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ABSTRACT
Customary citizenship practices and their implications for contemporary citizenship and democratization remain under-recognized. Recent contributions to Citizenship Studies expand the study of citizenship to include everyday practices in Indonesia, yet they limit their focus to state-related practices or recognize customary practices as citizenship, only to conclude that they ended with colonization. To include customary institutions in our consideration of citizenship, this article draws on contemporary ethnographic fieldwork in a Balinese polity to discuss how villagers practice citizenship through customary institutions in the context of national democracy, in particular customary associations and social networks. In addition, I urge that we bring new perspective to these institutions by paying attention to the customary associations’ informal arenas where women’s roles become more visible, and that we avoid conflating customary networks with party-political networks. To understand citizenship and democratization in their diversity, it is important to tell the multiple stories of everyday practices.
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by Udayana University; the State Ministry of Research and Technology for the Republic of Indonesia; a National Science Foundation grant under number 0964432, and by Central Washington University. First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge my academic debt to the participants in my interviews and surveys on political change in Bali, and to everyone who in the course of my years of working in Bali have contributed to my understanding of local citizenship, including the associations that have welcomed me to sit in on their meetings and attend their ceremonies. I am grateful also to Carol Warren for her supportive response to a longer manuscript from which this article is drawn and two anonymous reviewers for their careful attention and helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This mirrors Geertz’s dramatic declaration that precolonial Indonesian polities ‘vanished with a completeness’ with Dutch conquest, and that in Bali this was ‘quite literally the death of the old order’ (1980,3,13), which ethnographical-based work has similarly shown to be overstated (McRae 1999, Pedersen Citation2006).
2. The Global North–Global South distinction is problematic for the same reasons as its precursors: It is deployed as a socio-economic and political division determined by Euro-American indices. Rather than an objective designation of analytically valid categories it produces a falsely binary, essentializing, and absolute division of the world, which also belies the differences within the countries on either side of the divide. This is not harmless. As sociolinguists recognize, our language about the world shapes our understanding and actions in it, and we come to see our categories as ‘reality.’
3. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork, beginning 1998, I spent eight months in 2010–2011 and another six between 2012–2014 conducting systematic interviews and surveys throughout the sub-district’s customary villages, administrative villages, and irrigation societies, and I have done regular follow-up fieldwork since. All quotes are taken from field notes and transcripts of interviews conducted during these periods. Everything presented is triangulated through a variety of perspectives grounded in actual experiences. This means that I do not rely on one person’s perspective on an issue but establish validity by cross-checking with different data sources, including (as applicable) other interviews, direct observation, and other reports or local texts. I also take care to not confuse opinions or cognition about something with objective data (and in some cases, I am interested in opinions rather than merely determining the facts of a situation). In my fieldwork, I have deliberately positioned myself for different perspectives, including with people of different caste and class standings, of different religions (primarily Hindu and Muslim), and of different genders (primarily identifying as men or women, but also some of gay/lesbian/fluid identities and who do not conform to gender norms). In 2010–2014, for face-to-face surveys and one-time interviews (ca. 1.5–2 hours each) with larger numbers of people (ca. 300), I used stratified random sampling to ensure representation according to caste, age, and gender in Hindu and Muslim communities. Further, ethnographic work relies on implicit controls through long-term participant observation and engagement, and my findings and interpretations are contextualized in over two decades of work in the region. (It thus stands in contrast to the approach of starting an article based on short-term involvement with an ‘ethnographic’ vignette.) My primary focus has varied, but topics of politics have featured throughout.
4. This article’s scope does not include the local Muslim population’s citizenship as Muslims meet through their mosques rather than Hindu customary associations. See Pedersen 2014 for an example of Muslim neighborhoods and their relations. Like the Muslims, members of the Hindu-Balinese high priestly caste also live in separate compounds, with their own neighborhood association, death temple, and cremation ground. Otherwise, since the 60s and 70s high-caste Hindu-Balinese also participate in the banjar.
5. See Winichakul (Citation2008) and Searight (Citation2019) on the thwarted idea that Thailand’s democratic transition had solidified.
6. In light of having heard about customary associations in a predominantly negative light, with violence and corruption attributed to them, one reviewer, as might be the case for other readers, wondered about the honesty of reported opinions especially in regard to ‘matters that could be construed as controversial, such as violence in the past or money politics in the present.’ In addition to the process for ensuring validity in ethnographic fieldwork (note 3), it bears noting that the topics of violence and vote-buying are not necessarily controversial in the ways some might understandably assume, as did I when I first started working in Bali. Based on what I had read, I expected the perpetration of violence in the genocide of the 1960s to be a taboo topic all around. I discovered differently during my dissertation fieldwork in 1998 when, in the lead up to Suharto’s fall, there was fear that violence akin to that of the 60s might ‘erupt.’ Because both the Danish and American embassies were urging me to leave on their last flights out, I had an excuse to ask questions I might not have embarked on otherwise, and to my surprise found that those on the side of the official narrative, including perpetrators, were prepared to talk about the violence of the 60’s disturbingly frankly. (Joshua Oppenheimer describes being similarly surprised, and his films showcase the impunity of the perpetrators who still live in the belief that they did the right thing and would continue to be judged favorably by history.) Since Suharto’s fall, I have conducted multiple interviews with both perpetrators and victims or families of victims about violence – past, present, and potential. Rather than the violence per se, it is the suffering caused that has been, and remains taboo. Most perpetrators appear oblivious to it, while most local victims and families (in the area where I work) are reluctant to dig up in it, both because of the pain involved and because removing the veneer might compel them to seek revenge of fellow villagers. It is also clear from those on-the-ground at the time, that the violence was instigated by the Suharto and the Indonesian military; it is not attributable to customary institutions. We also know now that Euro-American democratic nations , including the United States and Britain, were involved. In his recent (2018) award-winning book, ‘The Killing Season,’ Geoff Robinson conveys the history of the Suharto and army-led campaign and argues explicitly against any idea that the violence arose from communal religious and social conflicts. As far as vote buying goes, my conversations and interviews have been mainly with voters and family group leaders rather than politicians, and people have talked about this quite openly. Only in the immediate lead-up to the last election did I have interlocutors make comments about needing to make sure there were no election monitors around.
7. The number of banjar in any given village varies, and in low populated areas, a village may contain just one banjar. Sizes vary too, from a few dozen to over a hundred households (Warren Citation1993 remains the most comprehensive study of banjar; see also Lorenzen Citation2008).
8. Wardana recognizes the discrepancy between policy and practice, and its impact on why Balinese communities chose to not seize the opportunity presented by the 2014 Village Law for desa adat to be recognized as the state-official village and framework for local governance.
9. The claim that precolonially ‘only males could be citizens’(Stuurman Citation2019, 9; Creese Citation2019) is based on the observation that only ‘men who bore arms’ were counted in the census (Creese Citation2019), not on participation in the elements of citizenship otherwise discussed, which would apply also to non-arms-bearing men and women.
10. This point was made by my interlocutors. One young Balinese man who was asked this by a researcher takes it up in his blog, ‘I was confused when asked. And I was born and raised in Bali.’ (https://www.kompasiana.com/wayan17eka/59f2b2acb3f5ca4fb73d3be3/beda-desa-dinas-desa-adat-desa-pekaraman-di-bali, accessed 12 November 2020). As many interlocutors will, he does his best to outline their roles.
11. They are no more coterminous at the banjar level, where there are seventy adat versus fifty-two dinas.
12. Referring to customary institutions as informal and state institutions as formal has become normalized. However, this reflects and reinforces state-centric positionality and, even if inadvertently, perpetuates biases harkening to early social theory (e.g. Tönnies Citation1955). Appropriating the distinction for this purpose also hinders awareness of important informal versus formal aspects of customary associations and practices themselves.
13. For more on the issue of women, see (Warren Citation1993), (Parker Citation2004), Pedersen CitationPedersen, L. 2007, (Lorenzen Citation2008). We need more ethnographic study of local citizenship from women’s and youth perspectives, with attention to the informal social field beyond the formal assemblies.
14. Warren describes a case from her field-site which escalated over four years (1977–1981) when a group of households wanted to secede from their banjar (1991,223ff) and Connor and Vickers (Citation2003) discuss examples based on media stories. Some of these, however, are not best explained by the adat of customary associations, but more aptly as forms of mob action also found elsewhere in Indonesia and the world. Similarly, in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali Bombings and context of financial crisis, customary security guards (pecalang) which gained status with the 2001 Village Law, have in some cases started policing migrant workers and participating in summary justice against thieves. Indeed conflicts which involve adat groups or appeal to adat may turn acrimonious and culminate in violence, as may other kinds of conflicts; but the sample of cases featured in the media is not representative of the everyday of customary associations. Note that the media also refers to cases where customary associations join forces to resist big capital projects and land appropriation as ‘adat cases’ (Warren 2000, Warren and Wardana Citation2018; Suasta and Connor Citation1999).
15. Subsequent legislative acts confirm this, e.g. the 1999 Law on Human Rights. Customary associations, villagers and legal experts discuss these issues and (re)interpret awig-awig in this light (Buana Citation2016, 104ff, Ndun et al 2018, Pedersen 2007).
16. In Tenggah, Muslims do not feel further marginalized by the new legislation. In preliminary conversations following the 2014 Village Law’s allocation of greater funds, several expressed ongoing empowerment to carry out projects, emphasizing start-up funds for local enterprises. Still, we need a study focused on the citizenship of established Muslim communities within Bali, and also on how migrants are -or are not- incorporated in communities.
17. The 2001 legislation renamed adat villages pakraman, a Sanskrit term from old inscriptions, but locally people still use adat.
18. But Tenggah had a female head of the noble house in the early 20th century.
19. Others have made similar arguments. Stone and James (Citation1995) argued that modernity not custom best explains the escalation of dowry claims and deaths in India. Yang’s (Citation1994) study of guanxi in China invites a similar perspective.
20. Apriani and Raffiudin (Citation2018) mistakenly identify her caste status as ksatria, and thus misapply this example to their interpretation of caste and voting behavior.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lene Pedersen
Lene Pedersen is Professor of Anthropology at Central Washington University, U.S. Her recent research has focused on the changing structures and meanings of ties between citizens in Indonesia’s hybrid system of governance whose decentralized political system intersects with older, multi-level traditional systems.