piisat

Latihan PKK (PKK training centers) were begun in all the districts of Central Java, and in

the early 1970s, these were fimded fi-om district budgets. It was at the end of 1971 that

the Minister of Internal Affairs suggested that PKK be implemented throughout Indonesia.

In 1973, PKK became a main program of the LSD {Lembaga Sosial Desa, Village Social

Insritution). TTie LSD was later changed to the LKMD {Lembaga Ketaharian Masyarakat

Desa, Institution for the Maintenance of Village Society) in 1980 (the development of the

LSD and LKMD will be discussed below in terms of their role ia the evolution of local

administrative structures). In 1980, responsibility for PKK also shifted fi-om the Mmistry

of Social Affairs to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. At this time, PKK also began

receiving some of the money granted to villages through INPRES (Presidential

142

Instructions).

It was in 1982 that PKK become one of the working sections of LKMD structm-e

and was put under the charge of the village head's wife who also served as the

"fimctional" second deputy chairman {Ketiia IF) of LKMD. This change would prove to

be very important in the incorporation of wives mto local administration as the helpmeets

of their ofiScial spouses. Suryakusuma also notes the shift in 1982 that moved the

Pancasila courses to the first of the PKK programs (1991:56). "This change is significant.

By making P4 [Pancasila courses] the first program, the state uimiistakenly put its stamp

on PKK" (ibid.). She goes on to say that the mclusion of PKK in the GBHN {Garis Besar

Hainan Negara, State National Guidelines) in 1983 marked the zenith of PKK's state

approval; "[n]ow as one of the ten sections of LKMD, in theory at least, PKK is supposed

to be implemented m all the 70,000 villages m Indonesia" (Suryakusuma 1991:56-7).

While PKK has now been incorporated within the structure of village/kampung

administration through the LKMD, the structure of PKK itself is also broken into sub­

sections: social projects, sport and art, education, community relations, family planning,

equipment, credit-savmgs program (simpan pinjam), and area commissioners (Gerke

1992:33, n. 26). A final shift m PKK administrative and bureaucratic position has to do

with its inclusion as the main mouthpiece for the government's family planning program

{Badan Koordinasi Keluarga Berencana Nasional, BKKBN, Coordinating Board for

National Family Planning).

The national structure of PKK is summarized in Figure 4.1. PKK is under the

143

auspices of the Mmistry of Internal Affairs and is headed by the wife of the Minister of

Internal Affairs. At each descending level of the male admniistrative bureaucracy, the wife

of that particular official serves as the head of PKK. In this fashion, PKK extends from

the smallest administrative unit to the highest level of government, so that the wife of the

president of Indonesia is titular head of PKK. This structure is much the same for the

other well-known, national level government organization of women, Dharma Wanita

(Woman's Outy; the successor to PERTIWI). Dharma Wanita is the civil servants' wives

organizations, which was established in August of 1974 (Suryakusuma 1991:52). Nancy

Sullivan (1994:61) reports that PKK's organizational structure is mediated by Dharma

Wanita and Dharma PERTIWI; however, her fieldwork was done in the early 1970s and

this mediation is no longer evident except perhaps at the higher levels of administration

where ofiBces overlap. Although PKK and Dharma Wanita are similar m their bureaucratic

structure and their housing under the umbrella of KOWANI, the officially recognized

umbrella organization for women's groups, they differ m important ways. Not only is

Dharma Wanita limited to the wives of civil servants^, but the charitable works of this very

J

There is a growing contradiction within Dharma Wanita in that it now must include the expanding numbers of women who work as civil servants themselves. That is, they are members of Dharma Wanita based not on their husband's status but their own. This has led to a clumsy designation of some members as Dharma Wanita murni (literally pure), that is true or real member, versus those who are there because they are civil servants themselves. The pure, true Dharma Wanita member is a member because she is a wife. Interestmgly enough, many women who are civil servants themselves may be Dharma Wanita members through another office: their husband's. The paradox of the goals and positions of women m Indonesia may thus collide quite openly at Dharma Wanita meetings.

144

high profile group are aot community based, instead membership is based on the

husband's oflBce. So for example, I attended the meeting of Dharma Wanita at the Kantor

Imigrasi in Yogya which included all the wives of local immigration officials. PKK, in

contrast, is at the local level very much associated with local community since its members

are all the adult (i.e., married) women who live in a particular administrative area. Despite

potential contradictions m the administration of Dharma Wanita and PKK, as noted by

Julia Suryakusuma (1991:63-4), both of these organization are coordinated by the UPW

Ministry (Unisan Permian Wanita, Ministry for Women's Roles) under the P2W-KSS

(Peningkatan Reran Wanita, Kelnarga Sehat Sejahtera, the Enhancement of Women's

Role in the Healthy and Prosperous Family). Gerke notes that Dharma Wanita and PKK

complement each other perfectly:

Dharma Wanita reaches fi-om the central to the sub-district level, and PKK covers all women (except wives of civil servants) at the village level. PKK is structiu-ed similar to Dharma Wanita. Leadership at the village level is usually held by the wife of the village head, and here both organizations overlap. The wife of the village head is also a member of Dharma Wanita because her husband is a civil servant. Therefore PKK can be regarded as the perfect appendix of Dharma Wanita at village level (1992:31).

In fact the connections between Dharma Wanita and PKK have been variously interpreted,

in part because they have changed with structural changes m Indonesian administration.

The nature of their official bureaucratic connection notwithstanding (and it appears that

the two organizations are not connected flmctionally any longer), the contrast between the

two is illustrative of the difference in women's positions by class particularly and of

different visions of women's role in society in general.

145

For example, Dharma Wanita is associated with social advancement. Its programs

and publications represent women as doing charity work for the needy and as working to

fiance the status of their husbands (and thus their families). Because Dharma Wanita

reqiiires that women leave their local communities to attend meetings and because it is

associated with charity outside one's own community, it tends to have a distinctly urban

and middle class tenor. Moreover, participation m Dharma Wanita requires money.

Women must be able to afford transportation, nicer clothing, the contributions themselves,

and the various costs of Dharma Wanita's status-related activities such as flower

arrangmg, cookware demonstrations'*, and style shows.

PKK, in some contrast, is overtly aimed at the rakyat (the people, the lower

classes). Its membership extends to all adult females and its meetings are community

based, and thus always within easy walking distance. The government's explicit aim in

PKK and the LSD/LKMD programs is to reach poor people, and these programs were

designed with rural folks m mind. Although some women reported to me that they were

main (shy, embarrassed) to follow PKK, this is much less prevalent with PKK meetings

The inappropriateness of some of these activities was clear in a Dharma Wanita meeting I attended at a local prison. The second half of the meeting was devoted ahnost entirely to a demonstration and sales pitch for pressure cookers. While modem kitchen implements are definitely part of the rising middle class housewife's desires, the pressure cooker is an odd choice. Not only is electricity still unpredictable and of low wattage in places such as the kampung, but the instructions for using the pressure cooker to cook rice, the staple of every Javanese diet, required significant modifications. Based on the reaction of many of the women, the lure of the "modem" was stronger than the distinct disadvantages of these kitchen appliances, not the least of which was their expense.

146

than with those of Dharma Wanita. While it is true that women usually take special care

with their appearance before attending a PKK meeting (and indeed 1 was instructed on

more than occasion by Bu Apik to wear more make-up), there is not the same pressure for

prestige as that associated with Dharma Wanita.

The programs of PKK may include cooking demonstrations too, but these are

more often aimed at improving nutritional levels. Two examples should sufiBce. I

attended an RW-level PKK meeting in the southern section of the kelurahan of Rumah

Putri. At this large meeting with some 30-40 women present, there was a demonstration

of how to safely and nutritiously use milk to improve diets.^ At another series of PKK

meetings that Steve and I both attended in the countryside to the west of Yogya, we

watched as demonstrations were staged on how to make jamu, the ubiquitous health

tonics of Java. In this case, the jamu recipes had been specifically designed to include

large amounts of carrot juice. Vitamin A deficiency remains a problem in poor, rural

Indonesia. The paradox of demonstrating a "traditional" medicinal drink to Javanese

peasants is attenuated by the fact that this jamu was effectively being used as a health

delivery system. Strangely enough, this use of a presumably 'traditional" medium to

deliver new cures for social ills is illustrative of how PKK came into being in its present

Yet again, despite the very different focus on nutrition rather than modem convenience, the proposed recipes for milk were not cocok (suitable) for the kampung women at the meeting. First and most importantly, most Javanese do not like milk, and second, it is a very rare commodity in the kampung since there is no real dairy industry m Indonesia. Although dried milk is common enough, it is quite costly.

147

form, as I will explain fixither in a moment. Note first that while Dharma Wanita and PKK

overlap m their use of women to do social service work and in their quasi-governmental

status, in fact they are quite different organizations in focus (one up and one down) and in

practice (one extra-local and urban and one a horizontal local grouping most closely

associated with rural areas).

STATED COMMUNITIES

The practice of PKK administration implies much overlap between the male and

female sides of administration, particularly in rural areas where, for example, a PKK

leaders will use the facilities for transport, communication, and administration provided by

her husband's oflBce (Suryakusuma 1991:63). In 1984, PKK was standardized throughout

Indonesia, and PKK oflBces were instituted at all administrative levels with a complete set

of PKK data to be displayed on a special board devoted to PKK activities. These oflBces

are typically housed within the male-dominated local administrative structure. As

Suryakusuma describes;

These [PKK] programs are designed to fit m with the development efforts and ideological aims of the state....PKK oflBcials claim that the implementation of PKK is achieved by integrating government eflforts with community efforts. The implementation of PKK is meant to be supported by various government oflBces both at the village level as well as above it, while direct implementation is to be carried out by the villagers with the guidance of PKK and government oflBces at the sub-district level (ibid.,65).

To understand fiirther how PKK's 10 principle programs are actualized, it is important to

understand the general history of local administrative structure in Indonesia and its

148

relationship to the government's rural development programs.

The Republic of Indonesia is divided mto 27 propinsi or provinces. Each province

is headed by a governor, and the subdivisions of the province, the kabupaten or regencies,

are headed by bupati. Regencies may correspond to large cities as in the case of the

Yogyakarta area or may comprise a large rural area. Withm the kabupaten, therefore,

there may be several towns and hamlets. The kabupaten are fiirther divided into

kecamatan^ equivalent to wards, administered by a camat. The wards are then divided

into kelurahan or 'Villages" administered by lurah. This summary of the ofiBces follows

John Sullivan (1992:134; see Figure 4.2 taken from N. Sullivan 1994:63 for placement of

PKK within the local government), although he goes on to say himself that

[t]he names of the various levels and oflBces still vary from one province to another and the government is now standardizing the system but the structure is uniform and ofiSces at each level serve the same flmctions as their fellows across the nation (ibid.).

Below the lowest level of paid civil service in Indonesia, the kelurahan, are the

RW {nikun warga, harmonious citizens) and the RT (nikim tetangga, harmonious

neighbors) divisions of the city (the countryside differs slightly). The RT division typically

comprises some 20-40 households, and there are then some six RT divisions in a single

RW. The precursor of the RW was the RK {nikun kampung, harmonious kampung), a

larger division that comprised several RW in one large unit, but this had changed in the

mid-1980s, at least m Java (before J. Sullivan's fieldwork). The RT, RW, and formerly

the RK are headed by unpaid volimteers who were conceived by the government and most

149

residents to be popularly elected kampung figures.

John Sullivan describes the civil-administrative system as ending at the level of the

xoUage or kelurahan. In fact, it is at the level of the village that the paid structure ends and

the unpaid positions begin. J. Sullivan notes that the two tiers below the level of

kelurahan (formerly equivalent to RK and RT and now RW and RT) are "completely

outside the state apparatus and are purely 'non-political'" (1992:135). It is unclear

whether Sullivan is reporting the government's explanation of the role of these tiers or his

own. He goes on to say that the state considers the kampung sphere to be an entirely

separate entity than the government although they may help higher tiers of government"

(ibid., 136). He cites a 1983 Ministry of Internal Affairs regulation to the effect that these

lower levels or tiers are "social organizations acknowledged and founded by government

to maintain and perpetuate the values of Indonesian social life ... also to help increase the

smooth execution of govenmiental, developmental, and social task" (cited in J. Sullivan

1992:136).

From my own work in the kampung (and indeed fi-om Sullivan's own quote), it

was clear to me that these lower levels of administration are nonetheless part of the

administrative structure since these popularly selected leaders perform ofBcial fimctions

for the Indonesian government. Moreover, they are highly political since they involve not

only perceived prestige and status m the kampung, but because the Pak RW and Pak RT,

not to mention their wives, are presumed to be conduits to government help and also to

serve as redistribution pomts for other kampung social goods. The articulation between

150

these lower level unpaid officials and the civil service administration is also demonstrated

in the elections of officials.

First, the heads of rukun tetangga are elected by their immediate neighbours, then the new RT chiefs decide who will be candidates for the top rukun warga']Q\)S and elect them. The process takes place under the direction of the Lurah, including the final approval of candidates, but the nikiin tetangga has primacy m the kampung portion of the process (J. Sullivan 1992:136).

It is at the most local levels of administration that differences between rural and

urban sectors are apparent, and it is also the point of slippage between paid civil service

and positions held due to personal prestige and status (and as we shall see below a key

point in the articulation between local and extra-local power, which has major effects for

the fiinctioning of communities m the wider poUty). At times, officials hold positions

based on both traits. Figure 4.3, taken fi-om J. Sullivan (1992:135), illustrates the

differences between administrative structures in rural and urban areas; however, these

differences were eliminated when the same structure was put in place across all areas.

Nonetheless, the lingkungan level m BCampung Rumah Putri had no physical presence or

effect on the lives of the inhabitants, as mentioned m Chapter 3. The dtisun or lingkungan

designation does still appear to have some valence m the countryside, however.

This administrative structure is the legacy of many attempts at defining community

and effective governance in Indonesia, and particularly on Java. The RK/RT system is a

remnant of Japanese occupation, when war-time occupation was organized around control

and extraction. Ruth Benedict's work on Japan suggests a striking resemblance to

contemporary Java.

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Tokugawa Japan had, like China, tiny units of five to ten families, called in recent times the tonari gumi, which were the smallest responsible units of the population. The head of this group of neighbormg femilies assumed leadership m their own affairs, was responsible for their good behavior, had to turn m reports of any doubtfiil acts and surrender any wanted individual to the government (Benedict 1946:82-83).

According to J. Sullivan, the Japanese Sixteenth Army introduced this "precursor of the

nikim tetangga to Java m 1944" (1992:136). The Japanese found this organization of

neighbor groups to be invaluable m Japan and thus a likely candidate for Java as well.

For centimes, Japanese and Chinese polities bad been compositions of small household clusters such as these, more so than aggregates of persons or families. Their basic value was that they minimized the number of discrete units to be govemed and greatly facilitated tasks of maintaining social order, gathering taxes, controlling and deploymg labour forces (J. Sullivan 1992:136).

Such groups had to be mtemally cohesive to be truly effective, however. The small face

to face community has perhaps functioned m this way throughout Southeast Asia (Reid

1988; Keyes 1995). Jay, for example, noted the tendency for East Javanese villages to

celebrate and cooperate with those people living close enough to render everyday support

and prompt assistance (1969). This tendency is critical to formation of kampung

community as we shall see over the course of this dissertation, and it is also conducive to

close administrative control.

J. Sullivan writes that the early use of groups of five to ten households, or

goningumi was introduced in the Edo period m Japan fi-om 1600-1868 and later replaced

by the tonarigiimi or neighborhood group. This system of clustering households waxed

and waned in use m Japanese history. Following the work of Bestor (1989) and Falconeri

152

(1976), J. Sullivan concludes that

[t]he goningumi cell probably gave rise to the classic image of Japanese neighbourship: muko sangen ryo tonari, which means roughly that your best friends are the households to the immediate right and left and the three directly opposite, a precept still valued in parts of modem Japan (1992:137).

Bestor describes the all too effective reach of this govenmient organization and the

ambivalent feelings of those so grouped, particularly as regards mobilization for the war

effort and the ability of the government to reach directly into the lives of every citizen

(1989:70-1).

[n China, Japan, and then Java, this clustering of households into small groups was

for the purposes not only of counting and control, but for the dissemination of information

quickly and for mutual defense. In rural areas, it was also a system for gathering taxes and

labor service (J. Sullivan 1992:138). And as already described for Indonesia, in Japan

there were also small clusters nested mto increasmgly larger units: "there were around ten

households to each tonarigiimi and every 10-20 totiarigumi were formed into burakiikai

(village associations) m rural areas, chonaikai (neighbourhood associations) in urban

areas" (ibid.).

The interesting question for Java is why a system instituted by a violently

repressive and hated occupier^ would persist, although m altered form, until the present

6

The Japanese were at first welcomed to Indonesia as a force for liberation from the Dutch. These feeling were promoted by the Japanese wartime propaganda a Great Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and captured by the slogan "Asia for Asians." This early elation was replaced with more bitter feelings when the Japanese proved to be even more difficult to live with than the Dutch.

153

day. Some would argue that the tonariguitii system was just a recent overlay on a much

older tradhional system of household cooperation and exchange that defined the

autonomous village. But as J. Sullivan writes: "The twentieth century variants of the old

neighbour groups established in wartime Japan and Java are not traditional in the

conventional sense; they are by no means relics of a feudal past, whatever the patterns and

mspiration drawn fi-om that past" (1992:138). Still despite the claims of kampung

residents to the contrary, J. Sullivan notes that the tonarigumi and the rukun tetangga are

much the same and in fact the terms share the same literal meaning (ibid., 139). In my own

fieldwork, older residents did not consistently identify the Japanese antecedents of the

system although it was not a completely unfamiliar idea to some.

The argument about the antecedents and nifluences of the neighborhood system

are clearly not unrelated to arguments about the presence of an autonomous, egalitarian

Javanese village, and I would like to suggest here that, whatever its antecedents, this

administrative structure fit rather too nicely with both colonial conceptions of village

administration and sociological perceptions of the precolonial past. The autonomous, self

governing community has proven remarkably resilient. It is, for example, no coincidence

that the cosmic and precolonial negara of C. Geertz (1980) or mandala of Tambiah

(1985) are premised on a powerful central authority with tributary relations that reach only

to the level of the autonomous community or that this model bears great resemblance to

the colonial forms of rule which were also based on control only to the level of the village

"headman." Indeed, this model of village and state persists despite attacks on its bases in

154

oriental despotism, faulty historical analysis, and plain old racism and classism Another

quote from Benedict is illustrative.

In all Asiatic nations, under whatever regime, authority from above always reaches down and meets in some middle ground local self-government rising from below. The differences between different countries all concern matters of how far up democratic accountability reaches, how many or few of its responsibilities are and whether local leadership remains responsive to the whole community or is preempted by local magnates to the disadvantage of the people (1946:82).

Recall, for example, the description of kampung development from Chapter 3. The

historical development of the Yogyakarta sultanate's reahn illustrates a rather weak

relationship between the central government of the reahn and the surrounding rural

hinterlands. The kampung which grew outside the walls of the kraton represented

spatially the link between central royal power and a more difiuse regional administration.^

It is perhaps no coincidence that this fli2zy linkage has been mimicked at the local level of

contemporary national and regional administration. Its potential is clear from the history

of control in the Javanese countryside.

This regional fiizziness and the lack of direct, extractive control between center and local power has been much studied in the anthropology of peasant communities over the last few years. For example, concern with the cacique level of regional power in Mexico and its role in articulating power from below and power from above is theoretically related to the marxist and neo-marxist concem with economic articulation (Nugent 1993). Moreover, this recent work has been more sophisticated in its treatment of any presumptive point of articulation, looking instead to slippage between levels in the exercise of power. Because, nnportantly, the attenuated connection between the state and the local has provided significant room for peasant resistance. Adas (1981), for example, notes in his important piece on the varieties of peasant political response from avoidance to overt protests that this weak control of the hinterlands allowed much room for flight and subterfuge in eluding pre-colonial and colonial control m Southeast Asia.

155

The classic statement about the Javanese village's relative autonomy and inward

cohesion is, of course, ClifiEbrd Geertz (1963). Although not often recognized as such,

Geertz's argument about the causes and consequences of agricultural mvolution in fact

mixes a historical and political economic view of the village as changed during colonialism

to produce, despite its flaws, a prescient piece of early political ecology. The elegance and

simplicity of the argument have made it a favorite despite evidence that it was a

hypostatized model of peasant cooperation that left out the differentiation within

agricultural production. That is, shared poverty impUed more homogeneity and equality

than actually existed in the desa (coxmtryside), and it was here, in the proposition that

peasant production was democratic and communal and locally integrative that Geertz

elides the historical character of these relations. A brief review of his argument and its

shortcomings follows.

Geertz identified three resuhs of the superimposition of sugar cultivation on wet-

rice sa^mh (paddy) by the Dutch during the Culture System (mid- 1800s; alternatively

translated as the Cultivation System): the post-traditional nature of social structure in the

villages, the mtensification of commimal landownership, the development of dry-season

crops, and the deepening of shared poverty in the distribution of employment

opportunities and income. His analysis is based on a presumption of traditional

communaUsm and egalitarianism; the Dutch merely mtensified and elaborated pre-existing

social arrangements. Shared poverty, the most frequent target of Geertz's critics is an

example of this process. The term refers to his hypothesis that "under the pressure of

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increasing numbers and limited resources Javanese village society did not bifixrcate... into

a group of large landlords and a group of oppressed near-serfs. Rather it maintamed a

comparatively high degree of social and economic homogeneity by dividing the economic

pie mto a steadily increasing number of minute pieces" (Geertz 1963).

A summary of the conventional ecological critiques of Geertz includes the

importance of garden lands m the overall adaptation of the Javanese people, the evidence

for a multiplicity of occupations outside of sawah agriculture, and the mcompatibility of

rice and sugar cultivation. All of these critiques point m the direction of the complexity of

adaptation of the peasantry; the presumed symbiosis between sugar and rice is not

indicative of the fiill range of options open to the small producer. In fact, intensification

may occur outside of sawah production, thus negating the homeostasis hypothesized by

Geertz.

Even more powerfiil critiques are leveled at Geertz's shared poverty. Whereas

Geertz saw an intensification of the presumed egalitarian and communal nature of peasant

technical and social arrangements, those who arrived in the 1970s to understand the effect

of the introduction of Green Revolution high-yielding varieties, saw increasing rural

stratification. Regardless of their ultimate conclusions, their emphasis on relations of land

and labor is crucial.

Some authors submit that there was indeed stratification in the countryside. Stoler

(1977, 1981), for example, suggests a significant amount of landlessness. Alexander and

Alexander (1982) contend that, although there were no large landowners and no large

157

decline in the average farm size as elsewhere, there was an mcrease in the people without

access to any land. Such access is decisive m the stratification of the rural sector and the

impoverishment of the lowest strata. The relationship between landholding and labor

arrangements is made clearer m Collier's description of the changes m harvesting practices

that have strengthened the private, exclusive appropriation of output. First, according to

Collier (198 la), the traditional collective harvesting known as bawon is replaced by

tebasan. Under the former system, portions of the harvest were allotted to the laborers

who helped with the planting, weeding, transplanting, and harvest of sawah lands. Collier

describes this as a collective harvest, harking back to Geertz's notion of communality. In

contrast, the tebasan is the system "whereby outside merchants or village landlords and

wealthy farmers with their band of wage laborers assume responsibility for harvesting and

marketing the crops for a fixed price (ibid.). Second, Collier notes the replacement of the

"ineflScient," traditional harvest tool—the a/2/-aw~with ordinary sickles, and finally, he

suggests that the fi-eedom to join in the gleaning of harvested fields~rtg^asfl^—was lost.

Stoler sums up the view of the 1970s critics of Geertz and the Green Revolution:

Recent changes m sharecropping and harvesting practices reported throughout Java can be understood, in part, as a product of the historical development of a more exploitative patronage system and the emergence of more refined intrapeasant class distinctions, accelerated in recent years by the rapid influx of capital m both the urban and agrarian economy of Indonesia (1977:693).

Unlike Geertz, these critics see the colonial era and the technological change associated

with the Green Revolution as being the cause of mcreasing stratification in the

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countryside. According to Kano, "of utmost importance is the fact that Dutch colonial

rule was not simply superimposed on the existing ecosystem but in fact created a

qualitatively new and diflFerent system; it was a result of this process that the socio­

economic organization and power structure of Javanese villages underwent radical

change" (Kano 1979:20). Stoler adds the distinction that as stratification becomes

greater, vertical ties predominate over horizontal ones (1977). Yet even these Green

Revolution era critics tacitly assume a pre-existing, "traditional" egalitarian village

community.

Perhaps because of the elegance of his original argument, Geertz remains the point

of disagreement in even more recent critiques. More current theories are based on the

refiguring of the role of the state and the rejection of the presumption of egalitarianism

remaining from older evolutionary models. Relations of dependence based on differential

access to land and labor have characterized Java's wet-rice cultivation for much longer

than the colonial era, and in fact, these dependency ties are an important adaptive

mechanism for the system of land, labor, and cultivation that has developed. So it was not

just colonial exploitation and growing population, as Geertz saw it, versus technological

change under the Green Revolution as Collier and Stoler saw it, but a long series of

accommodations and adaptations in the rural sector that have perhaps mtensified over the

years.

Recent critiques are informed by anthropology's recent reacquaintance with critical

historicism: any analysis must be placed m its correct political and economic context for

159

its results to be comprehensible. Breman's description of the colonial period is thus

equally applicable to all periods;

During this 150-year period, admfaiistrative thinking went through various phases, as is shown by the changing perspective on the desa which became the basic societal level as far as policies were concerned. Colomal authorities saw what they wanted to see, and this differed from era to era, historical justification being sought for each new interpretation. The past had to be adapted to new regulations and ideas....In actual fact, such official reflections resulted from the urge constantly to rewrite and adjust the past as it was recorded in current colonial practices (1988:5).

Clifford Geertz observed the colonial Javanese agricultural system just as it was in the

process of collapsing: "The cul-de-sac...mto which Javanese villages were seen to be

forced as a logical consequence of the colonial dual economy was in fact a reality

superimposed on the villages in the 1950s when he directly observed them" (Breman

1988:5). Likewise, the first wave of Geertz's critics in the 1970s were responding to a call

to understand the failure to modernize by investigating rural village life from a broad

perspective that mcluded its social and institutional aspects, with a consequent emphasis

on the stratifying and polarizing effects of technology. More recent research seeks to

understand pre-colonial stratification and involvement with wider political and economic

structures, and effectively shifts the focus to the adaptive response of the peasantr>'. That

is, it can be argued that the mamtenance of a rather fluid stratification and the failure to

polarize allowed for both resistance and accommodation to the various outside pressures.

The work of Jan Breman (1980, 1983, 1988 ) on pre-colonial Java and Michael

Adas (1981) on peasant resistance in pre-colonial and colonial Southeast Asia suggest that

160

the nature of the pre-colonial state was such that the village level and the household were

not penetrated by state administration. "The combination of low population-to-land

ratios, poor communications, weakly integrated administrative systems, and elite rivahies

that characterized the contest states of precolonial Java and Burma provided numerous

opportunities for peasants to defend themselves from excessive exactions by their

overlords" (Adas 1981:223). Consequently, an intermediate level of authority was used to

account for peasant production and taxation. According to Adas, these mtermediaries

included the landowning sikep. Breman outUnes a three-fold stratification present in the

first half of the 19th century that is based on the distinction between those with rights to

land and those without. The top stratum were village authorities and other notables,

followed by the true peasantry or sikep, where the ownership of sawah was concentrated,

and finally the wuwimgang, the lowest stratimi tied to landowners m a dependency

relationship.

The dependency relationships that developed due to the weakness of the pre­

colonial state were not changed in nature by the colonial state. Indeed, in the interest of

extracting a surplus from dispersed areas still predominantly involved in agriculture, the

regional system was collapsed and a system of supra-village regents became answerable to

the government.

This brief detour into the historical scholarship on the nature of stratification m the

Javanese countryside is not as gratuitous as it may appear at first glance. What the more

recent work suggests is that there was never an autonomous, egalitarian, closed, corporate

161

peasant community^ sharing its poverty in pre-colonial Java but rather a complex pattern

of dependency relations that despite their fluidity were implicitly stratifying and because

of their fluidity were distinctly practical adaptations to a weak central power. The crucial

issue here, in addition to uncovering the imaginary in the stories of the Javanese peasant

community, is the identification of a zone of slippage between the most local structure and

central state political authority. This "zone," as I call it here because it does not

correspond to distinct boundary between local and extra-local loyalty and power, is

important adaptively for peasants responding both to local conditions and to state-level

predations. Its adaptive potential has been captured and controlled by the contemporary

Republic of Indonesia which has built this connection between local and state power into

its administration and extended it even to urban areas. The Janus-faced quality of the

articulation between local community and the state is what creates its very mixed heritage.

For example, J. Sullivan cites Steiner who describes how the block system of Nazi

Germany was warmly protective and communal on one hand and patently fascist and

repressive on the other (1992).

This middle ground where authority from above reaches down and local self-

government rises up from below likewise has had contradictoiy effects for Java. For

example, the tonarigumi system implemented by the Japanese was actually used to shield

8

In chapter 8 there will a fuller reference to the scholarship on the closed, corporate community, but it is important to note here that when Eric Wolf first formulated his description of these communities he described them specifically as being found in higliland Mesoamerica and in Java (1957).

162

individual Javanese from the worst abuses of the Japanese. Because local headmen were

responsible for the head counts within their units, they were easily able to manipulate the

number to hide people who could then be absorbed without detection into the community.

In stark contrast, diuring the horror of the wave of killings that followed the alleged

communist coup in 1965, neighbors reported suspected communists to local leaders who

then reported their presence to the authorities. In this way, not only did local commimity

administration serve to control and police neighbors, but petty grievances could become

the justification for accusing another of being a communist. In the first case, the

community closed to shield its members from repression, in the second it opened itself to

the worst of state terrorism.

Two distinct but interpellated arguments are latent in this discussion. This first is

that the zone of slippage between local control and state power, overlooked in

conventional discussions of the autonomous, egaUtarian community, actually serves to

allow community residents some latitude in dealing with extra-local demands. Yet it

simultaneously has allowed for the penetration of state surveillance and state control to the

very most local level. The other argument implied here is that whatever its antecedents,

this notion of the egalitarian commxmity has been taken up by the Indonesian government

and literally reinforced or re-established through its own programs, including in urban

areas. Whatever its origins the ideal community has now come to be stated and restated

through the Indonesian government's own programs and discourse.

Therefore, despite the challenge posed by the post-Geertz work of Adas, Scott,

163

Breman, B. White, Alexander and Alexander, and others to the existence of an

homogeneous, egalitarian, poverty-sharing peasant village, there is a continued msistence

on its relevance, most recently by the government of Indonesia itself. What is so ironic is

the continual re-creation of this purportedly rural form m the city. Indeed, my initial

disappomtment at not getting to work in the countryside was more than compensated

when m my urban fieldwork I encountered the elaboration of so-called rural traditions in

the city.

What became quite evident over my time in the kampung was that the relevance of

these "stated" communities was not just the result of state ideology and programs.

Indeed, the association of the rural community with a purer, truer Java was made

consistently by kampung dwellers. The contrast between the desa and the city remains

extremely sahent for most of the people I met and knew. And the meaning attached to

this opposition works to make it so. For example, when asked about the idea and ideal of

the gotong royong (community self-help, mutual cooperation) many responded that of

course it was masih kuat (still strong) m the desa but that it was sndah pecah (aheady

broken) in the city. The critical need for attachment to the countryside was made clear by

those who would tell me about ^^desa sayd'' or my coimtryside. In the case of my research

assistant and a young boy in the neighborhood, both of whom used this phrase repeatedly,

they were both city dwellers their whole lives. It was their parents or sometimes their

grandparents who had moved to the city. Yet, they feh the need to identify a desa that

was their own. In fact, many families have kin in the countryside and these relationships

164

prove important for the exchange of goods, such as farm produce, and of children, who

may spend some time in the countryside. But for long-time kampung inhabitants the

connection to the countryside is attenuated m practice despite its imagined strength. A

final example of the weight and meaning of the split between rural and urban was revealed

in the common remark that to be poor in the city was much more diflBcult than to be poor

in the country. Although it is indeed true that those with access to land have the resources

for their own subsistence, the tone of these remarks, ahnost always made by urbanites,

was bitter in many cases. (See chapters 7 and 8 for the emerging discourse on the

breakdown of communal values.)

This insistence on the idyllic rural past by state and kampung folks alike is

reminiscent of the sociological and anthropological debates concerning the moral

economy. As Roseberry points out, work by some on the moral economy of the

peasantry because it overly romanticizes pre-capitalist social relations and thought does

not represent much of a departure fi-om modernization theory (1989:56). Roseberry,

considering the work of Raymond Williams' The Country and The City (1973) on the

disappearance of the idyllic rural past, concludes as does Williams that "[f]or whatever

century, it always seems to have recently disappeared or to be in the process of

disappearing" (Roseberry 1989:57). And as Roseberry goes on to say,

[S]ome might argue, the "moral economy" need not have existed in the past; it may be perceived m the past fi-om the perspective of the disordered present. The images of a moral economy may be a meaningfid itnage, even if "what actually happened" was less idyllic (ibid.).

165

The perceptions of the rural past that are significant in a given culture at a given time will

entail different idealizations and evaluations of the past, according to Williams. And

Roseberry adds that

[w]e mstead need to view a movement from a disordered past to a disordered present. With such a starting point we can asses the contradictions inherent in the development of a working-class consciousness and appreciate that the past provides experiences that may make the transition seem positive as well as experiences that may make it seem negative. Only then can we see the moral economy as a source for protest and accommodation, despair and hope (Roseberry 1989:58).

A final point from Williams that is important here is that both city and the country are

ever-changing qualities that must be understood m the context of capitalist history

(1973:302; and see Roseberry 1989:59). The images of the rural Javanese countryside

and the ideal community are then a way of looking to past as well as looking to the fiiture.

on the part of state and people aUke.

The association of desa life with the good and true Javanese culture is inherent in

the Indonesian government's programs for local administration and developments, such as

PKK and LKMD. One lynchpin for this association is captured in the emphasis on gototig

royong, a principle of mutual self-help generally associated with rural Ufe that is actively

embraced by sociological research and government propaganda (Bowen 1986). Gotong

royong thus serves as a potent moral indicator for the city as well. Gotong royong and

similar phrases such tolong-menolong (mutual aid) are used frequently in government

rhetoric to inspire cooperation and community spirit. The traits of cooperation and

gotong royong are in fact built into Pancasila and the Ten Principle Programs of PKK

166

The appeal of this sentiment for cooperation is not just ofiScial nostalgia for the rural past.

it also serves to prod people into accepting this form commimity as inherently Javanese

and thus inherently good.' In other words, gotong royong reinstantiates the community

imaginary for all of Java and Indonesia. The breakdown of gotong royong is often cited

by kampung dwellers as an mdicator of the changes in contemporary urban life. By

attaching it to the rural past in rhetoric, gotong royong's emotional valence for the

populace is heightened while it serves to validate the state's msistence that local

communities are self-sustaining, and of course, it simultaneously allows greater state

access and control. The capture and use of the nostalgic energy for the rural past in its

very forward-looking programs has also provided the Indonesia government with other

benefits. The following description of the creation of the LKMD program and the

emergence of PKK out of the period of nationalist awakening reveals that despite its

contradictory origins, the ideal community organization is now used to prevent any

popular power that might be contrary to state desires.

Schulte Nordholt (1987), m a nicely detailed piece on the creation of the

Lembaga Sosial Desa (LSD, Village Social Institution) and its transformation into the

Lembaga Ketahanan Masyarakat Desa (LKMD, Institution for the Maintenance of

9

The Java-centric natiu-e of most government practice, not to mention national politics, is a subject worth a dissertation in itself. Although this issue will be addressed again briefly in Chapter 8, the effect of the extending models of development and administration based in Java to the outer islands of Indonesia will not be treated at length here, despite the potential effects it has for national politics for many years to come (Koen^araningrat 1989).

167

Village Society), highlights some of the contradictions in the construction of post-

Independence community and its political relevance. Today, LKMD is conceived to be a

grass-roots organization to mobilize the village populace for government programs.

The ten sections of the LKMD are : I) Security, defense and order, 2) Education and the comprehension and practical application of Pancasila, 3) Information, 4) Economics, 5) Development of nifrastructure and environmental protection, 6) Religion, 7) Health population and family planning, 8) Youth, physical education, and art, 9) Welfare, and 10) PKK (Suryakusuma 1991:58).

The state's imprimatur is clear m the inclusion of Pancasila as it is in the very formalization

of what was originally conceived to be a popular movement. Begun in the 1950's as a

private eflFort to help poor rural villages help themselves, the LSD evolved from the efforts

of several exceptional mdividuals to "activate the populace" on its own behalf (Schulte

Nordholt 1987:49). The program was based on presumptions about "traditional" models

of village cooperation and leadership with a thoroughly sociological view of "social

institution" (literally translated as lembaga sosial) lifted from Dutch social science

(ibid.,50). In origmal intent, the LSD was supposed to be m the hands of rural people and

there was no connection to official administration. The post-World War II desire to return

to simple agrarian values made sense m a time of drastic, dislocating social change, and it

shared much with colonial and precolonial imaginings of rural Java as discussed above.

Schulte Nordholt also illustrates how the private work of a few dedicated people to help

the rural poor help themselves ~ although unfortimately perhaps again using ideas of ideal

communal self-help ~ was taken up the Indonesian government as a way to solve its

168

problems in building infrastructure, in organizmg development work, and delivering

necessary inputs. Not surprisingly, the revolutionary potential of this community-level

organization simultaneously was difiiised by its connection to officialdom.

The connection between LKMD and the village administrative structure is the

village head who is the chairman or Ketiia Umiim of LKMD. In the rural areas, where

LKMD is operational, the chairman is likely a pegawai negeri or civil servant. According

to Suryakusuma, the first deputy is typically not a civil servant but popularly selected (the

level at which civil service positions begin has varied over time in the administrative

structure of both rural and urban Java). As mentioned above, the wife of the Kepala Desa

(Kades, or village head) is the head of the PKK section of LKMD and the automatic

second deputy chairman of LBCMD. Thus, its presumptive origins notwithstanding, the

cooperative, cohesive, homogeneous, and democratic village has assumed a bureaucratic

life of its own, and today the LKMD structure is the prime vehicle for delivery state

programs to the rural populace.

Beyond the work of social scientists, administrators, and historians m organizing

the village based on the romantic ideal of the natiu'al community, this form is also

promoted through the structure and practice of PKK Although it might seem

paradoxical since the move toward the nuclear family in industrial Europe is often seen to

signal the end of community, for Indonesia the family is seen as the prime unit of social

organization which articulates with the community and hence the state. So the roles

assigned to women through PKK not only valorize the nuclear family ideal with a stay-at-

169

home mom, they also enforce and enhance local exchange practices presmned to be

traditional to Javanese society. A description of the emergence of PKK from the

nationalist women's organization shows that like LKMD, the government of Indonesia,

and specifically the New Order government of Suharto post 1965 has taken the media of

popular social movements, eviscerated them, and then used them as the module for its

developmentalist goals.

The movement from private to public concomitantly represents the depoliticization

of potentially subversive groups and structures that were once encouraged. Whereas

village-level activism and women's activism were an integral part of the early nationaUst

movement and of Sukamo's post-Independence government, they were both subsequently

stripped of any political content under the New Order regime.

THE FLOATING MASS"

Pembhiaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga has been defined m various ways. A

common translation has been Family Welfare Movement, but it is more literally translated

10

The term floating mass has been taken up by the Indonesian government to refer to the mral countryside and to suggest the disconnection of the populace from alliance with any particular movement. What is generally left unsaid is that disconnection has been accompUshed by the state's own capture of popular social movements for its own ends. It also neglects the continuing efforts to keep this mass afloat. For example, when we first arrived m May 1992 the national election campaign was going on. and all scholars had been asked to leave the countryside and stay in the city for the duration of the elections. Implicitly the government implied that outside nifluence m the countryside was a potential catalyst for change in this volatile situation.

170

as Guidance for the Prosperous Family. As Suryakusuma notes, this second translation

accords more closely with the actual nature of PKK as a public administrative structure

with quasi-private aims; "[sjignificant also is the change from calling PKK "Program

Kesejahteraan Keluarga" into 'Tembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga", implymg more

guidance and control and indicating clearly the role that state had in mind for PKK"

(1991:56). PKK does not have the character of popular activism suggested by the term

movement. Instead, it represents an organizational structiu-e that extends from the

President of the Republic of Indonesia down to very small units of local administration

(the RT, for example).

Although it does bear some connection in terms of form with the vigorous

women's movements that arose during the nationalist period, PKK no longer can be

considered a popular movement. Yet in its goals and many of its programs, PKK is

reminiscent of GERWANI, the women's movement often erroneously described as the

women's arm of PKI (Parti Komunis Indonesia ), the Indonesian Communist Party. The

gutting of the nationahst era women's movement and the retention of the form of these

organizations to be used in state development is perhaps one of the greatest contradictions

in the wholly contradictory character of PKK.

Saskia Wieringa provides a telling comparison of PKK vsdth Gerakan Wanita

(GERWANI), the independent organization of women that shared some common goals

with the Indonesian Commxmist Party during the early nationalist period. The first

women's organizations date to the time of Boedi Oetomo in the early 1900s, and their

171

growth parallels the growth and development of the nationalist movement. For example,

the '"''Kongres Wanita Indonesia or KOWANI took place in 1928 and was sponsored by

seven major organizations: Wanita Utomo, Wanita Taman Siswa, Puteri Indonesia,

Aisjiah, Wanita Katolik, and the women's sections of the Jong Islamieten Bond and Jong

Java. Gerke notes that the success of the nationwide Congress led to it being repeated in

the following years until it became institutionalized as the only legitimate manifestation of

the women's movement. "Today KOWANI is the umbrella organization for most of the

nation's women's associations, mainly upper and middle class bodies" (Gerke 1992:3 K n

21).

Branson and Miller also describe the importance of women's movements in the era

of Independence.

In the 1920s when Indonesian Independence movements were forming, formal women's organizations sprang up to promote the role of women in the development of an mdependent nation. Almost entirely professional, middle class and academic m orientation, they stressed the need of women for education and mdependence from superstitions which degraded and subordmated women. Polygamy, child marriage and religious prejudice were the prime targets of their criticism (1988:11-12).

Yet as Wieringa suggests, this initial vigorous women's movement was eventually co-

opted by the new nationalist state. According to Wieringa, PKK and GERWANI were

initially identical in their aims, and indeed in their specific programs such as health and

literacy.

By 1960 the activities of GERWANI mcluded credit groups, kindergartens, consumer cooperatives, literacy courses, assistance to women with marriage problems, handicraft courses, campaigns to lower the prices of

172

staple foodstuffs, and assistance to the PKI and other leftist mass organizations.... GERWANI also addressed a group of women the PKI never paid any attention to: housewives. In November 1964 a national Housewives Seminar was held m which ways to involve housewives in public Ufe were discussed (Wieringa 1993:20).

The difference between GERWANI and PKK, in Wieringa's estimation, is the political

connotation of each, as should be clear from the reference to PKI above. After the G30S

period," GERWANI was banned while PKK became the focus of government's goals

regarding women. This shift was part of a larger attempt to depoUticize the successful

women's organizations associated with the Indonesian nationalist revolution while

capturing its momentum for change.

One explanation for how this was accomplished is offered by Wieringa (1993),

who discusses the persistent story that members of GERWANI were involved in the

genital mutilation and torture deaths of the generals associated with G30S. Despite

evidence that this did not occur (Anderson 1987), the myth continues, presumably because

of its power to discourage women's active participation m politics. Wieringa continues:

... in the late sixties, mass campaigns were orchestrated with the objective of constructing an image of GERWANI members as whores and sexually perverted women. PKK members on the other hand are extolled as good ibus and dutiftil and respectable citizens (1993:17).

Branson and Miller (1988) and Gerke (1992) draw siitiilar conclusions.

The Indonesian designed [sic] several programs to specify the role of women in the nations development process and to create an organizational structure within

II

G30S refers to Gerakan 30 September, the September 30th Movement, the 1965 attempt to seize control of the government, allegedly by the Commutiist Party (PKI).

173

which that role can be played on a national level. Therefore the government established the so called "non - political women's movement," using elements of older women's associations and groups. PKK is without doubt one of the most important programs and was presented as a program of a "non - political women's movement" (Gerke 1992:30, n.l7).

Branson and Miller also note the effect of social science and western advisors in

this distortion. They note that the mfluence of the early women's movement waned

with the early post-Independence notions of development focussing on the development of the nation state and the national economy, both assumed m classic Western style — and their academic and economic advisers were Westerners or Western educated ~ to be male, women conceptually confined to the family, assumed marginal in the development process. This quite untraditional view of women m Indonesian society was particularly promoted by social scientists like Koentjaraningrat and Hildred Geertz, whose American-based paradigms of social structure and development relegated women to their socializing and nurturing roles in the family (Branson and Miller 1988:11-12).

Therefore, the hijack of popular movements for nationalist development was not solely a

local accomplishment: Western social science was integrally involved. And thus, a

vigorous popular women's movement was crushed to be replaced by a bureaucratic

organization with the same goals. The dijQFerence between PKK and GERWANI was not

just who controlled their structure but in their potential for radical social change. It is

enlightening that the rhetoric used to discredit GERWANI was overtly sexual; that is, not

only were it members communists but they were whores and prostitutes as well. The

transmogrification of the membership into good ibus or mothers, clearly without the taint

of unrestrained sexuality, was prescient for the future of women's status in Indonesia, both

officially and unoflBcially. The successful depoliticization of PKK in the government's eyes

is clear, as Wieringa's contends, in that "PKK is the only organization allowed to work at

174

the village grass-roots level" (ibid.,24).

In the next section some of the mixed resuhs for women of the official stating of

commimities, with its appeal to a nostalgia for the rural communal past, and hs of the

discoimection of popular power from popular administration wUl be considered in terms of

women's status. Because although it is clear that the government is using conmiunity to

control the populace, women are likewise using community for their own ends.

STRUCTURES OF FEELING

... pengatahmin kesejahateraan keluarga. Singkatan dari itu. Jadi, di sini khusxtsnya di orang [Rumah]... di Indonesia siidah di orang [Rumah Piitri] untiik ibu-ibii rumah tanggaya kalau remaja itu, PKK remaja, ibu-ibu bertanggung harus man masiik PKK. Term, PKK itu nanti dibagi berberapa kelompok.

... knowledge for the prosperous family. That's what the abbreviation [PKK] stands for. So, here especially for the people of Rumah... that is, in Indonesia andfor the people of Rumah Putri for housewives, if there are teenagers, PKK for teenagers, responsible mothers/women must join PKK. (from interview with female health officer at local office of Kelurahan Rumah Putri.)

The garbled explanation of PKK offered by a local official in Kampung Rumah

E*utri shows that PKK and its programs and principles are often poorly understood. Yet,

PKK and its much maligned counterpart Dharma Wanita, are two fixtures of Indonesian

life. Their programmatic posters and activities are ubiquitous enough to allow for

frequent joking about their actual nature. PKK is known by many as peremption kurang

kerja or "women without enough work to do" while Dharma Wanita becomes simply

"Drama Wanita" or women's drama. Both organizations are state organized and based on

175

culturally validated notions of women's importance to family and now national life, and,

interestingly enough, both seem to inspire the same disdain. Yet, despite this disdain,

PKK and its structure were used by the women in Kampxmg Rumah Putri for a variety of

ends.

In this last section, some of the foundations for understanding women's roles in

Javanese and Indonesian society will be considered, particularly in light of their effect for

official versions of ideal women as captured in the ideology of PKK. Although not

exhaustive, what should emerge is not only the fimdamental ambivalence towards women's

roles and status, but how this ambivalence, which is built mto PKK and like programs, is

productive of fiirther negotiations of appropriate gender behavior and simultaneously of

the local community, both from the top down and the bottom up.

The reference above to Williams' "structure of feeling" is meant to suggest that

gender ideologies and the consciousness of gender categories related to PKK and the

status of women in Indonesian society cannot be reduced to fixed forms and to show that,

as he says in reference to social forms in general, "they become social consciousness only

when they are lived, actively, in real relationships, and moreover in relationships which are

more than systematic exchanges between fixed units" (1977:130). As he notes, there is

always a fundamental tension between "received interpretation" and "practical

experience." Changes La these forms do not require definition, classification, or

rationalization to "exert palpable pressures" and set limits on experience and action. In

looking to the competing ideas and practices of gender in the kampung it is important to

176

keep in mind that

[sjtructures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct fi'om other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more inmaediately available (Williams 1977:133-4).

Thus the residues of former gender practices and ideology are in active competition with

emergent gender experience that may in fact make use of state-sponsored views of gender.

STUDYING WOMEN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Scholarship on gender asymmetry and gender categories m Southeast Asia

typically grapples with the relative autonomy of women apparent in many social situations.

From this point, however, scholars diverge on its match with reaUty. There are those who

suggest that indeed women m Southeast Asia do tend to enjoy higher status and more

autonomy than do women in the West (Reid 1988; Keyes 1995; Peletz 1996; Errington

1990). On the other hand, some argue that appearances to the contrary, women in

Southeast Asia, Indonesia, or Java are also always subordinated to male patriarchal

control no matter the outward appearance (Suryakusuma 1996; Sears et al. 1996b).

Perhaps the desire to describe gender categories and their contents for such a wide area is

the crux of the problem in these quite different readings. How can one hope to compare

the matrilineal Minangkabau with the hill groups of mainland Southeast Asia such as the

ICaren and in turn with the Islamic merchant societies of the Malay Peninsula. Indonesia

itself displays such a wide degree of variation in gender relations that such a simplistic and

rigid conclusion seems unwarranted. Indeed, the Javanese themselves note the difference

177

between the women of West Java and those of the central and eastern sections of the

island. And it is not uncommon for Balinese women to compare their own lot unfavorably

with Javanese women.

Diane Wolf usefiilly groups the various perspectives on gender in Java into three

general groups corresponding, although not perfectly, with generation and gender of the

researcher. She notes that the post-Independence scholars of Java, those associated with

the MET project of the 1950s and including prominently Hildred Geertz (1961) and Robert

Jay (1969), documented the high status of women in the Javanese household. Wolf

reports: "strong statements about female domination of the domestic realm and their focus

on women as primary nurturers has influenced research ... for the past twenty-five years"

(1992:55). Feminist social scientists such as Manderson (1983), Mather (1982) and

Wieringa (1988) have instead challenged the view of high female status and relatively

egalitarian relationships within the family. A middle ground is occupied by those who

describe Javanese women's power as indirect (Keeler 1990; Reid 1988) and those who

conclude that, if not equal, at least Javanese women's status is better than in other less

developed countries (Koen^araningrat 1989).

What must be considered, as in the case of the ideal village, is not only that

precolonial relations may have diflfered but that the colonial experience and post-

Independence development is hardly the same across Indonesia or Southeast Asia. Shelly

Errington (1990) has proposed a split between the exchange archipelago and the centrist

archipelago as a means to explain a general pattern of difference in island Southeast Asia

178

between those centrist societies that have bilateral kinship, envision marriage partners as

sibUngs, value unity and have generally level societies (with the exception of the Indie

states) and those exchange societies that have unilineal descent, have wives who marry out

of their social grouping or house, dual social organization and tend to be more

hierarchical. The centrist archipelago mcludes generally Malaysia, Java, Kalimantan,

Sulawesi and the Philippines. Exchange societies are found in the eastern Indonesian

archipelago and in Sumatra. The importance of Errington's model for the study of gender

m Southeast Asia is that she concludes that in centrist societies men and women tend to be

conceived as the same sorts of persons, whereas m the exchange archipelago, while males

and females are complementary, they are understood to be opposite types of beings.

One issue often offered as evidence of women's higher status is their association

with household finances. In the typical kampung household, the woman was in charge of

handling the money. Many men regularly tixmed their paychecks over to their wives and

received an allowance of a sort in return. Women's head for finance is also clear m the

prevalence of women in trading. Still to have it said that someone has the mind of a

bakiil, market woman, is not a compliment, and mdeed the instrumental, effective power

of women in household management and kampung support was not deemed to be of any

prestige. Instead, the association with the dirty world of money suggested the very

opposite. If potency is associated with removal fi'om the mundane through ascetic

practices, then the everyday power of women is denigrated.

Ward Reefer's piece (1990) on Javanese women's speech reveals fiirther diflBculty

179

in fixing women's status. He provides a telling example of how Javanese women are not

held to same standards of comportment as Javanese men, and as a result, have in fact

room for movement in social speech and relationships. Fluency in the high-flown registers

of Javanese indicates not only the refinement of a speaker but is also a proxy for their

potency. Men typically are expected to be more adept at this higher registers for various

reasons, including their roles as public speakers and representatives of families. Yet, the

very difficulties of speaking high Javanese without giving offense and the cultural value

placed on silence as a mark of potency render men's speech much more circumscribed.

Women on the other hand have much more latitude m changing registers. There is rough

division of language into that which is coarse or kasar and that which is refined or aliis

that also corresponds to the opposition between mtimate, family speech versus the more

distant, polite forms used with strangers. For example, children speak the lower ngoko

with their mothers and fathers as very young children. As they grow and mature, tliey are

literally conceived as adults based on their fluency m the registers of Javanese. Durung

basa (Jv., ngoko, literally before language) is used to refer to young children who speak

only the lower registers of the language. As children mature, their first exercise of using

higher registers is m speaking to their fathers, who at a certain point m the socialization

process begin to demand it (Keeler 1990; H. Geertz 1961). In contrast, children typically

continue to use ngoko with their mothers. The use of the lower language register for their

mothers might be said to result fi"om a lack of respect or fi^om a greater degree of

intimacy, but in fact it may be both. To return to Keeler's example, at a particularly long

180

meeting, a group of women used their greater flexibility to leave, all the while politely

saying inggih, inggih (yes, yes) and heading for the door despite the imprecations of the

males attending. This type of behavior would not have been possible for a male, Keeler

contends.

Women's association with kasar language also allows a certain degree of bluntoess

that can be quite effective even while it reiterates their lower status. It was certainly my

feeling that I would rather hsten to the blunt conversation of a Javanese woman than the

endless discourse of a bapak.

In summary, the Uterature on women's status in Southeast Asia and in Indonesia

and on Java specifically is mixed. While there is acknowledgment of their relative

autonomy and generally equal status and their key roles in money, trading, and indeed

getting things done, there is also a recognition that women's status remains lower than that

of men. As Atkinson notes for Luwu women who want to become shaman, such an

accomplishment represents not the inversion of norms but a case of beating the odds

(1990).

Some of the very mixed characteristics of gender categories and practice in Java

result fi"om colonial experience and fi"om differences by class to which I now turn.

COLONIALISM AND CLASS

Like the autonomous peasant village, the domestic arrangements represented in

PBCK literature represent an amalgam of mfluences and elaborations. The five roles of

181

women that usually accompany the 10 primary programs of PKK illustrate the

contemporary view of women's appropriate roles; note the order.

1. loyal backstop and supporter of her husband [helpmate] 2. caretaker of the household 3. producer of fiiture generations 4. the family's prime socializer 5. Indonesian citizen (N. Sullivan's translation, 1983:2)

Like the village commimity, there are both colonial and precolonial antecedents to

this evolving portrayal of the proper Indonesian woman as housewife and loyal supporter

of the state. Contmuous elaborations of this ideology are the basis for PKK. The Dutch

colonial faifluence should be clear in very use of the concept of "housewife." Women's

historians and historians of the bourgeois cultural revolution m western Europe have

documented the creation of the home and the domestic angel with the advent of capitalist

production (Harris 1984; Matthews 1987, and see Chapter 7 ). The colonial manifestation

of this cultural form has been well documented by Stoler (1989a, 1989b; Taylor 1983;

Gouda 1995; and many more) who links the arrival of white women with the arrival of

civilization and culture in the colonies. It was only when the white women arrived to

recreate the bourgeois European home m the colonies that the racial and sexual divisions

that came to mark colonial life were drawn. It can be no coincidence that the model of a

good woman in Indonesia is mightily affected by the arrival of Dutch women and the

creation of the domestic sphere m the Dutch colonies.

There may well have been elements of a woman-at-home ideology already present

in pre-colonial social arrangements, yet, the priyayi, or elites, who insisted that woman be

182

kept in the home did not and do not fiilly represent Javanese society (not to mention the

cultures of the outer islands). Carey and Houben (1987) use historical materials to show

that the women of the sultan's courts included not only Amazon-like warriors entitled to

their own war booty and royal legacy, but also powerfiil court women who, while

physically confined to the court, managed to run successfiil money-making businesses, not

to mention, political ventures. At the other end of the spectrum, poor rural women

likewise cannot legitimately be said to be confined to the home. Indeed, as Carey and

Houbens suggest, it was the privilege of the upper classes and the destiny of the poor

classes to have women in productive roles that reached beyond the purely domestic. It

was then the middle classes of the colonial administrative bureaucracy, the priyayi, who

most suited imported models of Dutch housewifery, just as h; had been in western cultures.

The association with elite culture is one of the reasons PKK and Dharma Wanita flourish.

Surely one of the clearest influences on the very middle class ideal of the Javanese

women has to be Kartini (Gouda 1995: Taylor 1983; Tiwon 1996). Raden Adjeng

Kartini was a daughter of a minor noble of Java. Like many girls of her station and age

she was fluent in Dutch and not uneducated. In her short Ufe she sent a series of letters to

Dutch fiiends in the Netherlands lamenting the poor position of women m Indonesia. Her

much repeated wish to meet a Dutch girl and her yearning for a better lot for girls of her

own country have been invoked ever since as cause for improving women's education and

opportunity. Indeed, Kartini schools were founded, and now every year there is a Hari

Ibu Kartini or Mother Kartini Day that is celebrated nationally. Despite her influence on

183

the improvement of women's lives in Java, it should be noted that Kartini advocated not

university education but education m domestic skills. Her own position as daughter of the

priyayi led her to promote a very Dutch-mfhienced vision of what modem Indonesian girls

should be.

As for contemporary Java, the emphasis on the housewife at home is in the process

of being both accepted and challenged by the bulk of Javanese women. One of the

consequences of REPELITA I, in its focus on innovation in the agricultural sector, was

the wholesale unemployment of women (Cain 1981; Collier 198 la, 198 lb, and see

Chapter 6). I will argue later that this situation combmed with a suite of factors to

influence the government's emphasis on ibii nimah tangga, or housewives, and their roles

in national development (see Chapter 6).

In addition to large numbers of unemployed rural women, the Republic of

Indonesia was faced with the task of improving standards of living for its poor,

particularly in the countryside, but with little m the way of money and infrastructiu'e. The

government of Indonesia now makes extensive use of the labor of women in its national

development programs.

Yet a paradox now appears, and it is related to the ambivalence I encountered

among my informants about the role of housewife. I remember vividly a woman, who

when asked what her work was, replied: nganggur, that is to say, unemployed. But when

my research assistant helpfully supplied the official term for housewife, ibti nimah tangga.

despite its recent vintage, the woman said, "oh, yes, right, that's what I am." I use this

184

example to suggest that the category of housewife is not one readily subscribed to by most

of my informants, who in fact, often work at wage earning projects within their homes.

Of the adult women fax the two adjoining RTs, 27 of 65 (42%) do wage earning work in

their home. This includes sewing, cooking, selling food and traditional medicine, and

money lending. Of the remaining 38, 18 (28%) work outside the home, so 70% of women

are earning wages. Of the adult men, 39 of 67 (58%) work outside the home, 5 (7%)

work inside the home, and 8 (12%) do not work at all. Sixty-five percent of men work for

wages. Female employment m the kampung can be considered without looking at male

unemployment (see Chapter 6). In fact, many components of PKK stress how to make

money through cottage industries. The government in effect advocates that women

appear unemployed while they actually earn a significant portion of the family's mcome in

many cases. This situation immediately belies the idea of a housewife, confined to her

hearth and home. And for the women I spoke with, not earning money was the source of

much embarrassment (although this differed by class, with upper class women often

embarrassed if they did work). Clearly, most kampung women did not feel it is

appropriate to stay home and clean, cook, and raise children only. And career women,

those working outside the home for wages, enjoy both their status and their wages, and

unlike their American counterparts, for example, have little conflict about leaving their

children (see Chapter 5).

Nonetheless, diuing the course of my time on Java, a series of newspaper articles

and editorials appeared warning of the dangers of PIL, or pria lain (a different man) to

185

career women. The substance of these pieces was that women working outside the home

were at risk of becoming involved with a PIL, thus endangering the fidelity of their

marriages and the stability of the family. Perhaps this editorializing represents an attempt

to get women to stay home along the lines of the campaigns of the U.S. government

followmg WWn when large numbers of women were forced out of employment to make

room for returning G.I.s. After all, the numbers of women in the Indonesian labor force

has risen faster than that of men (see Chapter 6). More likely, these editorials index a

growing uneasiness about the changing occupational structure for both men and women,

as agriculture declines and the service sector grows.

So, m Indonesia, an inappropriate (or at least suspect) model of domesticity is

being propounded by a government to serve its own contradictory ends. The resonance

with the promotion of ideal types of community should be clear. But one irony that the

connection between community and domesticity makes clear is that whatever the bases for

an ideal type rural community, the models of domesticity used have even less to do with

rural women, which has been documented to include much work outside the home and

relative equality m control of resources (Stoler 1977; Husken and White 1989; White and

Hastuti 1980).

PRACTICING PKK IN THE KAMPUNG

The key element common to both PKK and Dharma Wanita organizations is the

shared premise that women are unemployed housewives with time enough to do the work

186

of charity and community development. A key distinction between PKK and Dharma

Wanita, certainly in the minds of my informants, is that one is kampung or community-

based and one is not. But even fiirther, Dharma Wanita remains largely a showy charitable

group, while PKK has come to mclude a multitude of activities that belie its apparent

restriction to one section of the LKMD structure. Despite its depiction as the refiige of

bored, dilettante housewives, PKK includes child health measures, kampung and village

cleanliness to promote mosquito reduction, Indonesia's famed birth control programs,

training and credit for home enterprises, and even health measures for older Indonesians.

During my time in this kampung I followed PKK activities at all levels within

Yogyakarta. There were numerous baby weighings at the posyandii (pos pelayanan

terpadu, community health post), an award ceremony for the healthiest babies in Yogya,

meetings at the lurah and camat level, jamu demonstrations in the countryside'*, and

endless arisan. The arisan is a rotating savings association with equivalents around the

world. My work suggests the term arisan to be a capacious one. It now includes very

modem forms of credit such as buying on time, and it is also used to refer to any woman's

meeting because there ahnost certainly is an arisan involved.

As a means to consider some of the elements of ideal womanhood as exemplified

through ofiBcial discourse, portions of a pamphlet fi-om Tim Penggerak PKK, Propimi

12

Since one of the impUcations of this work is the re-invention in the city of a tradition associated, however shakily, with a romanticized agrarian past, it is interesting to note that the jamii demonstration represented the reintroduction of a "traditional" form of medicine to the countryside because the nihabitants had forgotten how to make it!

187

Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (PKK Team Motivator, Special Province of Yogyakarta)

entitled Keltiarga Sejahtera dan 10 Program Pokok PKK (The Prosperous Family and the

10 Principal Programs of PKK) are reproduced here as Figures 4.4-4.9. According to the

subtitle of this mimeographed pamphlet, there is a section called Konsep Diri Ibu (which

can be glossed as concepts of the self or perhaps as the individual woman and her

understanding of herself). Beginning then with Komep Diri Ibu in Figure 4.4 and moving

through a series of illustrations of its component traits and behaviors, these figures give a

glimpse of how the ideal mother is constructed rhetorically.

Despite the cynicism of local people and academic observers alike (e.g., N.

Sullivan 1994; Suryakusuma 1991; 1996; Gerke 1992; Oeyling-Gardiner 1993), the

programs of PKK can be effective and help fill. For example, the monthly weighing of

babies within each RW serves to identify children who are not thriving. This monthly

meeting is mounted by the women of a single RT for aU the children in their RW on a

rotating basis. Many of the RW within Riunah Putri made use of the local meeting hall,

but the RW to the west of my own used the space associated with a local kindergarten

school to host then- posyandu. The point of the posyatidii is that is locally organized and

convenient to those living within the RW. At these twilight meetings, women bring their

children up to five years of age to be weighed and to receive a hot meal and sometimes

vitamin supplements. The healthy meal and single vitamin offered at these meetings

clearly does not offer much m the way of help, but the mothers of babies who do not gain

weight over a period of three months are directed to go the nearby Pmkemas {Piisat

188

Kesahatan Masyarakat, Community Health Center; these centers exist throughout urban

Yogya and are typicafly m walking distance for most people) where medical care is free or

costs are nominal. This early detection plus the afifordability and proximity of the local

health care center are surely one of the reasons that child mortahty has dropped in Java

(Boomgaard 1989; Hull 1994).

The adaptability of the PKK system for delivering social programs is clear m the

recent addition of elder care programs. Now m addition to the monthly baby weighings,

older kampung dwellers have their urine analyzed and their blood pressure taken. Again,

although there is a nurse present at every posyandu and a doctor on a rotating basis three

month basis, the health care given at the site is negligible, but those who are ill can be

identified and sent on to the next level of care. Moreover, one of PKK's prime fimctions is

the delivery of information on health care as weU as other programs to the most local

level. In a country where the communication nifrastructure is still weak this is can be very

effective.'^

13

My experience with PKK is largely m urban settings, although I did attend meetings in two different areas of the countryside surrounding Yogya. The role of PKK in the countryside is different m many ways. Whereas urban kampung dwellers have other options for health care if they can afford it, isolated rural areas may have little medical care outside the monthly posyandu. Further, the health problems of the countryside are different. Malaria is virtually gone m Java but it can still occur in the countryside. Problems with nutrition and dirty water are also more prevalent m the countryside. Compounding these difBcuIties are the lack of good transportation in the countryside and the spatially dispersed population. None of this is to suggest that PKK programs are not useful in rural areas, but my experience and my assessment of the general success of many PKK programs must be understood as being based on an urban context.

189

Another PKK program that has had some success is that designed to help older

women read. Since mdependence, female education has been universally available, but

women who were children in the pre-war era typically did not receive educations unless

they came from the upper classes. As a consequence, many of the older kampung women

are illiterate. Although this program is not in use everywhere, at least one RW in my area

of the kampung had such a program in place.

Other PKK activities that appear to be beneficial follow from its role as the front

line in disseminating niformation. Women in small meetmgs of 20 or so received health

directives concerning not only their families and the kampung community but regardmg

their own health as well. Thus for example, I heard announcements at PKK meetings

about safe water and mosquito reduction. Government programs for educational support

for children were described. And the new emphasis on Pap smears for women was

disseminated through PKK meetings. This dissemination of information is not, however,

restricted solely to local affairs.

Not long after Steve and I arrived m Indonesia, the national government passed a

new traffic law. Anyone who has spent any time on the road m Indonesia knows that

traffic regulation seems to be willy nilly. The new traffic law proposed among other things

more strict use of motor cycle helmets and a stricter enforcement of licensing regulations.

The proposal was met with as much political resistance as was possible at that time. In

addition to heated editorials in all the papers, a large board appeared in the center of

Yogya across from the main post office at one of the busiest and largest intersections in

190

the city. On this board appeared the signatures of people opposed to the new law, and the

list grew daily as others signed. Without much fanfare, the proposal was dropped. It was

astonishing then when I attended an RW meeting m the countryside south of Yogya to

hear the Bu RW who led the meeting present the important benefits of the traffic law.

Apparently sensing a public defeat of the traffic law in the months earlier, the government

had backed off Their new strategy was to build popular support through local meetings

such as PKK before pursuing it at a national level Their use of PKK as a means to win

minds at the grassroots reveals its usefiJness to the government.

All of the good works of PKK notwithstanding to the contrary, this is not what

brought women to PKK meetings. The overwhehning reason given for going to PKK

meetings by kampung women with whom I spoke was the arisan. As already mentioned,

these rotating credit associations are a feature of most meetings, and in fact, local men's

meetings were often organized arisans as well. Rotating credit associations require that

each person in the group make a monthly contribution to a kitty. The entire collected

contributions are then won by whomever's name is drawn. Since everyone contributes

equally and the arisan continues until everyone has received the kitty once, these credit

lotteries actually work as savings mechanisms. None of the women I interviewed claimed

to use it as a way to save, mstead everyone reported that they did it just for fim. The

surprise of winning is what attracted them, the women said. Indeed, m contrast to some

areas of the world where the order of who will receive the lottery is known ahead of time,

m Java the element of surprise is key. At most PKK meetings at the local levels there are

191

typically several arisan, ranging from 200 rupiah up to 1000 rp. As mentioned in Chapter

1, the 5000 rp arisan begun at the meeting at my house was a rarity. Arisan are

everywhere in Java, and they typically figure as part of any official club or meeting. One

of my kampung neighbors was mvolved in 17 arisan each month, a feat made possible by

her retirement and her moderate income.

In addition to the arisan, h was clear from my experience that monthly meetings

were a way to get out of the house, meet with other women, and exchange news. A range

of meeting styles were present in the areas where I did my work, and there was also a

difierence between the meetings held for RT and RW. Meetings of the RT PKK group

tended to be short and relatively mformal. The group attendmg was usually under 10 in

number. The women who attend RT meetings, like the relatively new Dasa fV/sma'*

meetings, live very close to one another and typically are in daily contact. In contrast, RW

meetings mclude many more women who did not necessarily see one another on a daily

basis despite the proximity of their residence. In the RW to the west, where Bu Sae was a

member, the meetings were always more formal, with an agenda, and a meal. The women

in my own RT thought the food preparation to be too much trouble. And while the

meetings for the RW to the west rotated between households, for my ovm RW meetings

were always held at the empty pavilion at the pasar.

14

Literally, ten households. This unit of administration is smaller than the RT and is apparently only used for PKK activities currently. I found little official information on this level of administration.

192

Another contrast was in the type of business conducted at these meetings.

Whereas RW meetings tended to be more concerned with issues that were sent down from

higher up or laterally from the general RW organization, the RT meetings tended to be

focused on the needs of their particular part of the kampung. In many ways, the RT

meetings had the character assumed for them in the literature on small communities. That

is, fimds were raised for famiUes in need and for those who were ill. It was at the RT

meetings that such trouble was frequently identified first. Visits to those who were

housebound as well as those in the hospital were also organized at the RT level.

The endless trips to the hospital organized in the RT were apparently the result of

two unrelated goals. On the one hand, it was commonly held m the kampung that it was a

woman's duty to represent her household in showing neighborly support in this fashion,

although men would often visit the sick as well. On the other hand, the trip to the hospital

represented a break from kampung life. Most kampung women are very circumscribed in

their movements outside the kampung. The lack of private transportation and the idea

that women should not travel alone are two contributing factors. Although many women

leave the kampung to work, they are typically outside the kampung only for the hours of

work. For those women who work in the kampung, the chance to leave is welcomed

despite the diflSculties of arranging and paying for transportation. The fact that these visits

are done in groups adds to the sense of an outing rather than a duty call.

These visits to the hospital resonate with the felt responsibilities of neighborly

support. The responsibilities owed to one's neighbors are variously practiced and

193

endorsed by different individuals and families. StiU, the prevalence of these practices and

their local justifications signal more than a state-sponsored ideology of community.

During my fieldwork, for example, I was struck by the varieties of women's groups and

associations that existed and had existed m the kampung. WK (Wanita Katolik, Catholic

Women) was just one of the existing groups of women m the kampung. These groups

also performed duties of community support for the poor and the out-of-luck. Moreover,

there was a palimpsest of government organizations, mcluding the RX grouping

mentioned by J. Sullivan. One trend that is clear in recent changes m local admmistration

is the move away fi^om the large scale grouping such as RK, which used to comprise

several RW, towards smaller and smaller units. The initiation of Dasa Wisma, for

example, introduced government administration at the level of 10 households. Some

women lamented the passing of the older groupings. One older woman down the street

remembered the time when as a RK official she had known everyone m the kampung.

Now, with the smaller units of administration that sense of a larger community was being

lost, she thought. In fact, this ibu still attended meetings for an even older kampung

grouping PRP {Perempuan Rumah Putri, Women of Rumah Putri, a pseudonym) that was

moribund. The original members continued to meet each month because they enjoyed the

fellowship, and of course the arisan, despite the fact that the organization no longer

existed. Bu Sae herself disliked Dasa Wisma, and many women seemed to feel that it

represented yet another meeting they had to attend in an already busy schedule.

Consistently, across organizations old and new, state-sponsored and not (although

194

all official women's organizations are now under the umbrella of the government) there are

mcluded within their activities those aimed at community support. The basics of this are

typically the collection of a social fimd for community needs. This social fimd is

apparently an longstanding practice in Java. It was reported to me by several people that.

zaman diilti, m an earlier age, each household put out a spoonfiil or cupful of rice for the

person who patrolled the neighborhood. Alternative versions had the rice contribution

being sold for community programs. The important thing was the collection of the fimd

for community needs, as was illustrated by an Ibu RW I interviewed who had to begin the

RW organization m her area. I had asked her what she had done, and the first thing she

thought to do was begin the social fimd.

The social fimd for an RT may also be used to purchase the necessary implements

for slametan celebrations such as mats, glasses, plates, etc. These are then rented or

loaned to inhabitants as need be. This support of the slametan should be understood as a

direct support for the community, since slametan are typically communal affairs. Indeed,

some slametan are organized specifically for the community. A good example of this are

the activities of the PKK group in my RT associated Ramadan, the Muslim month of

fasting, and Lebaran, the festival ending Ramadan.

Before the month of fasting begin, neighbors and families are supposed to send a

meal to one another that includes typically apem, a rice flour cake, as well as a sweet

cassava dish. In the past, each family fiilfiUed this obligation on its own. What has

happened in recent years is that the women of PKK organize a communal cooking session

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to produce the meal for everyone in the neighborhood, thereby greatly reducing the labor

for the individual women. Norma Sullivan (1983) described this phenomenon, so it was

not a surprise when it happened in my own neighborhood. The use of the PKK

organization to solve a community responsibility results not from government plannmg but

from the practical use of the grouping by neighborhood women to solve a problem. The

effects for community maintenance are contradictory. While community obligations are

met and women's workloads are decreased, mdividual family responsibility for social

obligations is also attenuated. The potential for absurdity was illustrated during the

slametan I attended after the close of Ramadan known colloquially as minta ma'af

(literally "to say I'm sorry").

At these slametan, another traditional meal is eaten, this time opor ayam (chicken

in a mild coconut sauce), and at this time each person attending asks for forgiveness for

anything they might have done in the last year that had given offence. Hands are shaken

and a formulaic apology is given. In Indonesian, the phrase is minta ma'af lahir batin, or

somethmg like I'm sorry body and souL This phrase is often reduced to merely "lahir

batin" in a mumble as hands are shaken. This asking of forgiveness is actually most

critical between fatnily members, especially children and parents. And for many families,

this time is associated with family reunions as grown children gather at their parent's

homes to ask forgiveness. The convention of asking forgiveness of your neighbors

although less emotional than that associated with the family is also deemed critical to

harmonious relations. Yet when this ceremony is performed in a large group it resembles

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nothing so much as musical chairs or ring around the rosey. At the PKK slametan I

attended at this time of the year, the assembled group stood and walked in two circles as

everyone shook hands and asked for forgiveness. The formulaic nature of the request for

forgiveness feels oddly empty after one has said it a dozen or more times m a row. To add

to the general bizarre air of this ceremony in my own RT is the fact that most people were

Catholics and not Muslims.

Still the use of PKK and its offices to meet cotmnimity-wide social obligations

suggests several things. First, it shows that community obligation still has valence, and

this is reinforced by the community support that goes on within and without government

administrative units. The use of PKK to solve local problems reveals not only their

continuing importance, h also suggests the importance of women in this community work.

It is woman who visit hospitals, who collect social flinds, who cook communally, and who

make certain that family obligations to community are met. Moreover, the adaptation of

PKK to meet these needs mdexes not only women's increased workloads but shows that

the structure provided by the government may be used for different ends. Thus, the

organization founded around the ideal of the stay-at-home mom actually works to help

women who work outside the home meet kampung obligations.

KANCA WINGKING

Anecdotally, the multiple and conflicting views of women in the house were

revealed to me through the various definitions I heard for kanca wingking. Kanca is the

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word for friend. Wingking literally means back, and in polite speech, back means not only

the back of the house where cooking and sleeping occur but often specifically the

bathroom that is at the back of the house. The back of the Javanese house is the part of

the house associated with privacy and mtimacy (Chapter 5 considers the meaning of

architectural space in the Javanese house at more length). The important thing here are

the multiple meanings of "friend of the back of the house."

When I first began questioning people about the meaning of kanca wingking there

seemed to be no general agreement on what the term was. Indeed, I first heard that kanca

wingking was a girlfriend. It was later identified as a term for a house maid. Others

identified it as having a distinctly sexual double meaning. In general, the meanings

reported to me corresponded to these three basic meanings: close friend, maid, or lover.

In the first example, the idea of being a fiiend of the back does not imply sexual relations

but a sort of closeness that allows easy access to the back part of the house. This general

category mcluded not only playmates for young children, but the females who were

involved in active exchange networks — those who could be counted on to come help

cook and clean in the event of a wedding, funeral or slametan. It seems that girlfriend or

boyfiiend would most easily fit here as well. Not only are pacar (girl/boy friends) referred

to by kinship names, Mas or older brother for the boy and adhik or yoimger sibling for the

girl, but pacar relationships do not usually imply much sexual content. Young urban

Javanese apparently have many such relationships that mclude an easier access to each

other's home but no sense of serious relationship.

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Building on the connotation of shared kitchen help, kanca wingking may also refer

to a pembanhi or maid/cook. The meaning of friend of the back is fairly clear m this case,

and it implies as well the intimacy of reproductive work m the Javanese household.

Fmally, the use of kanca wmgking to refer to a lover glosses the sense that access to the

back of the house is also access to the most private part of a household's life or a person's

life.

The overlapping and mterpellating meanings of kanca wingking go along way

towards understanding the general notion of male and female relationships m urban Java.

That is, not only do they share a notion of reciprocal help but of a non-sexual siblmg

relationship. They also comprise the need for household reproduction and the feeding,

cleaning, and mamtenance of its members. But it also connotes the sexualized private

reahn of Javanese relationships, which it must be noted, may not always overlap with the

first two relationships although it is held to be the ideal.

Solvay Gerke reports that "the Javanese expression ''konco winking' means friend

in the background or friend in the kitchen and describes the role a woman should play in

the house in relation to her husband" (1992:116). Although Gerke's definition appears

too singular, she goes on to note that this role of'konco winking' is the point of much

disagreement and negotiation between husbands and wives, particularly in recent years.

Citing articles m the popular press, Gerke says that the pubUc questioning of conventional

women's role is occurring more and more and not just among liberal urban dwellers but

among rural Javanese as well. In her own work, she found generational differences in the

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level of agreement about women's household duties.

A hot topic is the division of household tasks between husband and wife, a problem which is widely discussed among young married couples with the wife working in a qualified job. It is for many famihes the most likely source of conflict, and the conflict Unes do not only part sexes but generations. Only few women stated that the household has to be managed by a woman alone. Instead, the majority of women felt that the husband should help the wife in the household, especially when the wife is working (Gerke 1992; 117).

My own work and my readmg of the literature on the sexual division of labor and gender

relations m Java suggests that these negotiations and conflicts are longstandmg, but have

assumed something of a new inflection with the changing pattems of employment and

economy in Java since 1945 (see Chapter 6).

SRIKANDI AND SUMBAJDRA; THE MODEL WOMAN

As part of my group interviews at PKK and Dharma Wanita meetings, I often

attempted to do a brief focus group style session in which I directed questions to the

women gathered and recorded their responses, their contradictions, and their

complementarities. This questioning was not particularly successfiil, and I noted that the

hierarchy present at male only or male-dominated gatherings was evident m these meetings

as well, although it tended to be more pronounced at higher levels of the bureaucracy. For

example, when I would address a question to the group I was often greeted with silence as

the women turned to look at their leader, who almost always undertook to respond for the

whole group. This was not always the case, however, and sometimes the women would

loudly discuss among themselves and shout out answers. This was more likely to happen

200

in the local-level PKK meetings or at Dasa Wisma meetings which typically only mcluded

close neighbors.

The only question that proved to be consistently interesting was one concerning

the wayang or shadow puppet characters, Srikandi and Sumbadra. Wayang stories are

based for the most part on the cast of characters from the Mahabarata and the Ramayana

myths of the Hindu epics that apparently origmated in India. Although the characters are

well-known, they are not necessarily static. They change over time and between stories.

For this reason, describing their characteristics must remain an approximation. Srikandi

and Sumbadra are generally known the be wives of Aijuna, the hero of the many of the

stories of the Ramayana. Sumbadra was his first or chief wife and is generally considered

to be gentle, modest, quiet and restrained. She is the epitome of ahis refinement that

favorite trope of Indonesian scholars everywhere. As mentioned above, alus is typically

opposed to kasar, coarse and unrefined, and is used to describe language levels and poUte

behavior as well. Srikandi is also a wife of Aijuna, but she stands in marked contrast to

Sumbadra. Srikandi is described by Brandon (1970:394) as the second of Aijuna's wives

and as an adventuresome female warrior.

Brandon also compares the type of puppet used for each of the characters.

Sumbadra is typically lijepan, "a small, extremely refined, controlled character, whose

manner is modest," while Srikandi is a lanjapan puppet, "small, extremely refined, but

active and aggressive" (Brandon 1970:49). As a novice at wayang, I was unable to

distinguish the two puppets until it was pointed out to me that the Sumbadra puppet I had

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bought was bent over m a gesture of supplication or respect. According to a personal

acquaintance, Srikandi may originally have been a transvestite character m India that

somehow transmogrified m the journey across the Sea of Bengal (Suyenaga p.c.). Carey

and Houben oflfer the two characters as examples of female prowess. Srikandi was

renowned for her skill as an archer and a warrior princess. She is "portrayed in the

wayang as a virago much given to rages" and as taking an "almost masculine delight m

warfare" (1987:14-5). Sumbadra, who is an incarnation of the rice goddess Dewi Sri is

"depicted as a lady of great spiritual power (kasekten) who was quite able to gamsay her

husband" (ibid.).

In their general outlines, Srikandi and Sumbadra, despite their common husband,

stand as opposites with power derived from quite different sources. Srikandi's power

comes from her military skills and aggressiveness. Sumbadra's power stems from being

the "quintessential female vessel of kasekten and potent heredity" (Carey and Houben

1987:15). Consequently, they represent two very diflFerent images of female power and

behavior in Java.

In the focus interviews I usually closed by asking the following question: who

more closely represents the ideal PKK woman, Srikandi or Sumbadra? Although asked

under the restrictive conditions mentioned above and obviously only a small number of

times, the response to the question was remarkably consistent. The typical answer was

Sumbadra but with the caveat ^""kalaii soya sendiri, Srikatidi^^ or "but for myself

Srikandi." In other words, although most women saw Sumbadra as being consistent with

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the ideals of PKK, most did not personally identify with her. The clearest exception to

this pattern was really only an elaboration. The Dharma Wanita meeting I attended at the

Immigration Office mcluded a very strong leader. In this case, the general agreement was

that Sumbadra was the proper image for the PKK woman. Yet, even m this case of overt

group agreement, there were munnm-s from others that Srikandi was a better choice. One

group of women were plainly cynical about Sumbadra's quaUties. As one woman

reported, "she is always bowing and bowing. If the house were burning down she would

still be bowing." For this woman, Sumbadra's lack of eflFective instrumental power left

her an object of derision.

It would be a mistake to suggest that this very small sample of answers elicited

under extraordinary conditions truly represents what Javanese women feel about PKK and

its ideals. Yet, I do think that the contradictions posed by the existence, alongside one

another and sharing the same husband, of these very different female characters does

suggest some of the pulls of gender ideology and practice for Javanese women,

particularly working class women. They prize action and cotnpetence and see less value in

the subservient posture of the Sumbadra ideal.

The discussions of the relative merits of Srikandi and Sumbadra are not my only

evidence. The general denigration of PKK and Dharma Wanita are plain enough in the

derogatory puns for the organizations: "women without enough work to do" for PKK and

"women's drama" for Dharma Wanita. Yet, many thousands of women are mvolved in

PKK, and within the kampung, even those who make fim of the organization or avoid its

203

regular meetings take advantage of some of its benefits. In fact, it was relatively rare to

meet a woman who did not at least follow the arisans that feature so prominently in PKK

meetings. And few women, despite their busy schedules, begrudge the food and aid that

are fimneled through PKK.

What is comprised within the competing images of PKK is class and its tensions.

The Srikandi image captures the dominant working class image of an effective, competent

Javanese woman who is able to manage her family, its finances, and her own business/job

and who is equally responsible for the support of her family. Sumbadra corresponds to the

priyayi image of the submissive, supportive wife who represents power while she bows to

her husband. While Carey and Houben suggest that this idea of the "vital legitimating and

dynastic role played by women in Javanese history" was overlooked by Benedict Anderson

in his classic discussion on the notion of power m Java (1987:15), rt is possible to see this

image in the PKK ideal. Despite the recognized power of motherhood on Java, the

women of the kampung seem to relish their warrior status as well.

This long section began with the heading "Structm-e of Feeling." Each sub-section

was meant to provide background on some of the resources, the sentiments and the

residues that are variously invoked by women as they practice their roles m the home and

community. Dutch colonial ideas about proper women and their effect on priyayi

conceptions of housewives, the legacy of community that is used and extended by the

Indonesian government, and the polysemy of categories such as kanca winking and of

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wayang characters like Srikandi and Sumbadra are variously called upon as kampung

women seek to deal with the new category of ibu rumah tangga or housewife and their

working and community lives. Moreover, the concept of housewife, the spirit of

community, and the idealized caricatures of women represent and are experienced as

nuanced sentiments which index the shifting nature of kampung life and gender roles to

produce the structure of feeUng that is contemporary kampung Ufe. The fimdamental

tension — within this structure of feeling — between "received interpretation" and

"practical experience" is revealed when PKK directives are met through longstanding

patterns of community cooperation and likewise when the module for PKK is used to

efl&ciently meet social obligations that are independent of and prior to its organization.

Part of what makes PKK work in the community and m the lives of women, who

may not even agree with or understand all of its principles, is this structiu-e of feeling

which provides at once the precipitated forms of urban kampung and PKK organization

and the social experiences in solution that women and kampung members use as resources

to negotiate their uneven investments m the various activities, images, and associations

embodied in PKK, family and kampung life.

CHAPTER 5

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THE HOUSE: KAMPUNG AS BUH^T WORLD AND LIVED MEMORY

Much of what houses are and imply becomes something that goes without saying (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995:4).

GHOST STORIES

We were sitting together in Bu Sae's family room when a loud thump was heard

from the back. Both Bu Sae and Bu Apik looked to the back and then at each other. Bu

Sae told me that ever since we had left the house next door there had been strange noises

from the back part of the house, near the well. We had already heard from several

neighbors, upon our return to the neighborhood after three years away, that our old rental

house was haunted, that setan masuk (Satan had entered). Many of these accounts were

told m a joking fashion. Bu Kasar had cuffed her son, Mas Yoto, who had often played at

our house, and said he was the only setan that was involved.

Ghost stories were not imusual in the kampung. We already knew that the open

area across the street from us was considered to be haunted as was the area around the old

kraton building down the street. We heard from the kampung kids several longstanding

stories about disembodied heads that rolled around scaring people and about little people

206

{tttyul ov setan gundiii, see Koentjaraningrat 1989:342; Geertz I960) who lived in various

places in the kampung. These stories are widespread throughout Central Java if not the

whole island. Empty and unused areas tend to fill up with ghosts. So I thought that I was

about to hear yet another amused comment about our haunted former home, when Bu

Apik suddenly turned serious and related the specifics of what had happened m the house

smce we had left.

One night, accordmg to Bu Apik, one of her brothers-in-law was sleeping m the

house. The unmarried males fi"om the house on the other side of ours, younger brothers of

the house's owner, often slept m the house after we left it empty. Ostensibly they stayed

there to guard it, but more likely they wanted to escape the crowded main house. Mas

Potong' was sleeping m the fi"ont room when he heard a noise fi"om the back. He walked

to the middle portion of the house where the well was and there he saw a man sitting. He

was dressed m the traditional clothes fi"om zaman duhi, long ago. His hair was very long,

and his face very white. He said nothhig and merely looked at Mas Potong. Then on

another night, a nephew of Mas Potong's was awakened by a loud noise, like a pillow

being thumped on the floor near his head, but the sleepmg mat next to him was empty.

Bu Sae and Bu Apik added their own commentary about why the house was

haunted. It had been left too long empty since we left, and houses left empty are known

to attract ghosts. The owners, family members of both Bu Sae and Bu Apik, had reftised

I

Mas is the honorific for younger, unmarried male, and is the shortened form of kangmas or brother m Javanese.

207

other oflFers to kontrak or lease the house and were now trying to sell it. So no one had

lived in it after we had left. And although the house was very nice and modem, it

suffered from one signal failure; h had no back door.

It would have been easy to dismiss these comments if this were the first time I had

heard about this lack of a back door. But m fact, the lack of a back door had been a

continuing issue dimng our fieldwork m the kampung and to hear about it again, after

three years' absence, merely reiterated its importance. Indeed, as I now consider space

and its meaning m the kampung, the issue of our back door appears to touch on all the

several issues involved in the kampung house: gender, kinship, changing class

circumstances, community reproduction, and state-sponsored domesticity.

OUR BACK DOOR

The house that Steve and I leased m Kampung Rumah Putri was a nice one. As

described in Chapter 3, we had chosen the house not because we planned to do fieldwork

in the kampung but because h was m a Javanese neighborhood and had some of the basic

features we wanted m a house. We were blind at that point to some of the signals given

about the status of the house and what it represented to the small area of the kampung

where we would live. Looking back now, I can see that the house was troubled from the

first by family tensions (and now by ghosts), although it was also seen as a promise to the

extended family living around it ~ a promise ultimately unftxlfilled as a brief history of our

house shows.

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To understand our house and what it implied for the kampung, kinship and family

histories must be mcluded as well. As it turns out, the comer of the kampung where we

chose to live was dominated by a large extended family, and over the course of fieldwork

and living in the kampung, I came to see the area of our house as a family compound.

The center of this compound was a ramshackle wood and bamboo house belonging

to the senior couple, whom I've called Bapak and Ibu Cipto here. This couple had 10

children. Figure 5.1 is a kinship chart that shows this family as part of a larger network of

kin living in the kampung. Some members of this family were introduced m the preceding

chapter and the family as a whole will figure in discussions throughout remaining chapters.

For the purposes of this discussion, those members of the natal Cipto house and their

connection to Bu Sae will be the focus of the discussion.

Their first child, a daughter was married with seven children of her own. She did

not live m the kampung, but lived m Yogyakarta close enough to visit occasionally. The

second daughter was our landlord, Bu Widodo. She and her husband both worked at the

local public hospital as pegawai negeri (civil servants), and they resided in the countryside

outside of Yogya on her husband's family's land. Due to their relative financial success,

they apparently had bought from their parents part of their land to build what was to

become our house. Figure 5.2 shows the family compound and the new house built along

the west side of the natal house.

Extending to the east of the natal house is a small area that belongs to Bu Apik and

her husband who is the fourth child of the Ciptos. Bapak and Ibu Apik had three children

209

living at home at the time of my initial fieldwork. While Bu Apik had several mcome-

generating activities, her husband had no visible means of support other than her. He was

known as a handsome ne'er-do-well, who had left his parents' home but not by much.

The third child was Bu Rin who had been married and divorced. She and two of

her three child had moved back to the kampung. During the first period of our fieldwork.

she was living in half of a small house some 200 m southeast of the natal house. The fifth

child, Bu Sugeng, was widowed during our time in the field. She and her two children

lived some 150 m west in a house that was said to belong to her husband's family.

The six child, Pak Cilik, was also a civil servant working at the hospital. He had

gotten his job through the good graces of his brother-in-law Pak Widodo, a not

uncommon way for people to gain employment in Java. Pak Cilik thus owed his loyalty to

his older sister's family, which over time worked to cause some family tension. Pak Cilik

was also the point of contact with yet another branch of the family which again was filled

with potential tension; as a young child, he was adopted by a member of his larger family.

Anak angkat (literally, lifted child) are a common occurrence in Javanese social life. If a

couple is childless, a family member wiU foster a child with them. This fosterage also

occurs when a family is poor and overbiudened with children; a child will be sent to a

better oflF family member to benefit fi:om those opportunities. The fi:equency of anak

angkat is a tribute not only to the unportance of children in Javanese society but to a

pragmatism about shifting resources and maintaining exchange relationships that are

beneficial to all. Unlike adopted children in the U.S., these adopted children typically are

210

well aware of both sets of their parents and may move between households over the

course of their lives, taking advantage of the benefits offered m both. Pak Cilik, because

of his greater resources m his job and his family connections, was able to build a small

brick house m the fi"ont of the natal house compound. This small house was less than 5 m

fi-om the natal house. Bu Cilik and her three sons lived in the house with him Fa. Cilik

had been selected as the Pak RT not long before we arrived in the kampung, making his

wife, reluctantly, the Bu RT.

The remaining four children all lived in the natal house. The seventh child was

Mas Bagus. At the time of our original fieldwork, Mas Bagus was unmarried and one of

the only family members still residing in the natal house who actually had steady

employment since he worked as a clerk m an office." When we returned three years later.

Mas Bagus was married, and he and his new, pregnant wife were living together in the

main house.

Likewise, Bu Tri, who was mentioned in Chapter 3 and who had four daughters in

1993, was still in the house in 1996, although her husband had gone to Jakarta to find a

job and she had a new child. When we fiirst lived in Kampung Rumah Putri, Pak Tri was

employed, although not steadily, as a driver. His place in the natal family was a marginal

2

The number of pegawai negeri or civil servants is quite large in Java. Civil service jobs are highly sought after, not because of the wages which are often minimal, but because of the pension that workers receive when they retire at 55. The ubiquity of civil service employment was made evident m my census interviewmg. Many people identified themselves merely as wiraswasta or swasta, meaning employed in the private sector in contrast to government employment.

211

one. As an adult male, with more than one child, it was unusual that he was still living

with his parents-in-law after having four children, although there is a pattern in Java of a

daughter staying with her parents to take care of them m their old age and then

subsequently inherit the house. Pak Tri, however, had never been able to maintam steady

employment and so seemed unlikely support for Bapak and Ibu Cipto in their old age. His

difiBcult poshion was demonstrated by his frequent absences from the kampung. We often

saw him sitting just outside the main entrance to the kampung with the becak (pedicab)

drivers who wait for fares there. He was also a frequent occupant of the raised bamboo

platform that was a frequent meeting place for family members and the de facto family

room for the natal house. This platform, shown m Figure 5.2, was the source of some

trouble early m our time in the kampung. The first few nights we slept in the house, the

young men of the family sat up very late, singing very loudly, apparently in an attempt to

assert their dominance in the area. After a settling-m period, this stopped. The role of this

platform m the family compound and in the community is discussed fiuther below.

The final two Cipto children, Mas Potong and Mas Ganteng, were unemployed

and unmarried males. They were both were high school graduates but remained

unoccupied because, it was rumored, they could not find anything that suited them.

Although Mas Potong earned money occasionally by cutting hair, his brother did little or

nothing to help his family. When we returned to the kampung, Mas Potong had moved

out of the house and across town while Mas Gantung remained, although he had managed

to get a job.

212

Although this "nuclear" family is complex enough on its own, to fiilly understand

the history of our house, it is necessary to describe Bu Sae's connection to the natal

house, as well as some of the other kinship ties m the nearby kampimg area.

Bu Sae and Pak Cipto are cousins (see Figure 5.1). Although Bu Sae and her

husband and four children had lived for many years in a leased house to the east of the

natal family compound, for the last decade they had lived in the dilapidated bamboo and

wood house west of the Cipto's that had been Bu Sae's natal house. There was a family

dispute that kept Bu Sae from renovating this house, and this family dispute was manifest

in the house itself Bu Sae's father was Pak Mongo, although we did not realize that

niitially so alienated had they become. What I learned mdirectly and then later from Bu

Sae herself was that Pak Mongo would not allow her to improve the house while he lived.

Bu Mongo had been dead for ten years, and so the house in essence belonged to Bu Sae,

the daughter who had remained m the kampung and taken care of the family while her

siblings all had moved away from the kampung. Her father's refusal to let her modify the

house became such a contentious issue that Bu Sae and Pak Mongo no longer spoke. He

lived m a small room that shared walls with the main house but had its own entrance (see

figure 5.2), so while they actually shared the same dwelling, they were literally and

figuratively cut off from one another. When we returned to the kampung, we found the

situation much changed. Not only was the house renovated but Pak Mongo had been

remtegrated into the family, but that is a story for later. Before describing our rented

house and its spatial and social relationship to the natal compound, it is important to note

213

that between the families Pak and Bu Sae, there are numerous other kin-related houses m

the kampimg.

Our own house was something of an anomaly in the extended family compound.

Not only was it newer than the surrounding houses, with cement walls and tiled floors as

well as with windows of paned glass, but it was the only house to be available for kontrak

(lease). When we first looked at the house, the back portion was unfinished (figure 5.2

and 5.3 show the house and the adjacent structures). We had been taken to see the back

of the house by gomg through the house of the owner's parents: Bapak and Ibu Cipto. At

the time, the back of the house was open and one could easily pass fi^om the parent's

backyard to the new house and on to the back of Bu Sae's house. We agreed to lease the

house for a year with the stipulation that it would be finished by the time we moved in two

month's time. Pak Widodo had asked at that time if we would like a wall in the back.

Not understanding completely, we had repUed that it was not necessary, although we did

want an electric pump installed for the well. Pak Widodo, the son-in-law of Bapak and

Ibu Cipto, who had apparently built large parts of the house himself msisted again that

wouldn't it be nice to have a wall in the back? So without understanding the nature of the

wall or the need for it, we agreed ~ since it cost us nothing and the owner himself seemed

to want it so much.

We were very surprised when we returned to move in at the changes that had

occurred in the house (Figure 5.2). When we had first looked at it, the house consisted of

a large, long fi-ont room with three small bedrooms opening onto it along its west side. A

214

door at the back of this large room gave onto a small partially enclosed area where there

was a covered well. Another small room opened onto this area, and in the hall that led out

of the house, the door to the mandi (bathroom, sometimes as in this case including a

toilet) could be found. Before it was completed, the door at the back, past the mandi, had

given onto an open backyard area. When we returned, the whole area had been

completely walled in with bricks. The west half of the area had been covered with a

concrete platform that was tiled. There was a sink with piped water from the well, plus a

tiled counter area. The eastern half of the back yard area was now covered m stones, but

more significantly it was cut off from the neighbors by walls that were over 7 feet high.

To us, this new space seemed a welcome, very private area in the back of the house away

from the prying eyes of others. To our neighbors, the new wall not only signaled a break

in usual kampung and family relations but rendered our houses incapable of fimctioning

within the kampung community.

Although we did not know what, if any, kind of house existed before ours was

built, several things happened during our time in Rumah Putri to suggest the changes that

accompanied this new house. The first difference we were aware of had to do with the

completion of the back area of the house. Before our house was built, this area had been

open with access available to both the back of the Cipto house and the back of Bu Sae's.

Bu Sae herself had complained about the house to me early on because she used to be able

to get to her cousin's house out of the back door and because the new house with its long

cement walls had shut out the breeze that used to flow through her house. Our new house

215

blocked not only the flow of wind but of people and things.^ With the completion of the

walled back portion of the house, our new home did indeed eflfectively become one solid

construction from the gang (narrow street) in front to the back of the property, effectively

driving a wedge into what had been a more open family compound.

We also heard throughout the time we were in the kampung that we had paid too

much for our lease (approximately $800 for the year). It was a testimony to the way that

kampung gossip moves, and the importance of this information to local housing values,

that everyone we met in the neighborhood was scandalized by how much we had paid (or

were actively trymg to find out how much we had paid). Even more revealing was the

problem we had with the leakmg roof We lost our electricity at one point due to water in

the ceiling and walls and several people m the neighborhood were called m to help fix it.

The commentary accompanying our landlord's failure to do anything about it was

mstmctive as to her position within her own family and the surveillance of kampung

neighbors. Our neighbors did not know that we had turned down our landlord's request

for a large loan, which is how we explamed to ourselves their failure to do much. Instead

the neighbors denigrated our landlord's poor workmanship on the house and decried their

poor stewardship. These comments were not confined to just neighbors, Pak Cipto, father

to our landlord, made an imaccustomed visit to our house for the sole purpose of telling us

3

Ferzacca (1996) has documented the significance of "flows" and blockages in Javanese perceptions and practices related to the body and health. Anyone who has spent time in Java knows the dangers of mastik angin (wind that enters one), which seems to correspond to colds, flu, anxiety, and a variety of other complaints.

216

that he was going to let Pak Widodo know all about his shortcomings. The modem and

improved character of our house was the cause of not only jealousy but contempt, clearly

inside the family as well outside. This was most evident m the claims that our house was

totally useless because it had no back door.

Yet, the house did have a door letting onto the back yard area, which was half

given over to the kitchen. What was missing was a door out to a narrow alley that

allowed access to the street to the west. The lack of a back door was significant for many

reasons that only became clear over time. The first thing we were told was that we would

not be able to get out of the house through the back if we had unexpected guests. I did

not understand at first why I would want to do that, but as it turns out, the unportance of

the back door is in direct proportion to the fi-ont of the house. This is illustrated not only

m the customs for receiving guests, but in the hosting of slametan (ceremonial dinners).

Both of these occasions will be described briefly here.

'INSIDE, OUTSIDE, ALL AROUND THE HOUSE'

Pak Hormat was a retired army general who served with distinction during the war

for independence. He and his family were a kampung success story, and Pak Hormat was

an important kampung leader, involved not only m the administration of the RW but in the

local Catholic prayer group. The Hormat house lay just across the street fi"om the Cipto

compound (Figure 5.3). The house itself bad a large main room m which prayer meetmgs

were held a.«; well as meetings of the smaller sections of PKK, such as Dasa Wisma. As

217

Keeler (1984) describes for the typical Javanese house, this room had a set of chairs, a

sofa, and a cofiTee table as its main furniture. When receiving guests, Bapak Hormat

would sit with his back to the rest of the house facing his guests. Ibu Hormat would

appear only occasionally to supply drinks and jajan (snacks).

For meetings, this room was emptied of all its fiimishing and its floor was covered

m mats; these tikar conventionally were woven bamboo but are now predominantly made

from plastic. Arriving guests would niitially see Pak Hormat seated agamst the far wall

and then be invited to enter. They would typically drop to their knees to cross the room

and take a seat along the wall, choosing the side of the room based on their sex. Men and

women, husbands and wives, neither arrived nor left together, and the seating at the

meeting was by sex.'* Eventually, the room would be ringed by guests who would sit with

their legs crossed under them

If in either the case of the casual visitor or the prayer meeting, Bu Hormat found

herself short of sugar or tea or glasses, she could easily escape out her back door or send a

child to obtain what she needed without her guests knowing it. Great emphasis is put on

receiving guests in Java, and to receive them well, they must be served at the very least a

The attention to the placement of heads, bodies, and feet and their indexing of social hierarchy are a common feature across much of Southeast Asia (Reid 1988). In my own experience, these "feudalisms" remain alive and well in the kampung, particularly at slametan. The changing proxemics in other contexts, however, is not unrelated to changmg class relations. These older forms seem to be more salient among working class women, whose role in the conservation and perpetuation of elite forms is something of a challenge to theories of working class consciousness and resistance.

218

drink. Moreover, it is very poor form to be unprepared no matter who comes or how

many guests attend. I saw this ethic in practice many times, but perhaps the most telling

episode was when I myself received guests and ran short of sugar. I tumed to Mas Yoto,

one of the children who were our constant guests, and sent him to buy sugar, little

reaUzing what I had asked him to do. It wasn't until he walked back into the house with

the bag of sugar stuffed up under his shirt that it became clear to me that, if a 10 year old

boy already felt the pressure to hide this lack on my part, it was very important to not

seem unprepared to be hospitable.

The role of the front door and the required openness to potential visitors is

characteristic of kampung homes. As suggested m descriptions of formal visits and

slametan, the male head of the household often receives guests m the front while the

female head works from behind the curtain, and while there have been changes in

kampung houses due to rising incomes, this division between a formal open front room

and the family room to the back remams. While this is not much different from traditional

Western homes with their receiving rooms and parlors, the difference at this time in Java is

that the front room mitst be open to any guest. That is, kampung doors are always open,

unless the people in the house are sleeping, it is late in the evening after the appropriate

time for visiting, or the residents are gone. In visiting a Javanese house, a guest usually

approaches the doorway and leans forward, calling kula nicwiin (literally, 'I request or ask'

in polite Javanese). This call is repeated until the guest hears an answering mongo (the

mark of Javanese poUteness which means generally "if you please"). At this point, the

219

guests hesitates until asked to enter again, and then typically shedding their shoes and

saymg again nuwun, they step over the threshold. The key thing is that guests may

approach a house at ahnost any time and expect to be received. The lack of telephones^

has left this Javanese convention relatively unchanged, although h varies by class and area.

In contrast the back part of a kampung house is typically only approached by family and

close neighbors, and even then, adult males often will not approach the back door unless

they live in rt.

Beyond the importance of the back door in being able to host guests, certainly a

part of maintaining a sense of hospitality m the kampung community, the front and back

doors of a kampung house are crucial to maintaining the ties that make community and

their use goes to the heart of the house and its role in the symbolic order, m the gender

and kinship systems, and m the reproduction not only of the household but the community.

The following description of my own harrowing experience with givmg a slametan serves

to introduce these issues for a fiiller discussion in the second half of the chapter. The

ceremonial meeting, hosted at our house, proved to be critical to my understanding of

space and its related issues in kampung community, mostly due to the shortcomings of our

house.

Quite the opposite of the Western experience, televisions have appeared in Javanese homes in advance of the telephone. Indeed, most kampung houses I visited had a radio or a television, but only one or two had a telephone. This lack of a phone culture has worked to preserve some forms of community and politesse that are missmg now in the West, where the drop-in visit is relatively rare now.

220

Steve and I joined a local Catholic prayer group early in our time m Rumah Putri.

This group was predominantly made up of our older neighbors. We had found out early

on that despite the Muslim majority m the kampung, there were a significant number of

CathoUcs as well (see Chapter 3), and mdeed m our immediate neighborhood, the

Catholics were m the majority. This was the result in part of the proximity of a Catholic

church (immediately outside the kampung), but it was also due to the extended Cipto

family which dominated our RT and who were predominantly Catholic.

The local prayer group met once a month at a member's house, the location

rotating from month to month. In an eflfort to mgratiate ourselves as well as to bring our

house into the exchange system, we oflfered to have the December prayer meeting or

sembahyang at our house. We had no clear idea what was involved, and it was only

through the intervention of Bu Sae that we were able to have the slametan at all.

Although these kampung prayer meetings, like the various other religious and

community meetings, were not m fact slametan in the classic sense, they shared some of

the basic elements. For example, a traditional slametan would mclude as its first stage a

round of mvitations typically delivered by a family member. For a wedding, the invitation

would come m the form of a box of feast foods with an accompanying written invitation,

although this is a recent phenomenon. The next phase would be the preparation for the

slametan, accomplished largely through family members and neighborhood women. In my

own case, I had no basis for askmg for help, that is, 1 was not m established exchange

relationships with other women at that time (nor would I ever be truly). Indeed, so

221

ignorant was I of the work involved, I originally thought I could do it myself. Bu Sae and

her daughter told me early on that there was no way that I could cook the slametan in my

own kitchen. It was then that the issue of our missing back door became so critical. I did

not fiilly understand why they would not want to use the kitchen in our house, since it had

running water and more tiled counter and floor space. Bu Sae's kitchen, in contrast, was

a small dark, dirt-floored annex to the main house, reached by a dirt path along the east

side of the house. There was very Uttle room and no clear space for food preparation.

Yet, Bu Sae was insistent that we could not know how many people would attend

and thus could not use my house. What if we ran out of something, glasses, piring

(plates), or tea. At some point, as so often happened during my time as a housewife, the

decision was made, with little input from me, that people would sit in our house while the

food would be prepared and served from Bu Sae's house next door. My ineptitude at

staging a sembahyang began to appear early in the preparations. I mclude here an

extended part of my field notes.

The portent aboiit how nervous I was came when I awoke at 4:30 [am] and heard Bu [Sae] cooking and half-dazed with sleep thought I had better get next door atid help cook gulai [a cocomit curry dish]. Cooking actually did begin early. After I bought the oranges, carrots & other items from Mbak [Tik, a market seller], Bu [Sae] and I immediately went home to cook

I have to backtrack atui say that at some point this stopped being my sembahyangan & somehow or other became the responsibility of Bu [Sae], It started becoming clear when she told me that she had already ordered the emping [bitter crackers] for me — because the prices would rise later in the Christmas season. Then she accompanied me to shop and bargain — hard-nosed she is. And a bit of surprise to the pasar ibus who have come to expect me to be an easy mark. Lxiter / told her that I hadn 7 yet seen the woman who sells pecel [vegetables with peanut sauce] so that I coidd order chickens. She told me that she had already sent Bu [Tri] to do that ~ and when I added

222

a chicken she did the same. Later when I went to pick up the things ordered from Mbak [Tik], I found out that Bu [Sae] had already picked up half & asked [Tik] to write down the prices.

After an inauspicious start, I spent the day m Bu Sae's kitchen helping to cook for

the prayer meeting. I was given the job of chopping the carrots and cucumbers for the

acar, a standard dish of vinegared vegetables. I should note that this is easiest job

possible, often assigned to children. Meanwhile, Bu Sae cooked lunch for those of us

there to work, this included Bu Sae's own sister and Bu Sae's two daughters. Later, Bu

Cilik, Bu Tri and Bu Apik, all kin to Bu Sae through the Cipto house, made appearances

as weU. Each woman arrived independently, usually after having finished their own

household chores and cooking. Like most slametan meals, the dishes are formulaic so that

any woman who arrives to help knows what needs to be done. For very large slametan

over more than one day, such as those staged for kampung weddings, the woman of the

house along with the wedding committee {panitid) mobilize the labor and organize the

tasks. In this case, women may arrive with their own knives and dish towels. The female

labor in a large slametan is immense, and it requires not only the well known conventions

of work sharing and conmion recipes but often a committee of women close to the family.

To stage such a large event means that a woman must be able to call on a large number of

women outside her family to help, and such a call to rewang or help is based on prior

reciprocal exchange.

As I would come to learn later, this was a small number of people working for a

fairly large slametan made larger by the mtense curiosity of my neighbors as to whether I

223

could do it. If I had known better and had already established relationships with women m

the neighborhood, I could have asked them to come help, as it was I had to rely on Bu

Sae's family network to supply the labor. Not only must the woman hosting a slametan

organize the labor, she must also feed those who come to help. So while Bu Sae made us

lunch, her sister, who as it turned out was a specialist in gulai, helped to mix the spices.

As the day wore on, diflferent family members appeared to help. Late in the afternoon,

Mei, my assistant and her sister came to help too.

When the guests began to arrive m the ^ore/early evening, both Steve and I were

there to receive them. After taking a mandi, I had returned to Bu Sae's house to help

finish with cooking and servmg. Instead, I was sent back to my own house to be hostess.

It would have been more typical for me to have been absent and in the back working, but

because of the arrangement for cooking at Bu Sae's and certainly because I am a

foreigner, I was told to go and receive guests. I was not particularly pleased at this

decision. Not only was I again shown not to be mistress of my own fate in matters

slametan, but the formal slametan itself is a dreary affair. One must sit in a very

uncomfortable position, quietly, for what seems an eternity. Men seem to spend the time

smoking, rocking in place, and staring at the ceiling. Women fan themselves with their

handkerchiefs, apply eucalyptus balm to their wrists, and constantly readjust their position

(they were no more comfortable than I). Conversation is desultory, and everyone seems

strained and uncomfortable. In great contrast, on the other side of the curtain at most of

these affairs, women and children are eating, joking, and sittmg however they please. It is

224

the job of those in the back to serve the food and hand h: through to the person nearest the

door. Plates, glasses of tea, and other items are then passed around the room, from hand

to hand until everyone has received a portion.

As the meeting at our house began, tea was served from the front door, rather than

the back, after having been prepared at Bu Sae's and then carried on a tray in the rain.

There was a minor rebellion earlier when Mei had msisted that the cake that was served as

a first course along with the tea should be served from my own kitchen. She was insistent

and although she did not carry the day, I have come to understand that h was less her

worry about the cake getting wet or the desire to have our kitchen used, than an attempt

to control a part of the proceedings by controlling the food. As I said at that time:

Mbak Mei and her yminger sister arrived atidpromptly went on strike about Bu [Sae's] suggestion that we serve from there. There had been much talk during the planning about our lack of a back door — but I had persisted in thinking we would cook there and serve from here. But we — Steve & I — were finally made to lavierstand that it was better from Bu [Sae 'sj. Attd I saw the wisdom in that. Not only could we add as needed — but Bu [Sae] has so much at her house [her store of kitchen items is unbelievable] but also she woiddn 't have to leave the comfort of her own house.

But Mei in her Mei-ishness said the kue [cake] would get all wet & she thought it better from the back I decided to opt out of the potential fight & just tell them next door. They took it without comment, but I was really gratified later when they [Mei and her sister] moved to join us.

For the actual serving, Bu Sae's younger daughter and some of the young boys

and girls from the extended family compound came to help. During the final phases of

cooking, young boys and girls were underfoot much of the time. Older males were

nowhere to be seen, although often teen-aged and young adult males will help by carrying

heavy serving trays. This same mixed group of youngsters got to eat gulai m Bu Sae's

225

kitchen after serving the guests.

At the slametan itself following tea and cake, a prayer service was held in udiich

people acting like Catholics who weren't, the need to help the poor and the community,

and the unportance of the section of Rumah Putri in which we all lived were all discussed.

When the service itself was finished (Steve was asked to speak at one pomt), the gulai was

served. While the food served before the service was yellow cake along with the bitter

crackers or empmg, the second course was rice with gulai sauce topped with shredded

chicken and fiied onions. The gulai was accompanied by knipiik (shrimp crackers), the

acar, and sambal (hot pepper sauce/chutney), and of course more tea.

After the guests took their leave, the house was cleared of dishes, which were

washed at Bu Sae's and returned to her cabinets. Because she had served as a Bu RT for

many years, Bu Sae had an extensive collection of plates, spoons, and glasses. The final

phase of the slametan included the dispersion of the remaining food. Although ostensibly

this was my decision, the actual negotiation over whom would receive food with Bu Sae

and her older daughter was very instructive.

First, food went to Bu [Apik], then Bu [Cipto] & Pak [Cipto], And then a separate plate to Mbak /Trij because as [Bu Sae's older daughter] said it was lebih enak [better^] than one (an instructive message for me). Then Bu [Cilik] got some food. When I suggested Bu [Sri] [another daughter of the natal house], she comidered & then said that was too far & so "tidak enak" [not good]. That counted out Bu [Tima] and Bu [Kasar] as well.

6

Enak is a capacious word. It can mean deUcious, good, nice and any variety of states that are enjoyable. It provides EngUsh speakers with much hilarity since the way to say your shoes are comfortable, for example, is to say that they are delicious. Lebih literally means more. Tidak means no or not.

226

Later when I mentioned Bu Kircmg, she too was ruled too far, altho [Bu Sae's daughter] did say 'do you want to sendfood to her?' & then quickly dismissed her as too far [although indeed she was quite close]. So the food broke down along the lines of family partially but Bu Sri was ruled out as too far. It was thus difficult to know if the determining fact was distance or family membership.

I had mistakenly thought one of the motivations for the sharing was to help poorer

neighbors, which was why I had mentioned Bu Kirang, a young mother living in one room

with her husband and child. I have come to see mstead that the food is used to repay

those who help, those who are m estabUshed, consistent exchange relationships, including

some family, especially poor relations.^ That is to say, a poor neighbor must be in du-ect

exchange relations to receive slametan food, although this would be diflBcult m the first

place simply because of their lack of resources. Otherwise, the only way to give food

without setting up unreasonable expectations is to share food with poor family members,

m addition to those who help. The actual distribution is done out of the backdoor of the

house using the swift feet of young male and female helpers. The food should be covered

and given discreetly. According to many accounts (Koentjaraningrat 1989; Geertz

19660), at more conventional and formal slametan in the past, food was not eaten during

the meeting, although a small amount may have been eaten for the sake of formality.

Norma Sullivan (1994) considers the male and female aspects of a slametan. Male involvement is confined to the formal kenduren part of the ceremony, while female work to stage the slametan is accomplished through the faiformal and invisible rewang, or help, of women. Sullivan documents rewang networks in the kampung where she did fieldwork. "All female members of a rewang network are related to each other because of each member's prior relationship with the rewang organiser, who is currently the focus of group activity" (1994:159).

227

Instead the food was distributed m boxes to the heads of households in attendance, often

only males, who then carry the rest of the food home to be shared with their families.

Thus the siametan brmgs kampung neighbors into the house through the front

door. Food flows from the back of the house to the front to be eaten or taken home by

those attending. Simultaneously, female labor flows into the house through the back door

and food flows out to redistribute resources to maintain kin and exchange relationships

through the back door.

The missing back door of our rented kampung house was an entrance, a way to

begin to glimpse the importance of family, gender, and exchange in the making of

kampung community. The failures of our house, its inability to fimction effectively in the

exchange of hospitality and food, showed the salience of these exchanges to a perceived

community of people as well as the new threats to that community posed by changing

socio-economic status. That is, the faction of the family that was doing better financially,

Ibu and Bapak Widodo, built this house so that it would not fimction communally: it was

shut ofiEi literally and figuratively, from both family and community activities. In effect,

our absent door illustrated the close connection between the household and kampung

commimity. Interestingly enough, m Rassers's I960[I925] description of the Javanese

house, he identified an open area within the house but between the front petuiapa which

he associated with the male, the public, and the powerful, and the back omah biiri

(literally, back house) associated with the female, the private, and the fecund — and he

called this area the kampung (figure 5.4). This usage of the word kampung, with its

228

resonances vvdth community and compound, for an area within the house that is associated

with the mediation of male and female aspects seems contradictory, but as I will argue

below, the connection between the individual household and kampung community have

much to do not only with gender relations but with their spatial organization. The bamboo

platform mentioned above (Figures 5.2 and 5.3) and the role it played within the family

compound and within the community offers another way to break down the doors of the

single-family dwelling.

This platform served a variety of fimctions, and its use over the day was a telling

barometer not only of kampung relations and the use of space but the ebb and flow of the

day. Early m our fieldwork, we saw the platform only as a convenient surveillance device

for our new neighbors who could literally reach into our front windows from the platform.

But over time, its other fimctions became obvious. The rhythm of the kampung day was

witnessed by the occupants of this platform who varied over the course of the day by age

and gender. Very early in the mornings (pagi), school children were seen there, brushed

and washed and perhaps eating before setting off for school. Even earlier in the morning

(pagi pagi), adult men might be found sitting sleepily on the platform, their sarongs pulled

up around their neck from the cold. After the rush to school, the platform would remain

empty as household chores such as cud (washing), belanja (shopping) and masak

(cooking) took place. About midmoming {siang\ young mothers with their infant

children gathered to gossip and idle. As the day grew hotter, the platform usually emptied

agam. Naps were taken and young children home from school ate. Sometimes the

229

platform would be occupied by those who found it too hot to sleep, including older

children and young adults who were unemployed, and the mood at that time of day was

lethargic and subdued.

As the day lengthened (sore), adults began returning home from work (the typical

work day m Yogya ends at 3:00). People reappeared to sweep their stoops and the street

m front of their houses. Women who worked outside their homes changed mto house

dresses (duster), men into their sarong and tee-shirts. Children played m the streets

between the sweeping and washing of the adults. At this time, the platform became mixed

with adults of both sexes and with children of all ages. People stopped by to chat and

those on their way to meetmgs or the mosque hailed those sitting on the platform. This

was the time of day when most people met to talk and exchange news. As the evening

progressed, children were taken off to be bathed and adults disappeared to take their

second mandi of the day.® Over the course of the early evening, the occupants of the

platform would change as mdividuals disappeared to mandi or eat. Everyday eating is

8

One of the most dehcious parts of the day m Java is the mandi, the splash bath that the majority of Javanese take twice a day, in the morning and evening. Typically, the room for bathing mcludes a tub or receptacle filled with water that is poured over the body usmg a hand-held scoop. Stories abound of naive westerns who climb mto the receptacle which can be quite large in better equipped houses. For those who do not have their own mandi, there are several neighborhood mandi and some even go the river to wash. This ritual of the twice daily mandi is evidence of the importance placed on personal cleanlmess in Javanese cultiu'e and it is also a clear marker of the rhythm of the typical Javanese day. This rhythmicity is directly related to that provided by the calls to prayer heard each day throughout the kampung, and the bathing associated with going to the mosque is perhaps the basis for the afi:emoon bath.

230

done alone, and usually a single meal is cooked in the morning and reheated throughout

the day. As night falls, the platform is given over to a majority of males, although some

females, particularly those like Bu Tri who enjoyed rebelling and disdained feminine

fussiness, also gathered there. Pak Tri was often an occupant in the late evening; indeed,

his actual time in the natal house was limited to sleeping and eating only. In the malam,

which begins with fiill dark, the platform becomes the venue for more adult activities. For

example, the teasing, a constant part of the banter emanating from the platform, often

became rougher. This was one reason that my assistant Mei did not like to leave after a

certain point because she was sure to receive a verbal assault by the young men.

Several issues need to be noted m regards to the platform and its use. First, the

cycles and patterns of the Javanese day have much to do with changing temperatures and

less to do with actual times, despite the attempt by most westerns to determine the exact

timing of the change from siang to sore, for example. The morning or pagi is described as

fresh (segar) and is a favorite for most kampung folk who rise very early to work, shop,

and clean. The siang corresponds to the hottest part of the day and sees the kampung at

its quietest, except perhaps in the middle of the night. The sore begins with the cooling of

temperatiures and a dimming of the sun. It is a busy time in the kampung but it has a

relaxed feeling as people move slowly and amiably through the neighborhood. Then as the

night falls with the onset of dark, the streets become the preserve of the men and

teenagers. This then is the second pattern that is revealed, the changes in those sitting on

the platform and the street by age and sex. Although the bamboo platform was dominated

231

by women and young children m the early parts of the day, the group became mixed in age

and sex during the sore. In the late sore and into the night, it became dominated by men

and teen-aged kids. Women typically retreated into houses at night, although with the

advent of televisions more and more whole families disappear into their houses. In the

very late night, it is not uncommon to find men talking, smoking, sleeping in common

areas like porches and the platform.

The use of the platform over the course of the day also reveals the fluidity of the

boundary between inside and outside, public and private, for the family compound. The

majority of those using the platform was family. Bu Rin and the other adult daughter

living in the kampung could often be found on the platform. Close family friends were

very comfortable there as well, and there were often visitors from other parts of the

kampung. Yet, in some contrast, it was rare to see Bu Apik on the platform, although her

children were frequently there. She could sometimes be found alone down the street

sitting on a stoop in front of someone else's home. Considering the small space she lived

in with four other near adults, this comes as no surprise. StilL, her avoidance of the

platform probably says as much about family politics as anything else. For like reasons,

Bu Sae and her family were rarely seen on the platform even though they were relatives of

the natal household. It was telling that Bu Sae rarely entered the Cipto home, preferring

to send a child as a messenger. And when the yoimg daughter of Bu Tri, Bu Sae's

adopted daughter (her first cousin twice removed), was called back to Bu Sae's house, it

was typically from the area of the platform. This avoidance of the large, apparently

232

public, open space in front of the Cipto home by Bu Sae's family was an indication of

family tensions and also a consequence of the construction of our house. Before it sealed

off access between the Cipto and Sae families, Bu Sae and Bu Cipto could more easily and

niformally meet behind their homes. An approach from the front required more formality.

In many ways, however, besides serving as a popular spot for socializing in the

local neighborhood area, the platform worked as extension of the Cipto family house.

There were eleven people livmg within the main part of the Cipto household. The main

front room had seating for six at the most. As a result during the times when most family

members were home, activities spilled out mto the front yard and platform, which served

as an niformal parlor for those guests who did not want to make a formal visit. On other

occasions, non-family members could approach a family member on the platform to then

go the main house on their behalf with requests and faiformation. Therefore, in a sense one

entered the Cipto "house" when one approached the platform in the open area of the

compoimd. The permeability of the front threshold of the house was described above:

front doors are typically open and people approach and haU the occupants before being

asked to enter. The platform at the Cipto's was an exaggerated exanrple of this that

resulted from the smallness of the natal house and the Cipto family's general demeanor.

Yet, the platform and its uses also show that people spend much of their times out

of the house, mixing, mingling, and talking. The distinctions between inside and outside,

public and family space seemed very attenuated in the compound, although tensions within

the family were sometimes revealed very clearly in the use of space. What the examples of

T>

the slametan, of hosting guests, and of raising a family show is that while houses have

different relations to the kampung through the front door than through the back, the flows

and spaces between for houses may be just as important for making community, and as we

shall see below for the role of gender in making community.

HOUSE, HOUSEHOLD, HOME

From the beginning m my own work, influenced by cultural ecology and economic

anthropology, I had thought of the household in a fairly unproblematic way as a unh of

production and consumption. My work had come to concern the mutual constitution of

domesticity and community m modem urban Java and their historical and temporal

outUnes. It was when I subsequently turned to contemplate the spatial coordinates of

community and domesticity that I discovered that my conception of the household was too

simple (belatedly its seems, cf Netting, Wilk and Amould 1984; Wilk 1989; Folbre 1988.

1986; Moore 1988). In my own work, I came to thmk of the household as more than

production and consumption, but as a adaptive response to a colonial and post-colonial

political economy. My fieldwork had already made clear to me the aflTective and moral

contents of the home in light of the Indonesian government's state-ordered domesticity

programs emphasizmg good mothers and proper citizens. Eventually, during my write-up.

the fashionable emphasis on space and place led me to reconsider the relevance of the

spatial and symbolic form of the house as built form and symbolic space. Thus my work

evolved to consider simultaneously this triptych of approaches, glossed in their separate

234

literatures as house, household, and home (Chapters 5, 6, and 7). Each differs in its

conception of domestic space and of the connections between that space and experience,

but none of the them alone captures the complexity of the Javanese kampung household.''

THE HOUSE

The house and house society is most closely identified with the work of Levi-

Strauss, who outliaed the concept m a series of lectures m Paris (1987). He proposed at

that time the societes a maison or house-based societies as a solution to a particular

problem in kinship and social organization: cognatic systems m which neither descent nor

filiation is the primary organizmg principle. The category of house society also provided a

transitional stage in Levi-Strauss's evolutionary order of societies moving from blood to

soil; that is from societies organized through kinship to those organized through property

ownership: "Levi-Strauss sees the 'house' as a solution to the problems of societies where

'political and economic mterests' have not yet 'overstepped the old ties of blood,' in other

words where class division must still be represented in a pre-class ideology of shared

descent and alliance" (Gibson 1995:129). Carsten and Hugh-Jones suggest that the key

elements in Levi-Strauss's theory of house societies revolve around 1) the transition

between the elementary structures of kin-based societies and the complex structures of a

9

The term household will be used to refer to the object/location/nexus in question for want of a more neutral term. This choice does not imply that the economistic model implied by the term household is accorded any more weight than the other approaches.

235

class-based society and 2) the combination and reconciliation of the contradictory

prmciples involved in alliance versus descent, which follows from the first principle

(1995:8). Levi-Strauss himself borrowed the idea of the European noble house of Europe

to illustrate a kinship form that is transitional, combinmg elements of filiation and

residence, patri-Uneal and matri-Uneal descent, hypergamy and hypogamy, close and

distant marriage, all elements that are presumed to be in opposition in traditional kin-

societies. In the case of the European noble house the name of the house as a kinship

group transcends any particular place, although land and property are clearly involved.

The house society then mixed the properties of mheritance and transmission of

goods and family name through descent, with the more horizontal connections built

through marriage. The only problem is that while Levi-Strauss refers specifically to

Indonesian societies as examples of the house society, 'lie devotes very littie space to the

bilateral societies of the Philippines, Sulawesi, Borneo, and Java" (Gibson 1995:132).

Gibson and others (see Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995, for example) have taken up Shelley

Errington's distinction between the Centrist Archipelago and the Exchange Archipelago of

island Southeast Asia as a means to consider the distribution of the house society. As

mentioned earlier, although geographical m extent, this distinction is based primarily on

Shelley Errington's idea of a flmdamental split between those societies where male and

female are viewed as basically the same sorts of beings, as in the Philippines, Sulawesi,

Borneo and Java, and those areas where marriage exchange is "predicated on the

distinction between male and female, and the fact that women must leave their natal

236

Houses (social groupings) in order to marry men who are not their 'brothers'" (Errington

1990:39). These latter areas include most of Eastern Indonesia such as the Lesser Sundas

and parts of Sumatra.

In the societies of the Exchange Archipelago, the more rigid distinction between

what is male and what is female leads these cultures to "construct symbolic forms in terms

of paired oppositions—right and left, sky and earth, inside and outside, etc." (ibid.). These

societies tend to be organized around unilineal descent which stands in contrast to the

cognatic cultures of Centrist Archipelago, like the Javanese.

The term 'house,' in actuality, resonates with at least two separate literatures that

meet in the work of Levi-Strauss. This articulation appears accidental but indeed is the

necessary implication of the relationships between social organization, kinship, gender,

and symbolic order. In the amplification and modification of these relationships by

Bourdieu and others (Moore 1994; Jean ComaroflF 1985) and the subsequent critiques and

elaborations offered by those who work in Southeast Asia (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995;

Waterson 1990, 1995; Headley 1987a, 1987b; Gibson 1995), it becomes clear that there

are several perspectives or models that have been conflated in the discussion of the House

society, making it unclear what is exactly being described by "House society" in a given

study. The interrelated and nested character of attributes of the hoiise in theory and

10

Some scholars (Gibson 1965; Carsten 1995; Boon 1990; Errington 1990; Headley 1987b) have suggested the kmship systems of the Eastern archipelago to be organized less around any structural opposition than through the reconciliation and mediation of gender difiference through a model of siblingship.

221

practice as well as built form and social order makes their explication difficult but

necessary nonetheless. To that end, the discussion below will be broken into sections,

which runs the risk of losing some of the complexity of the connections mvolved but gains

something in clarity. So for example, the house has been described as a literal house or an

architectural form, as a model of kinship, as an organization and/or manifestation of a

gender system, as a metaphor of the body, and as the manifestation of a symbolic order.

Although these are clearly interrelated and mutually reinforcing, they will be discussed

separately below in terms of the evidence from Java.

HOUSE AS BUILT FORM

The current fascination with what people term postmodern architecture has focused attention to the design of buildings in which we live and work, but the appeal is not limited to examples from awn familiar surroundings. During the last several decades anthropologists have been increasingly joined by others in taking a more careful look at the built environments of nonliterate societies, and especially the shelters they construct and occupy (Lawrence and Law 1990:453).

The importance of "the built environment and spatial form" (ibid.) has received

much attention in recent years. Before that time, cultm^al anthropologists tended to do

less of this work than did architects, architectural historians and archaeologists, although

the architecture of the house or human shelter is generally the first enviroimient

confi-onted by the ethnographer. As Carsten and Hugh-Jones describe it (1995; following

Bloch), the house stands as a symbol of the alien culture and to step inside is to confront a

"world of unfamiliar objects and strange people, a maze of spatial conventions whose

238

invisible lines get easily scuffed and trampled by ignorant foreign feet" (1995:4). But

eventually, for both the anthropolo^st and the host alike, "much of what houses are and

in:q)ly becomes something that goes without saymg." As Humphrey observes, "dwellings

tend to be thought of as 'cases' of symbolism or cosmology rather than a subject in their

own right" (1988:6). It often appears that those who do look at space, both within and

without anthropology, talk at great length about the importance of space and its social

construction more than they do any particular space or place.

Luckily some work has been done on built forms in Southeast Asia, most notably

by Roxanna Waterson (1990) in The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in

Soiith-East Asia. Waterson attempts to cover a variety of styles and meanings of houses

across the region, but just as no single description of the Indonesian archipelago can do

justice to the diversity of cultures present, neither can a survey of house styles fiilly

capture the differences within this culture area. This is particularly so for the Javanese

house which appears simple and uncomplicated in contrast to the soaring roofs of the

Toraja of Sulawesi or the elaborate roof forms of the Karo Batak houses of Sumatra. As

Carsten notes for the Langkawi of Malaysia, whose houses tend to resemble those of the

Javanese,

[i]n comparison to the well-known Indonesian example of Batak or Atoni, the symbolism seems curiously flat, the architecture unexceptional, the units themselves impermanent and mobile. Tension between a markedness and an unmarkedness runs through all that concerns the house and makes this unit's centrality to social organization always ambiguous (Carsten 1995:107).

Carsten juxtaposes the temporary, unprepossessing character of the Langkawi house with

239

its centrality to social life: "houses are at the very heart of social organization; their

material and symbolic significance is elaborated at many levels and m countless contexts;

no account of social life can avoid reference to their structure or a description of the

relations within, and exchanges between these units" (ibid.).

Several authors have attempted to deal with the symbolic contours of the Javanese

house (see House as Symbol below) and in the course of that work have rendered

schematics of the architecture of typical Javanese house (Rassers 1960[1925]; Keeler

1983). Although Keeler presents a simple house versus a more elaborate one, both

Rassers and Keeler tend to present stylized versions of reality. In contrast, Santoso

(1996) discusses three examples of the Javanese house, basing his work on actual

residences while making typological statements concerning them. It should be noted

before beginning a discussion of these various, "ideaUzed" houses, that none of the houses

in the two RT I studied conformed to this type of house; only one older home retained

some of the attributes mentioned here. Still this discussion is a necessary precursor to

understanding the role of architecture in kampung houses.

Figure 5.4 represents the house as described by Rassers in 1960[1925]. The front

of the house is dominated by a large, open room with no walls only a roof and is known as

the pendapa ("S" in the figure) which gives on to an open passageway running between it

and the back part of the house. This area between the front and back sections of the

house is designated as kampung by Rassers, as mentioned earlier. In the back portion of

the house, there is again a large main room, but it includes all the back wall three rooms:

240

the sarong, boma and sentong, although he notes other names as well.

Keeler's aristocratic home (1983; Figure 5.5) resembles Rassers's house plan. The

front pendapa is separated from the main house by an open area. The back of the house

includes an open verandah or pringgitan, and the inner part of the back house is divided

into a main room with three senthong or rooms along the back wall and a gatidhok where

household things are kept — "plates, kitchen utensils, some food supphes, lamps, etc."

(Keeler 1983:2) — along the side. The kitchen area itself is located outside the dwelling.

Keeler's two simpler dwellings include the central room with a partitioned area or jromah

(from jero for inside and omah for house; both ngoko terms; see below) along the back

wall, although the more substantial dwelling also includes a front room {omah ngarep:

front house) and a gandhok.

Santoso details the architecture and use of three houses in Java. The first is what

he calls a simpler omah (see figure 5.6), and the second is a more elaborate omah (see

figure 5.7), the home of a priyayi or elite family. His third example is an elaborate family

compoimd inhabited by members of a royal family with connections to the Sultan, and the

final example is the kraton itself the Sultan's palace in Yogyakarta (see figure 5.8). For

the purposes of the discussion here, there is no need to go into the complexities of each

example, only to touch on the features they hold in common. For example, each of these

houses has a central area within the mam room of the house that is defined by four vertical

beams. The central space within these beams is the jogan. Santoso defines the three

rooms at the back of each house as senthong, which each house exhibits in varying

241

degrees of complexity. He notes that each house form shares, in general, this distmction

between a front and back. He also mentions that the orientation of the house, whether to

catch cool breezes or collect the spiritual power of the sun, is a factor in construction.

The houses tend to have a main axis but also exhibit sidedness which has to do with

kinship and gender relations. In general though, Santoso emphasizes the importance of

the central interior of the house, marked by darkness and privacy, and the nested character

of the houses which show varying degrees of openness; that is, as one moves toward the

center of the house, openness declines.

Although Santoso offers the most complete catalog of house types for the

Javanese, neither he nor the other authors mentioned offer a description of a Javanese

house that corresponds to the houses that I saw m Kampung Rumah Putri.

Koenq'araningrat's description of the house of an average urban civil servant family is

more in keeping with the better-off inhabitants of the kampung.

The houses... were usually stone structures, built on a uniform architectural design with an open front veranda where guests were received. A central corridor with two bedrooms on either side led to a larger closed dining-room, with another bedroom on one side, usually occupied by the head of the family. The back door of the dinmg-room lead to an open corridor connecting the mam building, the dalem ngajeng {krami) or hoofdgebouw (Dutch), with the servant's quarters, winking (krami) or bijgebouw (Dutch). The bathroom (jamban) and the lavatory (kakiis) for the family were, however, located there, as well as the kitchen (dapur) (1989:259).

Yet, even this description approximates only a very small number of kampung houses.

Even the simplest of Javanese houses exhibits a distinction between front and back, for

example, the smgle room dwelling of a widow who lived not 75 m from our rental house.

242

Ibu Cicipan made her living by cooking for others, particularly on special occasions. Her

house, for example, was used to cook the food distributed by the families of the RT to

mark the beginning of Ramadan, as was described m the last chapter. Bu Cicipan's single

room included a bamboo screen that marked the front "room" from the back. A large

wooden bed was along the north side of the house", and the household goods were kept

along the back wall behind the bamboo screen. This room was actually a small portion of

a much larger, predominantly bamboo or gedeg house that was divided mto several

dwellings, and Bu Cicipan's was the smallest of these. Her floor was predominantly

packed earth, although there was an area of poured concrete. She had no back door exit,

although her circumstances were such that she did not receive visitors, making the

presence of a back door somewhat less important. Bu Cicipan got her water and did her

bathing at a communal area in the front of the larger dwelling. She had little electricity,

only a single bulb strung from a wire that was extended as a courtesy to her from the large

family in the bigger part of the house.

As a contrast, there was the large house of Pak Hormat which was next door to

Bu Cicipan's dwelling and which was described above. Bapak and Ibu Hormat had one of

u

Santoso (1996) discusses amben in his description of the Javanese house, as does Koentjaraningrat (1989). These raised wooden platforms are a frequent feature of rural Javanese houses. They fimction not only as a raised sleeping platform, but they mark off within the open space of a large room the space for relaxation, for food preparation, and other activities distinct from the more formal area for receiving guests, for example. The sin:q)le act of raising the platform serves to mark this space as separate. Bu Cicipan's wooden bed resembled an amben in style and fimction. These raised platforms are rarer and rarer in the kampung.

243

the nicer homes in the RT. There were in fact two large, elaborate. Western-styled houses

m the area, but the inhabitants do not play an active role in the neighborhood and I was

never able to visit these houses.'^ Putting outside these two outliers, the houses Pak

Hormat and Bu Cicipan represent the opposite poles of kampung houses. The middle

range is represented by Bu Sae's house.

The layout and use of the main room of the Hormat house was described above.

Ibu Hormat would serve hot tea and food from a second large room curtained ofiF from the

main room. The Hormat house clearly reflected the greater success of its owners, because

this room had a large table with chairs and contained the family television. Sitting

together at a table is not a common thing in working class homes and nearly non-existent

m the desa. More revealmg than just the presence of the television and the table and

chairs was their segregation in a room not accessible to the public, although close

neighbors and friends could approach the side door. Finally, the bedrooms of the Hormat

house were along the side and back of the house, and the kitchen was at the very back of

the house.

An mteresting contrast between the houses of Bu Cicipan and Pak Hormat is the

12

The role of these households in the community, or rather their lack of an active role, touches on the issues of class and community. For my fieldwork, m many ways, these households served as silent reference points for the kampung life that went on around them. In one case, the house was always closed and its only nihabitant was a young relative going to school m Yogya. In the other case, the inhabitants were m residence but were rarely seen outside the house. This apparent middle-class isolation from neighbors is more apparent in other parts of the kampung and is a powerfiil symbol of the effect of changing socio-economic circumstances for kampung community.

244

architectural style. Bu Cicipan's house had gedeg (woven or plaited bamboo) waUs with a

red tiled roof that it shared with the larger dwelling of which it is part. Pak Hormat's

house had masonry walls or tembok, which are associated with nicer and newer houses,

although the house exhibits the double wooden doors typical of more traditional Javanese

homes. Its roof form is srontong or limasan which in the past was indicative of higher

status.^' In many ways, the Hormat house preserves some of the elements of the Dutch-

influenced Javanese house, with its wooden doors and window shutters rather than paned

glass, while it also exhibits evidence of changmg socio-economic status and architectural

styles. The house is one of the few in the neighborhood to have a gated entry to the yard,

and it is fronted by an ornamental fence that exhibits elements of classical Greek or Roman

design m its cement posts.

One of the most stunning contrasts between my two periods of fieldwork in 1993

and 1996 was the appearance of a long, high wall along the east side of Pak Hormat's

house. Not only did this wall run directly through the common area between the house of

Bu Cicipan and the Hormats, but it served to cut ofiF access to the house of Pak Gendhut,

a retired police ofiBcer who lived behind and to the east of the Hormat house. The act of

13

Koentjaraningrat describes four roof styles ~ trojogan, srontong, limasan, and joglo ~ which in the past were used to mdex relative degrees of status. The joglo roof "used to be restricted to the houses of members of administrative service in the towns and cities or to the houses of people of noble origins in the court centres" (1989:135). The limasan roof was reserved for the original inhabitants of a village who "form a sort of village nobility." As Koentjaraningrat goes on to say, these styles can no longer be taken to mark these distinctions, but instead serve to indicate changing socio-economic statuses.

245

enclosure signaled by the wall illustrated not only the relative affluence of the Honnats but

the changing character of kampung social relations.

A final contrast should serve to suggest some of the critical features of a kampung

house because it is a comparison of the same dwelling before and after renovation. This is

the house of Bapak and Ibu Sae, w4o during the time of my original fieldwork lived in a

dilapidated bamboo and wood house they were prevented fi-om improving because of a

family quarrel. Bu Sae, Uke most kampung members, was keenly aware of how her house

looked to visitors. During my mterviewing m the kampung, there was always a constant

struggle at the fi"ont door of every house as I tried to remove my shoes before entering as

politeness dictates. I was always reprimanded and told to keep my shoes on because the

house was kotor or dirty. Sometimes the struggle was quickly over but in the case of

some houses, my hosts would literally grab my shoes and force me to wear them in the

house. This excessive interest in shoes relates not only to Javanese politeness but to older

forms of etiquette in which hosts washed the feet of those who entered (Koentjaraningrat

1989).'^ Bu Sae insisted that I wear my shoes in her old house, although I sometimes

14

The removal of one's shoes signals an equivalence m status so that those who insisted I keep my shoes, by even touching my shoes, were indicating that they were of lower status than me, and this status was mdexed in their houses as well. Those who could afiford to have nicer houses felt less need to insist that I take my shoes oflf. This is more than an acknowledgment that a dirt floor was kotor, because I was forced to wear shoes in houses with cement floors as well. The removal of one's shoes to enter a house is a complicated gesture in Java. When sitting together on the floor, one must take care not to point the soles of one's feet towards others. This convention is relaxed among intimates and it varies by class, but is very much in force at kampimg slametan and prayer meetmgs as witnessed by the contortions of older participants who find sitting in the sila (cross-

246

won the struggle to leave them outside. She also told me repeatedly how awfiil her house

was, such self-deprecations bemg part of polite Javanese behavior concerning everything

from gifts given, food served, as well as houses. If served a meal, it is just seadanya

(whatever there is, pothick), gifts are tidak seberapa (not much), and houses are kotor.

All of these comments are significant m a culture that still values visits and exchange while

it is also deeply hierarchical. Bu Sae's embarrassment at her house was partly a result of

her desire to have a nicer house, part bitterness at the family quarrel that prevented her

from improving it, and part knee-jerk Javanese politeness.

As mentioned already, the family dispute was manifest in walling off of Pak

Mongo's section from the main house where Bu Sae's family. When we returned to the

kampung in the summer of 1996, three years after last bemg there, we were amazed by the

changes in Bu Sae's house. Although we had received letters imploring us to stay with

them now that the house had been improved, we had no idea how changed it was. Gone

were the bamboo walls and the patchwork dirt and cement floor. The entire house had

been widened to take up a path that had run along the side of the house between it and the

rental house we had used. Now the walls were masonry, there were windows with glass.

legged) position difficult for long periods. The connection between the foot and status is also related to the convention of wearing closed shoes rather than sandals in oflfices and schools and then sandals at home. In an interesting reversal of the female fashion of American women who wear their tennis shoes on their commutes and then change to high heels in the oflSce, Javanese ofSce workers wear their high heels on buses, in becaks, and on the street, but switch to sandals when they are behind their desks.

247

and the floors were covered in shining white tile.

On our first visits to Bu Sae's house we never saw Pak Mongo, and thus we

assumed he had indeed died. It was a great surprise when he one day appeared, walking

out of the house. For whatever reason, never discussed with us, he and Bu Sae had

reconciled and he was now living m a room within the newly improved house. So not only

the house but the kin relations had been repaired.

The changes in Bu Sae's house show some of the important changes in the socio­

economic status of the kampung. Indeed we were struck by the number of houses that

had been renovated m the three years between our visits. But even fluther, the similarities

between the two houses show, in theff continuity, what remains important in the Javanese

house.

For example, m both houses there was a main room that was entered by a fi^ont

door, although the newly renovated house has a deep tiled porch as well, where family

members can sit in the cool parts of the day and watch the street. The main room of the

house was in both cases fimiished with chairs and a low table arranged to host visitors.

Javanese visits among people who are not intimate are stiff and formal affairs for the most

part, and the uncomfortable chairs are suitable for that purpose.

Both versions of Bu Sae's house had a separate room behind the main one, which

was only open to intimates and family. In both cases a curtain was used to separate the

two rooms, although in the renovated house it was not always closed as it had been in its

older form. Like the Hormat house, these back rooms were used to stage the servmg of

248

slametan meals; that is, food cooked m the kitchen was placed in portions on plates before

they were handed out through the curtained partition to the front part of the house, which

for these events again was covered with mats for guests seated m on the floor.

Both before and after renovations, this second room of the house was used to

store household goods such as plates, bowls, and cutlery, much like the gandhok described

by Keeler. A wooden table with chairs was present in both versions, as was the small

icebox which served to mark the family as somewhat better off than the neighbors and to

make ice to be sold or used by the family. The main difference in this room after

renovation ~ aside from the faa that is was larger and cleaner ~ was that the television

was now in this part of the house. In the unrenovated house, the television and its large

cabinet/hutch had dominated the central, front room. The back room had been used for

eating, storage, slametan preparation, and private family needs. For example, the vanity

with mirror had been in this part of the house originally, so that people combed their hair

or applied lipstick in this area. The move of the television and several of the older chairs

to the back room marked the division of activities mto formal and informal, family and

non-family. The family now spent the majority of their time in this room, leaving the front

room empty. The vanity was now even deeper mside the house, near the door to the

outside and the mandi area.'^

IS

One of the clear changes over time in Javanese house is the move to put the toilet and mandi within the house. In the past, these facilities were separated from the house. Poorer kampung members stiU bath near the river, for example (even more common for poor rural Javanese) or share one of the communal wells and toilets. Similarly, the kitchen

249

While the kitchen remained an open-air area, with only partial shelter from the

elements, it was moved from the east side of the house to the west. In general, Javanese

consider cooking a dirty business, conducted low to the ground, in areas that are not

enclosed. We were told by Bu Sae durmg this second period of fieldwork that they had

run out of money {uang habis) before they could remodel the kitchen. The important

thing about the move of the kitchen had less to do with its construction and use than with

the change in access to the house. In the old version of the house, a narrow dirt lane had

led from the front of the house to the kitchen and side entry to the house. Intimates and

family members could approach the house in this way. In the renovated house, this area

had been incorporated to make the house wider, and now a narrower passageway with

walls led from a side door to the kitchen. Although a bamboo gate had been in place to

stop access to the dirt path m the older house, this newer passageway had a wooden door

that could be locked. The family could now store articles such as bicycles in this area, and

one of the sons had set up a name card business in this narrow area as well. Only at the

back of this passage, where the roof ended did the area become taken up with kitchen

activities. Indeed the kitchen area was much reduced in this newer home.

Bu Sae's home retained the open back area where the well, the W.C. (pronounced

way say), and the mandi were located. A separate room had been built before the

area in elite homes is now inside the actual walls of the house, although this remains rarer. Most kitchens are low back rooms or side aimexes with at least one open or bamboo wall. The mcorporation of these activities within the walls of the house is surely one of the biggest and still uncommon transformations in the Javanese house.

250

renovations for Bapak Sae to sleep in. He had been ill for many years and only recently

died. This small, free-standing concrete addition was the first change made to the

property. A high wall separates this back area from the house to the north and the street

to the west. A wooden door controls access to the street. The eastern waU is the back of

the kitchen area of our rental house. As mentioned earlier, before its construction the

back area of Bu Sae's house was open to access from Bapak and Ibu Cipto's house. With

the building of our house, this access was cut oflf entirely.

The changes m Bu Sae's house suggest some of the important architectural

features of a kampung house. Most critical is a formal room to receive guests, the niang

tamu m Bahasa Indonesia. In the houses of those who are less well-oflE^ this room has to

be used for day-to-day activities as well, but an important mark of a nicer home is a room

that is only used for receivmg visitors (and hosting slametan). This room corresponds m

fimction if not form to the area defined as jogan m the houses described by Santoso

(1996). The second room behind this main room, used to store household goods might be

associated with Keeler's gandhok, but is more Ukely associated with the idea of the

jromah because of its connection to family goods, mtimacy, privacy, and informahty. The

location of the kitchen outside of the mam living area and the access to the outside

through a back door are consistent features of kampung houses. The primary changes

evident in Bu Sae's house are the movement of the television out of the pubUc receiving

area and the controlled access to the side door through an enclosed passage. Both are

indicators of changmg socio-economic position. Televisions are still public goods in

251

many parts of Indonesia, and often the only set m rural areas is in the home of the kepala

desa or dusun, that is a local leader. Local residents are generally allowed access to the

room with the television or it is put in a public area (and this still holds true in parts of the

kampung, where neighbors are allowed in to watch television). The movement of the

television to an area of the house that has controlled access is an indication of its removal

from the commimal sphere. Likewise, controlling access to the home signals somethmg of

a closiu^e to the approach of people other than very close family.

The architecture of kampung houses is only minimally reflective of the house types

described by Keeler, Rassers, and Santoso. Yet, even as they change with rising incomes

and more disposable income, kampung houses tend to retain or exhibit a differentiation

between front and back and a concern both with controlling access into the back but in

being able to escape through the back as well. For example, there was one house in the

adjacent RT that I was never able find occupied. When I asked the neighbors about who

lived there, the response was that an older woman lived there who always came and went

by the back door because she wanted to avoid mvolvement with her neighbors. Her

behavior was deemed eccentric in the best case and as rude and downright un-neighborly

in the worst. What her behavior illustrates is the key role of the front door in kampung

community, yet the back door and the flows through it in the form of women's and

children's labor and of food and other resources show that threshold to be as critical to

kampung community as the front door. Although it seems that the front is often

associated with male formality and the back with female practicality, fiuther considerations

252

of the house as a form of kinship and as a symbolic map of body and gender mdicate that

unity and complementarity of male and female may be a more appropriate way to think

about the flmction of the house.

HOUSE AS KINSHIP

The built form of kampung houses and their changes are mtimately related to kin

relations, but the house society as it has been conventionally analyzed neglects architecture

in its central concern with kinship. Levi-Strauss's oft-cited definition of the 'house'm

house societies describes it as

a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods and hs titles down a real or imaginary line, considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself m the language of kinship or of afSnity and, most often, both (Levi-Strauss 1987:174).

The house in Levi-Strauss's vision also mediates between conflicting social

structural principles such as patrilineal and matrilineal descent, filiation and residence,

hypergamy and hypogamy, which are traditionally viewed as being mutually exclusive.

The house then transcends these oppositions and transfixes an unstable union.

The whole fimction of noble houses, be they European or exotic, implies a fusion of categories which are elsewhere held to be in correlation with and opposition to each other, but are henceforth treated as inter-changeable: descent can substitute for aflBnity, and affinity for descent (1983:187).

Although the house society remains, at least in Levi-Strauss's work, more virtual

than actual, the idea has provoked flirther research and scholarship on the house society.

253

for example, the recent edited volume About the House: Levi-Straiiss and Beyond

(Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995), which includes considerations of societies m Southeast

Asia as well as South America. Levi-Strauss's work does not apply to all of Southeast

Asia by any means. Although as Gibson notes, Levi-Strauss

sees the house concept as having special relevance in the context of Indonesia. However, in Indonesia, we find houses playing a key symbolic role in a whole range of social forms, from self-sufficient, egalitarian tribes, to maritime empires, to oriental despotisms I will argue here that Levi-Strauss's concept of the 'house' cannot be applied in a straightforward way to the Indonesian societies characterized by Errington as 'centrist'.... This is because an idiom of siblingship. linked to an idiom of shared place, is far more important in organizing social life than are alliance and descent, the idioms to which Levi-Strauss gives prominence (GiTjson 1995:129).

Yet, Grinker sees the attention given to the idiom of siblmgship by both Errington (1990)

and Boon (1990) as consistent with Levi-Strauss's view of the house as solving the

problems of conflicting social structural principles. The work by Errington, Boon, and by

Gibson himself all suggest siblingship, in which male and female are represented as

essentially alike rather than configured as opposites as in marriage, to be central to kinship

m the societies they study: the Luwu of Sulwesi, the Balinese, and the Ara of Sulawesi,

respectively. The relevance of siblingship for gender categories and roles will be discussed

below. The critical thing here is the character of the bilateral kinship organization of Java

and the Centrist archipelago, and not whether these societies were included in Levi-

Strauss's original, vague formulations (Waterson 1995:47).

Work on Javanese kinship, as is typical for many descriptions of kinship, tends to

overemphasize ideal schematics to the detriment of actual kinship practices. For Java this

254

has meant a picture of a bilateral system with neo-local residence, perhaps following a

brief period of matrilocal residence, and a nuclear family organization. Koentjaraningrat,

Javanese himself is more aware of the great variety of kinship based on location (urban

vs. rural) and class, although he concentrates on the priyayi class and the elites (1989).

For the discussion at hand, only those elements of Javanese kinship that relate to the idea

of the house society and with implications for the use of space will be discussed.

As mentioned, conventional descriptions of Javanese kinship (Hildred Geertz

1961; Jay 1969; Koenljaraningrat 1989) portray the nuclear family as the ideal in Javanese

society along with neo-local post-marital residence. Yet, as Koentjaraningrat points out

himself this model is not necessarily the statistical norm. Jay (1969) describes four types

of families that compose rural, peasant households: the simple nuclear family; the

augmented nuclear family which includes elderly retired parents; the multiple nuclear

family which includes in addition to the original married couple, their own married

children or includes married sibUngs in the case of a jomt family household; and

households made up of single adults. While Jay's data shows that 74.4% of households to

be simple nuclear families, Koen^araningrat finds the third type, the multiple nuclear or

jomt family as the most dominant type. Norma Sullivan's work in 1979 showed that only

35% of the families in the downtown Yogya kampung where she did work conformed to

the ideal nuclear family (1994:118). My own work shows that the majority situation in

both Rumah Putri (only 12 of 41 households, or 29.3%, contained a single nuclear family)

and Langit Ayuh (6 of 13 were nuclear famihes, or 46.2%) is an extended family

255

resembling the multiple nuclear family type described by Jay.

The earlier description of the Cipto family compound should serve as a first

corrective to this notion of nuclear family residence, [n the case of the large Cipto family

compound, the older children were able to build on the plots of land that they were

allotted (in some cases sold to them) while their parents were still Uving. Clearly, there is

not enough land for each of the ten children to receive land, and those who came of age

earlier were able to take advantage of their niheritance. Three daughters have already

married without apparently receiving land when they established their families, although

one daughter has a home near the compound and another has returned to rent a house in

the neighborhood after divorcing. The remaining children include a married daughter

living within the natal home and three unmarried (at the time of my original fieldwork)

males. The married daughter has stayed within her family's house because she and her

husband do not have the money to build a home or move away to a separate dwelling but

also because it is typical in Javanese families that one daughter remains with the parents,

caring for them until their death, and then inheriting the house itself This leaves little for

the remaining sons of the family.

Inheritance in Javanese society is governed by both adat or customary law and

more recent koranic niterpretations. While koranic law in Indonesia dictates that female

children receive only one half (Koen^araningrat 1989; 155; Jay 1969:21; H. Geertz 1961)

of the niheritance received by males, Javanese custom usually works to give male and

female children equal shares, although Koenljaraningrat disagrees with Hildred Geertz's

256

notion that property division at death and divorce is governed by the ideal of nikim

(harmony).

As a participant of the culture I have seen and experienced various cases where exactly this stress on the nikiin value as an ideal standard for social relationship, manifested in unity of effort, harmony, minimization of open conflicts and avoidance of overt social disturbance, has constantly created suppressed feelings of dissatisfaction and the consequent breakdown of relationship m many Javanese kin groups and families (Koen^'araningrat 1989:155).

Yet, my work m Rumah Putri suggests that rukun is a motivating value in family relations,

perhaps just because they are so susceptible to competing tensions, but the ideal of

harmony also is combined with another Javanese ideal, that of giving more to those who

need more. While Koenq'araningrat's experience is with the wealthier priyayi class in

which the stakes in family struggles are higher, there is a clear tension between wanting to

make certain that all children are taken care of and the Ufe cycle and socio-economic

differences within families.

So determining mheritance in the kampung is a matter of combining the generally

equal inheritance between male and female children, trying to maintain family harmony,

but also making allowance for the occupation and life experience of each child. For

example, Bu Cipto's second oldest female child was our landlord. She was able to buy the

land from her parents and build the home, thereby reducing the natal family's plot,

although Bapak and Ibu Cipto retained some rights of access to the property. Another

example in this same family is the house built by Pak Cilik, the Pak RT and sixth child of

the natal family and adopted child of another, wealthier branch of the family. He retained

257

ties to his natal family and was able to purchase a small plot in front of his birth parents'

home and build a small house. Again, the original family plot was reduced, although the

space in and around this house remained open to family use. Fmally, Pak Apik, fourth son

of the natal family, lives in a small extension of the larger birth family house that he owns.

Although scarcely larger than a single room, this division mto a separate house was

important to the family, who were among the least economically self-sufficient of the

extended family. This division of the natal family's land is typical of Javanese bilateral

inheritance, and particularly evident in the smaller plots of land of urban areas.

The fragmentation of kampung land through inheritance is especially evident

among the poorer families of Rumah Putri. In some contrast to the Cipto family is the

Hormat family right across the gang. Both Pak Hormat and Pak Cipto were in the

military, although Pak Hormat was of higher rank. Both had large families; Pak Cipto had

10 children and Pak Hormat had 13 children. As ahready described, eight of the Cipto

children live m the kampung, and seven own or live on land that was originally part of the

larger family lot. Only one of Pak Hormat's children lived at home at the time of my

original fieldwork, and this was an unmarried daughter who had been "called home" from

a job m another city to live with her parents. As a result, Pak Hormat's land has remained

undivided. The difference m mheritance patterns between the two families can be related

to different socio-economic status. Pak Hormat was able to send most of his children on

to receive education past SMA, the equivalent of high school. Consequently, all of the

Hormat children are employed, and mdeed several have moved quite far from the

258

kampung, to Bandung in West Java, Jakarta, and to Lombok, an island east of Bali.'® The

pattern of distribution of children away from their natal houses reflects the rising incomes

and changing economy of Java and Indonesia. If the Cipto family had the resources, the

children would have Ukely been better educated and would more likely have moved away

from the Cipto compound. As it was, it was the older children who were successflil

enough to move on at all, \^^e the younger children had even fewer resources as the

family's fortunes dwindled.

The effect of the fragmentation of the larger piece of land held by the Cipto family

is to produce a family compound of interconnected houses and households as was

described in the preceding sections. Such compounds are typical of Javanese settlement

in both rural and urban areas and have particular significance for the definition and use of

"houses" and space in the kampung and the definition of family and household. For

example, the family compound is the first m a nested series of spaces that work to

challenge any strict division between public and private. The growth of separate houses

around the natal house defines an area within which family members move relatively

freely, and in the case of the Cipto family, the houses ring an open area where family

members meet when they are relaxing, watching children, and gossiping. Intimates of the

16

Pak Hormat's children tend to follow one another to new cities ~ another pattern of urban growth. In 1996 when we visited, Pak Hormat was making visits to his children in each of the cities where they have congregated. So despite their dispersion, Pak Hormat's children still exhibit the importance of extended family relations through a sort of cham migration.

259

family and other family members move easily though the compomid, and neighborhood

children have the run of all the houses. Yet, less well known kampung members may not

past the bamboo platform without compunction (Figure 5.3).

A more telling exanq)le of the nested character of these connected houses is the

attempt to define the private within the compound even though the buildings are quite

close and may be in fact physical extensions of one another. This was demonstrated to me

by an exchange I witnessed between Bu Apik and her mother-m-law Bu Cipto. As

mentioned above, Bu Apik and her husband lived in an extension of the natal house,

separated only by a bamboo wall. Indeed, Bu Apik could walk out of her front door and

look right and literally see into one of the doors to the main house not 5 m away. Despite

their proximity, the two households worked to mark their separation, as was shown on

this occasion when Bu Apik went to hail her mother-m-law. She walked to within two

paces of the open door of the natal house, stopped and then she actually leaned forward as

though there were a physical barrier to her movement any closer and called to her mother-

m-law. Although this exchange took place deep within the family compound and the

buildmgs were separated more in spirit than in fact, the imaginary line drawn between the

households was enacted in Bu Apik's leaning over it m her approach to the main house.

This tension between commonly held land and the establishment of separate

households resonates with the distinction between kinship and household and the

frequency confusion of the two.

Defining cognatic systems has also proved diflficult for they seem more to lack

260

features characteristic of other systems than to possess specific features of their own.... hi the absence of corporate descent groups or other clearly bounded social units, anthropologists such as Freeman (1958, 1970) on the Iban and C. Geertz (I960) and H. Geertz (1961) on Java, focused on the individual and the household, echoing Miurdock's (1960) criterion of the pre-eminence of small domestic groups in bilateral societies (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995:17).

As to the idea of a house as a &mily form persisting across generations, this indeed

does not hold true for the majority of Javanese, and the flexibility of kinship and

inheritance is also evident m the impermanence of the dwellings and their habitation. For

example, Pak Cilik has since sold his small house in front of the natal house to a non-

family member (not only not a family member, but a Chinese Indonesian as well). Our old

house is Ukewise to be sold, most likely to a non-family member. The dispersion of the

family land has thus begun, and it is likely that the houses that remain within the family will

change inhabitants. Pak Cipto has since died and his wife has now become a secondary

member of the household. While the married daughter was the likely one to stay on in this

house, she now has a married brother m the house as well. It is uncertain who will keep

the house over time. Just as Carsten and Hugh-Jones emphasize, both the house and

kinship are processual nature: neither is static nor permanent (1995:39). In fact, the

extended family appears more as a practical imit of cooperation within a given space and

time.

The ephemeral character of the extended family is manifest in the trah}^ These

17

Family names do not exist in Java. The closest thing to a shared name is the use of a husband's name by his wife in formal settings. Thus, it is not odd to call Pak Hormat's wife, Bu Hormat, but in all likelihood she will have a name of her own that is as widely

261

ancestor-oriented non-unilineal or "ambilineal" descent groups exist in the Javanese

countryside as alur waris, and members share the obtigation of caring for the ancestor

graves and of meeting the expense of the ceremonies and slametan involved. Although

urban trah may or may not perform these duties, in both urban and rural areas trah are

optional rather than obligatory (Koentjaraningrat 1989:273). These large multi-

generational groupings exist only insofar as its members choose to make it so.

Among the nobility, the gentry and the urban Javanese, such a kin group can also be recognized w^ere it is often called trah. As we have also seen among the peasants, it is an optional rather than obligatory kinship category. This means that not all Javanese should be organized m trah, as the Javanese ancestor-oriented kindred only has circumscriptive and occasional fimctions. Therefore only those who are in need of a social unit for the enhancement of self-identity and of kinship solidarity develop such a kin group (ibid.).

Koentjaraningrat goes on to show that these groupmgs became popular in the early

twentieth century, disappeared after World War EL, and resurged in the 1960s when they

were more popular among lower class families. The "creation" or "recognition" of a trah

for urban families is a sign of status. Not only does it imply enough income to flmd the

various activities associated, but in status-conscious Java the existence of a trah is an

mdicator of the general fortimes of a family. That is, a single nuclear family that makes its

fortunes in Yogya (admittedly an unlikely scenario) while the rest of the extended family

known as this "married" name. Many Javanese have a single name, and name changes are not uncommon. For example, if a child is often sick, the diikiin (healer) called m for consultation may suggest that the child's given name is too heavy {berat) and recommend that the name be changed. Several people of my acquaintance went through such a name change. Moreover, young people may choose a name for themselves as they become an adult, partly to signal their independence and growing self-awareness.

262

remains poor and rural has little grounds for creating a trah.

The optional character of trah was brought home to me in a discussion with Bu

Sae as we worked out a kinship chart for her family (see Figure 5.1). She is proud of her

family, especially on her mother's side, and it was with some excitement that she told me

they could be a trah if they wanted. All that was required was that they meet once a year

or so and that they each contribute some money towards that gathering. Her husband was

present during this discussion and made no such claim for his own family. Indeed, Bu

Sae's excitement over her family and Pak Sae's acquiescence was a testimony not only to

her power in their relationship but to a wider pattern of relative equahty between maternal

and paternal lines in the bflateral kinship system.

The urban Javanese of Yogyakarta may indeed want for themselves nuclear

famiUes m separate houses, but m fact, they more often live in extended families and

frequently in areas with other family members nearby. While a pattern of equal mheritance

among males and females seems the nonn, the individual family appears to adjust

faiheritance to the pragmatics of who can afford to make do without family resources and

what the Ufe cycle development is of the natal family. That is, the oldest children may get

nothing if the family has nothing when they reach the age of marriage or they may be in a

position to receive and use lands before younger family members. Those siblings who

come later may benefit from living in the family home when parents are aged so that they

receive the family house and lands upon their death. Often this goes to daughters who are

more likely to stay home or move home to take care of parents. On the other band, in a

263

large family like the Cipto's the youngest members may find no land left to build on and

only scraps to fight over. Although koranic law would seem to direct families to leave

more to male children, this too is mitigated in practice. Several families m the

neighborhood had sufficient resources for only one child to go to college. They may plan

for this to go to the oldest son, but as was the case in several famihes mcluding Bu Sae's,

the oldest son preferred another route (typically business) and a daughter was educated

instead. This pattern apparently varies by class, with priyayi and eUte famihes showing

more male preference.

Kampung kinship then is a practical, adaptable grammar, whose emergent forms

correspond to a given time, space, and class. Levi-Strauss' house society matches

kampung kinship only msofar as it captures the flexibility of kinship in its use. In the next

section the role of the house as a map of symbolic order and its rendering of gendered

space and the concomitant relationship to metaphors of the body is considered. Again, the

work of Levi-Strauss is imphcated.

HOUSE AS BODY AND SYMBOL: GENDERED SPACE

According to Stephen Headley, Levi-Strauss's bare outline of a theory of the

house society mcludes its role as an institution as well as a fetish. In the second sense, the

house transfixes and objectifies the unstable relation of marriage in societies in which unity

of the married couple has no foundation m descent, property, or residence (I987a;2l0).

Headley, along with Boon (1990), S. Errington (1990), and Carsten (1995), suggest that a

264

consideration of the social and kinship practices of the Centrist archipelago (although not

all use that terminology) shows an emphasis on siblingship rather than the marriage of

opposites m the formation of &milies.

Briefly stated the densely-populated lowland societies of Java and peninsular Malaysia with their heavy state bureaucraties and often nearly landless peasants have carved out a considerable social space for the expression of "house" through the extensive use of the idiom of siblingship. This idiom expresses and maintains the identity, the intimacy of the family "house." At the same time, it is a technique or strategy for extending the idiom of the family, i.e., sibling-styled bonding, to distantly related or unrelated mdividuals. In this sense it can be seen as a strategy for accimiulating and installing family identity even beyond the loosely classificatory family limits (Headley 1987a:210).

While a discussion of siblingship would seem to be a return to a discussion of kinship

rather than one of symbol, there is a strong and necessary connection between the idiom of

siblingship, its fetishization in the house, gender categories and the resulting symbolic map

of the Javanese house.

Before beginning this discussion and describing its special significance for Java, the

links of the symbology of the house with the work of Levi-Strauss should be explicated.

These links are confused theoretically and chronologically, and they contribute to some of

the continuing misunderstanding of the legacy of the house society for Java. Levi-

Strauss's discussion of the house society is primarily a discussion of change in the

organization of society from kinship to class. The house of the house society was not so

much a physical structure as a metaphor for thinking about social organization in these

evolutionarily transitional societies. In his comparison with the noble houses of Europe,

the focus was not Buckingham Palace, for example, but the House of Wmdsor. Still, the

265

ghost of Levi-Strauss hovers over the work of those scholars who attempt to map the

symbolic contours of the architecture of the house, not because Levi-Strauss directly

addressed this issue, but because these analyses tend to see within the house a series of

complementary oppositions. Figures 5.9 and 5.10 are reproductions of the symbolic maps

of the Kabyle house (Bourdieu 1977) and the Tshidi house (Jean Comarofif 1985) to

illustrate this type of analysis, which often contrasts male and female parts of the house.

As Bourdieu (1977:275) describes: "the house is organized in accordance with a set of

homologous oppositions — high : low :: light: dark;:day: nightmale : female :: nif:

h 'urma :: fertilizing : able to be fertilized." Perhaps the only direct connection between

these two perspectives and Levi-Strauss's work is through the notion of fetishism That

is, while Levi-Strauss sees m the house society the festishization of a particular form of

social organization, those who look to the architecture of the house as mvoking the

symbolic oppositions of a society are necessarily considering the house architecturally as a

fetish, a "fantasmatic form" (Headley 1987a;210). Separating out the various

contributions of Levi-Strauss to the study of the house, as built form or as social

organization, is not the focus of this chapter and should delay us no longer here. I

mention it here only to suggest some of the confusions in the study of the house, especially

in Java.

Returning then to the 'Idiom of sibilingship" and its relation to the symbolic

contours of the Javanese house and its gendered dimensions, the works of Keeler (1983)

and Rassers (1960[I925]) are instructive. Rassers suggested in his 1925 piece that the

266

open pendapa in front of the Javanese house was associated with male, public, political

power, while the back portion of the house was associated with the female, private, family

space. In his description, however, Rassers noted that the keris or kris, the sacred dagger

that is the quintessential representation of Javanese male power'®, was stored m the back

part of the house, which he had associated with female power. Although Rassers's

dualistic view of gender prevented him from resolving this contradiction, Keeler

approached this problem in the architecture of the Javanese house differently.

Rassers runs himself pretty ragged over the question of whether or not the jromah. or iimer sanctum, is properly women's space, in contrast to the front, public area associated with males. Because the goddess of rice, Dewi Sri, is appealed to here, and because rice is stored in the jromah. Rassers is inclined to treat this area as women's. But then he feels puzzled by the occasions on which men take charge of activities in this area. I think he has complicated matters by omitting from his discussion the kitchen and gandhok. These are clearly women's space: they balance the men's sphere in front, and leave the jromah open to appropriation by both sides. In many ways—as Rassers eventually concludes—this area of the omah mburL and the jromah especially, represent the unity and continuity of the family, as assured as both masculine and feminine roles (Keeler 1983:5).

Referring again to Figure 5.5, Keeler's depiction of an aristocratic Javanese house, we can

see here most clearly that there are three rooms along the back of the nmer house or

18

Koen^araningrat (1989) and Rassers (I960) both deal with the keris. Briefly, Rassers refers to the kris as "an organic part of Indonesian culture and, so far as we can judge from our knowledge of the facts, of this culture alone. We can observe the kris as a living cultural artifact in the Archipelago only" (1960:119). And according to Koenq'araningrat, "[i]n Javanese cultiure, an extensive cult of kris daggers has developed, of which the belief system focuses on the symbolic interpretation of the forged metal patterns on its blade ipamor\ the genealogies and legends of the people who have owned the weapon; the ceremonial system focuses on the recurrent elaborate ritual of cleaning it and the slametan sacred meals and offerings that go with it (1989:344). Kris are often a central element in a family's heirlooms or pusaka, although it is rare kampung family that owns one.

267

dalem which he has distinguished as the area for ascetic practices, a central room

identified as the bridal chamber, and a storage area. In Keeler's analysis, the room

associated with asceticism is where the family keris is stored along with other piisaka or

family heirlooms. The storage area on the oppose side of the bridal chamber is used to

keep food and household goods. In general then, these two rooms are associated with the

male and female, respectively. The central room of the three is a seldom-used room which

effects the transfonnation of these apparent oppositions through marriage as is illustrated

by the use of this room by the newly married couple and the performance of the wedding

ceremony in fi-ont of the door to this room.

In a simpler Javanese house (Figure 5.5), the jromah area of the omah mburi is

shown as one room but with three separate entrances, although presumably the tripartite

division works in the same way. Sunilarly, Waterson describes the internal architecture of

the Javanese m the following way:

In South-central Java, the association of Sri, the rice goddess, with the most sacred, inner part of the house is also quite explicit. The most important thing m a compound, and the one to be built first is an enclosed structure called the dalem ('iimer') or omah. Within this are a row of three smaller store rooms (senthong). Those to the left and right contain agricultural produce, and sewing tools or sometimes weapons, respectively, while the central one (senthong tengah) is the domain of Sri and the place vy^ere incense was customarily burned to her once a week, and where a bride and groom are seated during their wedding ritual. Placentas of the newbom are buried m front of it (Waterson 1990:186).

There are several associations that are mentioned here, for example, the role of the house

m weddings. Although most celebrations take place outside, key parts of the Javanese

wedding ceremony take place within the house (Gibson 1995; Carsten 1995; Pemberton

268

1994) and at the threshold. Pemberton describes the betel nut throwing ceremony, in

which the bride and the groom try to hit one another with a bundle with betel nut to

determine who will rule the house. Pemberton notes that while in the past this contest was

a spirited one. New Order brides make only a half-hearted attempt at winning (1994:212).

The breaking of an egg, or the seed of Ufe, with all its connotations of generative power

also occurs at the threshold. In the weddings I witnessed, the groom also approached the

house with his representatives to meet his bride, who was waiting within the house, at the

threshold. After performing the two ceremonies mentioned, they then entered the house

where a poignant ceremony takes place m which they bury their heads m the laps of family

members from both sides and ask for forgiveness. Afterwards, they are seated in side-by-

side in chairs or on small sofa to receive the guests. Since most modem, urban houses do

not have any semblance of the three room division, the chairs are placed at the back of the

main receiving room facing the front door through which the guests enter as the groom

did. Although elites are less likely to have a house-based wedding, the majority of

Javanese weddings, particularly those in the kampung, are done m front of and within the

house. The relationship of the wedding with the house may be seen in the opposite

direction too, as Santoso cites a describes a Javanese building treatise as saying; "erecting

a house is like conducting a wedding celebration" (Santoso 1996:54).

TTie association of the house with the wedding relates not only to gendered space,

but its symbohc relationship to the self and the body. One set of data which relates to the

equivalence of the body and the house is the Javanese vocabulaiy used for the house and

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concomitantly for marriage. Dalem the word used for the inner structure of the Javanese

house, is also the krama word for '1." In Bahasa Indonesia, dalem or dalam means umer,

deep, within (Echols and Shadily 1990). Similarly, the word omah, which is the madya

word for house is used as a verb to mean to be married, i.e., diomah-omahake (likewise

diemah-emahake) means to be married. This use of the word for house to mean to be

married resembles the use of the word krama as a verb to mean fluent m Javanese and thus

fiilly adult, which interestingly enough is also equivalent to being married. That is,

dikrama 'ake, means to be married. Building on this even fiirther, in the Kawi or older

form of Javanese, krama means v^e or husband. Whether the pairing of omah and dalem

as the ngoko and krama forms of house or home is a transformation of or a parallel form

to, the pairing of the krama form emah and the krama inggil form krama meaning "to

marry, set up housekeeping, to run one's home and household" (Home 411) is less

important here than the concatenation of terms that are associated with the house; I,

spouse, to marry, to be fluently Javanese, to be an adult. And it should be noted here that

the gender asymmetry m these terms is relatively weak.

The gendered symbolism of the house is also evident m the association of the

jromah or inner room with the womb. As Keeler says, "[t]he links between the rice

supply, a woman's chastity and the household finances suggest an analogy between the

jromah and the womb" (1983:8). That is, Javanese women are typically the family

financial managers and are charged with conservmg and distributing the family rice harvest

in rural areas. Keeler goes on to suggest a connection between male semen and men's

270

generative power as evident in the ascetic practices typically performed by tnale and

between the female womb and women's conservative power m household reproduction.

The association of the interior of the house with the female has also been made, and not

just for Java. Boddy weaves a careful description of the symbolic enclosure of the house,

the compound, the family, and the female and its parallel in the literal closure of women's

bodies through infibulation in her work on the Sudan (1989). According to Santoso, the

Javanese house is broken into two parts, one "portion that is wider, brighter, more

exposed, accessible, public and often predominantly male stands in front of the more

narrow, dark, protected, enclosed, private, inaccessible part associated with the female"

(1996:9). This opposition is reiterated m contrast between the dark house and light latar

or yard where communal activities occur (ibid.), and here Santoso reiterates the idea that

most ceremonies are held outside.

Waterson focuses mstead on the idea of immobility and its relation to gender

complementarity.

Immobility, then, represents a concentration of fertility, or of supernatural or political power. Dressing the wedding couple in royal fiaery suggests a symbolic parallel between reproductive and political power. Remarkable, too, is the fact that this immobility is always within a house, or else there is a particular association between a house and the person for whom immobility is enjoined (1990:193).

Yet m the Javanese case, immobility and interiority should not be understood as strictly

female or male. Instead, it has been argued that what happens within the Javanese house

instead is the symbolic resolution and reconciliation of the potentially dangerous

271

opposition of male and female into the complementary and more stable unit of brother and

sister, as was suggested in the description of the three-room division of the central part of

the house.

It is at this pomt that we should return to the debate revolving around the idiom of

siblingship and whether the resolution of competing principles of hierarchy versus equal

exchange is eflfected through the house, symbolically or pragmatically. One last issue

raised in the house of Levi-Strauss is important here and it leads from a consideration of

kinship only to the role of the house in the symbolic order and its connection to the gender

system of a culture. To wit, his notion that it is within the house that conflicting social

structural principles are resolved. Recall that Gibson finds that "Levi-Strauss's concept of

the 'house' cannot be applied in a straightforward way to the Indonesian societies

characterized by Errington as 'centrist'" because "an idiom of siblingship, linked to an

idiom of shared place, is far more important in organizmg social life" (Gibson 1995:129).

In contrast, Grinker finds the idea of the house as successful for this very reason, that is, it

provides a way to reconcile such oppositions. As he says.

It is clear that the "house," as developed in this literature, is suited to the characteristic kinship contradictions in island Southeast Asia, many of which are managed or reunited at the level of the house. But the concept of the house, m whatever context it is elaborated as a unit of social analysis, can help repair some of the problems associated with the preoccupation with descent rules, and it can illuminate new aspects of social organization and its symbolic representation. In Indonesia, for example, whereas a focus on descent would emphasize the diflFerences between societies with distinct kinship patterns, a focus on the house reveals important continuities between uilineal and nonunilineal and exogamous and endogamous societies—according to Boon (1990), these may be transformations of one another (Grinker 1994:112).

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Indeed, Gibson himself comes to see that Levi-Strauss' formulation does work for the

centrist archipelago, at least in the historic sense. As Boon has argued (1990), even the

apparently hierarchical unilineal systems based on exogamy and wife exchange imply

through their logical extension relative equality, and mdeed endogamous systems of

hierarchy m Western Indonesia and the exogamous systems of exchange in Eastern

Indonesia are transformations of one another. This very complex argument is made more

opaque by the conflation of the symbolic order mapped in the architecture of the house

and the house society as a form of kinship practices and by the simultaneous reading of

gendered, bodily, and social structural principles in the house and m the culture. No

complete answer to this perplexing problem will be proposed here, but the idiom of

siblingship and its potential for understanding gender and space in urban Java are now

taken under consideration.

Keeler and Waterson both appear to suggest that potentially contradictory

principles of male phallic power and female generative power are reconciled through their

marriage and combination m a center room m the central part of the house. That such a

marriage apparently resolves the contradictory beings of males and females into brothers

and sisters is suggested by Gibson (1995) for the Ara of Sulawesi not the Javanese,

although I would argue here that hi principle it works the same in Java. Gibson's

conclusions were presaged, again, by Levi-Strauss.

In Borneo as in Java the conjugal couples constitutes the true kernel of the family, and, more generally, of the kindred. Moreover, this central role of alliance manifests itself in two ways: as a principle of unity, underpfammg a type of social

273

structure ... and as a principle of antagonism because, in the cases considered, each new alliance generates a tension between families on the subject of residence...of the new couple, and therefore of that of the two families which it is the couple's duty to perpetuate (Levi-Strauss 1987:155).

Gibson goes on to say that one of the consequences of bflateral descent is that

"genealogical 'rules' do not unambiguously allocate individuals to discrete units which

may then be linked by exchange of women. All social relationships tend to be assimilated

to kin relations, so that one is either a kinsman or a stranger, with no room left over for

'afBnes'" (1995:131). Anyone who has tried to sort out kin relations in urban Java has

probably had difficulty determining whether persons are aflSnal or consanguineal kin.

Kampimg dwellers tend to reduce all kin relations to masih saiidara or family (literally still

brother/sister/cousin of same generation). The ubiquitous use of mbak (sister) and mas

(brother) for all age-mates regardless of relationship only complicates this. Moreover.

girlfriends are often called adhik (younger sibling) by their pacar (boyfriend; term also

refers to girlfriend). Thus, kin terms suggest that family relations within generations are

treated m some ways as a group of brothers and sisters without the diflferentiation mto kin

by marriage and by blood.

If relations between males and females within a group are treated equivalently to

those between siblings, then definitions of incest become a problem. As Gibson says, this

poses the problem of how to define incest where "shared place is of the essence to group

identity" as he claims for the 'cenrist systems' of Austronesia. If the house as both

residence and architectural construct becomes the central symbol of the social group, then

274

in some sense people always marry kin. The difficulty comes m producing enough

difiference between potential spouses so that there is no feeling of incest.

One solution is to stress sexual difference in the early years of courtship and marriage, but to see marriage itself as a process in which there is a progressive transformation of aflBnes into kin, or more narrowly, of spouses into siblings (Gibson 1995:132).

Although no smgle scholar has made the conceptual leap that seems inevitable based in the

various separate arguments about the reconciliation of competing male and female

principles within the house, I argue here that it is possible to read this transformation in

the architecture of the Javanese house such that the reconciliation of male and female

elements into a married couple is effected metaphorically through m the three rooms at the

back of the house. Although Keeler's 1983 article is only a brief introduction to this issue

and not an attempt to resolve it, he comes closes to this argument when he too suggests

that there are two competing principles governing the Javanese gender system and its

representation in the house. First, there is a principle of mutual exchange in which the

male and the female are treated as equally hnportant. In contrast, there is a competing

hierarchical principle of male dominance. For Keeler, "the tripartite division of the

house's nmer space, image[s] particularly well these simultaneous concerns with

reciprocity, on the one hand, and unity or what might be called unilaterality, on the other"

(1983:6). He sees the ascetic practices of men as complementary to the conservative

practices of women.

The jromah's division, therefore, represents a contrast between men, who must concern themselves with spiritual power and the status such power wms them and

275

their family, and women, who must carefully gather and distribute supplies of food and money, which they husband and dispense in a variety of exchange relations (ibid-)-

In a telling passage later in the short paper, Keeler suggests the sibling-like relations

implied architecturally and practiced ritually in rural Javanese houses.

Women also take prime responsibility for the first fixiits ritual celebrated at the time of the rice harvest. The ritual can be reduced, for the present purposes, to a few essentials: offerings are given to the rice goddess Dewi Sri; snacks are "discarded" to lesser spirits and pests; and the first stalks of rice, identified as "the bride," who is Dewi Sri herself^ are carried home in silence, and placed on a bed overnight. The next day, the bride is hung on the wall m the jromah, to guard over the rice harvest brought in fi-om the fields and stored in the jromah (ibid.).

And fiuther.

But there is a curious ambiguity about the term I have translated as "the bride." The word, ngantenan. derives fi-om the word for bride, groom, or bridal couple, temanten. Some mformants explained that the ngantenan are Sri and her brother and consort, Sadana, who sleep together and thereby give rise to the rice harvest (Keeler 1983:7).

While people in Klaten where he did his work rejected this account, Keeler goes on to

report that

what is curious in these accounts, fertility and a bountiful harvest are not tied to the reciprocity of sexual mtercom-se, but rather to what might be called unilateral generation. Incidentally, informants in the area who recognized the name Sadana thought of it as part of Sri's name. The duality of the couple ~ already only minimally dual, since Sri and Sadana are brother and sister — has given way to an identity, Mbok Sri Sadana (ibid.).

Keeler does not wade in on the argument surrounding siblingship, mdeed his article

predates much of the work on this issue, although the tension between reciprocity and

hierarchy he notes is the much the same as the one treated by Boon in his work on

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Balinese twinship and it clearly resonates with the work of Levi-Strauss and Gibson as

well. Yet, despite the disjuncture in time and specific topics, it is mteresting that Keeler

provides evidence for this idea of siblingship as key to gender relations figured in the

house, and his emphasis on the struggle between a unitary prmciple and one of reciprocity

is not inconsistent with the case being built here: namely that men and women become

relatively equal within the house and particularly m their mutual contribution to the

exchanges between houses. This is not to deny that principles of hierarchy are at work as

welL, but that unity and complementarity through union seem to be key values.

The various entangled symbols of house, body, and gender could easily be the

subject of this dissertation alone. Carsten and Hugh-Jones confirm the obvious when they

say: "[t]he house and the body are intimately Imked. The house is an extension of the

person; like an extra skin, carapace or second layer of clothes, h: serves as much to reveal

and display as it does to hide and protect" (1995:2). Still these conclusions suggest a one-

to-one correspondence between an individual and a house, an assumption that is in many

ways untenable m Java; that is, which single person would that be, or is it instead a union

of male and female, as I have suggested that corresponds to the house. Moreover, the

question remams as to how the symboUc categories represented in the architecture of the

house, no matter their contours, are enacted, experienced, and felt.

PLAYING HOUSE

The work of Pierre Bourdieu and Henrietta Moore provide a bridge between the

I l l

practice of kinship and the symbolic contours of the house by pushing us to think about

the 'logic of practice" (Bouxdieu 1977) and how to read the house (Moore 1986; see also

1994). It is important not only to capture how a society symbolizes itself architecturally

but also how these potentially arid maps are invoked, performed, and made real through

the living that takes place within the walls. The connection to kinship may not seem

evident, but kinship has these two potentials as well; that is, as a sterile schematic of ideal

relations and a lived network of people, or as Bourdieu terms them: oflBcial and practical

kinship (1977).

Bourdieu's description of the Kabyle house precedes and presages his idea of

habitus as Carsten and Hugh-Jones note.

Moving m ordered space, the body 'reads' the house which serves as a mnemonic for the embodied person. Through habit and mhabiting each person builds up a practical mastery of the flmdamental schemes of their culture (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995:2).

Yet, Bourdieu goes on to note that "[i]n fact, the meaning objectified in things or parts of

space is fixlly yielded only through practices structured according to the same schemes that

are organized in relation to them (and vice versa)" (1977:275.). Thus the symbolic

content of the house is read, enacted, when an honored guest is seated in front of the

loom, when a bride sits in front of the loom wall, and when a sick person is put near "the

wall of darkness" (ibid.). The linkage between the house and the body is again evident in

Bourdieu's work:

The opposition between the centrifugal, male orientation and the centripetal, female orientation, which as we have seen, is the true principle of organisation of

278

domestic space, is doubtless also the basis of the relationship of each of the sexes to their 'psyche', that is, to their bodies and more precisely to their sexuality (Bourdieu 1977:92).

The only difficulty is that the architecture m the kampung corresponds to that

described by Carsten for the house in Malaysia: "the symbolism seems curiously flat, the

architecture unexceptional, the units themselves impermanent and mobile" (1995:107). In

kampung houses, there are not three senthong arrayed along the back, and few families

grow rice or own pusaka. Nonetheless, there do appear to be some architectural

constants that are meaningflil to kampung residents. For example, there is indeed some

difference between the front and back of the kampung house which bears some

relationship to gendered activities. Even so, the general character of the Javanese house is

less about front and back than about the flows of goods and guests through its doors and

across its thresholds. As the slametan illustrates, both male and female family labor are

used to make a house fimctional: the male receives guests and oversees the distribution of

food that accompanies guests back to their homes, while the female receives the labor of

other women and distributes food out of the back door to family and friends m established

exchange relationships. Although it is possible to emphasize the distinction between front

and back and male and female, from another perspective, the house symbolizes a couple's

or family's equal contribution to the larger cormnunity, a contribution that would be

impossible for a single man or woman.

As Carsten notes for Malaysia, while the community can be seen as an extension of

the house, they operate on two potentially contradictory principles: relations within the

279

house, which she characterizes as hierarchical, with those between houses, wliich are

based on an idiom of reciprocity and sameness (cf. Keeler above).

I have shown how the community is in one sense modelled on the house, and we can see a continuity between the house, the compound and the wider community, and yet the commimity seems at the same time to be based on principles which are opposed to those on which houses are based. However, we can resolve this paradox by seeing the house as part of a dynamic process. In their internal aspects houses represent sibling groups, undivided consumption and shared substance; relations are foimd on the hierarchy of close kin, and they are dominated by women. In then* external relations houses are conceived as equal units exchanging according to rules of balanced reciprocity which are epitomized in marriage and relations between co-parents-m-law. Here both women and men as married couples may be said to represent the house (Carsten 1995:120).

Carsten goes on to suggest that households founded on hierarchical consanguinity are

transformed from and into similar houses within a community based on reciprocal

exchange through the image and practice of domestic cooking and eating. As the earUer

discussion of inheritance and kinship showed, there are indeed differences within the

family although these are often mitigated by factors such as financial success, birth order.

and developmental cycle of the family. And while the principle of reciprocity does apply

to relations between the house and the community, there is some difference between the

more general exchange with the whole community effected through the front door of the

house and the more specialized exchange with specific women that goes on out of the

back.

Waterson argues for seeing the house as the center of the a chain of associations in

social life: "metaphorical chains of association Unking women, houses, kin groups,

ancestors, the earth itsel£ and so on" (1990:196). As she goes onto say.

280

the association of the house with womb, rather than serving to hive off women's capacities as birth-givers and nurtm-ers within the constricted domain of 'denigrated domesticity,' is merely the starting-point for a wide-reaching web of ideas about life processes and the reproduction of social groupings which themselves are intimately identified with the house (Waterson 1990; 197).

Waterson is disputing the opposition of public/private and suggestmg the centrality

of the house and women in social life in Indonesia. She emphasizes complementarity

rather than opposition and reiterates the idea that it is the conjoining of the male and

female that is then considered female which is central to gender conceptions in Indonesia -

- that is, no negations but complementarity and conjunction. And as Carsten and Hugh-

Jones (1995:19) note, the house is not just about the marital couple.

It is not just about sleeping together but also about living together, eating together and dying together, not just about bed but also about house, hearth and tomb, the last sometimes a monumental hypostasis of the house itself (ibid., 19).

That is, the house has another, very practical side.

It is an ordinary group of people concerned with their day-to-day affairs, sharing consumption and living in the shared space of a domestic dwelling. It is out of these everyday activities, carried on without ritual, reflection or fiiss and significantly, often by women, that the house is built. This house, all too easily taken for granted, is one that anthropologists have tended to ignore (ibid.,45).

For the people of Kampung Rumah Putri, the symbolic character of the house

form is apparently minimal; at least, it does not conform to descriptions of traditional

Javanese houses by Keeler and Rassers but to Carsten's description of houses in

Langkawi, Malaysia (Carsten 1995:107), with their flat symbolism, unexceptional

architecture, and impermanent construction. Although all Javanese take seriously the

protection and burial of the placenta near the threshold of the house, the urban kampung

dwellings I visited appeared to share little m the way of symbolic contours with the ideal

of the Javanese house. This is not to say that there are not symbolic dimensions to these

houses, rather that their symbolic meaning is attenuated and fluid. Although the

traditional Javanese house had certain structural components associated with symbolics of

fertility, reproduction, and male and female spaces, these appear to be largely absent in the

house forms of Rumah Putri. This flat character is due, at least partially, to the

circumscribed space of urban dwellings and the patterns of inheritance mentioned above.

The symbolic character of the Javanese kampung house, 1 would argue, is realized

not through its form alone but through its connection to other houses in the neighborhood.

That is, like the houses of Langkawi, it is the house as compound that is significant,

defined less by the walls and rooms of the house, than by the paths, connections, and flows

between houses. Carsten's description of Langkawi bears a striking resemblance to an

urban Javanese kampung; that is, houses tend to be built on a common piece of property,

producing a family compound occupied by adiilt siblings and their spouses and children.

"In many respects the compound can be regarded as an extension of the house" (Carsten

1995:117). Her description of the relationships between the house and the compound is

particularly apt for the kampung as well. Like Bourdieu's idea that relations within the

house mirror those between the house and the greater society, Carsten writes:

Not only is it possible to see the compound as an enlarged house united by links between adult siblings, but this is m many respects true for the village community.... Lim (1987:93) has commented on how 'house compounds flow into each other,' boundaries between them are indistinct, and space is 'free-flowing\ This process of gradual enlargement is underlined by the fact that one term:

282

kampung, is used for a confound consisting of one house, one of several houses, a neighbourhood of several adjacent compounds, and a village of several neighbourhoods (1995:117-118).

Carsten notes that the 'image of the commimity as an expanded house is lived out at

communal feasts," which is also clear for Javanese kampimg mhabitants and slametan.

During a slametan, a single kitchen is used by many women to cook one meal that is

distributed to alL The flow of women's labor into the backdoor and kitchen area and the

flow of food out through the front door through the work of men renders the idea of a

discrete house form less appropriate for understanding Javanese houses and their symbolic

lives. It also suggests that gender relations are reproduced at the level of community as

well as household. Seeing the house as a conduit also moves our gaze away from the

form itself to the spaces between the houses, to the pathways and open, common spaces.

The incessant need to ascribe spaces to male or female remains a stumbling block

to a fixUer understanding of social space. As Carsten and Hugh-Jones conclude, "symbolic

oppositions such as these, which may stand as transformations of or metaphors for each

other, are by now the routine products of semiotic or structuralist analyses in the social

sciences" (1995). While it is clear that there are parts of the kampung house and parts of

the kampimg itself that tend to be dominated by one sex or another, this is very fluid and

subject to change by not only time of day, but time of life and community evolution.

McKinnon has concluded that the house society is dogged by "an unresolved

tension between the dead weight of old kinship categories and the effort to transcend these

in the face of the integrity of resistant social forms" (McKmnon 1995). The house as I

saw in Kampung Rumah Putri embodied such transcendance and resistance. Doors and

paths, walls and gates, front rooms and back rooms, as well as empty and lived-m houses

were the spaces and places where emergent social form and practice meet. The ghost

stories about our house tell us something of the ambiguity, if not anxiety, Javanese feel

about houses in urban neighorhoods like Rumah Putri. A house left empty and unused too

long is a house that can never enter into the flow of everyday kampung life.

CHAPTER 6

284

THE HOUSEHOLD: REPRODUCING THE COMMUNITY

Households are a problem for anthropologists for a number of reasons, historical sociological and intellectual (Wilk 1989:23).

WITHIN AND BETWEEN

The natal house of the Ciptos and the extended family compound was the stage on

which many community dramas were performed. One particular incident, late in my

fieldwork experience, had a powerful impact on how I viewed these shared houses. As we

were getting ready to leave the field, we struggled with how to split our household goods.

Although we did not have much, we had acquired enough m the way of household goods

to be of mterest to the neighbors. Long before our scheduled departures, various

neighbors had expressed interest in specific items. We planned to give to those most m

need after meeting various social obligations. Reid notes that the social debt as an

obligation as a widespread component of Southeast Asian cultures (1988), and it is true

that managing inefifable but compulsory social debts was one of the most difficult tasks 1

faced as a household manager and kampung member. Our position as members of

285

kampimg commimity was honorary and somewhat farcical, but nonetheless, we were

expected as rich orang asing (foreigners) to give something back. And of course we were

driven to be as appropriate as possible as part of our attempt to live like our neighbors.

Several lessons I had studied m the lives of others, I only came to understand fiilly

as they played out in my own life through the distribution of our household goods. As

mentioned in Chapter 5, much emphasis was placed on discretion m receiving and giving

food to guests. The importance of the back door was partially that it allowed the

appearance of effortless hosting and hid the necessary work of exchange and consumption

that occurred out of the back door. In a similar way, the exchange between households

must be covered, discrete, and effortless. Mas Yoto again illustrated this most clearly.

Yoto was the child of a woman in the neighborhood who was rumored to be a prostitute.

Bu Kasar was the unacknowledged daughter of the widow Bu Tuwa. The kampung story

went that Yoto had no acknowledged father, and mdeed the more vicious gossips in the

kampung had suggested a lottery be done to choose one. Yoto's marginality in the

neighborhood was made evident m many ways. At the time of our fieldwork, he was still

young enough at 10 to be acceptable in everyone's house, but that would change over

time. In this particular mstance, I had given Yoto a tee-shirt. It was diflBcult to gift him in

any way because of the presence of many other children and the kampung emphasis on

fairness. This constraint made most gifting a very private and discrete aflFair. Indeed,

Steve and I were amazed to discover the vehemence of the kampung prohibition on

sharing food that is uncovered between houses. Indeed, any exchanged good that left the

286

house should be covered. And so it was that I unwittingly put Yoto in an untenable

position by giving him a tee-shirt that he could not carry home. It was very poignant to

watch him try to get his gift home, and ultimately he had to leave it behind to be collected

the next day. For him to receive something from me, something he could never

reciprocate, was to mark him in the eyes of the neighbors as needy, undeserving, or

avaricious. Havmg witnessed his distress, although not fiUly understanding it at the time. I

was still unprepared for the trouble we would have in distributing our household goods.

We had over our time m kampung been most closely mvolved socially,

economically, and personally with Bu Sae's family. We had planned to give them several

large items such as mattresses and curtains. Bu Sae had m fact requested these specific

items months before we left. It wasn't until a few weeks before our departure that she

made the unusual request that we bring the goods to her house after dark, when few

people would be about. This kind of request reached absurd proportions when members

of the Cipto household asked that we pass the items we had promised them through the

windows directly mto their waiting hands. Clearly, neighborhood exchanges take on a

different aspect v^dien pubhcly observed.

The culminating event in this chain revoh/ed around our two kerosene stoves. I

had already promised one of these small single-ring kerosene burners to my neighbor, Bu

Tri, who was the married daughter still living within the Cipto household. I knew that Bu

Tri's position m her house was not a good one. As mentioned in Chapter 5, her husband

was the father of her four girls and worked only sporadically as a driver. As an in-

287

manying male, he had probably over-stayed his time m this house but was unable to

establish his own house for several complicated reasons. Perhaps Bu Tri hoped to gain

the Cipto house after her parents death since she was the last daughter m the house, or

perhaps because she had married quite young, she did not want to leave her parents home;

she certainly had never earned much money on her own. Finally, her husband, although he

did have gainful employment off and on during our time m the fieldwork, could not be

counted on for a stable mcome. My sympathy for Bu Tri and her family's tenuous

position was often mitigated by Bu Tri's own brusque attitude. She and her husband did

much in our early days m the kanq)ung to make us feel uncomfortable, yet I admired their

unorthodox attitude at the same time; Bu Tri was the very antithesis of the PKK model in

many ways.

At any rate, I had promised Bu Tri a stove less because of any outstanding

obligation and more m the hopes of improvmg her position, and then again, she had asked

directly for the stove. In our final days as we cleaned and distributed items, Pak Cipto

visited our house. As he was leaving, I told Steve to give him the stove to give to Bu Tri.

It was with much alarm and no little surprise that we then witnessed only a few moments

later through our front windows a screaming argument over the stove. Bu Tri attempted

to claim the stove, while Pak Cipto, her father, claimed that it had been given to him. The

yelling took place in the yard m front of the Cipto house, and it was extraordmary not only

for its semi-public setting (see Chapter 5) and the raised voices, both much against

Javanese social etiquette, but for the nature of the discussion. Bu Tri and Pak Cipto lived

in the same house and shared the same kitchen and hearth. We thus bad enacted before

our very eyes a most vivid example of the lack of pooling within the household.

I had suspected during my census work that several families were as recognized

within a single household by the residents themselves (see Chapter 3). According to

Norma Sullivan, "'[ijn Sitiwaru the average number of households to a house was almost

two, but... in fact many houses accommodated more than two households" (1994:116).

She notes that withing Sitiwaru, residents make a distinction between keluarga (family),

somahan (hearthhold), and rumah tangga (household). These distinctions corresponded

to a genealogical unit, a corporate unit, and an oflBcial, formal taxable unit, respectively

(ibid., 115-116). Sullivan argues that household and hearthhold are aspects of the same

social unit. Moreover, she notes that the hearthhold is the 'locus of household food

preparation" and thus falls within women's responsibility, while the household as oflBcial

unit of representation is the responsibility of men (ibid.).

The inhabitants of Kampung Rumah Putri marked the distinction between units by

noting the separate kepala keluarga (family heads) within a smgle dwelling. Still, the

amount of sharing and division in these settings was not always clear. Perhaps the most

complicated family m this sense was that of Bu Hijau, a widow whose dead spouse had

been her second husband. Although she had no biological children, she became

stepmother to her second husband's eight children, all of whom were now grown. At the

time of my initial fieldwork only one son had married and moved his new spouse into the

house. On our second visit to the kampung, however, there was a new second story to

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the house. It seems that although all of these chUdren were employed, none were leaving

the household, even as they married. When I saw Bu Hijau, she remarked on all the

grandchildren she now had in her house. In such situations, there is commimal pooling of

money, enough so that the widowed and retired Bu Hijau could build a second story to the

house, yet at the same time the individual couples maintained their own livelihood and

separate purses. For example, wdien I interviewed Bu Hijau in 1992 she reported on all

the unmarried children in the house but she called on her new daughter-in-law to report on

her own family, which included her new husband and baby as well as her own mother who

had moved into the house as a babysitter/nanny since this young woman worked. Thus

within this large family, this small sub-family was recognized. Its mdependence was clear

in that the daughter-in-law's mother had been brought in for child care rather than having

Bu Hijau or one of the other siblings take charge of this. This led to the rather interesting

proposition of two elder females who were in-laws sharing the same roof

What seems clear from my experience in the kampung is that there is pooling

msofar as is necessary to sustain the house and to take care of those less well off. That is.

school age family members, whether children or siblmgs, are recipients of support from all

those capable of contributing, while individual couples and people are also entitled to save

and keep income to themselves. Likewise, aged parents are also due support from all

those who can contribute. These kinds of contributions may, however, transcend the

boundaries of the house, a point I will retum to in a moment. My evidence for the lack of

pooling comes from my conversations with housewives and other kampung members.

290

Moreover, although secrecy about the incomes of adult children varied by households,

there was always a clear recognition that incomes were indeed separate.'

The struggle over the stove related above shows that sharing within the household

is not always easy or clear. There was also evidence that there is as much exchange

between families in other households as there is between family within the same

household. In the case of the Cipto family, for example, the retired couple at the center of

the household received help from several other households m the kampmig. Bu Sri, the

divorced mother of two, regularly gave money to her parents, as did Bu Sugeng. These

daughters did not live m their parents' household, although they did live in the kampung.

Their monetary help was only one form of aid that they shared with the natal house. It is

standard behavior for families and close neighbors in the kampung who receive some sort

of windfall from relatives in the countryside or from other cities to disperse some of their

bounty. Thus, if someone visited the countryside and returned with many young green

coconuts, it was expected that some would be shared. The very public observation of

goods going into and out of houses made the avoidance of such sharing very difBcuh.

A contrary case, at least on the face of it, was the strained relationship between Bu

Sae and her father, Pak Mongo, which resulted m their literally sharing the same roof but

having no other contact. There was no exchange of help, money, or food between their

Recent work by Diane Wolf (1992) on factory work by rural Javanese women also supports the idea that although some remittances may be made to families, mdividual incomes may not always be pooled within the family.

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sections of the house until the breach was healed and Pak Mongo was re-incorporated mto

the main house.

The maintenance of families and households is often aided by the exchange

between households of labor and people, not just food and money. Perhaps the most

consistent example of this in the kampung is the movement of women between

households. As will be demonstrated more clearly below, Javanese women, particularly

urban women, are typically active wage earners and not uncommonly invoh/ed in work

outside the home. The prevalence of double-income couples leads immediately to the

issue of child care. Yet based on my own faiterviewing of kampung women, the care of

pre-school age children does not produce the anxiety that it does in the U.S.A.- In large

measure this can be attributed to the longstandmg tradition of women being economically

active in Java but it is also due to the practice of incorporating relatives within the

household to provide domestic help. In at least 12 houses in the 41 sampled from Rumah

Putri, an extra female relative was present and acknowledged to be critical to

reproduction. These women were either younger unmarried siblings, cousins, and nieces

or older widowed mothers and grandmothers. In at least three other cases, children were

Prior to going to Java, I was involved with a large longitudinal study of the relationship between maternal depression and women's working lives post-partum. As part of my involvement with this project, I conducted mterviews with women in their homes after they had returned to work. The anxiety and concern about leavmg their children and the troubles with finding appropriate day care were a continuous theme in these mterviews (see Hyde and Essex 1991 for a description of the project; my own experiences should not be taken as representative of the study's goals or conclusions).

292

brought to spend sigoificant time in their grandparent's home, attending school in the area

so that the grandparents could provide child care. In all of my interviewing only two

women reported having to pay for child care by a nonfamily member.

Anak angkat are another example of inter-household exchanges related to the

maintenance of a smgle family. As described m previous chapters, anak angkat are

children who are essentially fostered by a member of an extended family.^ In this way, the

costs of raising a child, as well as the benefits of their futiu^e income are shared between

households. Moreover, the child itself works as a carrier of goods and services between

households, literally in the sense of consumable goods and figuratively in the sense of

improved circumstances that are shared in their own children and the greater potential

income generation for both sides of the fosterage relationship.

THE HOUSEHOLD

Why then, given all we know about the variation in domestic arrangements is it so common to find the domestic domain treated as a universaL, or at least very widespread institution? Even those who recognise that the co-resident nuclear family is a historically specific idea wiU m the next breath talk of'the' family, 'the' household in a way that surreptitiously reintroduces an assumption of universalism

This relationship is described here as fosterage because typically the child in question is aware of his or her biological parents and may move between then- natal house and that of their foster parents during their youth. But there is quite a lot of variation in this relationship. Children may be fostered by people who are not kin, and some children never know that they are not the biological child of the people who raised them This fosterage is used not just to spread out the costs of reproduction but also to provide childless relatives with an infant and to give very young, unwed mothers a chance to avoid motherhood at too young an age.

293

(Harris 1984).

The status of the household as a sociological object deserving of inquiry, a

significant anthropological concept, and an ontological reality has seen much play m

scholarly literature (see Wilk 1989 and Moore 1988, 1994 for brief overviews). The term

itself in contrast to house and home, has come to comiote an economic analysis of the

household as a unit of production and consumption. Bartlett, for example, offers the

following dimensions of the household:

Household structure m its broadest mterpretation may be summarized by four general categories of information: personnel and household composition: production activities and the division of labor; consimiption activities and inter-and intra-household exchange; and patterns of power and authority (Bartlett 1989:4).

The concept of the household thus has come to connote the most proximate

location of economic relationships. The scholarly reconsideration of the household in

recent years was prompted by a dissatisfaction with its theoretical autonomy fi-om larger

society and its presumed impermeability to economic and political processes (Moore 1994:

Harris 1984; Hart 1993; Wilk 1989; Netting 1986; Netting, Wilk and Amould 1984). Yet.

the struggle over defining and operationalizmg the household rerterates at the level of

theory the very relationships being struggled over and defined within actual households,

but more to the point, the perpetuation of the argument fllustrates the critical importance

of the household to human social life. Ironically, many of the attempts to redefine the

household have recreated the obstacle first noted. While economic anthropologists and

economic historians questioned the Chayanovian model of the jointly producing and

294

consuming peasant household, feminists challenged its status as a theoretical black box

equivalent to the 'haven in a heartless world' (Harris 1984). Both groups argued for a

more economic understanding of the inner workings of the household, putting aside the

affective, sentimental attachments assumed to attain there. The new home economics

(Becker 1976, 1981) might be seen as just such a response, but its presumption of a joint

utility curve for households recreated the Chayanovian problem. While feminists directed

attention to the bargaming that takes place within the household, their presumption of a

unity of female experience created yet another abstraction immune to difference by

experience; that is, that women everywhere bear the same relationship to reproductive

labor. A very brief discussion of these various analyses of the household precedes some

ideas on how to transcend these diEBculties.

HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS

Chayanov, who in opposition to the prevailing Leninist orthodoxy of his time, argued that the peasant economy was not based on the same calculations as a capitalist enterprise but rather was oriented to the consumption needs of the household. Since the aim of this family-based enterprise was continued subsistence, it would exploit its own labour until the needs of all its members were satisfied, and no more (Harris 1984:140).

Both Chayanov's analysis of peasant production and Marshall Sahlins's analysis of pre­

capitalist or non-capitalist economics and the domestic mode of production share an

assumption that there can be relations of production and exchange that are disarticulated

or only partially articiUated with a capitalist mode of production and can therefore operate

295

by a different logic. Chayanov attempted to explain why the Russian peasants at the time

of the revolution did not act like rural proletarians as was expected m Lenin's scenario

(Chayanov 1966[1925]; Roseberry 1989). Chayanov's theory was both demographic and

economic, and significantly, it was also a marginal analysis, as Roseberry notes

(1989:177). The ioiportant thing here is that Chayanov suggested that the peasant

household, presented as an undifferentiated unit, makes production decisions based on

meetmg basic needs rather than producing a profit or surplus; thus production is aimed at

the level of meeting the consumption needs of household members rather than

accumulating profit or a surplus. Sahlins, m a like manner, proposes a domestic mode of

production which is characterized by underproduction m relation to capacity, "because

primitives do not produce in accordance with norms of maximization and expansion but in

accordance with the socially defined needs of the household" (Roseberry 1989:142).

As Olivia Harris notes, Sahlins' domestic mode of production is particularly

problematic because of the coniiision of autonomy and market dependence. That is,

Sahlins's domestic mode of production is based on two assiunption. First, autonomy and

self-sufficiency are the ideals of household production, so that there is a centripetal

tendency in household production, while simultaneously, there are countervailing

pressures, such as political power, that produce a centrifugal tendencies. Second, there is

a difference between the form of circulation and distribution of goods and labor within the

household as opposed to between households. As Harris writes

For him, intra-household economic relations are characterised by pooling and what

296

he calls generosity, while those between different households are termed exchange, le. a two-way balanced transaction. There is thus m Sahlins' view a clear-cut discontinuity between inter- and intra-household relations (Harris 1984:141).

Thus, both Chayanov and Sahlins point towards a different type of econotnic behavior

within the household than that between households.

One aspect common to many theories of the household, is to treat this form of enterprise as an isolated unit whose functioning can be analysed without reference either to wider social or economic structiu^es, or to the natiu^e of relationship within the unit (Harris 1984:140).

It was the combination of the failure of these models as they were unthinkingly

applied to other societies and a strong feminist critique of the undifferentiated household

that led to a dramatic questioning of these models.

It is clear that the feminist understanding of the family/household over the last fifteen years has been diametrically opposed to the anthropological models of the household influenced by Chayanovian economics and Marxist theory (for example. Sahlins, 1974), and to the somewhat similar views of the household manifest in the 'new home economics' (Becker, 1976, 1981). This is predominantly because such models emphasize sharing and altruism, whereas feminist scholars have characterized the family/household as the site of women's oppression and as the locus of conflicts of interest between women and men.... One result of this rapprochement between feminist theorizing and mainstream anthropology and economics has been the emergence of a view of the household which sees it as a locus of competing interests, rights, obligations and resources, where household members are often mvolved in bargaining, negotiation and possibly even conflict (Moore 1994:87).

These reactions, and the rapprochement Moore describes, were responses to the

"supposed anti-social tendency of the household, that is, that the interests of individual

households are in opposition to the interest of more inclusive social groups)" (Harris

1984). Feminists, in particular, have attempted to show that the household cannot be held

297

as distinct because of the unique structure of non-commodity relations, and their work

was not unrelated to the work of those who challenged the coincidence of the family with

the household. Yanagisako and Collier (1987), for example, suggest that the household

should be understood as co-residence and propinquity in contrast to genealogy, that is, the

family (cf N. Sullivan above). Feminist scholars were also mstrumental in questioning the

idea of a single household head, typically identified as the senior male.

It is curious for example that in Meillassoux's work, while the authority figure is central to the definition of a domestic commimity, the source of his authority is treated as unproblematic. Women are entirely omitted fi-om his discussion of the domestic economy since for him they are by definition entirely subject to the elder (Harris 1984:146).

ft was such critiques of the models of the mteraal workings of the household that led to

questioning its external boundaries. As Harris goes on to say, "to understand how the

position of the household head is defined and reproduced takes us beyond the confines of

the domestic unit itself The authority located in a household head is not intrinsic to

relations between household members, but must be sought in wider social structures"

(1984:146).

There has consequently been a move away fi-om the socially isolated,

undifferentiated household and towards understanding the household as a site of

bargaining and negotiation with boundaries permeable to the faifluence to the penetration

of a world capitalist system. This work has not been confined to that of feminists, but

whether reworked by neo-classical economists or economic feminists these new

formulations tend to founder on some of the same dichotomies they critique. The work of

298

Gary Becker (1976, 1981) and Nancy Folbre (1986, 1988) are exemplary of these

approaches and both, while apparently from opposing perspectives, tend to reproduce

similar errors.

Becker's new home economics (1976, 1981) uses neo-classical models of utility

maximization and marginal analysis to analyze the household. In his work, Becker makes

an analogy between the household and the firm. He proposes a joint utility curve for

household decision-making such that the household deploys labor in response to

differences m marginal productivity between home and market. This logic extends to

decisions about marriage and child-birth, such that changes in costs of education, for

example, mitigate against having a larger family. Becker's work represents a shift in the

view of peasant and household economics that corresponds to a shift in the gears of

development. As Wolf notes, "the peasant, forming the bumbling idiot of modernization

theory enslaved by tradition," was than "transformed mto a hyper-rational strategist,

playing the social game according to optimal strategies"; the domestic group formerly

viewed as passive and 'lacking in rationality suddenly had its qualities reversed"

(1992:13).

Becker's work on human capital (1981) presents an advance on the conventional

view that the household/family are somehow isolated from market forces, although the

proposition of a joint utility fimction suggests an internal homogeneity that is problematic

for those interested in issues of gender asymmetry within the household. Nancy Folbre,

for example, notes that the aggregation of mdividual preferences into a single utility

299

function is inherently problematic. Although some have suggested altruism within the

household as an answer to this dilemma, according to Folbre (1988:252), this leads to the

untenable proposition that wholly selfish individuals exist outside the household while a

purely altruistic collectivity may be found within h. As she says:

There is a delicious political paradox in the juxtaposition of naked self-interest, which presumably motivates eflScient allocation of resources through the market, with a fully clothed altruism that presumably motivates eflBcient allocation of resources within the family (Folbre 1988:252).

Wolf notes that "m some sense, Louise A Tilly and Joan W. Scott's (1978) discussion of

'family economy ideology' ~ that family members work together toward the collective

goal of survival ~ is tinged with similarly problematic assumptions of household unity and

consensus in pursuing one collective goal" (1992:12). And indeed in accepting this

division, we are again presented with the household outside of the dominant social logic.

Folbre notes that this idea is at least as old as Adam Smith and is not transcended by

marxist analyses which, despite an emphasis on conflict and mequality, tend to subsume

mtra-household differences to the divisions between classes and between use and

exchange value.

Fetninist scholars, such as Folbre, in some contrast to the proposition that the

household is the site of altruism and collective behavior, have mstead looked at the

household as the site of women's oppression and of the struggle between men and

women. Branson and Miller summarize the mandst-feminist debate about the household

that took center stage in the 1970s.

300

The seventies saw a feminist-inspired debate about the relationship between housework and capitalism which clearly estabUshed an essential link between the formerly-ignored private reahn of the domestic household and the public world of capitalist production. The apparent lack of fit between household production and capitalist production, the apparent autonomy of the two arenas of activity led to speculation about the articulation within capitalist social formations of a domestic mode of production within a capitalist mode. But while such approaches had the value of stressing that household production was not simply margmal to social production, they played down the fundamental inter-relationship within capitalist societies, between the universal experience of family relations... and the relations of production in the pubUc sphere (Branson and Miller 1988:1-2).

As a result, many scholars have looked to the differences within the household by gender.

Folbre summarizes the various literatures on bargaining within the household, includmg

those who see such bargaining as affected by structural issues and those who use a

microeconomics approach, and concludes that the bargaining power of individuals cannot

be defined with reference to individual assets because such power is affected by cultural

and political implications of membership in certain demographic groups (ibid.,256-259).

Harris writes:

As many studies have shown, shifts fi-om household production for subsistence to household-based petty-commodity production, to an economy based on the sale of labour-power affect radically the structure of households, power relations within them, and the resulting changes in the power to command the fiaiits of one's own labour (Harris 1984:144).

Yet, in Folbre's own analysis, although attention is paid to differences by gender and age,

she neglects to note that these categories are not undifferentiated either. That is, all

women do not have the same bargaining power within the household. Nonetheless, the

issue of intra-household bargaining has been one avenue for looking at differentiation

within and between gendered persons m households (Moore 1994; Holloway 1984) and

3 0 1

has also been a powerful response to any presumed joint utility by household.

All of these various arguments appear in the main to be a search for the site of

unified action; that is, all actions within the household are unified, or actions within the

peasant household are unified, or all actions by women within the household are unified.

The evolution of these analyses of the household illustrate a successive peelmg away of

layers as scholars try to penetrate the core of the household. What quickly becomes

evident is that there is no core. There is no single individual, fimction, or resource that is

the household. Instead there is a nested series of social forms, none isolated fi-om the

larger workings of capital and society. For Java, this nesting reiterates the spatial

organization suggested in the previous chapter: that is, the house is just one space in a

series of nested spaces associated with increasing mtimacy, and the linkages within the

house and between houses are both simultaneously building blocks and the repUcation m

miniature of the larger community.^

Moreover, the continued search for the point at which the natiu-e of exchange is

profoundly different is a just reiteration of the same problem. That is, exchange withm the

household is guided by centripetal, altruistic, cooperation versus the centrifiigaL, selfish,

individualistic exchange characteristic of the extra-household exchange. Again, if we look

to see exchange as a series of linkages fi-om the center outward, we can avoid the dualism

The idea of nested spaces centered around a hub and associated with diminishing power as one moves away fi-om the center is reminiscent again of the analysis by Geertz (1980) and Tambiah (1985) of state power addressed in Chapter 3.

302

and either/or character of these categorical arguments. An ecological perspective is

helpfliL, as WiUc points out.

The boundary problem mentioned above has been persistent in household studies. How can we treat households as a corporate budget units when they are so interconnected and their boundaries are permeable? If instead we treat households as systems analogous to ecosystems, the problem of the discreteness of the household becomes less pressing, and even expectable. Ecosystems are not naturally bounded units either.... Closure can never be assumed, though degrees of permeability can be defined. An analogy between ecosystem and household systems therefore suggests that we should place boundaries where we want during our analysis, as long as we remember the boundaries are arbitrary (even if they are emicly specified), and specify the flows across them... (Wilk 1989:31).

It seems clear that analyses of the household need to move away fi"om a focus on pooling

and look to differentiation, but at the same time we need to avoid the easy splits between

mside and outside that just reproduce old arguments about the private and public sphere.

It is important to mention here that the moral and legal implications of this split, which

developed in scholarly treatment in tandem with its development sociologically and

historically, share much with the association of women's lives and body's more closely

with nature than with culture (Ortner 1974; Rosaldo 1974). This issue will be taken up in

more depth in the next chapter, but deserves some attention here.

The unwitting conflation of women's bodies, their reproductive labor, and the

natural has served as a source of more confusion than clarification, whether done in the

name of feminism or neo-classical economics. There is not much difference in analytical

clarity between suggesting that women are often associated symboUcally with nature in

contradistinction to the male association with culture than there is in the unquestioning

I

303

acceptance that the household represents an autonomous, single unit of production and

consumption in contradistinction to larger logic of production and society. Both

perspectives share a common legacy: the Victorian^ idea of distinct spheres of life,

domestic and public. This distinction has implications not just for the presimied division

between male and female, but between the political and nonpoliticaL, between production

and reproduction, between emotion and rationality, and between the natural and the

cultural. It will be argued in the next chapter that this particular spirt is the result of the

peculiarities of the changing social forms of emergent industrial capital m western Europe.

This cultural form has been deployed to explain the rest of the world without sufficient

attention to its specificity to Victorian Europe.

The domestic as a category is then defined in relation to a set of other concepts which mutually reinforce each other as natural, universal and not amenable to social analysis. These unspoken associations are important in that they contmually reproduce the domestic as a separate readily-identifiable domain. The very circularity by vy^ch the domestic is defined confirms the apparent transparency of this category — physiological needs, consumption, use-values mhabit a space whose identity emerged principally in contrast with another space defined by social rather than natural relations, exchange rather than consumption (Harris 1984; 150).

Even those fenainists devoted to routing such unquestioned dichotomies may

reproduce them in describing the nature of women's knowing, nurturance, and experience,

just as the moral economists may posit the same division between capitalist and pre­

capitalist social forms. As Polyani notes: 'It is sometimes said that the mvisible hand.

Valeri, in contrast, argues that these oppositions predate the modem European period and existed at least as early as late premodem times (1990:442 n. 13).

304

wielding the ideology of laissez-faire, swept the medieval concept of a moral economy

aside" (1944). Folbre adds; "It might better be said that the mvisible hand swept the moral

economy into the home, where an imaginary world of perfect altruism could

counterbalance the imaginary world of perfect self-interest m the market" (Folbre

1988:262). And as Harris notes, the unthinking association of women's activities with the

domestic leads to the ignorance of other activities:

Too often, however such identifications move beyond the descriptive to the tautological; what women do is treated by definition as belonging to the domestic sphere, simply because women do it. One effect of this is to render invisible whatever activities women engage in that manifestly caimot be treated as domestic, for example wage labour. Anyone who has considered the problem of sexual division m capitalist society knows how easily women's waged work becomes invisible (Harris 1984:151).

In large measure, it was the msights of marxist theorists and marxist feminists into

reproduction that worked to break down the walls of the separate spheres (Barrett 1988).

but Moore reviews the debate between the feminists and mandsts and finds it ultimately

unsuccessfiil (1994). Although reproduction has been central to the concept of the

household, it remains under theorized and misunderstood.

One way m which this problem of multiple or dialectical determination has been approached before m anthropology and sociology is through the animated debate that took place between the Marxists and the femmists in the 1970s and 1980s. This debate was ostensibly about the relationship between production and reproduction, and, of necessity, it was concerned wdth the relationship between the family and/or household and larger-scale economic and political processes. However, underlying the arguments put forward was the assumption that women have a difiFerent relation to the mode of production than do men (Moore 1994:88).

Moore contends fiuther that the misimderstanding of reproduction is an obstacle to

305

understanding the relationship of the household to the global division of labor. Before

taking up the issue of reproduction and its centrality to any analysis of the household,

much less human social life, the evidence from the kampung, from Java, and from

Indonesia m general will be considered.

KAMPUNG REPRODUCTION

The issue of reproduction assumes central importance in the case of Indonesia and

the state-sponsored programs of domesticity included under the umbrella of PKK. Putting

aside the issue of governmental intention, a consideration of the shifting patterns of labor

employment and utilization in Indonesia and Java alongside the development of PKK with

its emphasis not only on housewives as the ideal mothers and wives but as the managers of

community and as workers/owners of cottage mdustries, it becomes clear that one of the

benefits of PKK is the reproduction of cheap labor and the absorption of surplus labor, not

infrequently male labor. The following section is devoted to making this argument which

remains, admittedly, speculative in many ways.®

Chapter 4 presented the history of the development of PKK and its various

programs. The connection between these programs and the political culture of Indonesia,

6

The argument is speculative m two senses. First, the data, particularly statistics from the Indonesian government, should always be considered with extreme caution. As Gillian Hart notes, "[i]ntense controversy surrounds the interpretation of national survey and census data on employment trends in rural Java" (1986:681), a comment that holds for urban data as well. Second, the argimient is speculative because much of it is based, not on primary research on this issue, but on secondary and derivative sources.

306

the cultural ideal of women, and the experience of Dutch colonialism and bourgeois and

priyayi notions of the housewife were explored. At this point, I would like to suggest

some of the larger iiiq}lications of this development. Before describmg the general

historical outline of labor employment in Indonesia, particularly Java, by sector and sex,

some examples of women's work in Kampung Riunah Putri wiU be presented.

The strength of studies such as this one is the detail available about the lives only

sketched statistically. There are, of course, statistics for employment at the level of

kelurahan and kecamatan (see Chapter 3), some of it disaggregated by sex. A brief survey

of some of the working class and middle class families of the kampung offers insights into

these statistics. To present these details, I will simply describe my way down the street,

focusing specifically on the employment status of the adult women in each household.

The various economic activities of Bu Sae have been mentioned already; she

worked each morning and some evenings at the PKK warung in the local market. She was

responsible not only for running the counter but also for buying, stocking, and managing

the warung. Yet this work was only her "formal" employment.^ Bu Sae also sold the ice

made m her refiigerator and cooked and sold peanuts out of her own kitchen. The other

The PKK warung itself was organized and established by Bu Sae and two other, demonstrating her entrepreneurial skills. To start the warung, these women sought and gained funding from PKK and the government. Calling this formal employment is my decision. As with many under-developed economies, defining formal sector employment is problematic. For the purposes of my work, as mentioned previously, any work that is home based or itinerant has been classified as informal sector work, with the exception of paid housekeepers.

307

women in the family compouid have also been mentioned in previous chapters, but to

review, Bu Apik made and sold jamu, the health tonic, as well as running a small warung

or shop out of her house. Bu Cilik worked as a seamstress out of her home, after

attending some training sessions sponsored by PKK. Bu Tri did occasional piecework,

always out of her own home.*

Across the street from the Cipto compound is Bu Hormat who was one of the rare

kampung women who identified herself as a housewife and reported that this was the only

work she had ever done. Bu Cicipan supported herself by cooking for others when they

required extra help. Bu Manis, who Uved in the larger part of the building that mcluded

Bu Cicipan's house, cooked cakes and meat pies in her home and sold them on

commission out of a store in downtown Yogya. She was helped m this work by her

children living at home. She also was fiill-time care giver to two grandchildren who were

brought to her home each morning and picked up each evening. Bu Manis had moved

when we returned to the kampung after three years, and m the meantime, two of her

daughters had become involved in a cottage industry, out of a house in the larger kampung

area, making quilt covers, purses, and pillowcases. Apparently this business was the

project of one of her daughters who had been unable to finish coUege due to iUness. She

If I had been lookmg for working class consciousness, Bu Tri was my clearest example. The piecework she did for a Spanish woman on leather handbags was very poorly paid. Moreover, the woman was not particularly fiiendly or appropriate in her dealings with the Javanese. It was no surprise then that Bu Tri described her as having a skin disease, when I asked about her.

308

was the only daughter to go on to college, and she had been able to attend the government

university, Gadjah Mada.'

Living in front of Bu Manis is Bu Guru and her family. Bu Guru is typical of many

of the second-generation kampimg families. She was educated and has become a school

teacher. Her husband is a laborer. Although Bu Guru had no other employment when we

first in the kampung, when we returned she had opened a warung out of her home. On

our first trip, her mother lived with the family providing fiill time child care for her four

children. This older woman had died in the intervening years before our return.

The complex of apartment-like divisions that housed both Bu Cicipan and Bu

Manis also contained the household of Bu Berani. Bu Berani's husband ran a small

fiberglass statuary factory out of a shed next to their home, where he employed two

workers (occasionally three). Bu Berani cooked the noon meal that the workers received

as part of their wages. She had no other employment, although she had become Bu RT by

the time we returned to the kampung. The alleyway to the east of her doorway ran to a

ramshackle house in the back that belonged to Bu Kasar. She had rented half of the

building to Bu Sri, daughter of the natal household. Bu Kasar had no visible means of

9

The situation in secondary education in Indonesia operates m a logic opposite of that in the West. In Indonesia, pubhc universities are prestigious, and although the tuition may be lower than m private universities, attendance is determined strictly on the basis of grades and testing (allegations of official corruption notwithstandmg to the contrary). In contrast, private universities are expensive but open to any who can pay. As a result, children of the working class must be bright to attend university, or as often happened in the kampung, the family can afford to send only one child to a private university.

309

support, but ugly kampung gossip suggested that she earned her money through

prostitution. About hal^ay through our time m the kampung, Bu Kasar started selling

iced drinks and snacks out of the Pos Kamling shelter in the afternoons.'" It was not

much of a business and attracted mostly those sympathetic to her plight. Those less

sympathetic described her drinks as kotor or dirty and shunned her.

One of the astonishing discoveries of my fieldwork was finding out that the woman

who lived m the large house in fi"ont of Bu BCasar was in fact her mother. When I uiitially

interviewed her, Bu Tuwa claimed to have only one daughter who lived in Jakarta. She

never admitted her relationship to Bu Kasar to me, but kampung gossips eventually let me

m on this secret. Bu Tuwa herself was a long-time widow who received her dead

husband's pension. She also had the most extensive wanmg on the short block near my

house. It was a separate small buildmg in fi-ont of her house and had su£5cient supplies to

supplement any last-minute cooking needs, in contrast to most warung which typically

carried only matches, oil, cigarettes, soap and candies. Bu Tuwa sold these goods as

10

The Pos Kamling (from Pos Keamanan Lingkiingan, or neighborhood safety post) is one of the remnants of the WWII neighborhood system instituted by the Japanese. Small shelters are built in every neighborhood for the nightly neighborhood patrols that are staffed on a rotating basis by the adult men of the area. In many neij^borhoods, although the open-fronted bamboo shelter remains with the large hoUow log for sounding the alarm, no one actually sits the night watch, although this varies by area. For example, in my own RT the Pos Kamling was used as a place to stop and chat by women and children during various parts of the day. It served an analogous fimction to the bamboo platform in the Cipto compound at the opposite end of the street. Paradoxically, night watches are being re-instituted in middle class neighbors — often on a waged basis ~ to protect the property of residents. So this mstitution for the common folk has assumed a new vigor among the rising middle class.

well as vegetables, tempe (fermented soybean cake), and fruit. She was also a

neighborhood fixture because she sat m front of her warung or slept m it during the

afternoons and so anyone walking down the gang would be hailed by her. She made

extra income by renting out parts of her house. During the first period of our fieldwork.

she eventually rented out two sections, reserving one for herself Upon our retimi we

found her livmg across the street, after having rented out the entire house. She had also

closed her warung because she was getting older. She now lived across the street with the

older widow of a wealthier family. This widow was the mother of one of the few older

single women I met in the kampung. This woman was a school teacher whose family

wealth provided her with a nicer home and lifestyle than most kampung famihes. In fact,

she had a niece and nephew living m her large house as they attended university in Yogya,

illustrating again how extended family is used to distribute resources.

Other women in the neighborhood mcluded the young wife of a law student who

worked as middle person in a variety of industries. Although her main work was m

supplying plastics to shops and warung, at least one time during out stay, she had

temporary piecework that she farmed out to her neighbors m the Cipto household. One of

these enterprises was the stufBng of pillows with kapok. Bu Tri, one of her daughters,

and the daughter of Bu Apik were some of the temporary pieceworkers.

Down the street, on the comer farthest from my own house, was the house of Bu

Rajin. She was inarried to a laborer in the wood mdustiy who was gone from the

kampung for long hours every day. She was a seamstress, working out of her house, often

3 1 1

with the help of one of her children. This struggling family had trouble keeping all their

children in school at the same time due to the fees." Her next-door neighbor to the west

was Bu Gumuk wiiose husband had a job at a bank. Although she was doing better

financially, Bu Gumuk also earned wages by selling used clothing out of her home. She

would buy the clothes, store them at home, and then sell them again in various locations.

This kind of work was also pursued by a couple who lived in a tiny niche in the back of

the single school teacher's home. In the large house next door to them was an older

woman, Bu Gimdul, who claimed no employment but then admitted in an embarrassed

way to me that she loaned money in the kampung to help support herself It was clear

fi-om her manner that this occupation is not a highly respected one, although it is prevalent

m the kampung and among women.'"

Bu Gundul's household illustrates an mteresting aspect of Javanese reproduction.

Not only does she support an adult son who appeared to be mentally disabled and who

was reported to have left a lucrative job in Jakarta in this state because of excessive stres

11

Compulsory schooling is required for all children through the elementary grades, but all schools, public and private alike, charge fees. The burden of school fees is the universal complaint of all kampung families, and the difficulty in paying them twice a year is likely a significant factors in the dropping birth rate.

12

My experience m the kampung suggests that m addition to the rotating credit associations associated with various kampung organizations, there are many opportunities to obtain credit. Moreover, credit serves an important fimction m supporting working class families who have no surplus cash and no cushion for emergencies. It Ukewise is an important link in kampung networks that define and support community.

312

(stress), but more amazingly, she likewise supported an aged and ailing husband who had

years before left her for another woman. When he became sick, he returned to Bu

Gundul's house and she took him m. Serial monogamy might be used to describe the

pattern of multiple marriages m Indonesia. Polygamy is not widely practiced, and was in

fact, mostly confined to elite priyayi and court families m the past. Nonetheless, divorce

and separation are not uncommon in Java. Official divorce is rarer than separation that is

followed by other unofficial marriages, and the experience of Bu Gundul shows that often

partners move back and forth across their lifetimes.

This brief summary of most of the households in RT Barat'^ shows that most

women are working not just at non-waged domestic labor but in earning cash m a variety

of informal sector activities. The households of RT Timur will not be presented in detail

but the poles in female labor activity there should be mentioned. RT Tunur appears to

have more women in professional and clerical positions. One extended family compound

has three sisters, aU nurses, livmg with their families. Their husbands do some of the child

care in addition to pursuing a variety of informal sector activities, such as a short-lived

enterprise raising chickens. These professional women lived m the western half of the RT

along with the adjacent households of two sisters, one of whom did not work but provided

child care for a grandchild and one who offered massages out of her home for cash or

goods. Javanese women have traditionally been pijat, or masseuses, and massage is an

13

RT divisions are referred to by numbers. I have designated the two RT where I did my work as barat (west) and timur (east) for convenience and the purposes of anonymity.

31

important component of good health and the treatment of ilhess. Pregnant women

traditionally received massages both before and after delivery, and one method of

contraception and/or abortion was purportedly massage. Neighborhood pijat do not

always receive cash payments from their clients, and instead receive food, goods or labor

m exchange.

In the eastem part of this RT there was a pocket of poverty that included some of

the poorest households encountered during census work. The varieties of income-

generating activities in this area of dense settlement included laundry services, batik

piecework, cookmg, and day labor. This area of the RT includes somethiag like 18

households/families in 11 structures, while m the comparable area across the gang on the

north side there are only 3 structures with 3 households. This RT, perhaps more than RT

Barat, illustrates the extremes of household circumstance in the kampung. RT Barat

exhibits less differentiation, and the majority of the households could be classified as

working class. RT Timur includes households whli no electricity and families who cannot

afford to cook rice everyday (an index of poverty inmiediately understood in the

kampung). These households exist cheek-by-jowl wftJi well-to-do, solidly middle class

households. Perhaps the best example of the well-to-do end of the spectrum was the

woman whose husband was a judge and wdio worked herself as a teacher in the morning

and then as a seller of spices and jamu ingredients at the large downtown Yogya market,

Beringhaijo. This couple had no biological children of their own, but were raising the

daughter of another family member. They had servants and two automobiles.

314

A consideration of women's "productive" labor in the kampung is mseparable from

their "reproductive" labor. For example, m several households grandparents provided

primary child care to grandchildren diuing the day. In these cases, parents put their

children m schools m their own parents' neighborhoods so that children could leave from

and return to their grandparents' homes each day. A parallel configuration is the

attachment to a younger family's household of parents or more typically a widowed

mother as primary child care provider and housekeeper, allowing the daughter to work

outside the home. The attachment of a younger sibling or niece is equivalent, although in

this case, the female will probably only be m the house temporarily until she marries while

a widowed mother will typically stay until she passes away.

The contribution of grandfathers to this reproductive labor is considerable and

should not be ignored. Because of the early retirement age m civil service and the army,

many men find themselves without formal sector work at a relatively young age (55).

Men m this situation in the kampimg often helped with the grandchildren as much as their

wives. In other households, with large numbers of children, older children may take turns

in this type of child care depending on their own position and life cycle development. In a

minority of cases, an unemployed or under-employed husband will do the bulk of

housework, although typically cooking is reserved for women. The clear presence of male

child care providers who did laundry and other domestic chores was denied in official and

unofficial kampung rhetoric, as wimessed by the deUght kampung children had at Steve's

expense when he was caught washiog dishes. Still, no embarrassment was evinced in this

315

type of reproductive labor by other men m the kampmig despite the very gendered

discourse about ideal male and female employment on the part of the government and

kampung dwellers alike. Gender differentiation was clearer at the market. The only men

seen working in the pasar market were credit sellers, young bachelors, or widowers.

There were three general categories of male employment within in the kampung.

There were a number of small-scale industries by men with the help of their families. They

included a wayang puppet and tourist business, two fiberglass statuary factories, and a

fried noodle {mei goreng) wanmg. The majority of men m the kampung employed in the

formal waged sector worked as civil servants, mcludmg the army and the police, while the

remaining number typically worked as private sector clerks. A number of these men were

retired, as mentioned above, and often these retired men did not take up other work but

collected their small pensions and pursued occasional waged labor. The final category of

work pursued was low-waged occasional labor in the informal sector, often as day-

laborers.

What is most strikmg about a brief survey of patterns of employment m the

kampung is the concurrence of particular female patterns alongside specifically male types

of employment. In those cases in A\Wch men have stable employment that is reasonably

remunerative by kampung standards, women are likely to pursue informal sector labor out

of the home. Dual income couples, in which both male and female have professional or

civil service jobs were relatively rare in this area of the kampung, although this pattern

may be different in the kampung-wide population. Likewise, for the unemployed and

316

underemployed males, their spouses are often involved in a complex suites of income-

generating activities, typically mformal sector. It was most common among poorer

segments of this part of the kampung for both male and female labor to be underpaid,

unstable, and manual. Still, a not uncommon pattern was a female m a professional or

civil service job whose spouse had stable but underpaid manual labor in the formal sector.

This brief look at the actual situations of kampung women immediately

demonstrates several key characteristics of urban female employment, and by extension

male employment. First, it is a rare adult woman who does not or who has not worked for

wages or cash during her lifetime, whether it is working m the formal sector as teacher,

nurse or clerk or in the informal sector as seamstress, warung operator, masseuse, or

cook. In addition, many of these woman are also involved in the reproductive labor for

the extended family, whether as primary care giver during the day to grandchildren whose

parents both work outside of the home, as attached care giver in a child's family, or as

younger sibling and niece attached as housekeeper and child care provider. Another

pattern evident among kampung women is mxxltiple income-generatmg activities such as

witnessed so clearly in Bu Sae's working life. Indeed, it was clear m my mterviewing that

some of the occasional work of women was not reported as work, and many women have

special talents that may be called upon by neighbors in particular circumstances, for

example, good cooks may occasionally earn extra money by cooking for neighborhood

317

weddings.'^ The definition of what counts as peherjaan, work or job, is an interesting

topic in and of itself especially as regards women who apparently do not count many of

their activities as work even though may generate income or other remuneration for their

families. The work of a woman as a pijat or masseuse, for example, would likely not be

considered work, although it may in fact produce income or compensation for the family.

OVERDETERMINATION OF REPRODUCTIVE LABOR

How are we to understand these small-scale industries, home-based piecework,

and marginal income-generating activities in terms of the structiu^e of labor and industry in

Indonesia and then by extension Indonesia's place in the global division of labor? A

lynchpin, I will argue here, is domestic (and we might accept the double meaning of the

word here) policy evident in PKK It is my contention that the labor redundancy that

characterizes employment in Republic of Indonesia, which is due in large part to rising

population and large-scale technical changes in agriculture, has produced a growing

dependence on the low-skill informal sector for the absorption of labor that is the

motivation for the government's interest m programs such as PKK and the patterns of

kampung employment. Not only does the mformal sector work of women subsidize

14

Kampung dwellers felt little compimction in calling on neighbors to provide services typically restricted to formal sector careers on a casual basis. So, for example, a neighborhood electrician was called m to help with our problem. The only payment he received was a memento from us brought from the U.S. A Javanese neighbor might reciprocate with some sugar, fruit, or other produce.

318

under-employed and unemployed family workers, but such state-sponsored reproduction

of the labor force serves to keep labor unrest low, people fed, and overall wages low as

well. Indeed, I argue here that PKK and domestic corranunity programs are

overdetemrined by the simultaneous needs for low-wage labor for export-oriented

manufacturing, for absorption of excess labor, and for low-cost nifrastructural

improvement and social development.

Before detailing how these variables are linked, a brief description of each will be

presented. This description will be confined to the time period following Independence in

1945 because the policy linkages of concern here are of fairly recent vintage. A thumbnail

sketch of Indonesia today would mclude its designation as a low-mcome, lesser developed

country or LDC (James, Nay and Meier 1989). Per capita income is low at USS 523,

although real income is growing at an impressive 4% annually (WHO 1989). As will be

discussed further below, the percentage of the labor force employed in agriculture has

decreased over the last 30 years. The World Bank reports that each decade since 1970

has seen a drop m the percentage of Indonesians living below subsistence levels, from 60%

to 29% to 15% {Newsweek 1993:22). In the same assessment, the Bank goes on the

predict that by the end of the decade Indonesia will be a solid middle-income country, with

an annual per capital mcome of around $ 1000. More specifics regarding labor force

participation and sectoral development are presented below.

AGRICULTURE AND UNEMPLOYMENT

319

The economy of Java and most of Indonesia remamed based in agricultm^e for the

first years following Independence, and Dutch colonial control and Japanese occupation

had left the economy in poor shape. Sukarno, the first independent ruler of the Republic

of Indonesia, made feeding the people one of his first concerns, although he was

ultimately unsuccessfiiL In the years following the transfer of power to his successor

Suharto the Indonesian economy was characterized by early successes tn the rural sector

due to Green Revolution technology which led to growth in agricultural output but

dechnes in its contribution to GDP and labor employment. There was also educational

expansion, growing urbanization, and a more open posture to foreign investment ~

especially in manufacturing. Significantly, there was also a growing feminization of labor.

As Gavin Jones summarizes:

Over the past twenty-five years, the Indonesian labour force has almost doubled in size, and its structure has changed substantially. The labour force in 1985 is better educated, more urbanized, less concentrated in agriculture, less concentrated m Java, and less predominantly male than it was in 1961. There is no evidence that rates of open unemployment have risen, and average productivity and levels of remuneration have definitely risen. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of the work-force remains in low-sldll occupations yielding very low incomes (Jones 1987:244).

A summary of the conditions and causes leading to these changes follows.

In 1965, at the time of the transfer of power firom Sukarno to Suharto,'^ who still

IS

The transfer of power fi-om Sukarno to Suharto occurred for various reasons, although the proximate cause was the killing of six generals in what is conventionally described as an attempted coup. FoUowing this event, popularly attributed to the faifluence of the commimist party (PKI), Java and many parts of Indonesia were swept by a wave of killings that would leave an estimated 500,000 people dead. This bloody violence on the

320

leads the RI, inflation was out of control and poverty was endemic. Indonesia became a

rice importer after being self-suflBcent in decades previous to the war, and some have

suggested that it was the shortage of rice that was responsible as much as any other factor

for G30S (Bresnan 1993). It was in the period from 1965 to 1985 that the Indonesian

population and economy underwent the major structural changes of relevance here. Most

prominently, there was rapid structural change m which the

share of employment in agriculture... declined very quickly, though not as steeply as this sector's share of GDP. In effect, because of the slow growth and dislocation over the period 1939-66, changes in the employment structure which in most countries might occur over four to five decades have been telescoped mto about half this period (Hill 1994:13).

This change m agriculture was m large part due to the mtroduction of Green Revolution

species and technology.

Only two years after the inception of Suharto's New Order government, two high-

yielding varieties of rice were developed in the Philippines at the IRRI (Bresnan 1993; Hill

1994). Within the year these varieties were mtroduced to Indonesia, although with Umited

success initially due to the incentives used and the delivery system to the farmers. A 1968

program delivering high-yielding varieties and their inputs to blocks of villages was

canceled m 1970, although by that year IRS, one of the HYV, was the most widely grown

heels of G30S {Gerakan 30 Septembre, or the September 30 Movement when the generals were killed) has assumed a prominent position in the popular unagination of Indonesia. It was at this point that Indonesia turned away fi^om Sukarno's poUcies of non-alignment and the government and people became fiercely anti-communist. It was not until March 11. 1966. that Sukarno signed power over to Suharto m what is known as Stiper-Semar. Sukarno, nationaUst hero and popular icon, would die m 1967.

321

rice in Indonesia. In the years 1970-71, mechanical rice huUers were introduced, and in

succeeding years, mechanized weeders and tillers were mtroduced as well (Bresnan 1993;

Cain 1981). Although the government of Indonesia had established its National Logistics

Agency or Badan Unison Logistik (Bulog) in 1967, the RJ was not self-sufficient m rice

until the 1980s. Indeed m 1972, there was a crisis in rice production due to drought and

poor management by Bulog.

During the 1970s researchers concerned with poverty and mequality produced microlevel studies of rural Java that documented an alarmingly high level of landlessness, the high degree of socioeconomic mequality and its rapid mcrease, and the disturbingly high proportion of the rural population living under the poverty line (Wolf 1992; 47).

It was not long after, however, that the 6 Day War in the Middle East mtroduced

another factor into the mix With the advent of the war, Indonesian oil prices skyrocketed

and the government found itself with the capital to fund Green Revolution technology

more successfiilly. The government's 2nd Five Year Plan, 1974/75-1978/79, was aimed

particularly at achieving self-sufficiency in rice. During this period, floor pricing for rice

was begun with increases every year before peaking in 1977. It was not until the 1980s

that self-sufficiency was achieved, but by that time, Indonesia's rice production showed

the greatest increase in Southeast Asia outside of Burma (Bresnan 1993).

This revolution in the countryside was accompanied by several changes. Perhaps

most problematic was the rapid disenfranchisement of labor in the agricultural sector,

especially female labor. The Green Revolution was accompanied by several technological

innovations that had dramatic effects for women and poor rural households. The change

from the traditional ani-ani to the sickle is "perhaps the most often cited example of

female economic displacement in the literature on women and development" (Wolf

1992:48-9). The ani-ani is a small hand knife used by female rice harvesters. It is small

enough to hide in the hand and was understood to be held thus so as not to ofifend the rice

goddess, Dewi Sri, when the rice was harvested (Cain 1981; Keeler 1983). The change to

the shorter, top-heavy HYV made the ani-ani less effective. The hand knife had been

particularly suited to cutting the older rice varieties that matmed at various times. When

the ani-ani was replaced by the sickle, which is used by men, labor requirements in

harvesting were reduced by up to 60 percent (Wolf 1992; Collier et al. 1973; Hart 1986).

The other technological change with particular effects for women was the

introduction of the mechanized rice huUer. According to estimates, this change translated

into an estimated loss of $50 million m annual mcome for women (Papanek 1983).

Melinda Cain specifically considered the job losses due to mechanical huUers and found

that "[e]stimates of jobs lost ranged as high as 1.2 million in Java alone and as high as 7.7

million m all of Indonesia as a result of the introduction of the new technology" (Cam

1981:134). Collier would likewise estimate losses to agricultural laborers of earnings

approaching US $50 million annually for Java, which represented 125 million woman days

of labor (Collier et al. 1973). Finally, the mtroduction of rotary weeders replaced hand

weeding, "another source of mcome for women from poor households" (Wolf 1992:49;

Husken and White 1989:182). This series of technological changes was particularly

significant for women from poor rural households and had the effect of releasing large

jZJ

numbers of women from agricultural labor.

So while the level of production in the countryside had risen dramatically, labor

requirements had dropped oflF. The labor released m agriculture was not absorbed into

manufacturing which was growing slowly, but instead was absorbed in the mformal and

low-waged sectors of the economy. The trade, finance, and service sectors of the

Indonesian economy, according to Jones (1987), have been responsible for the absorption

of most of the labor in the years between 1961-81. The new jobs m the 1970s, particularly

for Javanese women, were m trade and services. The largest growth has been in the

financial sector due to banking deregulation and in the service sector which mcludes the

informal sector and 'make-work' and low productivity jobs (ibid.). These developments

lead to a deepening of established patterns in both rural and urban areas of multiple

occupations (see below).

The disenfranchisement of labor only compounded Indonesia's population problem

which had its roots not just m colonial era, but even before. There is some evidence for

accelerating growth in Java after the peace of 1755, but the trend is much clearer in the

nineteenth century (Owen 1987:9). This growth is somewhat anomalous; "It apparently

began hundreds of years after Europeans first arrived in the region, yet before the mtensive

exploitation and 'modernization' that we associate with high colonialism: the 'cultivation

system' in Java (introduced m 1830), steamships, railroads, and most of the advances of

tropical medicine" (ibid., 10). There are many hypotheses for this growth. For example.

[i]t has been suggested that the demand for labour in nineteenth century Java

324

increased the demand for chfldren and thus fostered population growth through reduction in mfant and child mortality (by reallocation of the domestic food supply) or through abandonment of traditional contraceptive and abortion practices. The transition from shifting to sedentary agriculture appears to be associated with an mcrease in fertility, though it is not clear whether this is a result of a lightening of the female work load or of some other factor (Owen 1987:11).

It matters less here the causes than the increase. The population of Java grew from this

early period, achieving growth rates in excess of 4% (Abeyasekere 1987:189 n. 5).

Although fertility was high in the 1950s, it dropped in the following decade despite the

pro-natahst stance of Sukarno. Then beginning with Suharto's regime, population control

became a prime pohcy issue. Oey-Gardiner (1993:203) cites statistics showing that

despite a decline in fertility over the last two decades, droppmg from 2.4 to 2.0 percent

between the 1970s and the 1980s, "the labour force and work force grew faster and at an

accelerated rate; the respective average annual growth rates for the last two intercensal

periods were 2.9 and 3.4 per cent for the labour force and 3.0 and 3.3 per cent for the

work force.'"® The magnitude of changes in agriculture, despite the decline in fertility,

has caused a large increase tn redundant labor.

The 1980 and 1990 population censuses show that the total male population aged 10 and over mcreased by 30.2 per cent over the 1980-1990 period, while the size of the labour force increased by 33.5 per cent. In the same period female labour force participation increased much more markedly than that of males. Female participation rose from 32.7 per cent in 1980 to 39.2 per cent m 1990, whUe the male rate increased only from 68.4 per cent to 71.2 per cent in 1990. Along with

16

It will be of some interest later that the success of the national birth control program in bringing down Indonesia's birth rate is partially due to its incorporation as a module in the larger community/village development program of Indonesia, and its eventual inclusion within the structure of PKK,

325

population growth and greater labour force participation, the size of the labour force increased from 52.4 million m 1980 to 72.4 million in 1990 and is expected to increase to over 100 million by the year 2000 (Wolf 1992:46). "

There is general agreement that the major problem facing the Republic of Indonesia is

excess labor (Jones 1987; Cain 1981; Oey-Gardiner 1993; Wolf 1992).

Over the period of 1980-1990, the level of open unemployment in Indonesia rose from 1.7 to around 3.2 per cent. This is particularly due to the increased unemployment in urban areas, where the figure rose from 3 per cent in 1980 to 6 per cent in 1990. A major featm-e of unemployment in Indonesia is its concentration among the young educated labour force, particularly in urban areas (Wolf 1992:48).

The high levels of unemployment are compounded by high levels of under-employment.

'The 1990 Population Census showed that around 38.7 per cent of people work less than

35 hours a week, while around 34.3 per cent work more than 45 hours a week" (ibid..49).

This labor redimdancy is characterized by several emergent trends: the mcreasmg

urbanization, education, and feminization of labor.

URBANIZATION, FEMINIZATION, AND EDUCATION OF THE LABOR FORCE

Urbanization m Southeast Asia and particularly ia Java has been characterized by

an early, rapid and sustained growth m port trading cities whh much less urbanization m

17

"Indonesia has undergone a demographic transition invoKing significant decUnes in both fertility and mortality over the last two decades. There has been a gradual reduction in population growth rates from 2.4 per cent per year m the 1970s to 2.2 per cent m the early 1980s and 1.8 per cent in the late 1980s. The rate is expected to decrease to 1.6 per cent during the 1990s. Indonesia's population m 1990 was 179.3 million and is expected to increase to 210.3 million by the year 2000" (Simanjuntak 1993:46).

326

the interior (Reid 1988; Hugo et al. 1987). These regional differences, however, should

not mask the long-term urbanism throughout the island. As mentioned in Chapter 3,

urbanism is not straightforward phenomenon on Java. Raffles, among others, noted that

early towns and cities had the appearance of a group of villages rather than the European

model of an urban center. This lack of clear boundaries between rural and urban has been

described elsewhere for Java in the past (Reid 1988) ~ despite hs 1500 years of urban

civilization on Java (H. Geertz 1961) ~ and it continues to this days perhaps with renewed

vigor.

In the Special Province of Yogyakarta, the urban and rural areas coexist in a close mterrelationship, and this socio-economic symbiosis of town and countryside is also a common feature in other areas of Java. Like other cities, Yogyakarta is spreading out into the surroimding countryside, whereas at the same time rural areas with a rapid growth in non-agricultural activities emerge outside of direct influence. These areas, which are connected with the cities through good roads and easy access to transportation, are labelled "Kotadesasi" regions (Gerke 1992:69).'^

The continued blurring of the urban and rural areas, which seems to be particularly evident

in Java, is fiuther enhanced by the growth of manufacturing in rural areas, drawing labor

from both the desa and the kota. Grijns and van Velzen (1993) note that in addition to

improved conmiunication and infrastructure, large-scale modem factories have invaded the

countryside, and traditional industries have become allied with big enterprises through

sub-contracting arrangements. The development of manufacturing enterprises in rural

18

The Indonesian word for crty is kota and the word for village or countryside is desa. According to McGee (1984), kotadesasi describes the urbanization process in all its sociological, economic, demographic and physical processes (cited in Wolf 1992:46).

327

Java has led to a paradoxical situation m vdiich the greatest percentage of manufacturing

and a significant percentage of urban employees work in rural areas. There now exists a

continuum fi-om large-urban to small-urban to rural enterprises with agricultural

employment penetrating toto cities and non-agricultural employment very important in

rural areas (Jones 1987). Nonetheless, the growth of the urban labour force was three

times (7.5 per cent) that m rural areas (Wolf 1992:46).

Between 1971 and 1985, the number of rural women employed in the non-farm

sector almost doubled, and many of these women work in rural manufacturing. As Oey-

Gardiner notes,

labour force participation rose substantially, especially among women, thereby feminising the overall labour force. Overall labour force participation rose fi-om 50 per cent for the period 1971 to 1980 to 55 per cent in 1990. Female labour force participation rose from 32 to 33 and then to 39 per cent. Consequently the percentage of women m the labour force rose from 33 to 36 per cent (1993:204).

Most scholars agree that over the last twenty-five years the increase of the female labour

force has been greater than that of the male labour force. The changes in agricultural and

the slow growth ni manufacturing have had variable, often contradictory effects for the

female labor force. Moreover, the blurring of the Une between rural and urban makes it

difficult to separate the effects for labor force participation

As suggested above, the technological changes in the Javanese countryside led to

the release of large numbers of female laborers. Most of the rural population of Java has

long pursued more than one occupation because of the seasonal fluctuations in crop

production. Gerke argues that women have been more flexible in adapting to changes in

328

employment due to the Green Revolution, because "women have always been invoK^ed in

a greater variety of mcome earning activities in the small - scale trade sector and in food

production" (Gerke 1992:96; see also Stoler 1976). Thus for many rural women, what

had been side jobs in trading or small-scale home industries became their primary means to

earn a living. Older rural women tend to be left in the stagnating traditional handicraft

industries, while yoxmger women are taking advantage of the available manufacturing jobs

(Grijns and van Velzen 1993; Wolf 1992; and see below). In the city, the female labor

force is characterized by higher levels of education and more difBculty finding

"appropriate" work. Oey-Gardiner notes, m regard to rising urbanization, that "the much

higher growth rates among total urban (7.5 per cent per annum) and urban female (8.8 per

cent) workers compared with total rural (2.5 per cent) and rural male (2.0 per cent)

workers during the last decade, are associated with the industrialisation occurring in and

around major urban centres" (1993:206). Oey-Gardiner also notes that in contrast to the

growing female, educated work force in urban areas who are often unemployed for long

periods, the rural areas are characterized by older, less well-educated female workers who

are forced by poverty to supplement men's labor: "Unlike the usual pattern of males

exceeding females in the labour force, the net mcrement among urban female new entrants

exceeded that of males between 1980 and 1990" (ibid.,207). But she goes on to say:

"Rising work force participation, however, occurred simultaneously with rising

unemployment, which was slightly higher among females than among males" (ibid.,204).

That female participation is up as well as female unemployment is clear, but there

329

are also differences by sector and age.

The decrease in the share of wage employment for women has been balanced by an mcrease in entrepreneurs (self-employed) from 25.9 to 34.7 per cent between 1971 and 1985 (compared with 30.9 to 33.2 per cent for men). For women there was also an mcrease in the category of unpaid family workers from 19.2 per cent m 1971 to 22.3 per cent in 1985 (compared to only 5.3 per cent for men in 1971 and 5.9 per cent in 1985) (Oey-Gardiner 1993:219).

Grijns and van Velzen suggest that statistics may not capture all categories of women's

work, even as more women are working.

There is a group of women who manage their enterprise together with their husbands, although the husband is very often considered the de jure entrepreneur. Similarly, between wage workers and entrepreneurs we find women m various sub­contracting relations, and between unpaid family workers and labourers there is the category of apprentices. Unpaid family work is itself an unclear category, because it assumes that productive work is carried out by relatives who do not receive financial compensation.... Besides, there are cases of people who are not related to the owner of a family business but perform unpaid work. The person concerned might be a neighbour who is helping out or an apprentice who is hoping to learn the trade. The only person in the category of family labour who never gets paid is the spouse of the owner/entrepreneur (1993:220).

Jones writes that the overlapping character of agriculture, manufacturing, and service

sector makes interpretation of trends difficult; a problem that is compounded by "the

overlapping of these occupations with household maintenance, which is not classified as

an economic activity at all" (1987:277). B. White noted an increase m the service sector

which he takes to mclude activities that include "a large and growing group of relatively

well educated 'professional, administrative and managerial' salaried workers." including

particularly government employees like teachers, rural bank oflBcials, police and military.

local government oflBcials, health service workers (986:55). But this sector also includes

330

"those involved in personal rather than public services, a heterogeneous collection of

'informal sector' activities generally characterized by low labour incomes: domestic

servants, washerwomen, hairdressers, midwifes, masseurs/masseuses, various kinds of

repart services..." (1986:55).

Grijns and van Velzen suggest that the type and scale of industry, and the woman's

class background and life cycle all have some effect on the employment she is able to gam.

Again, young women and gkls often find work in modem medium and large-scale

factories and foreign-owned export industries, as well as in modem, domestically owned

industries where the productive processes are all concentrated within one unit.

There is another type of industry, which tends to be domestically owned and to have developed fi^om existing, smaller enterprises. Factories of this kind are characterised by extensive use of sub-contracting and putting-out arrangements. Here women and girls also work as employees, but more often as domestic out­workers (Grijns and van Velzen 1993:220-1).

They conclude that the smaller the scale of enterprise and the less capital-intensive the

production process, the more varied women's work status. They also note the apparent

contradiction between the higher or middle-class background of the young women in rural

areas who piu-sue factory labor under less than adequate conditions.

Oey-Gardiner (1993) reiterates that the boundaries between entrepreneurs, wage

workers and unpaid family labourers tend to become more complex with the increasing

fragmentation of the labour force as is evident in the diflFerent sub-contracting

relationships. She agrees that the chances of becommg an entrepreneur, wage worker or

family labourer are related to type of mdustry and scale of enterprise, class background

and the women's life cycle.

With the growing variation m rural manufacturing, life cycle has become a more important factor. Employment in modem industry, for instance, is open only to young, unmarried women. Older women have to rely on their relatives for a job, or work as self-employed small entrepreneurs. Individual women experience more changes m type of work and work status during their life (Oey-Gardiner 1993:228).

Grijns and van Velzen outline a typical labor history for a woman by life cycle.

Young girls start as &mily workers, helpmg with domestic work and with family-level

production. They may be wage workers from a very young age in family enterprise.

Bigger factories hire girls in their teens and early twenties, and entrepreneurialism is rare

among young, unmarried women. Home mdustries require space and consequently are

typically associated with older women who have children and have access to house space.

Women in this stage of life may also work in nearby small-scale residentially based

enterprises that attract young mothers who need flexibility so that they can go home to

check on their children. Women with more than two children are less flexible, and so

often look for sub-contracting work to do out of their home or engage m family labor

instead. Women with older, school-age children tend to become entrepreneurs and often

have larger enterprises. Elderly women are the worst oflf; they are often forced to become

small home-based entrepreneurs selling their own goods or handicraft workers of

traditional goods.

If we compare women to men, there is a trend for women to be found more often in the stagnating, unproductive sectors. Within each branch of industry, there is a tendency for women to work at the bottom end and m the smallest enterprises (Grijns and van Velzen 1993:223).

Women, according to Grijns and van Velzen, tend to lack of capital, operate out of their

own houses and sell in local markets, lack access to family labour, work m sectors where

the demand for products is seasonal, and have less access to management and skills

training. Similarly, the constraints for unpaid family laborers are weak bargaining position,

lack of access to skill formation and information, vulnerability to inadequate conditions.

and often exclusion from access to training and credit programs.

The urbanization and feminization of the labor market is matched and in many

ways promoted by the rising levels of education among the yoimg in urban areas. Despite

the clear evidence for the redundancy of female labor, particularly m rural areas, several

authors conclude that the long time spent by youths looking for employment is the salient

feature of the Indonesian labor market profile.

The unemployed are mainly the young who tend to gravitate toward urban centres and this raises important socio-political concerns. However, this is basically a flow rather than a stock problem, as by age 30 unemployment has akeady fallen. Even the better-educated, new entrants mto the labour market eventually adjust their expectations of'appropriate' jobs and wages (Oey-Gardiner 1993:204).

Jones (1987) notes that unemployment among young is a structural fact of life. Most of

these unemployed youths are supported by family and friends, and they are more likely

than older unemployed to Uve in a household with at least one working member (Oey-

Gardiner 1993). Yet, even this feature of the Indonesian labor force is not unrelated to

female unemployment. That is, the ability to support young unemployed males and

females is related to the unpaid family labor as well as informal sector labor of females.

The blurring between the rural and urban sectors, particularly evident m and

around Yogyakarta, is similar to the blurring between paid and unpaid work for many.

What is clear in considering the situation of labor m Java is that there is redundant labor,

high levels of female participation but also unetaployment, and a growing trend toward

structural unemployment because of increasing skill levels without adequate opportunities

for the young.

PKK AND LKMD

Chapter 4 dealt at some length with the development of PKK and its relationship

to other programs for national development. The tendency for revolutionary or popular

movements to be taken over by the government, emptied of content, and retained only in

form was noted. The chronology of the development of PKK as a government program is

of some interest to the argument here that the Republic of Indonesia gains in multiple

ways from the movement of formerly active female labor out of formal sector productive

work and into informal sector, home-based productive and reproductive labor. As was

mentioned in Chapter 4, the original home economics seminar that is conventionally taken

to be the basis for PKK in Indonesia was hosted in 1957. Yet, the institution and

promulgation of PKK programs did not occur until much later. It is perhaps not

surprising that the period of the early to late 1970s that produced the series of

technological and labor changes in the countryside was followed closely by the period

when the programs of PKK were mtensified and extensified. According to Gerke (1992),

PKK was institutionalized in 1973, although the LSD was introduced in the 1950s. It was

334

during the second 5-year plan (1974-79) that the focus on women was mtensified.

Indonesia's second five year plan (Replita II, 1974-79) had an intensified focus on the role and functions of women.... The significance of family welfare and family planning, and the central aim to improve living standards and social welfare (Rep. of Indonesia 1974:94) seems to have increased governmental awareness of women's groups and organizations.... This showed that state and women leadership supposed a close connection between activities of women's organizations, the National Family Planning Program (KB) and the Family Welfare Program (PKK). By winning women's organizations to propagandize these two major state programs, the government had found during the first half of the 1970s a successfid way to mfiise the new development blueprint into the brains and hearts of the Indonesian women (Gerke 1992:31).

Gerke notes that the establishment of PKK was important not only for the village but for

the urban kampung as well.

The simultaneous increase m state intervention in the agricultural sector which led

to the disenfiranchisement of female labor through changing technological and social

relations at the same time that PKK programs appeared that aimed at encouraging women

to stay home and support their families appears more than coincidental. The scale of PKK

once it was nationalized in the early 1970s suggests its importance to the government:

"when one considers that there is a PKK m each one of the nearly 700,000 villages in

Indonesia, and that two-thirds of government fimds for women in Indonesia are allotted to

PKK, the unpUcations are great" (Suryakusuma 1991:55). One can, however, argue that

the government's desire for national development of human and productive resources

could logically lead to these outcomes as well. Indeed, no hypothesis of a governmental

conspiracy is oflFered here. Instead, the near simultaneous release of female labor and the

institution of programs aimed at domesticity has many causes and likewise multiple

effects. Yet, it is clear that the government of Indonesia does see PKK as having

economic impUcations. As Suryakusuma writes:

While PKK is associated with women, it is ultimately directed at families. The family supports society and the state in three ways: first, as an economic unit, a place for reproduction, formation of a work force and also as an arena for consumption; secondly, as 'bi-social' unit, namely where the biological relationship of mother-father-children are given a social construction; thirdly, it provides the venue for the formation of an ideological unit ~ a system of values, beliefs, reUgion, social traditions, culture and conservatism mculcated since childhood (1991:58).

Moreover, PKK's prominent role is typically taken to be in the countryside, the place

where labor dislocation was the most prominent following the Green Revolution.

THE INFORMAL SECTOR, COTTAGE DVDUSTRtES, AND MULTIPLE OCCUPATIONS

Several trends were evident in the employment histories and current employment

practices of the women in Kampung Rumah Putri. First, many women were employed as

professionals in the service sector, as teachers, nurses, and ofiBce workers. Yet, the simple

majority of women were involved m informal sector work and many combined several

jobs, often with flexible or seasonal demands. This strategy of multiple and/or flexible

work situations was not uncommon in the countryside as was mentioned above, but it

seemed to be quite common m the kampung as well.

This tendency to combine several occupations, perhaps including both formal and

informal labor, surely reflects the lack of employment avaUable, plus the need to

supplement incomes and work around the changing demands of family. The other option

JJO

exercised by women in the kampung iDustrates the superfluity of male labor as welL and

that is the small-scale family enterprise. There were two fiberglass statue-making

enterprises in the two RTs where I focused my work, as well as a puppet-making shop

two doors down. In these enterprises, family members worked in the enterprise, the adult

female often cooking for the workers, for example. In this case, female reproductive labor

is their non-waged contribution to a family enterprise.

The diversity of occupations is indicative of the surplus labor in Java.

[T]he role of trade in particular and also of services and manufacturing has become more prominent. Together these three categories have absorbed an increasing share of the work force, rising fi-om 29 to 40 per cent. There is also a trend towards greater diversity m jobs as other and smaller industrial categories are absorbing increasing numbers of workers; their share has risen fi-om 5 to 10 per cent. Greater diversity in economic activities was enjoyed by urban workers while rural areas were mainly characterized by a decline in concentration in agriculture (Oey-Gardiner 1993:207).

Jones notes that the trade and service sectors have always been Important to labor

absorption but have become even more important m the last two decades: "The dominance

of trade and services in providing new jobs m the 1970s was especially marked in Java and

among females; among females m Java, they provided three-quarters of all new jobs (Jones

1987:277). Gerke cites research done by the Population Studies Center m Yogyakarta

identifying 12 different types of traders, 81% of them women, in a survey of947 traders in

an area close to Yogya (1992:77). As Gerke also notes, "trade besides household industry

is, the only sector of rural employment, where women are in the majority" (ibid.). Norma

Sullivan reports some figures for the employment of women in the downtown kampung

/

where she did her work.

In 1979 only about 40 per cent of respondents had formal employment, the majority working in the informal economy. Within the formal sector, nearly 70 per cent of occupations were in private industry with only 31.4 per cent of respondents holding govenunent positions of any kind. In the informal sector, the most common, jobs were in small business (111 = 46 per cent), casual manual labouring (58 = 24 per cent) and prostitution (23 prostitutes + 23 pimps = 46 = 19 per cent) (1994:34).

Remember that Kampung Kalasan where Sullivan did her work was poorer and more

diverse than Kampimg Rumah Putri.

The multiple occupations of women, reported by Sullivan, were not always readily

apparent or admitted by her respondents.

[M]any people m non-working categories worked but did not wish to publicise the fact. This was true of many women describing themselves m my survey simply as 'housekeepers'. Almost all kampimg women m that category (and, in fact, in several others) would have earned income for their families at sometime every year; most appeared to be doing so on a regular basis ~ sellmg home-cooked food, reselling batik fabrics, sewing, cleaning, cooking for money and so on. Yet they would deny that their paid extra-domestic activities were 'proper' work, because popular and ofGcial gender ideologies persuaded them that proper work was done by those working outside the home and community, ideally by men. A minority of better-oflE" married Javanese women wishmg to give the impression that their lives and families were modem and progressive m contemporary ideological terms, flatly denied that they engaged in home-based moneymaking activities. They did mdeed earn money at home, but it was important for their own sense of identity for their husbands to be seen as the sole providers and their families affluent and middle class (Sullivan 1994:33).

Dififerences m reporting employment are related to issues of class and status production to

which we will turn momentarily. The important point here is that the multiple occupations

characteristic of rural Javanese, especially women, which was mtensified following the

introduction of Green Revolution technologies, is also common in the city. In this case.

o JJO

the mformal sector, trade, and service jobs work to soak up excess labor and to provide

women with enough mcome to make ends meet. Gavin Jones describes the trade and

service sector as including a wide range of activities, from the informal sector to high

finance and international bankmg. "The service sector is represented in both the most

depressingly 'make work' and low-productivity end of the scale (street-vending of combs,

cigarettes, kitchen utensils and clothing; cutting hair under the bridge) and in the most

dynamic growth areas of banking and international trade" (Jones 1987:279-80).

As for tradmg, while rural women have long dominated the trading sector in Java

(Dewey 1962), urban women are often traders as well. My own mterviewing in the

Rumah Putri pasar showed that only 8 of the 67 women who regularly worked there

actually lived in Rumah Putri. The typical profile of the market woman was a rural

woman whose children were school aged at least. There were some unmarried women,

but many fewer than the older middle aged to elderly trader. The two market women who

lived in Rumah Putri sold higher end products that were packaged and sold for more

money or sold rarer, more expensive produce. For the most part, the women in the

Rumah Putri pasar were referred to as bakul (market seller), which has connotations of

poverty and low status, and most, but not all, were indeed poor rural women. My

evidence suggests that those women fi-om the kampung who sold goods, clothing and

food, did it out of their own homes or in locations far from the kampung. Wolf suggests

that trading among women differs by class; that is, traders occur in all classes but differ by

goods and capital investment, and there is much circular migration by women who are

339

active, perhaps more than men. These traders often go for three month stints in Jakarta

selling speciality goods, a trend that has intensified due to the availability of more and

better transportation (Wolf 1992). Carey and Houben also suggest that court women

were actively involved in trade despite their relative circumscription within the confines of

the sultan's palace (1987).

Female labor in the kampung was also used in subcontracting, as shown by the

handbags made on a piecework basis for the Spanish woman, the sewing jobs gotten by

Bu Cilik making clothing for wayang puppets, and the various piecework jobs

subcontracted through the young wife living just east of the Cipto compound. There were

also the very poorly paid service jobs such as selling out of a warung and cooking and

selling food. Seamstresses, like Bu Cilik, also provide a service, but their work varies by

popularity and demand. This profession is often chosen by women with young children

smce they can stay home.

What was clear m my own work was that female labor in the kampung was

involved m various activities, often more than one, as in the case of Bu Sae, for example.

In this way, households are able to support themselves in the face of low male

employment or male underemployment. And this tendency for kampung women to pursue

multiple jobs and niformal sector work out of their homes is encouraged through the

programs of PKK which emphasize ketrampilan (skills) and pengetahuan (knowledge),

not to mention the provisions of actual support through credit and classes for beguming

cottage or small-scale industries. For example, in the section of the larger Rumah Putri

340

kelurahan that was north of the area where I lived, a woman had received both credit and

training to begm a small cottage industry making shoes and other items from the dried

leaves of a particular plant. She employed some eight to ten women who worked on her

front porch, making the uppers by hand. She then subcontracted the leather trim and sole

work out to a nearby leather industry, also small-scale and kampung-based. She noanaged

the business out of the front room of her house which also served as the shop where shoes

could be purchased. The majority of her shoes were sold on consignment outside the

kampung, however.

This small-scaled mdustry is the example of the best m PKK-supported kampung

industry. Not only did this woman become an entrepreneur who supported other small,

local businesses, but the women who worked for her were mostly yoimg married mothers

who could bring their youngest children to work and who could also easily return home to

see to older school-aged children as needed. In this way, such small-scale, informal

sector, cottage industries actually do provide a means to support kampung families and

allow mothers to remain close to home.

This pattern of part-time, mformal work and a mxzltiplicity of occupations is not

new, as was suggested for the coimtryside, but m a mimicry of Geertz's agricultural

mvolution, this sector has come to absorb infinite amounts of labor m urban settings. The

benefits for the Indonesian government seem clear. In a situation of surplus labor and a

bottleneck in the employment of the young and better educated, the informal sector and

family labor of women serves to keep households afloat while it removes women from the

341

active search for enq)loyment, which might put them in competition with the male

unemployed. While the official stance towards women in formal sector employment

appears pro-active, the practices of the government work to encourage women to stay

home and work in the informal sector. And up to this point, the informal sector appears

to be infinitely absorptive. The work of women not only supports the young and educated

in the period before they attain employment, h also serves to support the family in the face

of low male employment.

CLASS AND STATUS PRODUCTION

Women's informal sector work must also be considered m terms of class, as was

mentioned above. The difference m class and occupation has already been suggested in

the contrast between PKK and Dharma Wanita (Chapter 4). The changing class structiu-e

in Indonesia is confounding and compounding the move to domesticate women's labor.

As suggested already, poor women and elite women have probably always been

economically active. In contrast, priyayi women of the upper middle class, partially as a

result of Dutch influence, have embraced the ideal of women staying home and not having

to work. As Papanek reports concerning Gillian Hart's work on rural Java,

Within the village studied by Hart, there were striking differences between socioeconomic levels with respect to women's participation m earning activities. In the top income group (families owning enough rice land for their own consumption and other needs), women spent only one-fourth as much time as men on income-earning. (This group included a few women who were very active traders; if they are eliminated from the calculations, time spent by women was even less.) In the lowest income group, women spent about as much time as men on

342

earning activities. This calculation included young girls who worked long hours, mainly seeding and watering sugar cane. Among better oflFfamilies, young girls spent very little time on either eammg or housework, although young boys continued to do some work on "own production." In all groups, women did most of what was defined as "housework." Among the poor, this meant about 30 percent of women's working time; among better off families, women spent as much as 60 percent of their smaller total of working hours on household work (Papanek 1983:77).

Papanek in summarizmg much of the previous work on time allocation and economic

participation by rural Javanese women, considers the work done by Ann Stoler (1975) fai

Kali Loro, where poorer households generally had the largest labor inputs and lowest

returns to labor in all activities and were also engaged m the greatest diversity of

occupations. Stoler found that status differences, based on land ownership, accounted for

differences in the returns to labor, and not gender. Papanek also notes that the very low

salaries of some professionals in Indonesia have meant that both men and women must

seek supplementary income (1983:76). Oey-Gardiner likewise describes differences by

class in female employment: among those women who are economically active, middle

class women are under-represented while small groups of eUte women are highly active

(1993:209). Wolf too cites both Hart and Stoler in suggesting that there is an mverse

relationship between class and labor requirements: the poorer the woman, the more she

has to work (1992). Carey and Houben (1987), using historical materials, likewise

demonstrate high levels of economic activity for that eUte court women.

My own work in the kampung of Rumah Putri and Langit Ayuh showed that

women of working class attach a positive connotation to work. "The practical ideology of

343

the 'good woman' that prevails among the poor, is that of woman as provider for the

family, not so much that of'good wife and mother'" (Suryakusuma 1991:67). Eammg no

income may thus be construed as an embarrassing failure. In fact, I encountered a sense

of embarrassment on the part of women who were not currently working. Many women

responded that they earned otily enough for kebutuhan seharian (daily needs) or that their

wages were merely tambahan suami (income supplemental to the husband's). This

evasiveness in reporting income may be as much a function of class position as of gender.

Women earning more substantial incomes almost universally reported their earnings to me.

The particular position of middle class women as regards not only waged

employment but participation m PKK is the subject of the work done on family labor and

status production by Papanek.

As defined m this paper, family status is "produced" by several distinctive categories of women's work. In addition, family status is also "demonstrated" by women's behavior which may also eflFect the types of work chosen. Family status is conceptualized as an mtervening variable in the analysis of work and its rewards, so that women's status-producing activities may eventually be rewarded through enhanced earnings by other members of the income-sharing group. The idea of family status production, therefore, specifically emphasizes the economic consequences of women's work, rather than direct rewards (Papanek 1983:81).

Papanek's work on the categories of family status production m Jakarta mcluded (I) work

done on behalf of^ or in connection with, the paid work of other family members ~ food

preparation for co-workers or hired stafi^ entertainment, clerical work, care of required

work clothing or uniforms, care of the workplace—but for which no direct payment is

received; (2) care of children's health, appearance, language training, education, m status-

appropriate ways; (3) collection and dissemination of information relevant to the family's

position in the commimity or reference group — the "politics of status maintenance" — and

(4) maintenance of the family's ritual status through religious ceremonies, slametan,

church attendance, prayer, etc. (1983:82). Papanek is thus arguing that while poor

women and landless women do less "housework" but more productive work, middle-class

women do more housework that can be understood as status production contributing to

class differentiation, suggesting the blurred boundaries between production and

reproduction. Papanek also suggests that while all classes tend to pursue a mix of

economic strategies, middle-class women have freedom to vary the mix in response to

total household mcome and price levels, in contrast to poorer women. "In these decisions

about involvement, women's opportunity costs are not assumed to be zero, even if other

household members are available to take over domestic tasks. The status-production

work that may be foregone because of limited time and energy may be a significant trade­

off against possible earnings from an outside job" (Papanek 1983:83). Papanek also notes

that status production work does not preclude work outside the home. "In some kinds of

part-time work, women can also accomplish aims closely related to status production,

such as exchange of information about financial matters, forthcoming marriages and the

like" (ibid.). Yet, even this status production work of women who do not work outside

the home has the character of being appropriated by outside groups: "these relationships

can be 'captured' by other social systems, such as employing institutions, for their own

benefit, such as obtainmg the labor of others m the group" (ibid.,81). In other words.

345

while the domesticated labor of women m mformal sector mdustry may be used to

reproduce the labor force cheaply, the status production work of middle class woman may

likewise be coopted for the reproduction of class. Indeed, the reproduction of the labor

force encoiu'aged by PKK includes not only food, shelter, and clothing, but the

reproduction of a citizenry with particular ideals. Status production work, with its

emphasis on reproducing the status quo of middle class mores is perhaps little different in

the long run.

Before turning to the issue of reproduction of labor m Indonesia and its

relationship to the household programs of PKK, a brief consideration of the Republic of

Indonesia's posture towards direct investment and manufacturmg is necessary.

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND LABOR IN MANUFACTURING

The connection between female labor and export-oriented labor intensive

manufacture is now well known (Ong 1987; Wolf 1992; Zavella 1991). It should come as

no surprise then that the postiu'e toward foreign direct mvestment and the employment of

women might be linked. Accepting this premise, the history of FDI m Indonesia is mixed,

although the seemingly inevitable result is the reproduction of a large surplus labor force,

seemingly endlessly supported by the kampung.

Indonesia has undergone three major shifts in its posture toward FDI following the

declaration of Independence. It was under Sukarno that mdustries were nationalized and

ties to the West were cut. Hal Hill (1991) characterizes the period from 1958 to the

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alleged attempted coup in 1965 as one of outright hostility to western mvestment. When

SuhaTto came to power, he instituted a period of liberalism with an open posture toward

foreign investment, including the return of nationalized industries. This period lasted from

1967 until 1972. A relatively open stance with some restrictions characterized the period

from 1974-84, with a return to a liberal posture following and contmuing until the present.

Hill notes that "Indonesia has recovered strongly from a recession in the mid 1980s

mduced by a sharp fall m its terms of trade, to near boom conditions in the late 1980s;

non-oil exports have risen dramatically, and foreign mvestment has played an important

role in this process" (1991:1). Indonesia's substantial oil and gas holdings have led to

spUt between productive regimes in this area and in manufacturing. According to HilL it is

convenient to see FDI flows as two roughly equal halves: the oil and gas sector that

originates mainly in US and all other sectors, especially manufacturing, that come mostly

from Japan. "The two parts of the economy are administered under separate poUcy

regimes and by different authorities" (ibid.,2). There are other compUcations m the

interpretation of FDL For example, the large amount of direct investment by the army:

"[m]uch of the 'commanding heights' of the economy is state-owned, or at least m joint

venture with foreign interests. (And is an army-run 'yayasan' [foundation], existing

mainly on government contracts, 'state' or 'private'?)" (ibid.). Moreover, it is difBcult to

distinguish foreign and domestic private mvestment because of the business contacts

between Indonesian Chinese mvestors (the dominant domestic private group) and Chinese

business interests in the rest of the East Asian regional economy. "Is a local firm's

347

partner, a former Indonesian resident now living in Hong Kong, 'foreign' or 'domestic'"

(ibid.).

As EfiU summarizes, the Suharto government took over a "ramshackle" economy

with triple-digit inflation, economic decline and sharp political divides and instituted a

return to economic orthodoxy, with programs directed toward stabilization and

rehabilitation. The Suharto government rejoined the United Nations and re-established

ties with both the Intemational Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

This resulted fairly quickly in Indonesia's reintegration into intemational capital markets and intemational aid networks, and most of the debt from the former regime was either rolled over or waived. Eager to obtain access to western capital, technology and markets, the Government, in one of its first major decrees, introduced a new foreign investment code in 1967 (Law No. I/I967), and foreshadowed the retum of property which had been nationalised over the period 1958-65 (HiU 1991:3).

The changes in Indonesia's economy were retnarkable, and there were sudden

mflows of large amounts of foreign capital. "Indonesia was suddenly transformed from

'pariah' status to something of'gold rush' atmosphere among foreign investors" (Hill

1991:3). The period of restricted trade beginning in the mid-70s was the result of

pressure brought to bear on the equity of investment in Chinese Indonesian industry as

opposed to pribumi (native) ownership. The rise m oil prices in the mid-80s mcreased the

government's bargaining power, and it moved to invest heavily m capital-intensive

industry and infrastructure. "However, the strategy was quickly overtaken by external

events. Declining mtemational oil prices resulted in a sharp decline in government

revenues (up to the early 1980s some two-thirds of the Government's revenue came from

348

oil and gas taxes), and many of the projects were postponed and later canceled" (Hill

1991:4). What followed eventually were major liberalizations in 1986 and 1989.

This brief overview of investment regimes serves to show the relative importance

of foreign direct investment in the Republic of Indonesia, post-Independence. And

although, "[u]nlike its neighboitts, Indonesia has not been attracted to the concept of

export processing zones (EPZ)," there has been much growth in labor-intensive, export-

oriented industry, particularly in West Java (ibid.; cf Robison 1986).

[M]ore recently the Government has promoted the 'Golden Triangle' concept of Batam-Singapore-Johor in co-operation with Governments of Singapore and Malaysia. Moreover, since 1986 the Government has operated an especially effective duty drawback scheme for exporters which has been so successful that it has obviated the need for such zones (Hill 1991:5).

As Hill goes on to say, "any suggestion that foreigners dominate the Indonesian economy

is clearly preposterous," yet it is also clear that Indonesia cannot continue to rely on its oil

reserves, and one resource that it has in abundance is labor. Still, at this point, Indonesia

mvolvement in this type of manufacture is modest by regional standards, but growmg.

Hill concludes that it is in fact the multinationals who are at the mercy of the

Suharto regime and not vice versa, and he goes on to characterize employment with the

multinationals as better than other opportunities: "multinationals emerge as good

employers of labour: they pay more, train more ... and have much lower labour tiunover

rates because of these desirable employment conditions" (Hill 1991:38). He also notes

that "some of the labour-intensive activities, such as garments, 'receive' very low, or even

negative, protection. In both cases the effects of the protection regime is to draw

349

resources out of the labour-intensive activities and thus retard badly needed employment

growth" (ibid.,45). In effect, FBU is advocating even more emphasis on the foreign

investment in manufacturing.

Diane Wolf m her book Factory Daughters considers the issue of female

employment in the manufacturing sector of West Java. She follows Hill in noting that the

percentage share of manufacturing m Indonesia's gross domestic product (GDP) is relatively low in comparison with that of other Asian countries, yet it has increased consistently over the past years.... From 1973 to 1984 Indonesia's manufacturing output grew faster than that of all the Asian countries listed.... Although many traditional household, cottage, and small industries still exist, most manufacturing growth has occiured in medium and large-scale "modem" firms that are usually more capital than labor mtensive.... In addition, many working in more traditional labor-intensive handicrafts have lost their livelihoods because their products simply cannot compete with cheap manufactured goods, such as plastics and textiles, flooding the markets ... (Wolf 1992:37).

Because the government's import-substitution policies have been only partially successfliL

most manufacturing remains in labor-intensive and intermediate goods. In contrast to Hill,

however. Wolf suggests that "[ujnskilled labor-mtensive mdustries producing consumer

goods dominate the manufacturing sector, particularly now that there has been a greater

push toward export-oriented industrialization" (1992:37). In fact, Indonesia's role in

global, oflF-shore manufacturing is only now becoming clear (Press 1996). The Labour

Working Group of the International NGO Forum on Indonesia points out that consumers

may not be aware of the tremendous increase m exports of garments and rubber shoes

made in Indonesia. It appears to be common practice, even with well-known brand names

such as Calvin Klein, for Indonesian workers to sew in labels stating that the items were

350

made in Japan, the United States, Canada, or Hong Kong (INGI 1991a:5; cited m Wolf

1992:40).

Wolf claims that part of the attraction that Indonesia has for international capital is

indeed its low-wage labor force. She also follows Robison (1989) in suggesting that

export-oriented industrialization requires higher levels of state involvement m the

disciphning of the labor force than other forms of manufacture. In an effort to lure foreign

investors, the Indonesian government advertises one of the lowest average wage rates in

Asia and proclaims that workers are controlled by the state, which forbids strikes" (cited

in Wolf 1992:40).

Wolf provides statistics showing Indonesian wages to be among the lowest fax the

world (1992:40). The Republic of Indonesia's suppression of labor unrest is key: "Strikes

and lock-outs are strictly forbidden by the government because they are not 'in harmony'

with the state philosophy of labor relations" (Indonesia, Consulate General 1983, 228;

cited in Wolf 1992:41)." Moreover, close ties exist between state bureaucrats, the

military, and the owners of resources, which is also crucial in the control of Indonesian

labor (ibid.,42).

Wolf goes much farther than Hill in outlining the special effects of manufacturing

for female labor m Java.

In comparison with male labor force, a higher proportion of the female labor force is in manufacturing employment, although m absolute terms males outaumber females. Females experienced a higher growth rate in manufacturing jobs m the 1960s, whereas jobs for males mcreased sUghtly m the 1970s (about 250,000 jobs) (Wolf 1992:45).

351

Wolf rejects the theory that women are margmalized by manufacturing employment.

Rather she says that m terms of female marginalizadon, it appears that proportionately

more females than males were pushed mto the informal sector (trade and services),

although not in absolute terms. "These data do not fully demonstrate that females are

being pushed out of manufacturing, but they do indicate that they are being pushed into

low-paying mformal sector work" (ibid.). Wolf cites the 1974-75 Industrial Census that

documented that 80% of the manufacturing work force was located m cottage industries,

with the majority in rural areas and with women constituting half the work force. Women

tend to be unpaid family workers, while males receive wages.

The argument that docile female labor is particularly effective or attractive for

labor-intensive, export oriented industry is not a new one. That the reproduction of this

labor force is tied up with state-sponsored reproduction is clearly illustrated in Indonesia.

The release of millions of female laborers from agricultural work through Green

Revolution technological change and consequent changes in the social relations of

production; the rismg urbanization, feminization, and education of the labor force; the

introduction of the domestic and community programs of PKK; and the Republic of

Indonesia's disposition toward foreign investment and its apparent reliance on low waged,

labor intensive, export-oriented manufacture as its post-oil productive regime represent a

nexus of issues, policies, and conditions that are central to the formation of the current

Indonesian state. Moreover, these issues illustrate a push-pull relationship between

household and community that is particularly productive of meaning, identity, and practice

352

inherent in state formatioa, which is the subject of Chapter 8. For now, in order to

understand these contradictory effects, it is usefiil to contrast the practical, mundane,

making-do associated with working class lifestyles only slightly removed from poverty

with the structuring of reproduction effected through government discourse and action.

THE LOGIC OF MAKING DO

The Indian girls would laugh and write long essays about ordinary magic, about their grandmothers, who coidd make stews out of atxything. They woidd remember beautifid stews craftedfrom a single potato, a can of tomato soup, and deer jerky. " Alexie Sherman, 1996, Indian Killer. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.

Polanyi's formulation ofhouseholding (1944) is often overlooked m considerations

of his work; most scholarship has focused on the contrast between redistribution,

reciprocity, and the market. Rhoda Halperin (1994), m a consideration of formal models

of economics generally and of the residents of Kentucky Appalachia specifically, has

reconsidered this third form of economic integration and suggested it be an economic form

resistant to capitalism. Halperin's description of poor, working class rural Kentuckians

shows much similarities with patterns of employment and sharing in the kampung.

Halperin analyzes the mixing of economic forms among parts of dispersed extended

families: periodic marketing (on a cash basis) often of second-hand goods or factory

seconds, periodic factory work, odd-jobs and small-scale enterprise, and the exchange of

resources among households. These economic practices vary in their level of integration

into formal sector production monitored by the state; for example, the strictly cash basis of

some of these activities is neither reported nor taxed. The mix of activities varies over

unit in the network, gender, and life stage. The significance of this mixing of residential

hamlets with the periodic marketplace system and the wage labor sector is that it is aimed

at provisioning the family network.

[P]eople marshal their family resources — primarily land and labor, but also tools, information, transportation, goods, and services — to piece together a livelihood that serves to maintain the members of the family network (Halperin 1994; 152).

This mixture of activities aimed at provisioning the family network is the 'Kentucky way,"

which Halperin sees as resistant to but not independent of capitalist enterprise. Her

formulation of the goals of this strategy sounds something like Chayanov.

The goal of the family economy is not to ascend the ladder of social stratification; rather it is to make ends meet by keeping the kin network intact through everyday, ongoing economic activities, often m seasonal cycles. The kin network becomes an umbrella that protects people fi-om depending on any single economic sector (ibid., 164).

Halperin argues that this pattern of "multiple and mterconnected livelihood strategies"

integrates nuclear families that are spatially separate because kin are expected to help one

another as needed. Therefore, householding does not imply or require actual households.

It may mvolve mdividuals, pairs, or groups or households. "The model of householding

allows us to understand the limits of households as provisioning units" (Halperin

1994:149). Halperin compares these strategies with Polanyi's formal model of

householding to conclude that

[H]ouseholding is a form ofmtegration capable of coordinating caprtalist and non-capitaUst provisioning processes for the benefit of groups at various tiers of state stratification systems, regardless of how the state or the local economies within it

354

are organized (ibid., 148).

Polanyi's householding, thus, is not "redistribution writ small." Rather it exists in various

settings. As Polanyi notes (1944:53), the "institutional nucleus is indifferent" and may be

as varied as the patriarchal family, the village settlement, the seigniorial manor, the Roman

familia, the South Slav zadruga, or the average peasant-holding of Western Europe"

(cited in Halperin 1994:147-8). Householding appears after redistribution and reciprocity

but before marketing in Polanyi's evolutionary formulation. Halperin reiterates that while

householding operates in complex sociocultural contexts, it is primarily a non-capitalist

form of economic integration. Most simply, householding is the "provisioning of the

group by means of circular flows of resources, goods, and services" (ibid., 145). hi

Polanyi's more formal wording:

Its pattern is the closed group, whether the very different entities of the family or the settlement or the manor formed the self-sufficient unit, the principle was invariably the same, namely, that of producing and storing for the satisfaction of the wants of the members of the group (Polanyi 1944:53).

In looking at the patterns of economic strategy and household formation in Kampung

Rumah Putri, parallels are immediately evident in the tendency toward provisioning of

households and compounds through circular flows of goods and resources and the mix of

capitalist and non-capitaUst strategies used m that endeavor. Moreover, there are

particular effects for identity.

"The Kentucky way" (in folk terms), in all of its various forms and manifestations, provides people with an identity precisely because it also enables them to make ends meet. Thus, a family imperative guides people's economic activities. Kmship orders livelihood processes through the pattern of householding. Tliese livelihood

355

processes are connected to geographical and residential places but are not bounded by households or communities (Halperin 1994:164).

Indeed, this is much like what I saw in Rumah Putri, especially the mix of formal

and informal activities and the tendency for goods and services to move between the

households and heartholds of the extended Cipto family compound. There is then in this

householding strategy an inclination toward the integration of households in exchange

networks that are based on the practical need for getting by. References by residents to

hidup kampung (kampung life) and the ways of the wong kampung (kampung people) are

likewise mdexical of a integration of neighbors m patterns of cooperation and sharing

perceived to be different than social relations outside the kampung. As Halperin discusses

for Kentucky:

Practical skills (food production, processing, storage), knowledge and use of local resources and maintenance of intergenerational ties through the meeting of family obligations provide people in the region with some measure of control over their livelihood. Families organize productive tasks and allocate labor and, to some extent, land within the larger context of a mainstream capitalist economy vidthout becoming dependent upon the capitalist economy for their livelihood (Halperin 1994:163).

The strategies of kampung residents and Kentucky hillbillies both appear to be aimed at

making do within a constraining capitalist system, all the while maintaining labor and

productive flexibility and movement. This adaptation to the evolving economic system in

Indonesia is particularly successful for urban kampung residents (and likely for rural

dwellers as well) who can move between niformal sector work and temporary work

always bolstered by family exchange. In many ways this strategy may be seen as a holding

356

action, providing peasants and working class people with a means to get by. As Halperin

writes, what may seem irresponsible to outsiders may simply reflect greater flexibility.

"Sporadic employment is only sporadic fi"om the point of view of a system that focuses on

individuals' actions and not on the larger cultural and mstitutional contexts within which

such actions must be understood" (ibid., 163).

Yet, the multiple livelihood strategy of kampung dwellers cannot simply be

understood as a temporizing action by those caught between fiill capitalist employment

and an agrarian past. Instead, as was suggested m the discussion regarding employment

and labor practices in Java, the RepubUc of Indonesia is not a passive player m this;

indeed, it cannot afford to be. Any real distinction between capitalist and non-capitalist

sectors becomes artificial when the state's role m organizing reproduction is revealed. It

is at this pomt, that we must consider the stake of the Indonesian government in

reproduction understood m its most expanded sense. To what extent does the

government of Indonesia foster such economic practices, or at the very least, ignore the

constraints that produce them? Claude Meillassoux's work (1981[1975]), with some

elaboration by feminist anthropologists interested in reproduction such as Henrietta Moore

(1988; 1994) and Maxme Molyneux (1979), provide a way to think about this.

STATE-SPONSORED REPRODUCTION

Henrietta Moore follows Olivia Harris and others in suggesting that reproduction

is in fact a three-fold process; social reproduction, the reproduction of the labor force, and

357

human or biological reproduction (Moore 1994:89; Harris 1984; Harris and Young 1981).

Moore goes on to say that the feminist deconstruction of reproduction^ although helpful

and necessary, failed in two ways. First, it neglected to point out that reproduction is not

confined to the household and family, and second, these early critiques never actually

produced an adequate analysis of social reproduction (Moore 1994:89). "In both feminist

and Marxist writing in anthropology there has been a tendency to treat social reproduction

as though it is simply synonymous with the reproduction of the household" (ibid.).

Carefixl attention to reproduction illustrates the relationships beyond the household with

larger political and economic mstitutions

Although not entirely successfiil, Claude Mefllassoux surely wrote one of the most

famous analyses of the connection of reproduction to larger scale economic and political

mstitutions in his Maidens, Meal and Money (1981 [1975]), and his work was central to

the debate on the domestic mode of production that was current m marxist-feminist circles

in the 1970s. It was Meillassoux's thesis that the reproduction of the labor force was

supported by the unpaid domestic work of the household, and that m fact, capital was

subsidized by the domestic mode of production. While his work has been criticized for its

unquestioned fimctionalism and a feilure to problematize mtra-familial gender relations and

how they came to be, his examples of the reproduction of African migrant workers in

France served to show the critical importance of reproduction and the domestic

community. In fact, he was followmg up on the attention given by Engels to the problem

and its relation to women.

358

If we are to understand how the domestic society operates, reproduction must be taken into central consideration. The domestic community is indeed the only economic and social system which manages the physical reproduction of human beings, the reproduction of the producers and social reproduction at large through a comprehensive set of institutions, by the ordered manipulation of the living means of reproduction, that is: women (Meillassoux I981[l975]:xiii).

The difficulties that plagued the domestic labor debate and the formulations of the

domestic mode of production are the same as those that both interested and ftustrated

mardst economists and anthropologists considering peasants and peasant economies in

relationship to capitalism. Arguments ensued, m both cases, over the appropriateness of

positing a separate mode of production, over the confusion between the laws of motion

and the abstract economic form, and consequently over a confusion between exchange and

production, and finally over a confusion of Marx's historical epochs with an analysis of

abstract economic principles and concrete social formations (Polanyi 1944; Sahlins 1972;

Halperin 1994; Meillassoux 1981[ 1975]; Molyneux 1979). For both the peasant mode of

production and the domestic mode of production there was the idea that advanced forms

of capital implied the underdevelopment or the entrenchment of less advanced, primitive

forms of production and exchange. Thus Meillassoux notes that there is an organic

relationship between the capitalist economy and the domestic economy, and he argues

that capitalism and the domestic economy are in the same sphere of exchange but

represent different spheres of production (cf. Sahlins 1972; Polanyi 1944).

It is by establishing organic relations between capitalist and domestic economies that imperialism set up the mechanisms of reproducing cheap labour-power to its profit ~ a reproductive process which, at present, is the fimdamental cause of underdevelopment at one end and of the wealth of the capitalist sector at the other.

359

Socially and politically, it is also the root cause of the division m the mtemational working class (1981[1975]:95).

Meillassoux sees this process as too prevalent to be niherent m capitalism itself

Others have taken issue with whether a separate domestic mode of production can be said

to exist if it is subordinated to the needs of another mode of production (Molyneux 1979).

This particular complaint has of course led m part to the work on articulation (Roseberry

1989; Foster-Carter 1978; Wolf 1982), and it is not unrelated to the rejection of the dual

sertor argument that once dominated peasant studies (de Janvry 1981; Roseberry 1989).

In contrast, Meillassoux argued that capitahsm tends to preserve and destroy the domestic

economy simultaneously in order to realize and perpetuate primitive accumulation, and

eventually, although the domestic economy remains qualitatively different from capitalism,

the domestic economy comes to depend on decisions made within the capitalist sector.

We will therefore be exploring not the destruction of one mode of production by another, but the contradictory organization of economic relations between these two sectors (the capitalist and domestic), one of which preserves the other to pump its substance and, m so doing, destroys it (Meillassoux 1981[1975];98).

In essence, Meillassoux is arguing that peasants in the domestic economy who are

realizmg part of their subsistence outside the capitalist sector represent the net transfer of

"mfllions of man-hours" to the capitalist sector. That is, the extreme profits associated

with primitive acciunulation in the release of labor after feudaUsm in Europe is recreated

through imperiahsm, which makes use of labor partially subsidized by a degenerate

domestic agricultural economy. As Meillassoux describes it: "[e]xploitation of the

domestic economy relied on two of its characteristics: on the one hand it is a collective.

360

organised cell of production whose exploitation is more efficient than that of an mdividuaL

on the other hand, k produces surplus- labour ( ib id . . I I I ) .

The collective nature of the domestic economy, or as he calls it, the domestic

community, is one of the key points m MeiDassoux's argument. His complex argument

about labour rent versus surplus value and how it relates to wages will not be dealt with

here. It is important only that he describes the three-fold content of wages: reconstimtion,

maintenance, and replacement, which only come entirely from the capitahst's pocketbook

under advanced capitalism During the transition from feudalism and in imperial contexts,

maintenance and replacement are supported by the non-capitaUst domestic economy, and

for this reason the domestic economy is preserved, although in degenerate form, under

imperial capitalism. For example, Meillassoux describes a situation for colonial South

Africa m which reserves are formed — areas not directiy threatened by capitahst

appropriation. These reserves then become a reserve army of labor filled with people who

have nothing left to sell but their labor power, but who are supported m part outside the

capitalist sector.

Their cash needs (to pay taxes, to buy local goods which used to be bartered, to replace craft by industrial products, etc.) force them to enter the capitalist market. Since land remains available and conditions of subsistence production change little, domestic relations of production persist because they are the only ones able to support the survival and perpetuation of their communities (Meillassoux 198l[1975]:119).

Meillassoux thus describes a system of rotating migration from reserves to the capitahst

sector that produces a double labor market: those fiilly proletarianized and those who are

361

still supported in part by the subsistence sector. The persistence of this double labor

market is guaranteed through discrimination, wage differentials for the two sets of

workers, and generally low wages to discourage integrated workers.

In essence then, Meillassoux is arguing that a domestic economy exists that

represents a different mode of production that is subordinated to the needs of capitalist

production through the mediimi of exchange. As a result, the "reproduction" of workers

in the early periods of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and in colonial

contexts outside of Europe was subsidized by a degenerate domestic community. The net

effect was the transfer of surplus-value from the domestic community to the capitalist

sector at a rate equivalent to that under primitive accumulation. Those African migrant

workers to France who return home to be supported by their own domestic community at

times of work stoppage, illness, or retirement, represent the transfer of many man-hours of

surplus value to the capitalist who is not compelled to pay a wage commensurate with the

theoretical costs of the reproduction of the labor force. This flmneling of surplus labor

outside the domestic commimity is fostered through differential wages and discrimination.

MeiUassoux's argument is a powerful one that begins to provide a way to think

about the state-sponsored reproduction in urban Javanese kampung. Still, the critiques of

Maxine Molyneux (1979) add an important addendiun to MeiUassoux's argument,

particularly as regards the nature of the "family" and the status of women. Molyneux, for

example, takes issue with most of those in the domestic labor debate for not reading their

Marx correctly. The marxist concept of mode of production refers to two levels of

362

analysis, according to Molyneux: the productive structure including forces and relations of

production and the laws of motion of the mode concerned. She goes on to note, following

Balibar, that mode of prodution fimctions in two ways; as, one, a distinct historical epoch

in an evolutionary history of economic and political forms, and two, as a "concept on

which our knowledge of determinate social formations depends — because it is a theory of

its constitutive economic atuisocial relations^'' (1979:17). She continues that "it is at

once evident that the housework mode of production cannot fiilfil this requirement of a

mode of production" (ibid.). Yet, although disagreeing with the presence of a separate

domestic mode of production, she agrees with the essence of Meillassoux's argument

when she suggests that the domestic economy can never be considered autonomous:

"[s]mce all housework's inputs except labour are derived from the capitalist sector, in

what sense, if any, can housework be seen as autonomous from it" (ibid.)? Neither does

Molyneux see housework as coincident with capitalism since she believes a gendered

division of labor and a distinction between production for domestic consumption and for

market or barter pre-date capitalism, although this does not mean that the domestic sphere

is "eternal and immutable" (ibid., 16).

Perhaps most importantly here is Molyneux's critique of the failure to problematize

the status of women and the family (see also Moore 1994) and her argument that any

subsistence economy increases the value of labor. Even if we accept that domestic labour

is beneficial to capital, according to Molyneux, we must then explain why it is women who

do it. If, as she says, capital is indifferent to the social relations under which domestic

363

labor is performed, why should there be a necessary connection between the domestic

economy and capitalism? Olivia Harris oflfers a guess on this presumed relationship.

I suspect that it is also because of the base in physiology that such domestic activities have been virtually ignored by Marxists. As Mackintosh points out. writers such as Meillassoux and Sahlins who are explicitly concerned with the domestic economy, never so much as mention this type of work (1979; pp. 176-7). Since the human body is ideologically presented as a natural given, outside of history (see Brown & Adams, 1979), it is easy to slide into treating domestic labour as a natural activity, also outside the scope of historical analysis (Harris 1984:148).

For Molyneux, what needs explaining are the variant forms of the relation between

domestic labor and capital: "the specific political, historical and economic reasons which

result in 'family' wages being paid to members of some classes and strata and not to

others, to men and not to women, and by some capitalists and not others" (1979:13).

Molyneux flies in the face of conventional wisdom on domestic labor when she

suggests that mdeed it may be cheaper to purchase the goods and services than to have

them offered in a fiiUy privatized domestic sphere.

[I]t requires empirical evidence to show that it costs workers less to perform their own domestic labour than to purchase what they require on the market. For whether this is so is at least contingent on the non-availability on the market of low-cost services, and subsistence goods requiring little or no transformative labour for their consumption. Certainly, it cannot be argued that these conditions do not exist; even m the advanced capitalist countries, let alone in the third world, there is a significant dependence by workers on the market for reproductive needs, and it is not necessarily only the better paid workers who do so. On the contrary, it is precisely where the value of labour power is lowest that the input of domestic labour is often most mmimal (Molyneux 1979:11).

For this reason, Molyneux believes that the relationship between the domestic economy

and the capitalist economy is a question, not a given. Specifically she advocates attention

364

to the historically specific and locally variable responses to capitalism.

The second conventional proposition is that the contribution of housework to the value of labour power helps to account for the position of women m the home. This argument, like the above, is premised on a conception of the value of labour power which is also too static and ahistorical. It should not be assumed, as many writers do, that the value of labour power necessarily includes the cost of reproducing the working class family (ibid.).

Molyneux argues that the questions should be why focus on the family and why are wives

doing the housework. The narrow economism of many of the domestic labor discussions

fails to grasp the "ensemble of women's economic (and non-economic) activities and the

relations within which they were inscribed. Thus even on its own Umited terms it failed to

provide a comprehensive theory of the political economy of women" (Molyneux 1979:21).

Nonetheless, for Molyneux, there are reasons to see, in specific local and historical

contexts, how housework has proved to be useful for capital. "Where it might be of

importance is in cases where the value of male labour power has fallen below the family

wage and the dependent housewife, unable or unwilling to enter the labour market,

redoubles her effort to stretch the family wage" (1979:12). Again, this is not axiomatic,

for as Molyneux notes, in some cases the costs of maintaining a fidly privatized home witli

a full-time housewife is more costiy than a situation in which a woman works, because in

the case of earning wages, the housewife may thus defi'ay the costs of her own subsistence

and reproduction. In contrast, however, the role of women in childbirth and rearing is not

easily replaced on the market, and for Molyneux this is the key cause for the association of

women with the domestic sector.

365

Under the conditions of advanced capitalism where high unemployment prevails it would be extremely problematic, without a change to a radical interventionist state, to create the conditions which would help to free women from the domestic sphere because the labour market provides an insufficient number of jobs to accommodate them hi this sense the 'family wage' and the 'housewife syndrome' help to conceal high unemployment—specifically high female unemployment, and in certain ways to legitimise it. Women can be seen as constituting a specific stratum of the reserve army, called upon in times of war or rapid accumulation, but returned to their 'place' in the family if these jobs contract or the men return to them. Because this 'place' exists and because of women's supposed 'natural' pre­disposition towards it, women's unemployment is potentially less politically and socially problematic; and, as indicated above, it also performs a usefiil function in providing a childcare service at minimal cost to the capitalist state (Molyneux 1979:26).

Molyneux's arguments provide an important corrective to the narrow economism and

fimctionalism of some of the domestic labor debate. Moreover, she brings to the fore the

status of women, although not as a given smce she questions the idea that women share a

common class position. Instead, she notes the historically particular character of the

relationship between the household and the capitaUst sector, and she shows that the

household is m no sense a non-capitalized phenomenon.

We have argued above that the relation women/home is not an invariant one and is not to be seen as essential to the reproduction of the capitahst mode of production. Instead this relation must be understood as the result of a complex combination of determinations the effects of which will vary according to the specificity of determinate social formations (1979:23).

But what has any of these to do with the kampung women of Rumah Putri? What do

Indonesia's economic and political position, the historical experience of female workers on

Java, and the needs for reproduction have to do with one another? What are the particular

effects for urban women?

366

It is my argument that PKK and the Indonesian govenmient's associated

community and domestic programs are only one factor among many that have

overdetermined the role of the household and household-community in urban Java and

women's position within it. It is not only that there are more unemployed females m Java

or more female workers that were disenfranchised as a result of technological changes in

the countryside. Neither is it merely the need for cheap labor for manufacturing. Indeed,

the Indonesian government has resisted an overt move toward export processing zones. It

is not only the historic development of gender relations m Java that has led to women

staying home to earn money. Nor is it the ideological power of the priyayi ideal of the

housewife able to stay home and care for her household and children only. It is all of

these things and none of these alone that explain the mixture of economic strategies that I

saw in the kampung. Perhaps the most paradoxical is the twin movements toward the

enclosure of the household, the nuclear family and female labor at the very point that

requires an open flow between households to ensiu*e their maintenance.

The PKK literature promotes the view of the single family unit, two parents and

two children living in a single family imit. Yet, the literature also advocates that women's

work extend beyond the boimdaries of the household to support the local commimity and

those within it that need help. Further, the programs of PKK are aimed at teaching skills

or ketrampilan so that women can earn tambahan siiami, or supplemental income

(literally addition to husband), which has the undeniable effect of absorbing excess female

labor and of supporting large numbers of under-employed males and teens as well. That

367

the kampung represents a large army of reserve labor seems clear. What seems equally

clear is that Indonesia can provide community support for basic welfare measures — child

and elder care, for example ~ without paying the price for this support, or at the least

paymg minimally for social mstitutions recreated in the aftermath of Independence. In this

fashion, the Republic of Indonesia not only absorbs and supports large numbers of under­

employed adults and children, it also improves its nrfrastructure, human and otherwise.

Nonetheless, as we will see m the next chapter, the morality of housewives is recent and

does not always sit well, despite its fimctionality for contemporary kampung life.

The boundedness of the household as an economic unit does not survive close

mspection in Java. Community and households are made m urban kampung only insofar

as people must make do. These are not the poorest people in the city or in Java, but

neither do they represent what has commonly been called the middle class. These families

typically have enough to eat, although some may go longer between meals than others.

And at least one of their children is going to high school and maybe professional school or

college.

The utilization of women as a cheap marginal labour force m the public realm, as unpaid domestic labour in the private realm, as essentially non-competitive with men in all walks of life, is all possible because of the ideological practice of the domestic sphere, the source of gender defmitions in capitalist society (Branson and Miller 1988:2-3).

I,

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CHAPTER 7

THE HOME: DOMESTIC SPACE

The govemment will support PBCK which we hope will be a spearhead for the development of society from below, 'motored' by women. I ask that the various activities programmed at the national level be channeled through PKK. We can have many programs for women to enhance the role of women in development. But it should not be forgotten that these programs are aimed and to be implemented by women m the villages, whether in the urban or rural areas. If there are too many organizations, it is not in accordance with their simple desires and way of thinking, and will only serve to confuse them (Presidential meetmg on the occasion of the National Working Meeting of P2W-KSS, 2 March 1981, cited in Suryakusuma 1991:57).

Sestidah bertjakap-tjakap seperlunja, kami bertiga permisi pulang. Kami mengambil djalan melaliii kedai-kedai, dan pasar pula. Topi pikiran saja tenis melajang. Melajangmemikiran satiisoal,—soalwanita. Kemerdekaan! Bilakah semua Sarinah-Sarinah mendapat kemerdekaan? Tetapi, ja — kemerdekaan Jang bagaimana? Kemerdekaan sepertiJang dikehendaki oleh pergerakan feminismekah, Jang hendak menjamaratakan perempuan dalam segala hal dengan laki-laki? Kemerdekaan a la Kartini?

After M/e had discussed what had brought us there, the three of us excused ourselves and left. We took the road home through shops and markets. But my thoughts continued to wander. Wandering into thinking about a particidar problem — the problem of women. Freedom! When will all the Sarinahs' attain

Sarinah is the title of Sukamo's 1951 book on women and women's rights. In the book, he uses the name "Sarinah" as a metaphor for all women. He writes: "What is the reason that I named this book Sarinah? I named this book 'Sarinah' as a sign of my gratitude to my nursemaid when I was a child. This nursemaid was named Sarinah. She was called only 'mBok' [term of address for Javanese women of humble origin]. She helped my mother, and I received much love and attention from her. From her I learned many

369

their freedom? But, yes — what kind of freedom. Freedom like that desired in the feminist movement, that desires to equalize women in all the rights of men? The freedom of Kartini? (Soekamo 1951; from his book Sarinah: Women's Duty in the Struggle for the Republic of Indonesia)

Something was clearly afoot. Neighborhood women leaned longer at the fence,

talking to one another. Glances were cast at Pak Wayang's house and then heads came

together. Slower to understand neighborhood gossip than others, I did not know at first

what the trouble was. In fact, ft wasn't until the drama was all over that I came to hear

the story of the trouble at our end of the street. The only hint I had that something had

changed in the neighborhood's view of Pak Wayang and his family was when Bu Sae

sniffed dismissively that Bu Wayang didn't keep good house and worst of all did not cook

for herself Indexed in her disdain for Bu Wayang's housekeeping skills was an accusation

about her family's moral standing. Her failure as an ibu nimah tangga was surely a sign

that theirs was not a good home. So it seemed that the architecture of kinship that is the

house and the logic of making that is the household did not fidly explain kampung

community and women's place within ft, it was also the morality of kampung Ufe, a

morality captured and contradicted in the ideology of the "home."

Home and the ideal of home life glosses the affective and moral dunensions of the

household in common speech, and as it turns out, in academic parlance as well. The haven

in the heartless world (Harris 1984) with its domestic angel is not just a Victorian image

lessons on loving 'orang ketjil' [the little people]. She herself was one of the little people. But her character was always large. Hopeflilly, God has returned the goodness of that Sarinah" (Soekamo 1951:5-6).

370

that weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living, it has mspired volumes of work on

the ideological construction of the bourgeois home and family and its realization or lack

thereof in the lives of colonists and the colonized alike (Scott and Tilly 1975; Tilly 1993;

Boris and Bardaglio 1983; Callaway 1987; Chatteqee 1989; Cott 1977; Donzelot 1979;

Harrison and Mort 1980; Jolly and Macintyre 1989; Knapman 1986; Matthews 1987;

Strobel 1993; L.White 1990). A brief review of some to the main issues and conclusions

of this literature goes a long way towards creating a foundation for understanding the

power of the ideal of the moral woman m Java and her role m creating and poUcing social

space.

DOIVUESTIC ANGELS OR CULT FOLLOWERS

The hterature on the emergence of the ideology of home as the domestic haven,

seat of filial piety, of sentiment, of family values, and the habitat of the domestic angel has

been analyzed predominantly by social historians and femmist historians as the peculiar

result of the emergence of the bourgeois nation-state in England and parts of Europe.

The housewife, as we know her today, emerged m the First World during the 19th century. She is the result of a protracted historical process comparable with and closely related to that of proletarianization; we, therefore, term this process 'domestication' or 'housevkdfization' in this context {Hcnisfraiiisiening) (Bennholdt-Thomsen 1988:159).'

Rybczynski (1986) dates the emergence of the private family home to the 17th century when the public, feudal home was replaced, while Oakley (1974) for example, does not see its spread until the 1840s and after, with its gradual penetration downward to the working classes.

During the age of empire in 19th century Victorian Europe, evolutionary histories.

Social Darwnism, and laissez-faire liberalism were at their height (Knapman 1986;

Callaway 1987; Stoler 1985). The "Victorian debate on women" ramified m the lives of

both European women and indigenous, colonized women. In the metropole, middle and

upper class women were being consigned to the domestic sphere as distinct fi-om the

public, a feat made possible for the contemporaneous consignment of lower class women

to the domestic sphere of elite women's kitchens, not to mention the very pubhc, industrial

sector. Although it was the experience of middle and upper class women that would

inform bourgeois ideology, as Maria Mies, who corned the term housewifization (1986),

suggests, it would result in all women being socially defined as housewives, dependent on

their husbands, whether they were or not. In this way, the class specific outlines of the

domestic sphere were extended to all women. Thus the separation of women from the

world withm their homes became the dommant metaphor even for those women who had

to leave the countryside to live m the city and work in the factories and for those women

who earned their wage mside the domestic haven reserved for others.

The home, as described by Ruskm, becomes a symbolic center; 'It is a place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division... a sacred place.' He concludes the romantic image of the domestic angel with a telling profile of her qualities: 'she must be enduringly, incorruptible good; instinctively, mfallibly, wise—wise, not for self-development, but for self renunciation' (cited m Callaway 1987:33).

The domestic angel could be found in America as well, where according to Nancy Cott:

The central convention of domesticity was the contrast between the home and the world. Home was an "oasis in the desert," a "sanctuary" where "sympathy, honor.

372

virtue are assembled," where "disinterested love is ready to sacrifice everything at the altar of affection" (1977:64).

The emergence of the Victorian ideal of private home Ufe has been described as the

outcome of the transformation of social relations that accompanied the deepening of

industrial capitalism (Williams 1961; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Oakley 1^74; Davidoff and

Hall 1987), and of course, this was the era that produced Engel's famous statements

regarding the "world historic defeat of women" (I942[1902]).

Social historians now observe as commonplaces (I) that the emergence of a developed "domestic domain" ~ associated with women, unwaged housework, and child raising, and the "private" — was a corollary of mdustrial capitalism...; (2) that "domesticity" was integral to the cult of "modernity" at the core of bourgeois ideology; and (3) that, far from bemg a natural or universal social institution, it grew to maturity with the rise of the factory system, which entailed the reconstruction of relations of production, of personhood and value, of class and gender (ComaroflFand Comaroflf 1992 :38).

Another version of this argument goes that with the emergence of the European

patriarchal state and of the male chizen who surrenders his labor for rights in the public

sphere, there was the simultaneous creation of the private sphere, glorified as the natural

site of family and moraUty. Carole Pateman (1988) suggested that the theorists who

originally described the basis for society as being the social contract neglected the

necessarily prior sexual contract. That is, m exchange for the willmg surrender of their

labor and their fealty to the king or head of state, men were given similar kingdoms on a

much smaller scale. As heads of their own households, they were allowed unrestricted

access to women who were consigned to the home. This access was then codified in

marriage and family laws.

The old, domestic contracts between a master and his (civil) slave and a master and his servant were labour contracts. Slaves and servants labour at the behest of their master. The marriage contract, too, is a kind of labour contract. To become a wife entails becoming a housewife; that is, a wife is someone who works for her husband in the marital home. But what kind of labourer is a (house )wife? How does the conjugal labour contract resemble or differ from other domestic labour contracts, or from the present-day employment contract? (Pateman 1988:116-7).

The creature at the center of the home, the domestic angel, has turned out to be

remarkably resilient across cultures m every succeeding generation, despite the fact that

she was the product of a very particular phase of industrial capitalism m one part of the

world- Part of the resiliency of the "housewife" and "good mother" is her association with

what appear to be essentially feminine qualities such as nurturance, care, loving sacrifice.

all of which were understood to be the surface manifestations of her biologically

determined role as mother. That this idea of female virtue persists outside the popular

imagination is witnessed by the persistence of the nature/cultiu^e debate which is informed

by the same logic (Ormer 1974; M. Rosaldo 1974; Peletz 1996). The persistence of the

dual spheres of male and female endlessly reiterated through public:private, culture:nature.

material: spiritual and so on, not only endlessly dog academicians but indeed provide the

motive force behind the effective extension of this form of social control to the colonies

and moreover its subsequent capture by post-colonial nationalist and revolutionary

movements. That is, the "cult" of domesticity is an effective social form because it speaks

to our ideas of the naturalness of women's role within the home. And it is the apparent

naturahiess that makes this social form powerfiil and resistant to change.

The physical enclosure of the middle-class woman m the single family home

followed from her capUire within an ideological space that served to exclude not only the

dirty world of money and manufacture but the poor, the racially degenerate, and by

extension to the colonies, the native. The physical space of the home became wedded

with the moral space associated with appropriate sexuality, proper child rearing, and

appropriate social behavior to such an extent that m European colonial experience the

building of square homes and straight paths was presumed to be an effective way to

induce right thinking and Christian behavior in the colonized. In a sense then, there was a

movement from the ideological circmnscription of middle class women to their physical

enclosure within houses and then subsequently to the extension of the physical form as a

mnemonic for the ideological space in the colonies. Yet, in this movement, other spaces

were opened as well, for example, the political space for challenge and the space for

community change. In the following sections, these spaces will be considered individually

in terms of the experience of the American and European metropoles and the colonies,

such as Java. None of these spaces is necessarily chronologically, theoretically, or

practically prior; each is implicated within the other. Their artificial separation for the sake

of description should not mask their interpellation m the making of identities that have

gendered, national, class, and sexual dimensions.

DOMESTIC SPACE

The Anglo-American separation of home and world was based in part on the

separation of part of life from the dirty, money-grubbing world of employment and the

375

removal of women "from the arena of pecuniary excitement and ambitious competition"

(Cott 1977:67) or as Sarah Joseph Hale wrote m the early 1800s, "Our men are

sufficiently money-making, let us keep our women and children from the contagion as

long as possible. To do good and to commimicate should be the motto of Christians and

republicans" (ibid.,68). The coexistence of the ideology of the domestic angel alongside

high female factory employment m England at the same time serves to remind of the

contradictions created, concealed, and confused in the emergence of bourgeois capitalism

and its attendant ideologies.

The creation of a specifically domestic space defined as separate from the rest of

the world reflects a shift in how houses and homes were viewed. As Matthew describes,

the home m 19th century America was no longer a mundane and utilitarian world, instead

it came to be associated with nurturance and sentiment. Relating the heightened value on

nurturance and childhood to Locke's empiricism and the idea of the tabula rasa, Matthews

(1987) suggests a shift to a nurtiurant home for children along with the emergence of the

ideal of the companionate marriage, based on love and not property. As a resiJt of these

shifts, women came to have new emotional housework to do. Happily this corresponded

to a period of technological change that reduced housework along with an increase in

domestics. The concomitant elaboration in cooking among eUtes was a by-product of

housewives who no longer had to cook only to feed their families but could display their

privilege through displays of cooking artistry.

Literature on domesticity in the 1800s m America suggests it to be both

21 (3

conservative as well as revolutionary (see below). For example, by removing women and

the home from the expanding world of commerce and industry, by implication the

domestic sphere was associated with the preservation of tradition. Domesticity

enUsted women in their domestic roles to absorb, palliate, and even to redeem the strain of social and economic transformation. In the home, women symbolized and were expected to sustain traditional values and practices of work and family organization (Cott 1977:70).

She later says,

women's household service alone remained from the tradition of reciprocal service by fatnily members. Since it highlighted that aspect of women's role, the canon of domesticity in its early formulation directed them not to idleness or superficial gentility but to a special sort of usefiilness. Sarah Hale maintained, for instance, that women's principles of unselfishness and magnanimity should be manifest in their acts of service (ibid.,71).

So, m one of the many contradictions produced by the emphasis on separate spheres,

women were separated from the real world of money and politics, but their special roles in

the domestic realm provided a model for extending their work outside of the home.

fadeed, the enophasis on domesticity was related to the urge for women to be more active

in their communities as we shall see below, and to become educated so that they could

perform their domestic roles more eflfectively. This push for education would eventually

see the establishment of an academic discipline based on appropriate domesticity: home

economics (the basis, you will recall, for the beginning of PKK).

Home economics antedates the cult of domesticity slightly, appearing at the end of

377

19th century (Matthews 1987), and it springs from a slightly different logic^. Associated

with the science of managing the household, home economics developed as an academic

disciplme in part as an avenue for scientifically minded female scholars m an age before

they were accepted in other established disciplines. Thus, women such as Ellen Swallow

Richards graduated from Vassar and attended MIT to teach m newly created departments

of domestic science where they put their abilities to use in rationalizing the household

(Matthews 1987; Hayden 1981:306). The founders of the field "defined homes

economics (or domestic science) as a comprehensive social and physical science

encompassing sociology, economics, nutrition, sanitation, and archhecture" Hayden

1981:306). The early era of home economics saw an emphasis on the scientific analysis of

food and technological, measuring, and time-saving innovations that would improve the

welfare of all by improving the eflBciency of kitchens everywhere (Matthews 1987;

Shapiro 1986). Whereas the cult of domesticity had emphasized the sentiment and affect

of the home and given the home-bound wife a means to do status work for her husband in

the cooking of sumptuous food, home economics discouraged the emphasis on taste and

emphasized the importance of counting peimies and time in the production of healthy

meals.

Despite their different logics, domestic cults like domestic sciences, remained a

Although it can no longer be held to be distinctly American, home economics has a very American flavor, and it appears to have begun in this country in the early 1899 (Matthews 1987).

378

central way for women to be useful to their societies as well as giving them a space, albeit

restricted, for advancement. For example, home economics and the idea of women's

special domestic roles was an early justification for the education of women. The

programs and goals of PKK and Dharma Wanita are proof that women's special domestic

skills are critical not only to the family but to the state, and there is evidence for an early

emphasis on domestic education m the example of Kartini.

As mentioned m Chapter 4, Kartini was an early advocate for the trainmg of young

girls m usefixl, that is, domestic skills. "The powerfiil legacy of Kartini, the refined and

well-niformed daughter of a prominent aristocratic family in Java, exerted an indelible

impact on colonial definitions of educated womanhood in a self-consciously 'modem'

guise" (Gouda 1995:82). In fact, there is a "cult" of Kartini that equals the cult of

domesticity m the metropole. Kartini was described shortly after Independence by the

Indonesian wife of a Dutch joumahst m the following manner: "It was Kartini, this

immortal women, who guided us from darkness to light, who steered us through the eye

of the storm into calm waters, who escorted us through struggle to achieve honor, who

nurtiu^ed us in oiu* suflFering to bring us joy" (quoted in Gouda 1995:83).^

Her advocacy for the need to train young girls, based on her own isolation from

BCartini's place in Indonesia history is assured although controversy over her legacy continues. While some argue that her impulses were democratic despite the co-optation of her symbolically by the New Order government of Suharto (Tiwon 1996), others have noted that her own privileged status necessarily restricted her perspective to that of the ruling class (Gouda 1995).

379

the world of learning she desired, led to the establishment of the Kartini schools which

along with the Van Deventer schools sought to provide an education for native girls.

These schools, however, were aimed at elite priyayi girls and based on the notion that in

training these young women, there would be a trickle down effect to the poorer, humbler

classes. Yoimg girls so educated were expected to share their knowledge with those less

well off than themselves.

Thus, the Dutch teachers who contributed to Widoeri [an early women's magazine for graduates of the Kartini and Van Deventer schools] simimoned the upper-crust graduates of Kartini and Van Deventer schools to emerge from their charmed Uves. Even though few priyayi daughters were ever forced to cook, sew, or clean for themselves, Widoeri encouraged them to roU up their damty sleeves, so to speak, and to descend into the village and use their ingenuity in trying to teach better housekeeping and culinary skills to uneducated or overburdened subalterns (Gouda 1995:106).

The implicit class stratification in priyayi women's new duties was made explicit in

the creation of second class, istri (literally wife) schools for poor women to teach home

economics and prepare indigenous girls for their future as housewives (Gouda 1995:86).

Yet central to the curriculum of both sets of schools was the importance of women's place

m keeping good house and thus keeping good society. The relationship between good

housekeeping and class was clear as well: "in the Dutch colonial imagination, the hardship

of destitute women was transcribed into a neutral, depersonalized narrative that depicted

miridere welvaart [diminished welfare] as the inevitable result of their economic rationality

or inferior housekeeping skills" (Gouda 1995:81).

Built into the emphasis on women's education, alongside its class character, was

380

the idea that women held a special place in preserving the traditional culture of Java as

was described above for early Anglo-America. Women came to be seen as mediators

between the world of adat (customary law and usage) and Dutch middle class values, such

as that promoting housewives. The importance of women's domestic routines as a

measure of culture was identified early on.

Women's rituals and routines in daily life, in turn, constituted a yardstick with which to measure the meaning and "authenticity" of tradition. Hence, intricate changes m women's lives, over time, revealed a complex pattern of complicity between indigenous patriarchal dictates and Western ideas about "bona fide" cultures (Gouda 1995:81).

As Kartini's sister Kardinah said in 1914, the strength of a culture resided in "the

preservation of women's purity" and women should fimction as "guardian angels" of the

best spiritual and cultural value of Javanese tradition (quoted in Gouda 1995:80-1).

Although Gouda describes the mvisibility of poor women in the desa and women

laborers on plantation in the rhetoric on girls education in colonial Java, the connection of

domesticity to both morality and the preservation of class implicated all women in its

logic. She does note the general contradiction in the call for education to raise women's

status wrth its use to tie them more closely to tradition and housewifery (particularly when

it could be argued that Javanese women had higher legal status under adat than did

European women in the colonial era). The foundation for women's roles in PKK and

post-Independence national ideology is entirely consistent with these early ideas about

women's domestic roles. As we shall see below, in fact the contradictions built into the

idea of the separate domestic space with its ideology of ideal female roles serves not only

to confound any putative split between private and public but provides a means for

political, social and educational advancement by women.

381

MORAL SPACE

The connection between women's domestic roles and the preservation of tradition

and authentic culture in the First World had the effect of the associating women with the

purest symbol of Western civilization, and this white woman's burden had profound

eflFects on the colonies as weU. Not only were the domestic angels charged with keeping

good house but they were also critical to policing the boundaries of appropriate sexuaUty

and probity, and importantly maintaining the purity of their culture. The white woman as

a trope for civilized culture, however, had a way of flippmg over to reveal the dangers of

unbridled sexuality for the moral order as well. In an era consumed with why some had

evolved so much and some so little, it was a thin veneer that separated European women

from their wilder sisters: "According to evolutionism, Victorian women retained then*

animal natures, despite then- veneer of domesticity. Moreover, there was no place for the

civilized woman to go, except backwards. Yielding to the passions inherent in female

nature constituted downfall" (Tiflfany and Adams 1985:9). Very little separated the

domestic angel from the "primitive" women living m a brutish state of nature, but this very

little bit would come to represent the dividing line between native and cultiu^e, anarchy

382

and civilization in the colonial boundary-making project^.

Purity of race and questions of racial degeneracy were a powerful means to control

social distance in the colonies that was mtimately connected to presumptions of

appropriate home life, marriage, and family. In the early stages of colonialism in the

Dutch East Indies, for example, reproductive work, including sexual intercourse, was

performed by the native nyai, who served as a housekeeper and bedmate to the lonely

Dutch man. The VOC (Verenigde Oost-lndische Compagnie or United East Indies

Company) would not allow women to join their husbands without special dispensation

(Stoler 1985a; Gouda 1995; Taylor 1983), although after 1652, "general practice was to

allow men above the ranks of soldier and assistant in the civilian hierarchy to bring out

their families" (Taylor 1983:29). In the early years of colonialism then, social and sexual

relationship were relatively fluid. Children bom of Ehitch-Javanese unions were

recognized as Dutch, and the society in the Dutch Indies mcluded many Eurasians. Over

time, as the colonial presence deepened, Dutch women were allowed to emigrate and what

had previously been a situation of fluid social arrangements between colonials and the

indigenes became rigid.

The policing of this social distance often fell to women, whose position as

5

Contradictions abound m the literatiu^e on Victorian domesticity. For example, Matthews (1987) notes that in America in the 1800s, women were considered to be purer and finer than men, and it was men who must therefore control their baser animal instincts. This information does less to contradict the view presented by Tiffany and Adams than to confirm the contradictory, ambiguous, and mutually constitutive content of the separate spheres as they emerged and the structural, dual logic that informs them.

383

rq)roducers of empire's children and culture obscured their commonalities with other

subordinate classes. Colonial discourse on both race and gender concealed the issues of

stratification within the empire, both at home and in the colonies. The losers always

mcluded the indigenous "natives," but also white women as well. Nyais were replaced by

proper Dutch wives whose children may have been raised by native "baboes," but whose

parents were purely Dutch. The separation of Dutch families fi-om polluting indigenous

influence was assured by tune away at "hill stations." And threats to the purity of Dutch

femininity provided more reason to be strict with the potential sexual competitor that was

the indigenous male, the so-called Black Peril ("the superior fecundity and deep-rooted

sexual intemperance of the native world" Gouda 1995:184). The same strategy was used

in the American slave south, where the threat of black male sexuality served to justify

prompt, harsh punishment to transgressors and to broaden the divide between the races.

There are some interesting parallels between the male/female, white^lack, and civilized/savage cleavages. The unquestioned exercise of imperium by white males of a reputedly superior civilization over black races of "savage" character mirrored the "natural" dominion that Victorian males exercised over females.... Women and colonial subjects occupied restricted "colonized" domains, lacking m public power. To be a male was to be active, creative, and of high status. To be white was, in the parlance of the day, "to be right." To be female was to be passive and of low status, conditions felt to pertain to the nonwhite subjects of British imperialism. Thus, while set apart fi-om (and above) the Solomon Islanders by an almost unbridgeable gulf of culture and habit, European women shared, no doubt quite unknowingly, common ground with them (Boutilier 1982:175).

Boutilier's quotation illustrates how the idioms of gender, race, and ethnicity confounded

the speech of class. Those who shared common ground, indigenous men and white

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women (particularly in colonial service as doctors, administrators, and missionaries; see

Knapman 1986 and Callaway 1987), were kept quite separate. Indigenous women were

completely invisible.

In addition to the sexual prescriptions that played such a key role m boundary

drawing, women were at the forefront of promoting the "signifying system of their home

culture and social class—its language, values, symboUc structures, sacred and secular

rituals, hidden meanings, reference points" (Callaway 1987:10). European women were

expected to uphold enrpire in a variety of ways. The elaborate social code of the colonies

required forrrul dress on many occasions despite the less than hospitable circumstances;

dining in the bush, for example, required formal attire (ibid.). Social activities were

pursued in strict accordance with the stratification of the colonials, beginning with the

govemor and preceding down through the government ranks, followed at quite a distance

by the commercial and missionary groups.

Callaway also describes how power and rank were made visible in the theater-like

atmosphere of the colonies through elaborate pubUc ceremonies, in which British officers

wore ersatz uniforms, women dressed in then" finest, and displays of military pomp were

staged. Special hoUdays were inaugurated, all accompanied by a fiill showing of military

and ceremonial dress. The layout of the cities, of compounds, of memorials also served to

inscribe imperial authority in fiiU view of the indigenous and lower-class colonial

population (see below). Women, often as "mcorporated wives" (Callaway 1987), were

also a very visible embodiment of the moral order promulgated by the imperial home

385

country.

The arrival of white women in colonies as diverse as Sumatra, Fiji, Nigeria, and the

Solomon Islands corresponded to the fixmg of social space within the colony in imitation

of the metropole. Remarkably, despite their place on lower rungs of civilization's

evolutionary ladder, European women were thought to exemplify both the best and worst

of the national identity of the European metropoles; engendering a civiUzed response from

their European men while exciting native men almost beyond control and inscribing social

distance so effectively that they were accused of bemg the worst bigots.

In their daily lives, "incorporated" European wives were saddled with the role of enforcing subtle hierarchical distinctions, making them protectors of the ontological wholeness of the colonial system, even if they had little to do with its politic or economic construction. As such Dutch women served as foot soldiers ~ either willingly or whh moral qualms—who were in charge of defending an elaborate colonial pecking order that placed indigenous women at the bottom and classified white men at the top. Hence, in their quotidian routines most njonjas [term for respected married lady] m colonial Indonesia ... gave concrete expression to a male-defined imperial agenda and knowingly contributed to "the ideological work of gender" (Gouda 1995:162-3).

The literature on European women in the colonies suggests that they were the

bearers of a metropolitan moral tradition, based on 19th century scientific racism and

laissez-faire economics, rather than any primordial female character. Subsequently, during

reactions to colonialism, women often constituted the symbol manipulated by largely male,

nationalist leadership to rally opposition to the empire

FIXING DOMESTIC SPACE

386

By living in a house, one experiences a cultural apprenticeship in the prevailing values and the structure ofsociety, preparing oneselffor future involvement in a larger sphere of space atid society. "The space outside the home becomes the arena in which social relations (i.e. status) are produced, while space inside the home becomes that in which social relations are reproduced (Spain, 1992:7; cited in Santoso 1996:60).

If the ideal home and mother defines a specific social space, then these blueprints

for correct living are often extended through the concrete form of the houses and

communities they comprise. A consideration of the architecture of morality and its

coimection to women would have to include not only the bourgeois home and the

attempts to reproduce it in the colonies and tropics, but the way in which the architectiue

of the house became of a battle ground for women's suffrage as well.

Jean ComarofiF and John ComarofF (1988, 1992), for example, have written about

the extension of European models of personhood, family, and home to the ground of

southern Afiica through the work of the colonial churchmen, who insisted for example on

the use of the square over the circle in housing and settlements.

The right hand of civilization would try unceasingly to reorder the Tswana sense of space and line: to wit, evangelists came to judge the march of progress by the rectilinear extension of fence and fixrrow, hedge and homestead, across Afiican soil (Comaroff and ComarofiF 1992:53).

They continue:

Anticipating Bourdieu (1977) by more than a century, the evangelists believed that 'houses" literally constructed their inhabitants, that their fimctionally specific spaces laid out the geometry of cleanliness and godliness. By contrast, 'Tiuts" and 'Novels," undifferentiated within and made of all but raw materials, were brutish and transient—like filthy nests in the bush ... (ibid.,55).

If the efiforts of white colonial women ta the reproduction of European-style 'liames" in

387

the colonies was a way to preserve colonial culture, it should come as no surprise that the

construction of these types of homes for the colonized will likewise induce salubrious

change. The reference to Bourdieu is apt, since it was not merely the construction of

square houses but the livmg in them that would produce appropriate behavior.^

Luise White shows in her work (1990) how the British attempted to control the

migrant workforce m Kenya by refusing them the European ideal of housing and marriage.

Adult men migrated to cities where they were to be housed as single people. Their food

and sexual service were to be provided by prostitutes and landlords. Marriage was

discouraged, as was long time residence. Yet, the colonized Kenyans would later use the

same tools to resist and to re-instantiate spatially their own conceptions of home and

family. In a manner similar to colonial policy m Sumatra (Stoler 1985, 1989a, 1989b), but

for native labor m Kenya rather than for European, the policy changed from one

advocating single men to one promoting conditions suitable for married workers. In

White's account, colonial oflBcials had hoped for a remarkable city in Nairobi, one in which

African men would come and work for low wages, live wherever they could and then

leave, without entanglements. What they got instead was a city "m which the tasks of

social reproduction were parceled out to landlords, prostitutes and hawkers~a city in

6

Different conceptions of the body and hygiene were included in the reconstruction of the home in the colonies. That is, the body and the home were united as sites of colonial control. 'T)ifferent standards of dress and definitions of cleanliness are acquired, makmg both the home and the body a visible manifestation of the new order" (Moran 1992:98). See Boomgaard (1993) for the evidence from colonial Java.

which migrants' obligations and loyalties were to ... people whose work was illegal"

(1990:5). As policy began to shift, socialization of the labor force fell to "prosperous but

otherwise disinherited single women" (ibid.).

Concern for the potential militancy of "drifting," single African males led to the

provision of quarters for married workers. In at least one case, this was hailed as a

medical and social breakthrough (L. White 1990:17). This poUcy compares with the

period in Sumatra when married colonial oflBcers were recruited because of their better

health and stability. In Kenya, the architectural embodiment of the new poUcy was clear in

the new homes: "the fimdamental unit of association and community, the home... created

in bricks and mortar with kitchens and livmg rooms and bedrooms clearly laid out.

Function and behavior was to follow form; bricks and mortar could keep people out as

well as keep them inside" (L. White 1990:8).

Henrietta Moore suggests however that "... while living quarters were often

changed from a round hut to a square house and the interior fiimished m the European

style, such reordering of space did not necessarily change the existing structure of gender

relations (Moore 1986:147-152). And Hansen adds "the ways in which the idea of home

was realized, lived ni, and experienced were mediated by African notions of space, work,

gender, and power" (Hansen 1992:2).

This colonial reordering of community and reproduction finds snnilarities m the

strategies of the early feminists of America, showmg agam that the tools for making

houses can easily be used for contradictory ends. Dolores Hayden (1981), in her

389

architectural history The Grand Domestic Revolution, documents the attempt to build the

space for a socialist society in early 20th century America. Hayden describes the goals of

these early material feminists, as she calls them:

... they dared to define a "grand domestic revolution" m women's material conditions. They demanded economic remuneration for women's unpaid household labor. They proposed a complete transformation of spatial design and material culture of American homes, neighborhoods, and cities (Hayden 1981; I).

According to Hayden, these early material feminists campaigned for six decades to "create

feminist homes with socialized housework and child care" so that women could become

equal members of society (ibid.). These early women's rights advocates, like Susan B.

Anthony, argued that it was for women to change women's sphere: "They defined

women's control over the woman's sphere as a women's control over the reproduction of

society" (Hayden 1981:5). These early American movements have ateady been touched

upon. The key thing for Hayden's work on the material feminists is her focus on their

desire to build feminist spaces. Moreover, these spaces were distinctly communal and

decidedly urban. Indeed, the period of the material feminists coincides with the rise and

decline of the dense, industrial capitalist city. While early communitarians focused on

experimental socialist villages, these material feminists represented the communitarians

who advocated that the "entire physical environment of cities and towns must be designed

to reflect equality for women" (Hayden 1981:8). Hayden reviews the various

communitarian movements, many religious m nature, that sought to redefine the family by

changing the built envkonment of the home.

390

The earliest campaigns against traditional domestic life in the United States and Em-ope were lamiched by communitarian socialists committed to building model communities as a strategy for achieving social reform. Such reformers believed that the construction of an ideal coimnunity would transform the world through the power of its example. The often described the model communal household as a world in miniature, a concept which at once domesticated political economy and politicized domestic economy.... their conviction that the built environment must be transformed to reflect more egalitarian systems of production and consumption persuaded them of the importance of making fiill critique of conventional housing and domestic life (Hayden 1981:33).

As a consequence, plans were made for communities with a single communal kitchen and

with facilities for caring for all the community's children. The notion was that building the

appropriate community, women would be released from their confinement in the individual

kitchen and thus allowed to pursue other activities. This movement was prompted, as was

its opposition, by the critical importance of domestic duty. As concerns the discussion

here, it is the organization of space that may help or hinder such social relations.

The control of domestic space and its meaning was a feature in colonial Java as

well. The diOFerent spaces mhabited by indigenous women have already been suggested.

Kartini spent her life secluded behind the walls of the closed walls of her father's

household, despite the fact that her letters traveled to the Netherlands. Moreover, as she

advocated the training of young Javanese women in appropriate skills for the development

of her country, poor women were working alongside men on Dutch plantations. The

spaces occupied by Ehitch women also posed challenges and contradictions. Gouda

describes the effects of the open colonial house.

At a more mxmdane leave, Europeans' homes in the Indies lacked privacy and the "hostile tropical world entered the house through open windows, doorless spaces.

391

and gaping holes," which made many women inside feel exposed and defenseless, while some among them became angry and defiant (Gouda 1995:185, citing Korthuys 1947).

Thus despite their atteoqjts at a establishing a cordon sanitaire, a disinfected, neutral

zone, between their homes and their culture and that of the native, the conduct of their

own housekeeping introduced the transgression of that very boundary in the use of native

servants. Gouda writes that "in the hearts and minds of many totok [European bora]

European women, servants' physical proximity provoked eerie feelings of discomfort"

(1995:160). Early handbooks and guides for Dutch colonials depicted native servants as

dirty and perverse, although they might be rescued through the intervention and training of

the Dutch mistress. In recent work, Stoler (1996) has considered the role of child rearing

in the Indies and its relation to fears about the loss of culture in Ehitch children raised by

native baboes. She describes the racial and sexual motivations for social control secured

through the EHitch colonial order as it was illustrated m the changes m child rearing in

colonial Java. Servants are particularly important because

they both shaped and made up the habitus m which European colonials and their children lived. Servants policed the borders of the private, mediated between the "street" and the home, occupied the inner recesses of bourgeois life, were, in short, the subaltern gatekeepers of gender, class, and racial distinctions, which by then-very presence they transgressed (1996:77).

As Stoler notes these transgressions and the structure that required them was neither novel

nor confined to the colonies. The transgression was the inclusion within the household of

the very sort of people that were being excluded by their mability to maintain a decent

home. The denigration of the "unduly verindische [Indianized]" domestic milieu or

392

huiselijke milieu, was to be avoided" (1996:79).

The presence of Outch women in colonies produced other ambivalent spaces. As

scholars of colonialism have noted (Callaway 1987; Stoler 1989a, 1989b ) the arrival of

white women in colonial situations has been associated with the rise in racial segregation.

"One of the lingering mythologies of British coloniaUsm suggested that European

colonialists and natives had coexisted m brotherly harmony until white women appeared in

greater numbers and became the shock troops of racism by insisting upon a radical

apartheid (Gouda 1995:186). Without resorting to arguments about women's true

natures, it does seem apparent that European women in colonial settings become ''active

defenders of their European social standing and their own preeminence relative to the

native population" (ibid.). As Gouda points out, it was not women who had the authority

to force landless peasants to work long hours nor was it European women who tormented

Javanese coolies on Sumatran plantations, yet they were complicit spectators.

The physical separation of European women, although not accomplished m their

homes, was attempted in the use of hill stations as respites from the heat and proximity of

the colonial cities. Not only did the hill stations ofiFer cooler temperatures, but they were

thought to provide a means to avoid the dangerous effects of too much time m the native

presence. The hill stations served to keep colonials from "going native" by separating

them from the physical and cultural effects of the Indies. They also serve to reiterate that

it was not just physical space, but social space, that was effected in colonialism and

represented most significantly in terms of the home. Their contrast with the degenerate

world of the kampung makes the moral dimensions of home life particularly vivid. For

example, the mixed offspring of Dutch men and mdigenous women, the so-called Indos,

who might once have been part of an 'Indies family' became rarer, and as an early writer

described, might end up in the kampting, "the place of least resistance, where economic

and social degenerates have landed among their descendants" (Herman Salomonson cited

m Gouda 1995:166). Gouda cites other references to the degenerate space that was the

kampung; "any white girl who willingly 'married into the kampong' no longer thought or

felt like an authentic, dignified European woman" because such an action was both

'"shocking and degrading'" (1995:168). And fiirther.

It was true that the Encyclopaedie van Nederlatidsch-Indie had ah^eady referred in 1919 to the "dangerous pauper element" or to "crude and rough {Indo\ paupers, who are the scourge of the kampong (ibid., 172).

Social space in the colotiies was defined on the basis of class, gender and race, and the

contrast of social life in the colonial compound with that of the kampung was manifest in

physical space as well.

POLITICAL SPACE; MORALITY'S GUARD: NATION'S PILLARS

Nowhere is the ambiguity of the ideal woman and home clearer than m their use as

justification for nationalist revolution, just as they had been used earher for colonial

conservation. Partha Chatteijee's analysis of the symbolic role of women in Indian

nationalism reveals the privileging of some parts of "tradition" at the expense of other

visions in nationaUst rhetoric. Chatteqee describes the profile of the Indian male and

female in nationalist India. The Indian male was represented as able to compete m the

financial and technical endeavors of the modem world on an even footing with men firom

the metropole. Indian women, however, served to preserve and protect the finest tradition

of Indian spiritualhy in their very separation fi-om the modem world. In this fashion.

Indian nationals had the best of both worlds, the modernity of the West captured in its

men, the tradition of the East preserved in its women. Chatteijee's work also implies the

ambiguity of a discourse that fi-eed India fi"om European imperialism, while it worked to

subordinate women and lower class Indians in new, but all too familiar, ways. While

Indian women enjoyed fi-eedoms m this period not experienced by those in the metropole,

they paid the price of being at the intersection of symbolic rhetoric and practice.

The new patriarchy advocated by nationaUsm conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate, subordination (Chatteijee 1989:629).

Jayawardena's discussion of the Third World feminism (1986) reiterates many of

the themes in Chatteijee's piece. Caught between the desire to modernize their countries

along the lines of European technologic and economic excellence and the desire to assert

their independence, nationalist discourse in the Third World often made use of an invented

tradition that privileged women as a sign of distant and glorious past civilization.

Jayawardena points again to the invented nature of the past that was called upon: the

glorified Asian civilization presented by the OrientaUsts. There is a fundamental

contradiction in this discourse that encouraged the education and training of women as the

395

enlightened partners of the new bourgeois man, while simultaneously upholding a

tradition, embodied m women, that negated everything the "West" stood for—not to

mention that this was a tradition origmally encoded by the West. Thus, the very logic that

had been used to secure colonial dominance through racial purity and separation was used

m reverse to justify nationalist mdependence and the embrace of the West alongside the

preservation of what was essentially the East.

The cult of domesticity in Anglo-America reveals that the revolutionary function of

home and women's place within it were not only evident in the "Third World" but during

the American Revolution. The "cult of domesticity" referred to by historians actually was

used specifically for the changes in early to mid-nineteenth century Anglo-America.

The colonial home, then, was both essential and mundane, mundane because it had no transcendent fiinctions.... By 1850 all of this had changed. The home was so much the center of the culture that historians speak of a "cult" of domesticity in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Women in their homes were the locus of moral authority m the society (Matthews 1987:6)

Matthews notes, for example, that included in the welter of books on domesticity and

proper housekeeping that appeared in I9th century America, Catharine Beecher's 1841 /I

Treatise on the Domestic Economy mcluded along with a discussion of de Tocqueville and

republicanism, a series of laundry lists (1987:7). RepubUcan motherhood, a phrase coined

by Linda Kerber 1980, referred to the role of the revolutionary house m following the

trade embargoes against the British.

The notion that a mother can perform a political flmction represents the recognition that a citizen's political socialization takes place at an early age, that the family is a basic part of the system of political commimication and that patterns

396

of family authority mfluence the general political culture.... The willingness of the American woman to overcome this ancient separation [between the domestic sphere and politics] brought her into the all-male political community. In this sense Republican Motherhood was a very important, even revolutionary, mvention (Kerber 1980:283).

The political function of the home was recognized in the early American context.

Moreover, the value of the home continued to give it explicit political fimctions, as was

evident m the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe whose writings had such an effect on

American notions proper domesticity.

This nifluence came about because Stowe used the moral authority of the housewife to justify speaking out against slavery. The cult of domesticity was predicated in part on the idea that the home has an expressly political fimction. The political impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin, filled as it was with domestic imagery, demonstrated how the influence of the home on the world could manifest itself (Matthews 1987:34).

The cuk of domesticity did not have only negative effects for women's status, as

was discussed previously in terms of women's education. If women were to nurture and

raise good citizens, then they too must be educated. "With home seen as the front Ime of

action to produce virtuous citizens, women would need adequate training for the new

tasks" (Matthews 1987:21). Indeed, women's roles in producing good citizens proved

(and continues to prove) to be a particularly powerful way for women to affect public

policy. The "mother" as somehow outside or beyond political guile has, in fact, great

symbolic and practical political power. The Mothers of the Plaza in Argentina proved to

be such a powerfiil protest to the ruling junta as they marched day after day holding the

pictures of their disappeared children because they were jiist mothers. Violetta Chamorro

397

ran successfully for the presidency of Nicaragua on the basis of her experience as a

mother. Corazon Aquino's political legitimacy had a similar foundation. Yet the symbolic

power of the mother and her practical work may be captured for less happy causes.

Claudia Koonz (1987) documents the role of Nazi women in a fascist regime that

sought to end women's electoral privileges as it sanctified their roles as reproducers of the

master race. Nazi women reproduced a pleasant home place for their famihes even while

they worked to prevent that haven for those who were racially unworthy. Indeed Hitler

made the connection between the housewife and the citizen crystal clear: "The German

girl [will] belong to the state and with her marriage become a citizen" (cited in Koonz

1987:55).

The political power of the mother, or the Ibu, is evident in Indonesia as well.

Madelon Djajadiningrat-Nieuwenhuis coined the term ibuism to refer to the combination

of elite priyayi values with those of the Dutch petit-bourgeois to produce an ideology that

sanctions any action taken by a mother on the part of family, class, or country without

asking for anything m return (1987:44). State ibuism has been used subsequently by

Suryakusuma to suggest the New Order government's role m promoting such self sacrifice

for its own ends. Dharma Wanita and PKK are the prime examples of this state-sponsored

domestic cult.

Suryakusuma locates the influence of Hegel and the idea integralist-organic state in

398

the early nationalist constitution (1996:93)/ She goes on to describe the relationship

between this conception of the state and the role of the family.

In line with the concept of the mtegralistic state is the azas kekeliiargaari, or 'Tamily principle," which construes the state as a family. Paternalism nifuses Indonesian social organization and relationships, with President Suharto as the ultimate bapak, or father figure. Civil servants refer to their male superiors as bapak. Strong paternalistic strains m Javanese political culture, marked by deference to power and authority, coincide with military norms of hierarchy and obedience to the command (Suryakusuma 1996:95).

Suryakusuma, however, concludes that the "Indonesian government has settled on the

primary category of'wife' as the most convenient means by which to contam women"

(1996:99). Quoting fi-om an oflBcial description of Dharma Wanita, Suryakusuma says

that the mam duty of the wife as faithfiil companion is "to support the official duties of her

husband by creating a harmonious atmosphere, avoiding anti-Pancasila behavior, in order

to create a state official who is authoritative and clean" (ibid.). The use of the word clean

glosses not just hygiene but appropriate social conduct, including sexual conduct.

Suryakusiuna goes on to describe the similarity of Dharma Wanita to the

organization of the Indonesian military (ABRI, Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesian.

Indonesian Armed Forces).

In the early years of the republic, following the revolution, Indonesian women, even the wives of civil servants, engaged in a genuine suffrage movement. The

"Influenced partly by the ideas of Hegel, Supomo [an expert on customary law whose ideas were the underpinnings of the 1945 Indonesian constitution], rejecting both communism and Western-style democracy as models, settled on the 'integralistic-organic" state as appropriate for Indonesia. State and society, in effect, constituted an organic whole, with individuals and groups as parts of the whole" (Suryakusuma 1996:93).

399

New Order changed all this. Before 1965 the most militant and radical women tended to join leftist organizations, including Gerwani [Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, the leftist Indonesian women's movement], or even the PKI [Partai Komunis Indonesia, Indonesian Commtmist Party] itself To stop this drift, after the coup of 1965 the government opted pragmatically snnply to coopt women in the organization structiu-e of their husbands. A few sources have observed that Dharma Wanita was modeled on the organization of American military wives (Suryakusuma 1996:100).

As Suryakusuma goes on to write,

Dharma Wanita has estabUshed an ikut suami [follow the husband] culture, which epitomizes the ideology of State Ibuism. Motherhood is also important, but it comes second to the primary category of wife. Thus a double patriarchy is imposed on women; a hierarchy of gender is superimposed on the hierarchy of bureaucratic state power. The state controls its civil servants, who m turn control their wives, who reciprocally control their husbands and their children and the wives of jimior officials. The purpose is to propagate a conforming society, built around the nuclear family, mstrumental to state power (Suryakusuma 1996:101).

Both Suryakusiuna and Sunindyo comment on the effects of New Order sexuality for

women; that is, Indonesian male sexuality expressed outside of marriage and in second

marriages does not provoke the same reaction as the unrestrained sexuality of females.

The association of women with state ibuism has meant inevitably that they are associated

with clean living and normal sex, and women who do not conform are labeled as

dangerous and outside the norm (Sunindyo 1996). AUson Murray notes in her work on

Jakarta street prostitutes that class sexualities develop along with capitalism, and she

follows Foucault in concludmg that sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois (Murray

1991:8). Murray sees in the development of Dharma Wanita the merging of a pseudo-

traditionalism with Western models of sexuahty in an elite-controlled "regime of truth"

(1991:7). Murray joins others in locating the particular power of representation in the

400

constraint of Javanese women (Sears et ai. 1996b).

Sylvia Tiwon (1996), for example, notes an interesting elision in the

representation of Kartini, the young woman whose published letters to Dutch friends

describing her life as a member of a noble Javanese family garnered her a spot in the

national consciousness of Indonesians to this very day. Although Raden Adjeng Kartini

or Princess BCartini, has come to be known as Ibu Kartini in, for example, the song sung to

her for Hari Ibu Kartini (Mother Kartini Day), according to Tiwon she did not long for

that role. Indeed, despite her prominent role in representing the dreams of young

Indonesian women for an education, Kartini herself knew a very circimiscribed life within

the walls of her father's palace. She was married at a very young age and died at 25

giving birth to her first child. Tiwon notes the various ironies of her Ufe: that she would

long for a democratic education as a member of a noble family, and that she would be

assigned the honorary title of "mother" despite her own wishes to be a single woman. As

she writes.

The transformation of Kartini from young woman rebelling against the shackles of marriage and family is significant, for she stands as the ofiBcially sanctioned model of behavior for not what she says but rather for what is said about her. Her transformation into ibu occurs simultaneously with the rearticulation of the word /Aj/itself (Tiwon 1996:57).

What Tiwon means by the "rearticulation of the word ibu itself^" is that the use of the term

"mother" for adult women is a relatively recent phenomenon. She quotes an early 19th

century Javanese chronicle (Serat Chentini) as portraying women's primary roles as wives

not mothers (1996:57). The use of the term ibu rtimah tangga for housewife is probably

401

of European ancestry, a translation of the Dutch word hxiisvrmtw, she suggests (and as

was suggested in Chapter 4 this term has an even shallower history among the working

class).

Tiwon uncovers the elisions and transformations m another important New Order

myth with significant effects for women, and that is, the role of women m the mutilation of

the six generals killed in the 1965 "coup" (see Chapter 4). The place where the generals

were dumped m a hole after being kidnaped and tortured is now a museum. Dioramas

display the events said to have taken place and the bloody clothmg and personal

belongings of those killed are on exhibit. The happenings at Lubang Biiaya (literally

crocodile hole), where the communist youth and women's groups were tramed, are the

stuff of popular legend.® As Tiwon describes, after the generals were kidnaped and taken

to Lubang Buaya,

they were blindfolded and bound to trees and made "a vile plaything by the women" who were dancmg naked, under the direction of the Communist party leaders, D.N. Aidit. The women were given penknives and razors and they proceeded to taunt the generals, to strip them of their clothes and to slowly torture them, gouging out their eyes, slashing then" bodies and stabbmg their genitals (Tiwon 1996:64).

Orgies were said to follow with the young soldiers. Witnesses were brought forward to

testify to the use of aphrodisiacs for the women at the training ground so that they could

s

One incident in my own house illustrated this rather chillingly. My young fiiend Yoto was playing on the floor next to my desk. He had found a very small, red plastic sickle ~ a child's toy. As he moved it between his fingers, he said softly, "PKI." This 10 year old's association of the sickle with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party) spoke volumes about how persistent are the stories associated with 1965.

402

service the men there. The women were trained in sexually arousing dances. Indeed, in

the diorama depicting the confrontation of the generals by the PKI on the night of their

deaths, women are shown on the night of the murders with their hair down, their arms

raised aggressively, eyes wild. I specifically asked a museum tour guide if the stories

about the role of the women m the torture were true and he replied, yes, they were. In

fact, there is no good evidence that the highly sexualized accounts that are common

knowledge are true. Still, the sexualized hnagery of women's attacks on the generals was

politically usefiil as the Suharto government moved to strip the active women's

organizations associated with GERWANI of any revolutionary political content (see

Chapter 4). Tiwon proposes a Kartini/Gerwani axis to represent the two poles of female

behavior in Indonesia, model and maniac. As she describes, the model woman is an

individual, sequestered as Kartini was behind palace walls and separated by rank and

privilege. The female maniac is mstead a woman in a crowd. In both cases, female

behavior has both sexual and political connotations.

In a very real sense, then, political behavior is equated with sexual behavior:

[0]ne is presented as good and nurtiuing; the other is presented as a powerful but destructive and thereby evil force. It is this suppressed background of the maniac force of femaleness that may help to explain the fimction of so many modem women's organizations in Indonesia with their insistence on rankings, the emphasis on Ibu as the only appropriate title for women. This channeling of women taps their energy and turns them into "motors for development" without imleashing the power of the female (Tiwon 1996:65).

The force of the role of mother is directly appUed in Indonesian government ideology.

Hari Ibu (Mother's Day, this is Kartini Day) was inaugurated oflBcially m 1953 along with

403

the Mother's Day Banner.

The banner shows the Melati [jasmine] flower as the symbol of pure motherhood, while its buds symbolize the natural unity and relation between the Mother as the source of love and her children. The five petals of the stylised Melati flower stand for Pancasila, the Five Principles of the state philosophy. The slogan on the banner reads "Merdeka melaksanakan Dharma", meaning "Free to do one's social duties" (Department of Information 1984: ID-11).

Women's roles as defenders of the moral order, whether colonial or nationalist, has

granted them some political space and authority such that the Indonesian govenunent, for

example, has tried to control it. Yet another political space is opened for women, in their

association with community, where the confounding effects of women's association with

the good and pure ideal motherhood within the home has been mobilized for change

within the community.

COMMUNTTY SPACE: SOCIAL HOUSEKEEPING BY COMMUNTTIES OF WOMEN

Women with a nostalgic vision of motherhoodfrom either camp applied survival strategies that were as old as misogyny itself (from Mothers in the Fatherland. Koonz 1987:12).

The fdl record of women's contributions to community building still remains hidden, but even the part recently recovered reveals women to have been formidable participants in—indeed the bedrock of—every phase of the development of American communities. This partial record also reveals that many women were most successjul and apparently most comfortable with public efforts that appeared to derive naturally from the domestic roles assigned them by society. Characteristically, women presented many of their most impressive accomplishments as "social housekeeping" andjustified them in the name of prescribed domestic responsibilities (Fox-Genovese 1991:27).

As slippery and ambiguous as woman's role in nation building and as symbol and

404

reproducer of good citizens, their role in building and sustaining conununities places them

again on the border between revolution and reaction. (That this continues today in

contemporary America is clear in the centrality of arguments about appropriate family

values.) It is yet another irony that the creation of the private home as a separate reahn

associated with mdividual women would also serve as the springboard for women's social

reform movements. As with the role of the home in colonial society and newly

mdependent nations, women's commimity associations appealed equally to fascists and

sociaHsts alike. In Italy, for example.

This distinctively upper-class female ethos of reform was most visible in the practice of one form of aid, that associated with the household management movement, or massaismo. Unlike the state and party services organized on behalf of the family, the movement's origins lay in prefacist women's groups (de Grazia 1992:99).

In Germany,

[t]he terms of women's discourse reflected the extent to which the notion of an exclusively female territory permeated their thinking.... Fearing that the individual mother ia her home stood powerless against the forces that threatened her, middle-class women formed national associations to defend women's interests as mother, consumer, homemaker, producer, and churchgoer. Traditionalist women dreamed of organizing a vast women's world within an essentially female space—under men's guardianship, to be sure, but beyond the surveillance of prelates or politicians. Beginning the 1920s, they began to refer to their world as their own "living room" (Koonz 1987:13).

Koonz continues,

Nazi women adapted the dream of a separate space and forswore claims to "masculine" public power and in exchange expected greater influence over their own social realm, [which she argues] perverted two central principles. Whereas most conservative women viewed the family as an emotional "space" and bulwark against the invasion of public life, Nazi women saw it as an invasion route that

405

could give them access to every German's most personal values and decisions (Koonz 1987: 14).

The women's club movement in early 20th century America is another

manifestation of this urge to reform based on women's natural duties (although the club

movement expressed more progressive goals than those associated with Germany and

France above, see Steinschneider 1994). For example, in 1915 Mary Beard suggested that

women took up commimity projects as a result of their traditional concerns for

community.

Thus, she argued, women, traditionally responsible for children, naturally sought to improve schools. Their housekeeping responsibilities led them to a concern with the cleanliness of community streets; theff responsibility for the family's food led them to support the pure food movement. Occasionally, Beard noted that the greater leisure of middle-class women relative to both the lower class and to middle-class men left them with the time to become mvolved in community affairs (Steinschneider 1994:10).

There is something of a contradiction in a movement to improve women's status based on

an unquestioned acceptance of the traditional organization of the home. Using terms like

domestic feminism and social feminism, scholars have sought to revision women's

contribution to community form as progressive yet simultaneously profoundly

conservative (Hayden 1981). Steinschneider notes Karen Blair's use of domestic feminism

as promptmg the rise of women's clubs because women's higher sensitivity to culture

made them better suited to its study. "Similarly, as women were better housekeepers than

men, and the care of the city was essentially like the care of the home, women had a right

and a duty to enter civic aflFairs" (Steinschneider 1994:13). The arguments about whether

406

the early club movement was truly feminist or merely proto-feminist (ibid., 15-6)

aotwithstanding, the American experience provides yet another example of how women's

"empire" was fixUy political and how the prerogatives inside the home could lead to the

impetus for social change outside the home. Moreover, the latent connection within this

work is that the home and the "community" are parallel structures.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese m her controversial book Feminism Without Illusion

(1991) sees much good in the relationship between women and commimity. I quote her at

some length to give a sense of her argument.

The ubiquitous association between community building and domesticity should make us thoughtfiil. Part of the mystique of community derives from its associations with organic relations and timelessness. "Community" has been used to signify the transformation or negation of contractual social relations. But, unless we accept a view of community as grounded in nature, instinct, or biology, it amounts to little more than an aura. Where women succeeded m creating community, they succeeded in creating a sense of belonging and bonding in contrast to the ruthless pursuit of individual self-interest. In this respect, conmnmity might better be understood as the opposite of mdividualism than of society. Indeed, that may well be what Toennies meant to convey. For communities, like individuals constitute the building blocks, or components, of societies and polities, albeit with radically opposed implications (1991:37-8).

Fox-Genovese realizes that while communities have "afforded women a positive sense of

support and identification" as defined and reinforced by states they also "figured as the

immediate locus of women's domestic confinement" (ibid.,40). In essence, she wrestles

with the western liberal-feminist commitment to individual rights and freedoms and what

she considers an ancient tendency for women to form supportive communities. In seeking

to pursue western individual rights, she contends, feminists have forsaken their age-old

407

connection in community. Again to quote her at some length.

This historical perspective on women and community suggests a number of tentative generalizations: (1) community membership has mdeed figured at the core of women's self-perceptions; (2) women's membership in communities has normally been involimtary rather than voluntary; (3) ever since women began to enjoy some measure of choice in their community membership, they have remained unequal or subordinate members of their communities of choice and more dependent upon them than their male counterparts; (4) women in modem times have been especially encouraged to identify with the ascriptive values of community rather than the achievement values of individuals; (5) with the confines of their commimity membership and attendant ascriptive values, women have accomplished marvelous works for their communities; (6) with the spread of contractual individualism as the mainspring of all social relations, community has becomes an mcreasmgly nostalgic ideology rather than a legally guaranteed social reality; (7) women's growmg participation in individualism has been undermined by their persistent inequality with their male counterparts, m part because of a legacy of the relations of men and women within specific communities; (8) the close association between community and the unity of wills that results from inequality has left an inadequate model for community based on gender equality, and (9) the contradictory legacies of community and individualism continue to inform contemporary feminist theory (Fox-Genovese 1991:45).

Fox-Genovese's argument seems only to have extended the site of women's natural

position fi:om the household to the community, such that women's "natural" place in the

domestic realm also granted her "natural" responsibilities for social reform. Yet, her

association of women with the work of commimity resonates perfectly with the state-

sponsored domesticity of the Republic of Indonesia.

This movement aims at a universal appeal based on the dual premises that all individuals are members of a family and that everyone seeks welfare, and is therefore literally translated named the Family Welfare Promotion Movement. In Indonesia it is simply referred to by its mitials "PKK" the english equivalent for the family welfare movement. Accordingly every citizen, every home, is invited to participate in and the benefit from the PKK activities (Ministry of Home Afiairs 1983; original text).

408

Or as another government publication puts it, PKK is "aimed at establishing a healthy

prospering family m order to create a welfaring community" (Department of Information

1984:31).

The basis for Indonesian society is described as the family, understood as the

nuclear family of a mother, father and two children. This social atom is the basic unit of

Indonesian society. Yet, PKK ideology especially is aimed not only at the development

and support of the family but of the community as well, and this is accomplished through

the work of women.

The "Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga" (PKK) is an integrated development movement through the family as the smallest unit in the conomunity, whereby women are recognised taking the primary role in the welfare of the family (Ministry of Home Affairs 1983).

In both the family and the community, the role of woman is to serve as mediator.

The objective of the PICK movment is to materialize family welfare, which covers mental, spiritual, and physical wellbeing. The target of the programmes is the family. Since the mother performs the central role in the family the prograimnes are mostly focussed on her. In this context the woman is viewed as an individual, a mother, a wife, often co-breadwinner, and a fellow citizen, where each dimension requries different needs and qualifications, and which entails different responsibilities and obligations (Ministry of Home Affairs 1983).

In recognizmg the role of women in family and community life, the PKK serves as a vehicle for the participation of women in development, and the mother being the first educator in the socialization of the child, the PKK takes in stride the responsibility of the right upbringing of the younger generation to grow into responsible, conscientious and loyal citizens (Ministry of Home Affairs 1983).

There is no need to search for subtle connections between the government's positioning of

women and housewives and their use in the development and maintenance of community.

409

At the village level, the PKK forms one section of the Village Resihence Body (LKMD). This body is responsible for enchancing community participation in the plannmg and implementation of community-based development activities (OflBce of the State Minister for the Role of Women 1991).

Namun demikian, esetisi dari pelaksanaan program dan tiijuan PKK tidak pernah bertibah, yaitu terns upaya meningkatkan kesejahteraan keltirga dari seliinih masyarakat Indonesia. Di dalam konteks kesejahteraan itiilah, antara lain, tercakup hasrat dan harapan iintuk membina keluarga yang sehat, dan lingkungan yang sehat (report from PKK Tim Penggerak Piisat, Central Movement Team, 1987).

Nevertheless, the essence of the execution of the program and goal of PKK has never changed, that is, it continues in order to increase the prosperity of family throughout Indonesian society. Within the context of prosperity, among other things, rt embraces desire and hopes for guiding the family that is healthy and the community that is healthy.

The report cited above is entitled "Peman Ibu Rumah Tangga Dalam Penyehatan

Lingkungan" (or the Role of the Housewife in a Healthy Community), and it was prepared

for the national PKK organization. The report outlines the needs for improvement in

community health, particularly as regards trash, waste water and the yard. The reason that

women as housewives and PKK followers are important to this effort are outUned.

PKK sebagai suatu gerakanyang basisnya berada di lingkungan Riimah Tangga dengan ibu-ibu rumah tangga sebagai pelahitrya, memang memiliki potensi yang ctikiip besar untiik berperan sebagai pelopor dalam ikut meggerakan partisipasi masyarakat di berbagai sektor pembangiinan (PKK Tim Peggerak Pusat 1987).

PKK as the one movement whose basis is in the neighborhood with housewives as the agents, indeed has a large potential for playmg a role as the vanguard in moving the participation of society in various sectors of development.

The report continues to note that diflFerences m activity and success rates for PKK has to

410

do with variations in the social-economic level of the area, but as always these programs

are "cfar/, oleh dan untuk masyarakaf or from, by and for society (note the resemblance

to the US Declaration of Independence).

A final example from ofiScial ideology was particularly compelling m its use of

women as the metaphoric lynchpin holding household, community, and nation together.

This was the banner wavmg above one of the entrances to the local public hospital where

Steve and I had an instimtional aflBliation. The sign was designed to encourage women to

breast-feed. Indonesia, like many developmg countries, saw an upsurge in formula feeding

of infants and a corresponding rise in mfant mortality. As is usual in such a case, the

Indonesian government has used not just its ideological muscle but the efforts of women

and particularly the symbol of women to improve the situation. The banner read simply,

Aku Sayang Ibii, Akii Sayang Isteri, Akii Sayang Indonesia, or I love my mother, I love

my wife, I love Indonesia.'

KAMPUNG SPACE

The movement from the cult of domestic angels, to colonial architecture of proper

domestic life, to the construction of the nationalist home as site of authentic culture

describes an arc that is general enough to capture the experience in many different parts of

the world. Yet, the specific curvature in any particular place requires some adjustment.

9

ASI, the acronym for each part of the phrase, was also the acronym for the breast­feeding program.

4 1 1

The general pattern described fits well enough the history of Dutch colonialism m Java and

the effects of nationalist transformations and post-war development. Nonetheless, to

understand the particular effects of PKK for Javanese women, commimity, and political

culture, the practice of kampung morality must be considered. The daily dramas of

kampung life illustrate not only the value and salience of community for kampung

mhabitants, but the key role of women in its fimctioning. The programs, practices, and

propaganda of PBCK have now become resources to be used fax the negotiation of

community and morality by kampung dwellers. Changes in lifestyle and ekonomi

(economic status) are registered in these dramas, as the scripts for ideal community are

invoked as a means of social control and adaptation.

When Bu Sae approached my house and perched on the threshold so that she

could attend the PKK meeting at my house, it seemed a happy thing to me. I was pleased

that she felt comfortable enough to come. After all, I had never seen her attend a PKK

meeting in this RT, even though she clearly lived within its bounds. I believe I fantasized

that I had somehow managed to bring together the women of the RT. But this apparently

mundane change in Bu Sae's behavior called into question old boundary lines, past

transgressions, and current jealousies and so reverberated along many fragile kampung

fault lines. As with many of these apparently small-scale, minor events that in fact mdexed

larger kampung pohtical and social structures, I did not understand what was happening at

first. It was obvious when she arrived that the atmosphere m the room changed. Voices

dropped, pitches rose, bodies hunched in. Only Bu Apik laughed and noted her

412

attendance. Yet, the reasons for these reactions were unclear to me at the time.

As it turns out, Bu Sae was a lightning rod for kampung morality. She represented

not only the generation of working class families whose children were doing better, she

personally was an example of a successfiil PKK ibu. Her success in raising her family and

in serving the kampung were part of the reason for the jealousy she mcurred, but her

personal demeanor was also a factor. In her income-generating activities, Bu Sae fit the

PKK ideal. Not only had she and the other women of the PKK warung pursued

government funds to open the warung, she fiirther added to her family's income by

cooking peanuts to order and m selling the ice fi"om her refiigerator. Her husband was

gainflilly employed as were here two oldest children. The two youngest had not found

suitable employment during our first visit. Bu Sae was an active member of PKK and one

of the few women in the kampung who professed to have been a member of Dharma

Wanita. Although she said she was too old to attend anymore, she remained an automatic

member of Dharma Wanita because her husband's job at the pharmacy had been classified

as civil service. The back room of her house had a large cupboard that was still filled with

the plates, cutlery, and glasses necessary for hosting arisan and slametan, fi-om the time

when she served as Bu RT.

During their time as Bapak and Ibu RT, Bu Sae and her husband actually served in

an RT to the west of the one where they resided (see Chapter 1). That is, they were

selected to serve as the leaders of an RT unit in which they did not in fact live. In part,

this was related to the number of relatives they had in that area. Although the Cipto

household lay within her own RT, many of her husband's relatives lived to the west. Bu

Sae had fiurther commented that PKK m the other RT was more actif (active) and modem

than the one in which they resided. It was clear from local sentiment that Bu Sae did not

go unpunished for her defection to another RT. As was suggested earlier, it was not just

her PKK activities that earned her local enmity but the fact that her loyalties seemed to lie

away from her closest neighbors and the relatives who lived around her, although she had

kin throughout the immediate area of the kampung (see Chapter 5). And finally. Bu Sae

proved to be so formidable in kampung morality because she had definite ideas about

appropriate behavior. Her troubled relations with the Cipto household had as much to do

with her disapproval of their profligate ways as it did with her relative prosperity m

comparison to that household. There was a certain righteousness about Bu Sae that

rubbed some people the wrong way. Her ambivalent position m the neighborhood was

illuminated from several different perspectives over the course of my fieldwork. The

different shadows mark the various boundaries in kampung community.

For example, in taking in one of Bu Tri's young daughters, Bu Sae was following

the longstanding tradition of anak angkat m the kampung, as has been already been

mentioned several times. Bu Tri did not have the resources to raise her four girls (five

upon our return in 1996), so the clothing and schooling of one by Bu Sae's family were a

boon. This young daughter, Tiwd, was fed at Bu Sae's house where she also slept,

although she would take advantage of the opportunity to do either of these things at her

natal house on occasion. Her presence m Bu Sae's house was partially due to Bu Sae's

414

oldest daughter who was chfldless. On her weekend vishs to her mother's house, this

daughter became the primary care giver for Tiwi.

Despite what appeared to be a happy solution to the problem of Bu Sae's lack of

grandchildren and her abundance of resources m contrast to Bu Tri's abundance of

children, the sharing of the upbrmging of young Tiwi caused some tension between the

branches of the family. This tension was most evident m the evenings when Tiwi could

often be found playing with her biological sisters at the Cipto compound. She knew that

she would not be compelled to study or eat properly m her natal home, and she took

advantage of that freedom. This frequently meant that she had to be called back to Bu

Sae's house where she was certain to be fed, bathed, and made to do her homework. It

was always evident in these exchanges that Bu Sae and her daughter thought little of the

way the Cipto side of the family raised their children, and for her part, Tiwi's mother, Bu

Tri, thought little of the high and mighty ways of her Bu Lik (from ibii cilik, literally small

mother, term used for an aunt younger than related parent and referring here to the

younger age of Bu Sae in relation to Bu Tri's father).

The interactions around the upbrmging of young Tiwi illustrate not only that

reproduction in the kampung is often spread between "discrete" households, it suggests

agam the moral character attached to issues of reproduction. Raising good children and

keepmg good house are often used as barometers of social character in the kampung, and

so it was with the wife of the puppet maker.

Pak Wayang and his wife Uved just to the west of Bu Sae, where they had moved

415

just after our own arrival in the kampung. We were pleased by the arrival of Pak Wayang

and his home-based business because he served to distract attention from us. His business

of making wayang puppets attracted tourists and so also the attention of our neighbors.

His daily workers made the leather puppets in a covered area in the front of the house, so

that tourists could watch the process. Pak Wayang's other enterprises, tourist transport in

vans he owned and trucking hauling, provided some make-shift employment for kampung

men. For example, Pak Cilik, the new Pak RT, began to work as a sopir (driver) for Pak

Wayang in addition to his job as a driver for the local government hospital. His younger

unemployed brothers took to sitting with Pak Wayang's workers and sometimes running

errands when the occasion arose.

Pak Wayang appeared to be a good addition to the neighborhood at first, at least

to the Crpto family who never turned down a good time. At nights, the men would gather

in the open area in front of his house that earlier had been filled with workers to play

keroncong music (the Javanese equivalent to country-western music, derived from

Portuguese songs). The men would typically sit up until late in the night drinkingyamM,

although in this case the health tonic was often bolstered with beer or wine. These late

night gatherings often led to card games as well.

Over time, in a fashion so subtle that I ahnost missed it, local kampung sentiment

begin to shift against Pak Wayang and his family. What began as whispered conversations

among women as they swept their front steps and the gang in front of their houses each

day in the sore (early evening), soon became a fiill fledged lobbying effort on the part of

416

women to do something about the situation at Pak Wayang's. Apparently the gambling

had become a problem. Bu Apik's ne'er-do-well husband was takmg money from her

purse to gamble and was losing. Other men were losing money too. The fact that women

typically control family finances made neighborhood wives immediately aware of the peril

posed by this new gambling problem. To make matters worse for Bu Sae, who practically

lived next door to Pak Wayang, her youngest son had taken to spending his nights there as

well.

I began to hear stories about the troubles at Pak Wayang's. His wife, who was

never given to much involvement in kampung affairs anyway, was described as being a

poor housekeeper. This whispered campaign centered around Bu Sae and Bu Apik, the

two women most unhappy about what was happening. In kampung cases such as this the

plaintiffs typically seek out the Pak RT to ask for his counsel and mtervention in what is

perceived as a threat to kampung security. Unfortunately, the Pak RT had become one of

the cohort of regular gamblers at Pak Wayang's. As a result, the women sought the help

of one of the local neighborhood's other moral bulwarks, Pak Hormat. While the impetus

for change was the product of the lobbying of women who felt the threat first, they looked

to a male patron to take direct action. Their choice of Pak Hormat illustrates that official

kampung leadership does not always match community power. Pak Cilik was a reluctant

RT head, and his youth and inexperience provided him with no status. His job as a civil

servant and his family's long-term residence in the kampung explained his choice as RT,

but h was an honor he did not want. In contrast, Pak Hormat did not hold an oflBcial

417

position, but he was considered by most to have high status because of his war record, his

relative afQuence, and his successful &mily. He served as a moral arbiter in the kampung

but not overtly so'". In the case of Pak Wayang's deviance from kampung norms, Pak

Hormat was apparently asked to approach him. Not long after, the gambling stopped.

This example of moral control m the kampung illustrates many things. First, it

suggests that neighbors monitor one another's behavior, particularly women. After alL the

first reports I heard were about Bu Wayang's poor housekeeping skills. It also illustrates

the mdirect power of women m mobilizmg support, vdiile leavmg direct action to a male.

The role of aU kampung dweUers in watching one another's behavior is a key component

in kampung life. Kampung folk feel responsible for watching over one another and m fact

entitled to know what is going on in their immediate neighborhood. The episode with Pak

Wayang also shows that of5cial leadership is not enough in the kampung, if it is not

backed by other types of local status and power. Further it shows the importance of long-

term residence in the kampung with the attendant involvement in relationships with others.

During the troubles with Pak Wayang, Bu Sae told us that Pak Wayang had not lived m

the kampung long enough to behave m such a way. This comment is also directly related

to Bu Wayang's lack of involvement in kampung exchange relationships. If she had been

more involved in patterns of exchange with her neighbors she would not have been so

10

When Steve and I established a school scholarship fimd for the children of our RT. we looked to Pak Hormat as its manager because we too trusted his impartiality and wisdom in directing the fimds to the most appropriate families.

418

open to the criticisms being made. Finally, it shows that the ofQcial boundaries of RT/RW

are only partially salient. The street that separated Pak Wayang's house from Bu Sae's

was also the dividing Ime between the two RT, yet the action to correct the situation

crossed that boundary and had more to do with kinship, proximity, and local prestige

structures than it did with official administrative boundaries. Nonetheless, the sentiment

behind the action was directly in line with PKK sentiments: that is, it is up to the women

of the community to safeguard the lingkungan (surrounding area) and protect cooperation

and harmony there.

Yet another example of community morality mobilized for what might

conventionally be considered a private concern actually happened a year or so before we

arrived in the kampung, although based on what residents said, it remained fresh in

people's memories. The fiillest telling of the incident came from Bu Apik herself^ who

was at the center of the events. According to Bu Apik, her husband was bewitched by a

woman who lived at the other end of our gang, in the far eastern section of the adjoining

RT. Her bewitchment led him to begin an aflfair with her. It had to be magic, accordmg

to Bu Apik, because the woman in question was not blessed in looks or temperament.

This affair between a man and a woman at opposite ends of the gang that stretched

between the two extreme ends of the adjoining RT apparently became a cause for public

scandal, because a community meeting was convened m an attempt to solve the problem.

At the meeting, Bu Apik's husband was asked to choose between the two women ~

publicly. This meeting was a pamflxl event in Bu Apik's life, because her handsome.

419

troublesome husband chose to stay with his lover at that time. When we arrived in the

kampung, Bu and Pak Apik had been reunited, and although I never heard how that

happened, I heard repeatedly about their earlier troubles.

It is mconceivable to an American audience that a neighborhood meeting would be

called to settle an instance of marital infidelity, but diflferent codes of behavior and

community conduct were at play m the kampung. And the tacit agreement to play by the

rules is part of the responsibility of living in such a close and closed community". This

agreement is made clear daily m the kampung especially as new challenges to its logic

arise.

Bu Apik and her continuing troubles provide a counterpart to Bu Sae's Ufe and

role in the family and kampung. Bu Apik, like Bu Sae, was an active member of PKK.

She also served as an officer in the larger RW administration, with duties that included

keeping track of local women's use of birth control. Although she was even more active

in kampung oflBces than Bu Sae during the time I was in field, in ahnost every other way

she was the opposite of Bu Sae. Physically, she was tall, loose-gaited with a open and

ready smile and laugh. Bu Sae was small, compact, and maddeningly difficult to read

when she chose to be. While Bu Sae was living with her children and husband in her

11

A common type of story exchanged among anthropologists and other observers in Java concerns the village-level response to marital infidelity. The typical scenario includes a severe public beating of the male and/or the pubUc humiliation of being walked through the area naked. The actual nature of the cases is less important than the commonly agreed upon ethic that so-called private transgressions deserve public punishment.

420

parent's house, Bu Apik was living in a small extension of her in-laws' house. Bu Sae was

comfortably established with a husband and a grown son working in addition to her own

wages and anything added by her daughter living in Klaten. Bu Apik was the only visible

support for her family, and although her husband often helped her prepare her jamu for

sale, more often than not he took money from her purse to pursue his own pleasures.

More than once in my presence Bu Apik found money missing from her purse and

wondered out loud xSsetan (Satan) had gotten into it.

Bu Sae and her family were all Catholic, and while they did not participate in the

local prayer group, her children were active in the church. Bu Apik and her husband

apparently did not agree about religion. Pak Apik's parents were practicing Catholics, but

he claimed to be a Muslim. Yet, when we were first in the field, Bu Apik made a monthly

trip with other Catholic women to a set of graves north of Yogyakarta thought to be

particularly powerfiil in answering prayers. It was during this part of my fieldwork too

that her oldest child, a son, took up Islam, apparently to attract a girl (not an faifi-equent

reason for conversion). Then when I returned to the kampung after three years, bringmg

Bu Apik a rosary as a gift, she admitted with chagrin that she was now a Muslim.

Although I had known that Bu Apik and her husband did not follow the same religion

because her sister-m-law had said to me kasihan (what a pity) that Bu Apik could not

become a Catholic because of her husband, I was still surprised to find her professing

Islam. The example of Bu Apik's family's mixed religion is not as unusual as it might

appear in Java where most of those who follow Islam are called Islam KTP {kartii taiida

421

penduduk, the national identification card that all Indonesians must carry and for which

they must choose one of the five recognized religions), meaning they choose Islam for

their identity card not because they follow the tenets of the religion or go to the mosque.

Yet, the lack of agreement among family members, a subject known to all in the

community, did not show Bu Apik's family in a favorable light.

There were a variety of reasons why Bu Apik's family, although well liked, did not

have the same status as her kinswoman's, Bu Sae. There was the way Bu Apik made her

living. Jamu, the ever present health tonic of Java and most of Indonesia, is sold in

numerous ways: in restaurants, fi-om small stalls, in powdered and Uquid form at the

grocery stores, and often fi-om the bottles carried fi-om house-to-house on the back of a

female jamu-seller. Jamu itself comes in a variety of flavors with various herbal

ingredients with associated healing properties. Jamu can also be made-to-order. The vast

majority of jamu drunk by kampung dwellers is of the generic variety. For women, kimir

asem (predominantly timieric and tamarind) is said to keep one slender. For men, beras

kencur (including rice and a variety of ginger) is to keep them strong and virile. Not only

do the eflFects tend to be sexual in character, but jamu sellers themselves, particularly the

women who walk door-to-door, are popularly thought to be loose women. This

stereotype undoubtedly stems from the fact that jamu women travel so much, and in

general women who travel freely are thought to equally free sexually (cf. Tsing 1993). Bu

Apik did not sell her jamu door-to-door, but after selling to women in the market each

morning, she did sell jamu each night, typically to young adults and men, from a stand near

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a busy intersection within walking distance o^ but significantly outside, the boundaries of

the kampung. Thus, Bu Apik, despite her work with PKK and her various religious

practices, was suspect in some ways because of her movements outside the kampung —

after dark.

Bu Apik's experiences also illustrate several issues m the kampung moral order.

Again, the movements of women are restricted and are marked in terms of their moral

meanings for women. Next, dissension and troubles within a family are central to daily

kampung gossip, so that most of the women m the RT knew the troubles Bu Apik had

with her husband and children (although Bu Apik was never shy in telling willing listeners

about her problems). Finally, Bu Apik's status m the neighbor shows that PKK and being

a good PKK woman is not enough. Bu Apik did not have the wherewithal to be a Bu RT

because her husband could never be elected as the Pak RT (in fact, h was younger

brother who was selected for the job), and they did not have the space nor the money to

host any of the necessary meetmgs. Still, Bu Apik did try to recuperate some of the status

lost through her family's behavior by being active in the oflScially sanctioned activities of

PKK. To be fair, her eflforts to that end were not unrewarded. Bu Apik was well known

and well liked in the area, but she did not have the stature of Bu Sae. who despite her

status, was a more problematic figure.

Kampung morality hinges on more than the behavior of women, although women

are, just as the PKK cant would have it, a critical point of articulation between individual

households and the community. A central concern of kampung residents, repeated

423

endlessly and without much variation, was the value of community life, of hidiip kampung

(or kehidupan kampung, or kampung life). Here are the words of Bu Sederhana, the

kampung official mentioned earlier, who is comparing here life in the kampung with that m

other areas of the city.

Di Kota Baru sudah jalan lagi. Ada tetangga yang meninggaL, Pak RT memberi undangan. 'O, ibu itu meninggal, nanti ibu-ibu perlu [garbled], diam. Kasih undangan. Kalau di sini, ndak. 'O, di sana ada yang meninggal.' Semua datang, ya toh? Kita bantu. Itu enaknya tinggal di kampung. Kota orang [garbled] itu lebih akrab, lebih baik daripada di komplek-komplek orang kaya-kaya itu. Ya? Karena di Sana ndak membetulkan bantuan. Ya? di situ kan masih tolong-menolong.

In Kota Baru it's yet again different. There if a neighbor dies, the Pak RT sends out announcements. "Oh, Ibu So-and-So has died, later women will be needed [to help]." There is only silence. And they are given announcements [literally invitations]. But here, not so. "Oh, there is someone over there who died." Everyone comes, you know? We help. Its good to live in the kampung. City people [garbled] are more intimate, are nicer than rich people who live m complexes. Right? Because there it's not necessary to help. Right? Here we still help one another.

The importance of help and community support was revealed repeatedly in

kampung conversations during my fieldwork particularly as relates to some new behaviors

in the kampung noted with some ambivalence by my neighbors. The first, more apparently

mundane situation was that of street cleaning in the sore or evening. As has been

discussed earlier, the rhythm of kampung life includes a late afternoon period of bathing

and street sweepmg before dark. It was usual at this time in the neighborhood for the

streets and gangs to be filled with playing children, adults both male and female sweeping,

and groups of neighbors chatting m-between sweeping or smoking or watching children.

This period also corresponded to a shift fi-om daytime productive activities to night-time

424

family activities for many. This time for seeing and talking to neighbors was also

considered crucial to the community and its maintenance. To come out and bergaul (mi.x)

and ngomong-omong (talk) or ndobos (bullshit) was considered to be crucial to good and

harmonious neighborship. The kampung had several media for communication; there was

a loudspeaker that announced meetings and deaths, there was the kitchen path network

between women, and there was the afternoon exchange.

Unfortunately, changes in work-day rhythms and in the numbers of televisions,

among other things, have led to changes in this neighborly exchange. There was talk

along the street about those who shut their doors and did not come out to bergaul. These

were the same people who had stopped coming to communal work sessions and to

community life cycle events such as weddings and funerals and who merely sent an

envelope of money instead. The option of sending money had long existed in both the

countryside and the kampung, but only the very well-to-do had taken advantage of it until

recently. For the elites it was not unexpected to send money rather than labor, but as

incomes rise in the kampung, more and more people choose to send money rather than

come themselves.

The use of kerja bekti or community work groups to take care of roads, wells, and

drainage was also in decline. Although community labor has apparently always been

stronger in rural areas, where its early model may have been corvee labor for the Dutch,

there is still evidence of such group work projects in the kampung. The most recognized

use of this labor is to beautify the neighborhood for the August 17 Independence Day

425

celebrations, which typically last for most of the month of August. Fences are painted,

trees trimmed, houses prettied so that kampung will look its best. Other types of

community work projects are the maintenance of the local balai or meeting hall, which is

used for events such as the various RW meetings and for some of the baby weighing

meetings. Local groups may also combine to improve their street, with the wealthy

contributing money and the less well-off contributing labor to refinish streets. These types

of projects may also provide extra income to poorer neighbors who make their living

doing memual labor.

These examples of gotong-royong or mutual self-help were described proudly to

us, but were less evident in practice than in conversation. In one of the most poignant

examples of the anthropologist taking what his informants tell him at face value, Steve

arose early one morning because we had understood that it was a day for kerja bekti in

our RT. He decided to tackle the dense growth along the fence line of the empty lot

across from our house. It made for a vivid scene; Steve red-faced and sweating as he

tugged at tough tropical plants intent on staying put while all the neighbors walked by or

sat and smoked. Only the Bu RT, Bu Cilik, looked chagrined at the effort Steve was

putting into mutual self-help all by himself Despite the very real gap between gotong

royong rhetoric and practice, there was clearly evidence of communal cooperation in the

kampung. Funerals still provoked the strongest support from neighbors, but sickness and

hard times might also lead to aid. Yet, some forms of community cooperation were

disappearing in the face of changing urban life. That the older forms still had some

426

meaning was clear in the report of a neighbor putting up a satellite dish and the

expectation by all his neighbors that he would share his signal with them.

The ethic of community can be marshaled as powerful form of local control. That

there is an important morality attached to kampung life was clear in all our dealings with

neighbors. Kampung dwellers refer constantly to the difference between life in the

kampung and life outside. It is safer in the kampung, people are lebih akrab (closer, more

intimate), there is a tolong-menolong (mutual aid) at work in the kampung. Those who

do not abide by the general ethics of kampung life are subject to various types of reaction

to bring them in line with local values. There are unexpected results in this community

morality, however. While Pak Wayang's nightly card games were stopped, the gambling

at the local galVs (gangster) house on the next gang over was the site of an on-going

gambling. His presence in the kampung was actually viewed as beneficial because

kampung inhabitants believed that he warned other gangsters to stay away from the

kampung and thus kept it safe.

KAMPUNG HOMES AND HOUSEWIVES: REAL AND IMAGINED

The power of the imagination has become a popular theme in anthropology, and of

course, the work that in some measure inspired this fashion, Benedict Anderson's

Imagined Communities {\99\) is about nationalism in Indonesia. The notion that national

identity is a project in imagination has been taken to look at other forms of identity as

well, and might profitably be used for the kampung.

All

Kampung morality is not disconnected from the state-sponsored forms of

appropriate domesticity and citizenry. The two are consonant, and any whifFs of invention

in either is a non-issue because people use the sentiments of harmonious community and

of good conduct on a daily basis. This is not to say that everyone subscribes to these

beliefs wholeheartedly. As already demonstrated, many women and kampung folk have a

very developed sense of irony about some of the contortions required in state rhetoric.

Still, every time an official transgression is noted and acted upon and every time a woman

or family seeks status through official service they are indexing these different ethics and

making them real. Moreover, whether women agree with PKK or not, it is often true that

to give a credible account of oneself within kampung community may mean making use of

the resources of PKK. Taking the ethnomethodologist's emphasis on accountability, and

on giving credible accounts (see Chapter 2) through daily practices of living and telling,

and using it to understand kampung morality returns our gaze to reproduction. Henrietta

Moore provides a powerful analysis of how issues of reproduction and redistribution are

tied up with identity formation. Using an example from the West, she suggests that the

various "resources" used by those who might be said to be giving credible accounts

amounts to the reproduction of common sense and conventional understandings that tap

both local and state level ideas.

This analysis of some of the resources which people draw on to press claims emphasizes that in any given context there are a very diverse number of discourses which can be employed, and that whilst certain discourses may be predominantly employed at one level or in one particular context, they affect claim procedures at other levels and in other contexts. For example, state legislation regarding mother

428

and child health and welfare may not displace local understandings of the rights and responsibilities of motherhood, but views of motherhood encoded in such legislation will affect negotiations between husbands and wives with the household regarding such things as women's paid employment and health care of women. Similarly, local understandings about the appropriate behavior of women and men, and of the sexual division of labour, will affect women's participation in employment, development programmes and in education, and will thus become utilized as a resource in the discourses of experts, academics and administrators (Moore 1994:99-100).

Passing as a good PKK housewife means, necessarily, the reproduction of a

particular gendered experience. The tics and tremors of women as they fit themselves

around PKK womanhood are the micro-technology of adjustment to an international

division of labor, a national developmentalist regime, and a local culture of common sense.

Moore notes that in reproducing a set of social relations the experience of these social

relations is also reproduced, and that reproduction means negotiations and bargaining over

redistribution.

The full engagement of social identities in the bargaining and negotiations that shape the system of redistribution means that resource flows within the system are partial outcomes of conventional understandings of the rights and needs of particular sorts of individuals. These conventional understandings can be seen as local theories of entitlement, and such theories are always bound up with ideologies and with unequal power relations (Moore 1994; 104).

These local theories of entitlement and local ideologies of gender and class are the

resources used in negotiation and bargaining, and it is the engagement with the system of

redistribution that they comprise which provides individuals with the experience of the

meaning of gender and community.

When Bu Sae and Bu Apik approached Pak Hormat to put an end to the gambling

429

threatening their families and community they might be said to have engaged a long­

standing set of ideas about appropriate community conduct. When Bu Apik takes on

more and more roles within PBCK she might be said to be activating the power of state-

sponsored domesticity to improve her ov^m status as well as that of her community's. It

matters less here whether kampung dweller's are imagining that they are involved in

"traditional" patterns of gotong-royong or that the state perpetuates an imagined role for

women. The effect is the same. Women and community are reproduced through the

local-level use of state resources and the state and state rule is reproduced through the

action of women in giving credible accounts of themselves by calling on these same

resources. The result of this zig-zag between the state and the local is what constitutes

state formation, and it is an eminently cultural process, but that this the subject of the

concluding chapter.

This chapter ends instead with the words of a well-known woman who played a

prominent role in the early nationalist women's organizations in Indonesia. She gave a

talk to a group of young language student from the U.S.A. in 1992. After her

introduction in which her many political cormections and accomplishments were cited, she

began her speech by defining the basis of her authority to speak that day;

5cya sebenamya hanya seorang ibii nimah tangga biasa.

I actually am only an ordinary housewife.

CHAPTER 8

THE GOOD TERRORIST

This task of making homeplace was not simply a matter of black women providing service; it was about the construction of a safe place where black people coidd affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We coidd not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that "homeplace, " most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to tmrture our spirits. This task of making a homeplace, of making home a community of resistance, has been shared by black women globally, especially black women in white supremacist societies (hooks 1990:42).

In the contemporary situation, as the paradigms for domesticity in black life mirrored white bourgeois norms (where home is conceptualized as politically neutral space), black people began to overlook atid devalue the importance of black female labor in teaching critical consciousness in domestic space (hooks 1990:47).

Drawing on past legacies, contemporary black women can begin to reconceptualize ideas of homeplace, once again considering the primacy of domesticity as a site for subversion and resistance (hooks 1990:48)

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However, we knew that dominant discourses are not impervious to change, and that one of the major ways in which change comes about is through processes of interpretation and reinterpretation.... Shifts in meaning can result from a reordering ofpractical activities. If meaning is given to the organization of space through practice, it follows that small changes in procedure can provide new interpretations of spatial layouts. Such layouts provide potential commentaries on established ways of doing things artd divisions ofprivilege. Shifting the grounds of meaning, reading against the grain, is often something done through practice, that is, through the day-to-day activities that take place within a symbolically structured space. This can involve small things, such as putting something in the wrong place or placing it in relation something else which it is

431

normally kept separate. It can include using space in a different way or commandeering space for new uses or invading the space of others (Moore 1994:83).

My original fieldwork plans were to go to highland Mexico and do research in the

vein of the longstanding scholarly consideration of the closed, corporate peasant

connnunity (hereafter CCPC; Wolf 1957, 1986; Greenberg 1981; and many others).

When my research opportmiity came in Java instead of Mexico, it seemed that I could still

continue with this work. After all, in his original 1957 piece considering the CCPC, Wolf

had identified it as existing in Java as well. When eventually I was compelled by

circumstance to do work in an urban, working class kampung, 1 said good-bye to the

CCPC and turned to consider, albeit in a similar fashion, the makings of urban community.

It was surprising, then, when late in my fieldwork I realized that all the elements of the

CCPC were in fact in place in the kampung.

The CCPC is typically identified with a suite of traits mvolving models of civil and

religious leadership, conomunity practices, land and labor sharing, and rotating credh

associations among other things, all of which were evident m Kampung Rumah Putri. For

example, the RT/RW system of leadership, regardless of its origins, does imply the

rotation of popidarly elected leadership among all male adult heads of households in the

area. These positions tend to be held by one man and his family for a long tune, and so the

rotation is more theoretical than practical. Still, any household is presumably eligible and

willing to take on this burden. The matching of this civil leadership with religious

leadership is less straightforward, especially in the part of the kampung where I did my

432

work. Yet even in this predominantly Catholic part of the neighborhood, one of the

community celebrations deah with festivities associated with Ramadan, a Muslim holiday.

The RT level festivities for Lebaran were orchestrated by Bu Cilik who is herself a

Catholic, but a neighbor who was a devout Muslim of some standing attended to give it

the air of Islam it needed. Presimiably in the parts of the kampung where Muslims are in

the majority, the mixmg of civil and religious activities would be more pronounced.

Another trah typically associated with the CCPC is a rather strict definition of

insiders and outsiders, that is, who is considered to be eUgible for community aid and

support and who is expected to abide by community standards. The saUence of wong

kampung and hidup kampung, kampung people and kampung life, m the lives of my

neighbors signaled that there are boundaries to the kampung that are well known and

commonly shared. These boundaries were not only official and physical, they also referred

to the appropriate life styles and behaviors for kampung residents, and moreover, to

history of residence. Steve and I, for example, could not be members of the kampung

even though we participated marginally in exchange activities. To be kampung members

implies longstandiag relationships of exchange and reciprocity. When a neighbor ran afoul

of kampung morals (Chapter 8), it was remarked that he hadn't lived m the kampung long

enough to behave that way. This definition of msider is officially recognized through the

use of the RT and RW to obtain social services, not to mention the fact that visitors ~

outsiders ~ must register if they stay in the kampung overnight. These boundaries are

perhaps most real m then definition of a shared set of specifically non-eUte values:

433

community, sharing, support, and safety, for example.

As akeady suggested, reciprocity and redistribution are also key in the kampung as

they have been suggested to be for the CCPC. The definition of msiders, for example, is

based in some ways on the right to make claims on the exchange systems in place within

the kampimg, fi-om anak angkat, to fimeral help, to the collection of social fimds for the

sick and needy. The role of redistribution is also evident m the anticipation that those who

are better off within the kampung will share with those who are not. There is some

expectation, in fact, that any longstanding kampung neighbor may make a demand on a

more well-to-do neighbor in time of need and that such a request should be honored. This

type of request is not confined to kampung culture and is perhaps the remnant of patron-

client ties that characterized rural Java in the past, since the supphcant is typically obliged

to retmn services in the form of labor or special attendance on his/her benefactor for any

aid received. Still, the ethic of kampung sharing makes denying such requests more

difl5cult.

Although not used as a form of redistribution, the rotating credit association or

arisan is also a feature of the kampung and the CCPC alike. My kampung neighbors

denied that they used the credit as a source of savings for family and community needs,

but a detailed study is required to see if indeed that is true. What is abundantly clear is

that the arisan is an important integrative feature of kampung life (cf. Velez-Ibanez 1983).

Not only are arisan an oflBcially endorsed part of any kampung meeting, but independent

arisan exist throughout the kampung as well. As with rotating credit associations in the

434

CCPC, these credit lotteries work because of informal sanctions against non-payment or

pulling out of the arisan before it is completed. The arisan again illustrates shared ideas

about appropriate behavior and expectations of reciprocity from neighbors.

It was perhaps siuprising enough to find these evidences of a structiu-e similar to

the CCPC m the kampung, but the epiphany came when I realized that there was actually

commimal land in the kampung as well. The common ownership of some lands within the

community has been taken as a hallmark of the CCPC, and although absurdly small and

apparently haphazard, there are small communal plots in most kampung. These tiny

fragments are typically used for commimity gardens, and often for jamu gardens, where

medicinal herbs are grown. The use of this land is less important than what it impUes,

especially when it is considered alongside ideas and practices of community labor.

Although kerja bekti (conmiunal labor) is no longer practiced consistently and gotong-

royongsudah pecah (mutual self-help is already broken) in the kampung, according to Bu

Sae, there are still many examples of community labor pooUng to fix streets, dig wells,

help neighbors, and generally improve the kampung.

All of these elements of the CCPC exist in the kampung for a series of complicated

reasons. One cause, for example, is the persistence of the idea that the rural Javanese

agricultural village was organized like the model of the CCPC. As suggested m Chapter

5, the egalitarian rural village was a product of the particular vision imposed on the

countryside first by the Dutch, then Western social scientists, and finally Indonesian state

bureaucrats. Questions of reality or myth are moot since these forms of communal self-

435

help and sharing are encouraged and enforced by contemporary government social

mstitutions. The effectiveness of this idea of community, moreover, stems in part from a

nostalgia for the countryside and the desa life. Although kampung folk do not see

themselves as rural, they do romanticize the desa and value the parts of their community

lifestyle that are most like the agrarian ideal.

The glaring absence in Wolfs formulation, the issue taken up centrally here, is the

relationship between gender and community. While the rotating leadership of the CCPC

has been conventionally taken to be male, women have been m charge of cargoes, and it

may be more important to see the charge of a civil-religious ofiBce as falling to the family,

since the male household head is dependent on family labor to successfully fiilfill his oflSce.

Likewise, the RT/RW system, like the organization of PKK and Dharma Wanita, is based

on the idea of a married couple rather than on a single male or female participant. His

perhaps understandable neglect of gender aside, Eric Wolfs original description of the

CCPC might well have been of the urban kampung as well as the rural village.

The main argument of this dissertation as described in Chapter 1, however, was

one concerning state formation and ideology. The succeeding chapters presented the

disparate elements of this argument. That is, that life in the kampung and women's roles

m it had something to do not only with the state-sponsored domesticity of PICK, but with

kinship, with community development, with the working class, and with space. In three

chapters dealing with the house, the household, and the home, various parts of the

argument were presented.

436

In Chapter 5, the architecture of kinship was considered in terms not only of the

built form of the ideal Javanese houses but of actual houses of the kampimg. The

symbolic structure of houses and their relationship to gender ideology was discussed in

terms of Levi-Strauss's idea of the house society particularly. Evidence from Kampung

Rumah Putri shows that kinship and house structure are fluid and adaptable, and in this

way are similar to Levi-Strauss's ideas of the house society as combining several elements

of kinship and emphasizmg their reconciliation. This reconciliation was extended in the

argument that rather than separate male and female spaces within the house, the house

serves as the space where female and male are resolved as complementary parts of a whole

which is tangible, for example, ni the house's contribution to greater kampung Ufe. A

symbolic cartography of the house that charts this synthesis in the interior of the house is

lived out in a gender system that emphasizes the stable sister/brother pair rather than the

more volatile husband and wife married unit. The practice of kinship like the practice of

living in the kampung vitiates any separation of the house into male and female spheres

and suggests mstead that any ideological and mdeed material mtegrity of the house is

realized through its position in a nested series of spaces that shows the house to be a

model of the kampung community just as the kampung may be seen as the house writ

large. The flow of kin, resources, people and labor across the thresholds of the house is

what makes kinship, the house, and the commimity real.

In the following chapter, the household as an economic and productive unit was

taken under consideration. After a review of the arguments on household economics, the

437

nature of employment in the kampung was considered alongside changes m the productive

regime of Indonesia, particularly shifts m terms of labor usage and structure by sex. The

outline of an argument was sketched: the government of Indonesia has fostered women's

position as an informal army of reserve labor, one that is easily soaked up within the

kampung. In such a context, the benefit of programs such as PKK that encourage women

to be housewives who supplement their husbands' incomes are multiple. First, the excess

female labor released when agriculture was transformed through technological change was

absorbed through an increase in informal sector work, often m the sort of piecework and

cottage mdustry employment that was once secondary to agriculture but is now

encouraged through PKK The documented rise in active female workers and their higher

levels of unemployment can be partially ameliorated by the confinement of women within

their homes and the mformal sector. Moreover, the structiu-al bottleneck in Indonesian

employment patterns that produces high numbers of young unemployed men and women

is likewise relieved through their support by family incomes supplemented by women's

work. Finally, not only does women's domestic labor support families — and it might be

added underemployed husbands ~ it works to keep the costs of labor low making

Indonesia attractive as a site for low cost, export-oriented manufacturing.

The practice of sustaining households in the kampung reveals them to be not

smiply a site of pooUng but a tangled nexus of familial and community exchange and

redistribution. The various income-generating strategies of women and their famihes in

the kampung are similar to the 'householding' proposed by Halperin for Kentucky

438

hillbillies (1994). That is, families pursue a variety of strategies to provision themselves

which includes both waged and non-waged work in different combinations that may vary

by season and life cycle position. The strategies chosen, often fostered by community

development programs such as PKK, have the effect of sustafaiing the reproduction of the

labor force and its social relations of production. As Meillassoux (1981) suggests for

situations similar to that reviewed here for the kampung, the state has not yet taken over

the fiiU costs of reproduction while the domestic peasant community is no longer able to

do it alone either. Consequently, the waged labor force is subsidized by the informal

sector and household-level production of the domestic community. Significantly, this has

required specific forms of labor from women and female workers.

Chapter 7 concerned the third in the triptych of approaches to domestic space and

life: the home. Victorian images of the domestic angel and the cult of domesticity were

considered in Ught of the definition of the moral space for women in Europe and then in

European colonies. The positioning of women as signfiers of a particular moral and

cultiural order was shown to produce contradictory effects for sexuality, race, and class.

While the ideological definition of women as occupying a separate sphere was realized

through the literal enclosure of women within houses, the symbohc conflation of physical

and moral, social space was manifest m the attempt to order colonial society by building

appropriate structures. The figure of the "mother" used to represent piu"e, authentic

culture was a tactic used by nationahst movements m the Third World as well.

Paradoxically, the circumscription of women within a separate domestic sphere associated

439

with morality and purer values has granted women the extra political room to make

demands based on this position. Thus the symbolic power of the mother, created by her

association with a bounded private realm, has allowed women to press for very public

changes. Like the household as one in a series of nested spaces, the attempt to isolate and

define morality shows the private within the public and the political withm the mtimate.

Indeed the irony of women's separation within the home is that it provided women with

the justification for improving their communities.

The contradictions in the presumptive control of women through their domestic

enclosure reveals the kinds of slippages and opportunities suggested in early chapters on

rural protest. Kampung morality specifically shows that while state-ordered sentiment and

organization may be used by kampung folk, demands are made upon kampung values that

suit the changing sentiments of daily kampung life. The roles and ideology of PKK are

enacted only insofar as they grant individual actors the room to accomplish ends that may

likely have been defined outside the constramts of PKK. The reality of programs like PKK

and their reproduction is assured when kampung women use the elements of PKK to

accomplish their own ends. In using even parts of the ideology of PICK to render credible

accounts of themselves withm the kampung ~ thus negotiating kampung ethics within and

alongside state ethics ~ PKK housewives are created. They are created and they persist

despite the apparent disparagement of PKK and like programs by Indonesians, and despite

the apparent contradiction of the role of housewife with working class women's own life

experience. What remains to be done now is to show how all of these domestic spaces

440

and places are used and involved in the ongoing formation of the Indonesian state, or

rather, how these practices are state formation.

The expected argument about kampung life and culture would be that they

represent a form of community resistance. That the embrace of nostalgic rural values as

the basis for harmonious urban community, the appeal to ideas of common lifestyle

supported by reciprocity and exchange, not to mention the bitter kampung discourse on

those who fail to conform to kampung ethics, show that kampung folk are resisting the

incursion of middle class, capitalist values. The use of householding strategies and the

movement of people, labor, and resource across various thresholds foUowing lines of

kinship and established exchange might be taken to show that kampungians have adapted

to the changmg circumstances of post-colonial, developing Indonesia by spreading risk

and sharing trouble. The kampung gossip about those who fail to come out-of-doors to

mix {bergauf) and chat (ngomong-omong) might be characterized as the discursive

equivalent of resistance to modem values. But this is not the argument that I choose to

make here.

State formation as it is used here cannot profitably be understood as a stand-oflf

between dominant capitalist culture and the resistant culture of the under-class. State

formation here does not mean the emergence of "modem" forms of bureaucracy and

governance. Nor does it deal directly with national political structures. State formation,

as I propose to use it, is the long-term, on-going process by which political rule is

produced and the maintenance of consent to that rule is sustained. This cultural process is

441

not solely ideologicaL, although clearly that is part of it. It is rather the set of common

practices and understandings that emerge along with particular productive arrangements

and their organization by national governments and international political-economic

regimes.

If the state is "the very organ of social thought" and "above all, supremely, the

organ of moral discipline" as Durkheim would have it (I958[19041) then it makes sense

to look not just at the bureaucracy and die legislation but how the state is lived, how it

comes to work within us (Corrigan and Sayer 1985). As was said in Chapter I, state

formation was and is a cultural project producing not only the "state" as an idea and a

set of practices but the citizen and the political culture within which she moves. Thus,

although PKK and the RT/RW system it works within are examples of state apparatuses

(Althusser 1971) and the extension of state ideology (Gramsci 1971), they are also

resources used by women to make do and in so doing knit together local and state in a

common cultural framework. My argument here is that it is not the finished piece that

is culture alone but the process of knitting that is culture as well. The attempts of a

kampimg woman to fit within the PKK ideal indexes not just her own neighborhood and

its realities but m eflfect taps the resources and reinforces the reality of national ideas of

administration and of appropriate domesticity as well as elements of the international

division of labor which currently exploits low-skilled, low-waged female labor on the

margms for consumers goods destined for the center. And this constitutes the cultural

process that is state formation in Indonesia.

442

THE GOOD TERRORIST

The Good Terrorist is a reference to the novel of the same name by Doris Lessing

(1985). I use the idea of the Good Terrorist to challenge the position of housewives in

oflBcial Indonesian rhetoric and in popular Western culture alike, because although the

idea of resistance has come to stand for the limited space of the down-trodden (and too

ojften understood as discourse only), m fact, the housewife and her domestic space offer

the opportunity to open up other room for movement.

The novel concerns a half-baked group of would-be terrorists who call themselves

the Communist Centre Union, and it charts their development from a bunch of

unemployed margmal "radicals" to their eventual, almost accidental, bombing of a

crowded street in London.

She is "the "good terrorist" who is Doris Lessing's heroine. Alice is strong, emotionally intuitive, and sympathetic, brave, warmhearted, hard-working, and generous—the sort of woman whose domestic skills and maternal sympathy have traditionally held the world together.... In nineteenth-century popular fiction Alice would have been celebrated as an "angel in the house." Louisa May Alcott... would have admired the way she takes over the derelict building and turns it into a comfortable home.... While most of the others stand about looking on, Alice goes into an almost supernatural frenzy of cleaning and contriving, painting and hauling fimiiture, and persuading the local authorities to restore services. Her love for the finished product is intense and personal.... And Alice's maternal care is not confined to the building; she shops and cooks nourishing health-food dinners for the other squatters who have been living on cheap takeout meals, gets a job for one of them, and tends others in their illness or grief {New York Times Book Review, December 19, 1985).

443

The review goes on:

It is one of the most disturbing ironies of this disturbing novel that Alice's best qualities, her domestic genius, her generosity and sympathy and energy, are ultimately responsible for the transformation of a collection of dissatisfied radicals mto a terrorist gang. She gives them a place to live and plot, regular meals, and a sense of community; she makes it possible for them to stay together long enough to leam to trust one another and work together to organize a "successful" bombing. Her love of order and beauty, her ideal of social justice, first destroy her, and finally destroy many innocent people (ibid.).

This reviewer noted that Alice Mellings scans like Doris Lessmg, and after reconsidering

the metaphor of the good terrorist I wonder if I am so drawn to Alice because I too feel

like the good terrorist, conflicted between my own so-called radical predilections and my

bourgeois background. My own dissertation considers housewifery and I self-consciously

reflect on my own poshion as housewife ethnographer and ethnographer of housewives.

So perhaps my work on how women's unpaid reproductive work and informal labor both

sustains and challenges the state-sponsored forms of domesticity has done the magic of

turning me into the very thing I study (or as the more cynical of you may observe, of

turning my Javanese neighbors into what I am).

On the face of things the appeal of the good terrorist was that it puts together the

idea of maintaining a social order, in Alice's case the bourgeois refinements of home, with

the idea of subversion and social change. But does that really shed any light on the

srtuation of Javanese working class women m the neighborhood where I did my work?

And is this not resistance despite the fact that I have suggested that idea to be of little help

here?

444

Alice Mellings' good terrorist points out two things that are significant m a

consideration of domesticity: one, that the work of cooking and cleaning must always be

done — even for disenfiranchised radicals ~ and two, that the figure of the housewife, often

taken to be one associated with conservatism, can actually be an agent of change and

transformation. These two features follow necessarily fi-om the very centrality of

reproductive work to human life. The quotes at the beginning of this chapter reiterate this

argument. As hooks writes, by redefining 'liomeplace" outside of white bourgeois norms,

it can be a site for subversion and resistance for black people (1990). Moore adds an

important addendum to this power of making place m everyday ways (which I take here to

mean domestic, reproductive work), and that is that the misplacement of such common

things can lead to change. "This can mvolve small things, such as putting something in the

wrong place or placing it m relation to something else which is normally kept separate"

(1994:83).

Returning to the kampung, I want to propose that my neighbors are good

terrorists. They comply with government directives on appropriate homes and domesticity

only insofar as it serves their own ends. And they often "misplace" these directives, ideas

and programs by usmg them to suit other local, kaoipung needs. In so doing, kampung

members subvert the government's attempts to structure lives in a particular way and

instead make the programs then own. This might be understood as resistance to the

degree that kampung dwellers fail to comply with government programs in the strict sense

they were intended, but it is more profitable to see that by accepting and reforming these

445

programs whhin their own lives, kampung dwellers not only live the state but change it.

It is the relationship between ideologies, power and entitlements established in the context of the bargaining and negotiation that takes place over resource flows which emphasizes the point that although patterns of contestation exist, and although the routinization of convention means that regularities occur, the final outcome of any struggle cannot be predetermined (Moore 1994:104).

IN THE SHADOW OF THE KRATON

The argument begun in Chapter 1 was that culture and ideology share a special

relationship, as Eagleton remarked, ideology "is not coextensive with the general field of

'culture', but lights up this field firom a particular angle" (1991:28-29). The relationship

between culture and ideology needs to be related to the idea of culture and its capture by

the state according to Pemberton (1994). Pemberton argues that state administered

culture m New Order Indonesia is a series of historical displacements that have robbed

ritual and cultural forms of their effective power. As he says of state-sponsored ritual

events:

Such explicitly cultural New Order gesturing confounds common anthropological assumptions of an underljrag cultural order.... The power of an indigenous discourse so self-consciously concerned with what constitutes "authentic" {asli) Javanese culture, with a "tradition" {tradisi) that must be preserved at all costs, operates to recuperate the past within a fi'amework of recovered origms that would efface, for the sake of cultiu'al continuity, a history of social activism fi"om the late 1940s to the mid-1960s (Pemberton 1994:9).

He is, in a sense, dealing with the same tension between culture and administration that

Adomo considers (1990). Adomo, like Pemberton, sees the state planning of the

unplanned, the capture of the spontaneous cultural form by the bureaucracy as deadly to

446

the cultural impulse in some fashion. Yet Adomo, unlike Pemberton, sees this as the

necessary consequence of both culture and administration in this age, and moreover, he

does not see, despite their antinomies, that administration is antithetical to culture.

Significantly, he suggests that "[ajdministration ... is not simply imposed upon the

supposedly productive human being from without. It multiplies within this person himself

(ibid.,41). The inevitable reach of administration to take over the culture does not mean

the end of culture; there remains room for the active play of culture outside of

administration. For Pemberton, New Order state ritual is the burial shroud of Javanese

culture, bearing the imprints of a once living thing, but m itself a shadowy representation

worshiped by those who are in effect mourners and not culture bearing folks who still are

living Javanese culture everyday (see for example his reference to doing "salvage

ethnography," 1994:223). In part, this is due to Pemberton's focus on old-fashioned ritual

and on priyayi and elite groups. Reports of the death of Javanese culture, however, are

premature. Pemberton need only have looked outside the walls of the kraton to see

people actively engaging, reworking, and making do usmg "culture." I agree with

Pemberton when he writes of the historical displacements evident in Javanese culture and

in state-sponsored forms of culture. The examples presented here were the government's

use of the goals and programs of early nationalist women and community organizations

for its own ends. But the recuperation of culture and ritual is effected not by the New

Order government but by people like those I studied living in the shadow of the kraton.

447

APPENDIX A

MAPS AND FIGURES

448

Figure 2.1 Census interview.

Nomor Rumah Tangga: RT: RW:

Tanggal:

HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS-DEMOGRAPHY

Kode Nomor

Nama Hubung -an dengan kepala keluarga

jenis ke-lamin

berapa lama di Rumah Putri

umur suku bangsa

agama status

kawin

449

Nomor Rumah; Tanggal:

HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS-DEMOGRAPHY (page 2)

Kode Nomor Sekolah (kelas yang

terakhir)

pekeijaan pokoknya

pekeijaan sampingan

status pekeijaan (berkeija/ penganggur)

Penghasilan rata-rata perbulan

450

Nomor Rumah Tangga: Tanggal:

HOUSEHOLD INVENTORY (page 3)

rumah dibuat dari apa?

rumah ini berapa meter?

bidang rumah ini berapa meter?

atap dibuat dari apa?

lantai rumah ini dibuat dari apa?

berapa kamar?

adakah tanah lain punyai KK?

di mana? (dalam RP, kota, di luar)

berapa bidang tanah lain dsb?

adakah rumah lain punyai KK?

Di mana? (dalam RP, kota, di luar)

berapa rumah lain dsb?

siapa punyai rumah siapa kontrak rumah ini? (nomor)

apakah air sumber?

adakah listrik? berapa wat? berapa lama Ustrik di sini?

adakah mobil? berapa?

adakah sepeda motor? berapa?

adakah sepeda? berapa?

adakah TV? adakah lemari es? adakah radio?

adakah telpon? kamar mandi dalam atau di luar rumah?

gunakan kompor minyak/gas?

Komentar?

451

Figure 2.2 Questionnaire for adult women.

NOMOR RUMAH: RT: RW: Nama kepala keluarga: Nama Ibu;

Hubungan dengan kepala keluarga; Umur;

BCawin; Berapa Lama; Berapa anak;

Agama;

Pendidikan terakhir; Daerah asli; Berapa lama di Rumah Putri; Orangtua masih hidup; tinggal di mana;

apa pekeijaannya; Ibu; pokok; Bapak; pokok;

Kegiatan apakah yang sering Ibu lakukan di rumah; 1 . 2 . J.

4 . 5 . 6 .

(Kalau Ibu tidak ikut PKK, mengapa?);

Apakah pendapat Ibu mengenai PKK, baik atau tidak untuk Ibu-Ibu Indonesia;

Menurut Ibu, kegiatan yang mana hubungan dengan PKK terbaik:

452

Menurut Ibu, kegiatan yang mana hubungan dengan PKK paling susah:

Kelahiran: Untuk tiap kali Ibu menjadi hamil:

KaU hamil

Umur Ibu

Tinggal di mana

Apa yang dipergunakan dalam KB pada waktu ini

Melahirkan di mana

Ada persoalan dengaii kelahiran

Ada kelahiran waktu Ibu melahirkan sebelum 9 bulan:

453

Dari pertama kali Ibu hamil sampai sekarang, siapa membantu atau mengantar Ibu selama kelahiran (misalnya, suaminya, ibunya, kakaknya, atau orang Iain);

Dari pertama kali Ibu hamil sampai sekarang, kapan Ibu berhenti berkeqa sebelum melahirkan:

Biasanya, kapan Ibu mulai berkeija sesudah melahirkan:

anak nomor

umur 1/p

sekolah/ klas berapa

berkeija/ sebagai apa

tinggal di mana

kalau anaknya sakit keras, dengan apa dan kapan

(* hanya untuk anak sebelum 5 tahun) Berapa anaknya sudah meninggal:

Umur berapa anak yang meninggal: Mengapa menmggal:

Hanya untuk Ibu dengan anak di bawah 5 tahun: Siapa yang mengasuh anak selama Ibu berkeija:

Apa hubimgan dengan orang yang mengasuh anak Ibu:

Orang itu tinggal di mana:

454

Berapa jauh dari pekeijaan Ibu;

Berapa Ibu hams membayar: dengan uang atau barang:

Hanya imtuk Ibu dengan anak-anak di atas 5 tahim: Waktu anak-anaknya sebelum 5 tahun, siapa mengasuh mereka selama Ibu berkeqa:

Pekeijaan (saat ini, untuk tiap ibu): Apa pekeijaan pokok;

berapa gajinya tiap hari: berapa jam tiap hari:

pekeijaan sampingan (I); (2): (3):

Apakah pekeijaan suami Ibu: Biasanya, kapan Ibu bangun: Berapa jauh ke pekeijaan:

Naik apa; Biasanya, kapan Ibu kembali: Biasanya, kapan Ibu memasak untuk rumah; Biasanya, kapan Ibu istirahat: Biasanya, kapan Ibu tidur: Kalau Ibu bisa mengubah satu sifat pekeijaannya, yang mana dan mengapa:

455

Pari pekeqaan pertama satopai sekarang:

Umur Ibu Pekeijaan Di Mana Berapa Gajinya tiap hari

Biasanya, siapa menentukan bawah Ibu barus berkeija (misahiya, suaminya atau sendiri);

Dan dulu, sebelum kawin, siapa menentukan Ibu hams berkeija, orangtuanya atau Ibu sendiri:

Apakah, Ibu pemah mengubah pekeijaan karena anak-anaknya kecil;

Apakah pendapat Ibu mengenai Ibu-Ibu yang mana dia mempunya anak sebelum 5 tahun. apakah mereka seharusnya tinggal di rumah atau berkeija:

456

Figure 2.3 Questionnaire for market women.

IJNTUK roU-roU PASAR Nama: Tinggal di mana: Umur: Kawin: Berapa Lama: Apakah pekeijaan suaminya: Agama: Daerah asli: Pendidikan terakhir: Apakah Ibunya juga menjual di pasar: Berapa lama Ibu menjual di sini, di pasar Rumah Putri: Mengapa Ibu mensual di Pasar PKK Gedong Kiwo daripada tempat Iain:

Apa yang dijual Ibu di pasar: 1 . 2 . J.

4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 .

9 . 10 .

Apakah, bahan ini dari Ibu sendiri atau kulakan:

Ibu memasak sendiri atau kulakan juga:

Siapa yang membantu Ibu:

Kapan Ibu memasak atau mengambil bahan itu tiap had:

Apakah, Ibu punya pekeijaan sampmgan: Apa: 1)

2) 3)

457

Biasanya, kapan Ibu bangun;

Berapa jauh dari rumahnya ke pasar PKK:

Naik apa: Biasanya, kapan Ibu pulang dari pasar; Biasanya, kapan Ibu memasak untuk rumah; Biasanya, kapan Ibu istirahat: Biasanya, kapan Ibu tidur: T-ahirr Berapa kali Ibu hamil: Berapa anak masih hidup;

Berapa umumya: Berapa anaknya sudah meninggal:

Umur berapa anak yang meninggal: Mengapa meninggal:

*Hanya unmk anak di bawah 5 tahun: Siapa mengasuh anak selama Ibu di pasar: Apa hubungan dengan orang yang mengasuh anak Ibu:

Orang itu tinggal di mana: Berapa Ibu hams membayar:

dengan uang atau apa: Kalau anaknya sakit, Ibu masuk pasar atau tidak: Kalau anaknya sakit keras, siapa yang menentukan bahwa anak hams dibawa ke dukun, rs, atau klinik:

Siapa harus membawa anak im:

Untuk tiap Ibu: Kalau Ibu perlu uang, siapa dihubungi oleh Ibu:

keluarga, teman, rumah tetangga, atau siapa:

Kalau Ibu perlu bantuan dengan anak-anaknya, siapa dihubungi oleh Ibu: keluarga, teman, rumah tetangga, atau siapa:

^au Ibu hams meminjam uang, biasanya Ibu pakai pinjam-simpan PKK di sini atau orang lain: Mengapa:

458

Figure 3.1 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1956. Kampung Rumah Putri lies immediately to the southeast of the Kraton's southeast comer (after Kasto 1976:24).

t

459

Figure 3.2 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1765 (after Kasto 1976:25).

460

Figure 3.3 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1790 (after Kasto 1976:26).

461

Figure 3.4 Yogyakarta and Kraton. 1824 (after Kasto 1976:27).

Figure 3.5 Yogyakarta and Kraton, 1970 (after Kasto 1976:28).

462

463

Figure 4.1 Structure of PKK from national level to local offices (from Konggres Wanita Indonesia 1985).

PKK nECHANiS:^

NATiONAL TO VILLAGE lEVE_

B M I N I S T E R I OF HOME A. -rAIRS

THE MANAGING TEAM OF

NATIONAL _EV=i.

+ + + + 4- i i -.c FKK BOARD --= ?i

7 - : = O F F I C E R S 1 NATIONAL LEVEL

GOVERNOR

THE MANAGING TEAM OF LKMD

PROVINCIAL LEVEL

y

^ + + + - - - +

I the ?KK BOARD -F, := OFFICERS

I PROVINCIAL LEVEL

bupati/mayor rrTTTTT

I RT!! N/SNAVS I INVS I ZAN Or LKMD

REGENCY/TOWNSHIP LEVEL /•

i T:-;E ?KK BOARD L OF OFFICERS I =!EGE*CY/T0WNSHIP LEVEL

C A M A T ITTT + + -!•- -r

THE MANAGING TEAM Op LKMD

DISTRICT LEVEL ^ THE PKK BOARD

OF OFFICERS DISTRICT LEVEL

HEAD OF VILLAGE - + * +

L K M D

ULJU I 11 'KK

+ + + +

GUIDANCE

TECHNICAL CCTIUNICATION REPORT I r>l3 "i^-iANISM COKSUL'A-:VE :OOPERATI ON

Figure 4.2 Schematic of the local structure of PKK section of Indonesian local government (after N. Sullivan 1994:63).

EXECUTIVE LEVEL PRESIDENT Deputy President I Deputy President il

1 Secretary 1

FUNCTION LEVEL Secretary il (SPECIAL SUB-SECTIONS)

1 Treasurer 1 Treasurer II

1 1 I I S Sport / Culture Education Community Social Leaders 1, II Leaders 1, II Leaders 1, II Projects

Leaders 1, II

1 1 1 1 Family Equipment Credit Area Planning Leaders 1, II Society Commissioners Leaders 1, II Leaders 1, II 1, II, III, IV and V

PKK rank and file - adult female population

465

Figure 4.3 Schematic of local levels of goveroment in rural and urban areas (after J. Sullivan 1992:135).

Civil-AdniinisiraQve Hierarchy after Village Government Law 5/1979

HAMLET (tingkungani Jitsiutt

VILLAGE (ktbmhamdtta)

NHIUIinOUR

GROUP (NIKWT

Ni:ic:i nun'R C.ROUl'

' ntkim

URBAN NEIGHBOURHOOD

intkun tojrjia)

RURAI. NEIGHBOURHOOD

(nikun Runpa)

Figure 4.4 Women's self concept and its components (Tim Penggerak PKK n.d.).'

npokah Kffnsep-Din ?

AVi rAMS Ai:AflKHKAU eewemw DCH&W Dim ANM, -(AN6 KE^IUDIAH MSNIMSARJ AM» DMAM UPAYA

KeUMRBA cm' MASrAMKfiT. iNiiAH yfiN6 etrnxsu:? flsvaw >

['P/

' •I'ncierticin Kbnsep-Diri Jt>u menum Kehatyt S^ahfem.

PRINSIP HIPUP/R^NCHNSAN POA HIPUF

dijelyy>akay) dalam

Gmpmmw HIPUF SEHARI-HARI

unfuk memijt^dkan

KFI^UARGA SBJAHTBRA T

mAN,TENT^f^M, S^LAMAT, MA'^U

^ydc6av(<ai'i fhm&la dan UUP 1(^45'

LEFT: Wfiat is Self Concept? Whatever it is that you think of in connection with yourself, that later forms the basis of what you do in your efforts to make your family and your society prosperous. Tliis is what is meant by: self concept. RIGHT: The Meaning of Women's Self Concept as Regards the Prosperous Family. Life principles and life blueprints creates attitudes and behavior in daily life for creates a prosperous family that is calm, peaceftjl, safe, and modem. Based on Pancasila and the * Constitution of 1945. c

Figure 4.5 Women's self concept and its components (Tim Penggerak PKK n.d.)."

Vun St/am t utayw apa yana l-mrus sdfranu Haisep-Vtyin/fa Myftr, nwn.'ap 7

(r^ msm/ArAV WIMMMJIAH PANCA ffniM mnA • FimnnKi - nnuLOLA nnuA • nuemis KetmufM/

DM fsvefPiKAmk - FfNCMO HA'K^ "POiMHM

WARSA AKSy/VWHT'

mums /SK /Vtu JUSA som& vmm >m^ MSfiufmvi flfvaw y>m UTUH

funjs//fcf^S il?nda/am FanCa Dha^ma j/\/an,V«L

\/WITA SSR^I

@ FSNOWFN/S 3UWI

•L'

® rcNSSUXA flmff^66A

fWCA DfWRMA wmnrA

WARBA MASm/W^r

T

fiEW/K/ NAHWi © ymnus Kewm'~. XfiMBMAN aw fSMPlPlK 4HV<-

LEFT; Two Important Prerequisites that Must Be Possessed by a Woman in order that her Self Concept be Genuine, Healthy, and Steady. (1) experience folly and apply the five duties of women as: support for lier husband, manager of the household, the one who insures the continuance of the family and the education of children, worker for supplemental income, and citizen. (2) A wife or mother is also a woman who constitutes a whole individual. RIGHT: The Function/Duties of Woman within the Five ^ Duties of Women. (Illustration of duties outlined on the left.)

o> •vj

Figure 4.6 Women's self concept and its components (Tim Penggciak PKK n.d.). '

h^anifa £el}aga, icir, ftndmpmtj Suutn, v Wmla ^etqga, yetiqehh rmah fa-nj^f

semm tsmi p&JNV mM SUAMI :

IJ sehagp) ^^6s^c5 •a^afi Jufa an. : t/u/ai 2j met^yodiri'/wema^mi ^eaaban .Suamij

aim ^ngjun

3! petwh raso, SeCry hfnrntf-meiyhxm . ' MraoM-ni^tvertmi/ mierimQ am

maHSen ant»v suami jebagm fvpin n»m/i Aajftz. dat isfri seba^i ibu rumeA

mmjay kesemgifan fmtuyan emfim •SHum-dfri

SeSfi^Ai' PSfoeMiA PunviTiweeA IJ mampu nteytciplokon rumohiangga yong -kf^rf

eton aman tntnjuM kdiersihon ehn kempihan runx^iiftMet d<n-\ (ingh^ngan

3! pareHi mengcriur datt nnemanfaaflayt wukfu J.) mttynptt nKmtuf 'kesdmbtt n penqhosi/fin '' dan ptmbtviyaon

Sj pandai mtnghenwf, hidup sutrhona dar\ y dopcrt menaoung

}

LEFT: Woman as Supporter of her Husband. (1) As a true love in success and sonow, (2) aware and understanding of her husband's condition; his situation, duties, and responsibilities, (3) iliil of considerate feelings, respectful of one another, believing one another along with each receiving and giving between the husband as head of the household and the wife as housevvafe, (4) guarding the harmony of the husband-wife relation sliip. RIGHT; Woman as Manager of the Household As a household manager; (I) competent to create a household that is peaceful and calm, (2) guarding the cleanliness and neatness of the household and neighborhood area, (3) clever in arranging and making use of time, (4) competent to arrange a balance ^ between income and finances, (5) clever in being thrifty, living simply and saving. °°

Figure 4.7 Women's self concept and its components (Tim Penggerak PKK nd.).^

'A.'iWiV S£hr/{jOi iX'Vn/S! Ketunmin

I9U PEMILMIR

Wciiuta seia i pencnri unfhn htnbaA^n

1« rrtmsofohn tifn mempergfOpAor} dm untnk • mttaftirhm arok ycuy te/»f 21 mmvu memtnuhi kd/utuhtn enak, n^footrikaii J mea pman dm htUft St^nj

am mifiimbrg ptritmbonfK 3] iMnpt''leridergrig me/ nibi t Jasnani don rolaytni anak onatn/a

4) )bu dan auth furus mtmm fasoluon sifap • fondor da/am ntn/idik omk onein f) seU^i jxnstmnf dm eonivA Ay.

SBBASAJ P&CM MVWH TAMBAHAN

»fetJB atm iartahan penfcsHtn fuan, eiM4n>er\)usafiaMn naui _ _ __ v<*y Tenwiad i ieri V Msahua ^menamm sai/imin. tetfrMi.-d>» XbagamyS, untuk memMutu Icebufum) Meluaiya

urmfmbunakan fvtoni iermmsuMsta (*"9" (gma-usam yang tDetyutttiaighin hitigfa /upas ttiuayn.

LEFT; Woman as the Preserver of the Family and Children's Education. (1) Carrying out and preparing herself for giving birth to a healthy child, (2) competent to fill the needs of a cliild, giving a felling of safety and love, (3) capable of pusliing and leading the development of the body and spirit of her children, (4) mother and father must possess a united attitude and perspective in educating their children, (5) as a motivator and model for her children. RIGHT: Women as a Worker for Supplemental Income. As a worker for supplemental income raising the skills and knowledge that is useful for the family. For example, sewing clothes herself, making cakes, etc. Organizing work or additional income appropriate to her capabilities, or making use of income to create more. For example, growing vegetables, breeding [cliickens], etc., for fulfilling the needs of the family. Developing the potential for entrepreneurialism with efforts that are profitable. Capable of arranging time so that her duties to the family are not neglected.

Figure 4.8 Women's self concept and its components (Tim Penggerak PKK n.d.).'

WanHa xtxigai nmyn nfi^anuxt

SSaiSVHMKH tj Sebagof warga mas^m/mr tftnr

hak dbn keuajiiaiiny '.J IVIeintlihQra peigeuhn hithp

Herukumiy Itrtetpn tei1'' n)Javb a/o ke/fnMmman mn teanwrioii nnftunyfuv/ J Sep memlmfu n>aielo/y sesamamfi sa»»i

kenvn^putm, sa/ing asaJ>, ttsih, asuh y Jfmt Said sbhm ^/cnfni pemtmifunan

Jbu/wamfa prifxii/i yot

TtM Svmi mmA ii»fJ6 H'Kui am/A ssae^tt-iim. uiwir/i ssfiiM /AM$ uruh

Ksimami t&vmVM PKJ' — • Ixtpaydofum btrkehmplhi

- icneuH

•aw ivemuTuShan, dan be/r(jof uoM baik bog! din-p 'badi ftaMrgo- tbn ytv^mkaf-

• • PefvHiM IXmiA

S

LEFT; Woman as a Member of Society. As a citizen of the nation and a member of society: (I) as a member of society who is good and aware of her rights and responsibilities, (2) to protect daily associations that are good with neighborly harmony that follows responsibility for the peaceflilness and safety of her neighborhood, (3) who helps as much as she is able, each teaching, loving, and caring for one another, (4) following along with the activities of development. RIGHT: Mother/Women as an Whole Individual. Three important principles that must be possessed by a mother/woman as a whole individual: (a) raising her own capabilities: knowledgeable and skillful, characterized by noble moral character, with muhiple roles; (b) herself, capable of determining, deciding and making what is good for herself, her family and society; ( c ) with the spirit of an aduh.

Figure 4.9 Women's self concept and its components (Tim Penggerak PKK n.d.)/

DERdlWA DEWA5A SBRASI seiji^s 5B|tvia«MMS

HAK aw VIRI, KELUAReA JAF>VINI WW Fa(H6l^l KSWAJIBAN JWM (/lASrWiAKAT

JAF>VINI WW Fa(H6l^l

yang •fercermin dalarn perilaku seba^i 3:_

PENSet-OLA rumahtamgsa DIRI PRIIMDI

?. KONSBP-DIRI IBU SBmfAl K4DER Pt<K

ggRAgl dan iSgiMEWS

TIJG/*S CMWM KHOMRSA *r TANtUUNG JAWA s

-RA5AS SEEWS^f MOCK PfSK

BS^IIVKP - DEH«SA / MANTAP - IJVJSGAP OBN KDNSEKUEN - PENUH KETAULADANAN - SgRBRHAN/* dIOd e;JAKSAA//A

PENSABPIAN KADER.*" VVWNTOA SEBA&AI PfOS'VPI TWO UTUH

LEFT: Having the Spirit of an Adult: Compatibility, Harmony and Balance between rights and responsibility, for herself, her family and society, body and soul, which is reflected in her actions as a person, a household manager, a wife, a mother, and a member of society. RIGHT; Women's Self Concept as a PKK Cadre. Compatible and |—> duties withui the family Balanced responsible for v

I—> duties as a PKK cadre; with an attitude that is adult and steady, perceptive and consistent, a complete model, simple and wise.

Figure 5.1 Kinship chart for extended Cipto family.

THE EXTENDED CIPTO FAMILY

I i~i

i ; i 1 1 Ibu Bapak

Cipto

i = A

i;uil U Bapak Ibu

Sae

i - A i - i i , A i , . i . A i i r a n i i u i i i Bapak Ibu Bapak Ibu Ibu Bapak

Apik \ Cilik \ Tri

(Children)

tn.mn

A k

Figure 5.2 Plan of Cipto compoinid.

Pak Mongo's room

fonner pathway APIK HOUSE

waning

kitchen CIPTO HOUSE

kitchen

OUR HOUSE SAE HOUSE CILIK HOUSE

bamboo platfonn

pathways/common areas for family O well ^ doorway

4 ni N CO

Figure 5.3 Sketch map of RT Barat.

V i( • > /,

> * . >1.

RT BARAT Sae/Cipio kio paved roadway

\^\ pathways 4 vegetation

RT boundaries river

•• walls interior walls infomtal meeting places

rV- fence line O well

Figure 5.4 Rassers's plan of a Javanese house (I960[I925]).

b a c d d d

m

a ^

d d d

m

a ^

I

I

d

I omah ngarep (pen^apa, salu, tarub)

IX kampung (paringgitan, jagasatru)

III omah buri (jerambah)

a. kobongan (senfong tengah, amben tengah,

boma. pajangan. paaarean ageng)

b. sarong (sentong kiwa)

c. s^nfong (scn^ong teng^n)

Figure 5.5 Plans of three types of Javanese houses from Keeler (1983). Kitchen

A simple dwelling

romah

omah kitchen

A more substantia) dwelling kitchen area

jromah

II II II

gandhok omah 01

omah mbiiri

1 1

gandhok

ornate mgarep

II

nina lor ascetic exercises

Jl

bridal chamber

I I

storage area

) t

dalem (dalem = honorific term for omah)

J L.

prlnggllan (an open verandah|

gandhok

An Aristocratic Home

pandhapa

•o cr«

Figure 5.6 A simple house plan (Santoso 1996).

Figure 5.7 Plan for a more elaborate house (Santoso 1996).

479

Figure 5.8 Plan ofthe Yogyakarta Kraton (Santoso 1996).

Soutiiera Alun-alun

Soutlicrn Siu Hiaggii

Southern Kcmandhungan

{Cuatriyan

Kq)Utren Kemagangao

Northern Kemandhungao

Northern Siti Hinggii

Northern Aluit-alun

Figure 5.9 Schematic for the Kabyle house (after Bourdieu 1977).

WEST

east spring

SOUTH north taw winter

autumn wet west

EAST

diy

high south sunnmer

NORTH

RITUAL INCORPORATION

D* £ SOCIAL

rt TIME

MALE SPHERE

NOIXVHOdHODNI oiwoNooa-ivoiinod

CULTIVATION

ECOLOGICAL

TIME

g FEMALE SPHERE rt

XSaAHVH

Table 6.1 Numbers of PKK teams, population, and cadre groups in the city ofYogyakarta. ** indicates numbers for the kecamatan of Rumah Putri alone. From Tim Penggerak Kotamadya, Daerah Tingkat II Yogyakarta,

JIULAH TIKGiCAT ICLPDIGURUSAN

T i n P E N C G b J R A K P K K .

JUHLAlf K£U)HPOK

JUH-

UH

KK.

JIMUH XADER

JIMLAH TL3UGA

SLKRETARIAT

XA5.

KO-

D3A.

KO-

HP.

K£C DESi KEL.

PXX

DtBUN

PKK

RW

PKK

RT

iJASA

wisiu

JUH-

UH

KK.

A»CC.

TP.

PKK

UfUl

KHU-

SUS.

HONO-EW17UA.N

ATAU

RELAHAN

3 4. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 1 15 16 17 18

*

m

'1

ft

mm

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

-

4

3

5

5

2

2

3

3

3

2

2

3

7

3

•MK

44

57

65

43

47

21

34

55

43

31

19

59

78

10

178

163

281

161

173

la

16?

227

175

111

84

234

301

160

mm

391

400

.631

242

503

2$0

325

516

366

m 149

416

626

Ml

6036

6555

9742

6244

4624'

4387

5795

7150

6239

10623 2830

ei2i 9393

A648

56

182

136

234

157

97

58

101

129

148

95

542

130

247

56

99

78

793

318

9C8

425

835

329

71

275

206

130

65

I K .

92

1171

284

1468

954

2724

1275

2505

923

776

625

618

717

975

.515-

e

1

2

4

1 lA 45 il5 2059. 5103 76921 2422 4627 15882 - 7

Jtjt karU, 31 Kar

00

•t 1992.

Figure 6.2 Statistical profile of Indonesia (fi"om Robison 1996:77-78).

GENERAL

Land area 1,919,445 sq. km Population (mid 1992) 184.3 million people Nominal GDP (1992) US$ 126,364 million

share of agriculture 19% share of industry 40% share of manufacturing 21 % share of services 40%

Average annual GDP growth rate (1980-1992) 5.7% GDP per capita (1992) US$ 686 GNP per capita (1992) US$ 670 Monetisation level (broad money [M2] as % of GDP; 1992) 42.6% Average annual growth rate of M2 (1980-1992) 26.3% Central government budget surplus or deficit as % of GNP

(1992) +0.5% Current account siuplus or deficit (after oflBcial transfers;

1992) -US$ 3.769 miUion Merchandise trade surplus or deficit (1992) +US$ 6,535 million Gross domestic savings as % of GDP (1992) 37% Gross domestic investment as % of GDP (1992) 35% Tax revenue as % of GNP (1991) 20% Total external debt (1992) US$ 84,385 million Percentage of population of working age (15-64; 1990) 60.4% Number of students in higher and university education

(1990/91) I.lmiUion

INDICATORS OF RELATIVE WELFARE

Real GDP per capita (purchasing-power-parity adjusted; 1991) US$2,730

Ratio of population with the highest 20% income or expenditure share to the lowest 20% (1990)* 4.9

Percentage of urban population (1992) 32% Total employment (1990) 75.9 million

of which professional, technical workers 3.7% of which administrative, managerial workers 0.2% of which clerical, sales, services workers 23.4% of which agriculture, production, transport workers

484

and equipment operators 62.7% Gross tertiary enrollment ration (1990)** 92 Table 6.2 Continued.

Life expectancy at birth (1992) 62.0 years Population with access to safe water (1988) 51 % Total consumer expenditure (1992)+ US$ 64,166 million

share of food, drink and tobacco 53.4% share of clothing and footwear 5.6% share of housing and fiiels 15.2% share of household goods and services 8.0% share of health share of leisure and education 3.4%

Per capita energy use (oil equivalent; 1992) 303 kg People per telephone (1989) 176.4 People per TV (1990) 16.3 People per doaor( 1989) 6.956.4 Per capita consumption of beef (1991) 0.9 kg Per capita consumption of chicken (1991) 1.4 kg Per capita consumption of fish (1991) 13.2 kg Per capita consumption of soft drinks (1992) 6.4 litres Book titles published (1990) 1,518

Notes: *Data refer to expenditure shares by fractiles of persons, ranked by per capita expenditure. **The number of students enrolled in the tertiary level of education, regardless of their age, as a ratio to the number of people in the relevant age group. +The percentage figures for consumer expenditures are on selected items only.

Sources: Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Yearbook of Indonesia, 1993 Euromonitor, International Marketing Data and Statistics, 1994 DLO, Yearbook of Labour Statistics, 1993 Ministry of Finance, Financial Motes and Government Budget Forecasts, 1994/95 The World Bank, World Development Report, 1994 UNDP, Human Development Report, 1994

485

APPENDIX B

HUMAN SUBJECTS APPROVAL

486

TH£ UwCRSinrOr

HufTun Suevvcu Ommtner ARIZONA ftHO V WjtTcn iBtdc, 526B1 Tuocn.-Aruonj -0lC:93^r31 of 626-7573

HtALfH SCiNCtS CtNTlIl

Qcrob«r 30, 1992

Janic* Newberry, H.A. Oeparraenc of Anthropology Building 30 Main Caapus

S2: VQMZH ABD THE ZSOOHESIAN STATS: COHXOHZTY AS A CASZGOBT OF STQOT ASD BX9ERZEHCS

Dear Ms. Newberry:

We received doctuaents concerning your above referenced projccc and letter of invitation froa official source to do this research in Indonesia. Regulations, published by the CJ.S. Department of Health and Huaan Services [45 CTR Part 46.101(b)(2)] exempt this type of research from review by our Coooittee.

Please be advised that approval for this project and the requirement of a subject's consent form is to be determined by your department.

Thanic you for informing us of your work. Xf you have any questions concerning the above, please contact this office.

Sincerely yours.

William P. Denny, H.O. Chairman, Human Subjects committee

cc: Departmental/College Review Committee

WFD:sj

487

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