Pluralities of Power in Indonesia’s Intellectual Property Law, Regional Arts and Religious Freedom Debates

ABSTRACT

This article re-analyses historical Southeast Asian power concepts and practices to interpret contrasting positions on two contemporary Indonesian legal debates. The first debate concerns the use of intellectual property models to regulate regional arts or ‘traditional cultural expressions’. The second debate concerns a 2017 constitutional court ruling that advocates citizenship parity for ‘belief practitioners’, meaning those who maintain ancestral or non-orthodox practices and do not list one of Indonesia’s six official religions on their identity cards. I argue that contrasting positions on the laws held by state and clerical authorities versus regional practitioners are better explained by reference to distinctively Southeast Asian ideas about unilateral versus decentralised ‘power’ than by standard globalisation, human rights, or modern state versus indigenous resistance explanations. Disentangling two features of Benedict Anderson’s classic model of Javanese power, fluid cosmic force and the concentration of ‘oneness’ by rulers, illuminates how the Indonesian minority and majoritarian legal perspectives fit within a common repertoire of regional power concepts. Framing religion, tradition, arts and law as prescriptive and normative rather than analytic categories, the article draws on historical and comparative Southeast Asian evidence to delineate tensions among differently positioned groups grounded in diverse modalities of power, ancestral authority and customary institutions, even as some now selectively adopt imported legal rights-based and heritage preservation discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• Indonesia
• ancestral religion
• Intellectual Property Law
• Traditional Arts

Acknowledgements

This note can only begin to acknowledge the insights and support I received from all participants in this volume, special editor Leif Jonsson, the intellectually generous anonymous reviewers, and the amazing scholars of Indonesia I consulted at a distance. Many are cited here.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The title of Warren Zevon’s 1978 song ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money’ memorably captures three primary sources of Anderson’s Euro-American power. Recent factors such as digital technology and the influence(r)s of social media warrant addition to the heterogeneous, ‘modern’ power toolkit.

2 All italicised foreign terms are standard Indonesian unless otherwise noted.

3 A complex topic beyond the scope of this article, both academic and UN concepts of indigeneity are largely formulated for enclosed groups in settler societies such as Aboriginal Australians and New World ‘First Nations’ or ‘Native Americans’. They usually are unsuited for analysing Southeast Asian minorities and majorities although states coopt or dismiss the concepts. The region’s (pre-)historically mobile populations have become defined variously as ‘original people’ (orang asli, Malay/Indonesian), ‘sons of the soil’ (bumi putera), ‘estranged ethnic minorities’ (suku terasing), full citizens, lesser ‘hill tribes’, or illegal aliens. Southeast Asian states use these kinds of categories to reinforce relatively recent postcolonial boundaries, nationalist ethnic ideals, discrimination, and development initiatives.

4 Many, if not most, Indonesian regional arts producers engage in other subsistence work including agricultural labor, small business manufacturing, or sales.

5 Confucianism was one of the six official religions recognised under first President Sukarno but was demoted from the list under President Suharto as political resentments against ethnic Chinese emerged. Confucianism was reinstated after Suharto’s 1998 resignation by the tolerant President and Nahdlatul Ulama Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid (a.k.a. Gus Dur).