The Aroused Public in Search of the Pornographic in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper explores the language and implications of the Indonesian pornography law passed in 2008 and a 2006 draft that targeted ‘pornographic action' as well as pornographic media. While noting how pornographic action was seen as an attempt to impose Shari'a law especially insofar as it focused on women's bodies, this paper also examines how pornography, widely available through new technologies and economic liberalization, has come to be seen as an array of foreign and mapped sexual practices. This paper argues that as sexual practices become ethnicized, and as pornography comes to encompass a wide range of bodily practices from bathing to dancing to dressing, ethnicity itself has become pornographic, and the nation has been encouraged to become voyeuristic peeping Toms monitoring cultural performance.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• pornography
• media
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Deborah Durham for her careful reading and thoughtful comments as well as an anonymous reviewer who made several valuable suggestions that contributed to the final version of this paper.

Notes

According to Hefner (2000:16), Javanese are 55% of Indonesia's Islamic population.

Bali has been the target of repeated violent attacks by fundamentalist Islamic groups, most notably in the form of bombings carried out in 2002 and 2005 in tourist areas on the southern coast of the Island. While the Western media sources suggested that these bombings were aimed at the Australian and other tourists, it becomes clear in popular Indonesian discourse that Balinese Hindus were a target for their tolerance of Western decadence. Some in Bali suggest that the RUU APP represented the ‘third bombing' of Bali.

Scholars who conducted research during the New Order period have repeatedly shown how coercive, yet highly successful, Suharto's development and modernization projects were in re-shaping local practices (Tsing 1993; Keane 1997; Kuipers 1998, 2003; Spyer 2000; Bowen 2003; Rutherford 2003; Boellstorf 2004).

RUU APP in many ways exemplifies the centrality of gender and sexuality in this nation-building logic. The recent draft anti-pornography legislation, RUU APP, and surrounding debates, however, go beyond a focus on the (Muslim) female body as the locus of the nation's moral integrity.

Bali has roughly 3 million Hindu inhabitants. A tiny minority of ethnic Balinese are historically Islamic or recent converts to Christianity.

Cell phone use and the internet, like pornographic video consumption, for example, have transformed social life in the last decade across the entire archipelago.

Between 2000 and 2006, the number of families and individuals using rivers as their principal bathing place diminished noticeably. During this period, many households installed indoor bathrooms. At the same time, however, the debate over what constituted the pornographic increased attention to public nudity. River-bathing had never before been categorizable as ‘public nudity' per se. Nonetheless, attitudes toward outdoor bathing were clearly shifting. While a decade ago, it was common; in the last five years, it has become less usual to see people bathing in rivers.

I base my assertions concerning Balinese conceptualizations of porno and the political implications of the concept of pornography and pornographic action on more than 36 months of field research in Bali, Indonesia, from 1996 to the present.

This tension between ideal modes of interaction and actual practice raises the question whether sex, like other religious and cultural practices, can be adat or not. My work on Balinese palm-leaf instructional texts devoted to yogic sexual practices makes it clear that such esoteric forms can certainly be regarded as essentially Balinese (Creese & Bellows 2002). Such esoteric forms, however, are beyond the reach of all but a small segment of traditional scholars. In an era of pornographic consumption, is there a Balinese adat sexuality that is not ‘gaya' Bali – which already implies a pornographic context – but rather a series of forms deemed traditional in contrast to foreign sex styles?