Air-conditioned Man: How Jakarta’s new men abandoned politics for the good life; by Sahil Mahtani
Lost in Mall by Lizzie van Leeuwen
reviewed by Sahil Mahtani
30 October 2011 — Early in Lost in Mall, an anthropological account of middle-class Jakartans in the 1990s, a elderly lady enquires, weeping, whether “demokratisasi means she has to allow her servants to sit on the chairs from now on.” Lizzy van Leeuwen, a Dutch anthropologist with Indonesian relatives who spent much of the 1990s there, tells us that the lady almost had a stroke that morning after catching a servant sitting in an armchair while watching television—previously a floor-bound activity. For anybody who lived through the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, history felt like it was on fast-forward, and Lost in Mall is full of vignettes that show the magnitude of social change.
Van Leeuwen is curious about the DNA of the new middle classes of Indonesia. What are their socio-cultural origins, if any? What is their outlook on life, and specifically, how do they understand themselves in relation to the state and the outside world? Is it inevitable they will push for democracy, as “modernization theory”, an academic school of thought, holds or are they eternal Suharto-style “guided democracy” sympathisers? Befitting an ex-journalist, van Leeuwen decides “long-term participation” is the best way to gain insight into these chosen themes, and she moves in with the Wiyantos, a family in Bintaro, a nondescript but prosperous suburb of Jakarta. In the great tradition of Indonesianists who began as anthropologists—Clifford Geertz, James Siegel and Robert Hefner come to mind—van Leeuwen’s method is “thick description” followed by social and historical synthesis. Academic purists who prefer their scholarship liberated from relevance may balk, but the rest of us will appreciate her sharp insights into a substantial and growing group that is emblematic of larger trends across Asia—and of which little is known.
Bintaro, van Leeuwen writes, is a “fantasy island of modernity” with the kampung areas— urbanized villages common in Southeast Asia—hidden behind fences and high walls, surrounded by golf courses and hopeless villas. Crucially it is a place “where nothing major is supposed to happen.” In their air-conditioned lives, with frequent trips to nearby malls, residents could imagine themselves to have escaped Suharto’s Indonesia, “its backwardness, inefficiency, provincialism, control, corruption, officialdom, abuse of power, its ‘bad quality’ and all things archaic in general,” even while being an integral part of the regime’s base of support.
These descriptions offer a faithful, if searing, mirror of the city in the 1990s. Her description of the “apparent need to talk continuously about money” in Jakarta is spot on. Knowing the price of something here is still a mark of solidity and good sense, and great acclaim has been known to greet Indonesians who recite entire ledgers of prices. There are also some extraordinary character portraits of the Wiyantos. Ugo, a tall, fat thirteen-year old who has just been circumcised, spends all his time reading Japanese comics in his air-conditioned “relax room” and sometimes demands male servants to play football with him. When the ball falls in the sewer, he makes an authoritative hand-gesture for it to be washed before he will resume playing with it. This sort of behavior might be common in any sort of society where labour is cheap, but crucially, Ugo’s parents applaud his behavior—it is his first step towards becoming a “pater familias… a serious bapak,” a word meaning ‘father’ in Indonesian, and encompasses “all the father figures in the socio-political system, who all demanded respect, deference, and obedience.” Another Wiyanto sustains enough pathologies for several people: Sonya is obsessed with her skin color, attracted primarily to bules (Indonesian colloquial for white people), and is constantly threatening to leave Jakarta for Wichita, where she once studied and which she associates with freedom.
Lost in Mall is best on the massive depoliticization of Indonesian society, which has only recently begun to change. There is an extraordinary chapter detailing reactions to the 1998 May riots that will ring true to anyone who experienced them. In the face of conflagrations outside, Van Leeuwen’s Jakarta acquaintances resort to denial, playing down or fixating on objects without clear importance. Luxury possessions are a common crutch—people refer to their cars and houses totemically; an elderly lady repeatedly asks van Leeuwen to bring boldoot—a Dutch eau-de-cologne used in colonial times—instead of discussing the looting and burning of Slipi Plaza unfolding a block away from her.
Part of the problem with political expression in Indonesia may be that Bahasa, the national language, is too polite to express demands or complain about injustice or power. In Bahasa, one is never poor, just belum, or “not yet” rich. In fact, University of Tokyo scholar Saya Shiraishi has argued that learning Indonesian is not just about grammar and syntax but especially about “what must be kept unsaid and how important it is to know what lies behind the silence.” No wonder that Jakarta residents resorted to the language of consumption to convey 1998’s trauma. It was a reminder of more comforting suburban days, when nothing was supposed to happen.
When did the Indonesian middle classes depoliticize? The Soekarno years saw a jangle of activism from an intellectual vanguard, but for the most part people cannot be said to have been politically active. Van Leeuwen cites the work of Benedict Anderson and James Siegel to argue that the rejection of politics takes a more extreme cast after the trauma of 1965-1966, when a contested “communist” coup led to the immediate seizure of power by Suharto, culminating in the massacre of more than half a million Indonesians. Even today, key parts of the story have not been clarified, and public discussion is not as extensive as it should be. Adam Schwarz and Michael Vatikiotis, among others, have noted the awkward responses of Indonesians to mention of the events—people pretend not to have heard certain remarks or abruptly finish phone conversations. In the aftermath of the coup, van Leeuwen tells us, depoliticization, which became entrenched, turned “communist” terms like “social inequality” (let alone “class struggle”) into taboo expressions. Even “politics” became a bad word, with modernization the imperative of the hour. Jakartans became obsessed with crime, revolt and insecurity, even though the city is not particularly unsafe. Van Leeuwen rightly points out that late colonial literature too was obsessed with “rust en orde” (peace and order), which suggests that repression with modernization has deeper roots than the Suharto era, and might in some sense be the natural frame of reference for most Indonesians.
Today, of course, Indonesia has a lively public sphere and the freest press in Southeast Asia, at least according to the 2010 Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. But Suharto nostalgia is also all-pervasive, and if anything, more powerful than any liberal sentiments to which Indonesians are frequently exhorted to subscribe to by civil society types. Van Leeuwen prefaces her book with a strikingly contemporary caution against Aburizal Bakrie, the notorious Indonesian tycoon who is front-runner in the 2014 presidential contest, writing, “Suharto was inspired and instructed by colonial rule, and just as in the Netherlands, it takes a few generations to overcome this experience.” A Bakrie victory would show that the political pathologies predating Suharto have survived his demise.
Sahil Mahtani is writer currently based in Jakarta. He has previously written for The Economist, The New Republic, and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Lost in Mall: An Ethnography of Middle Class Jakarta in the 1990’s, Lizzie van Leeuwen (University of Hawaii Press, July 2011; KITLV Press, July 2011)
© 2011 The Asian Review of Books.
