Intermediate Generations: Reflections on Indonesian Youth Studies

Abstract

This paper provides a reflective overview of studies of Indonesian youth. The main part is organised around a number of key ideas about youth, in three main sections, on ‘youth as generation’, ‘youth as transition’, and ‘youth as makers and consumers of culture’.

Keywords:

• Youth
• Generation
• Youth Transition
• Youth Culture
• Indonesia

Notes

1. This paper has grown out of the authors’ attempt during the last two years to compile a selected bibliography of studies on Indonesian youth. It does not yet do justice to much of the literature which we have identified, only a fraction of which is discussed here.

2. In this sense the common perception of ‘peasants giving up farming and moving to cities’ is doubly inaccurate: it is more a question of sons and daughters of peasants who decide not to follow their parents’ occupations and move to the city in search of non-farm work.

3. The Draft Law on Youth and the ‘Academic Text’ which accompanied it had originally set the age range as 18–35 arguing reasonably that it should not overlap with ‘child’ which is covered by another recent law (on Child Protection), but without argumentation for the 35-year end point (Menpora n.d., pp. 30, 36).

4. Among other Asian countries, Thailand defines youth as up to age 25, The Philippines to age 30, India, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea to age 35 and Malaysia up to age 40.

5. This tentative generalisation is derived from ongoing work by Sano, White and Margiyatun, and Naafs (all from Java).

6. Paraphrasing Alanen (2001, p. 13) on childhood as generational relation.

7. See MA research work by Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih (2010) and Mike Ingriani (2010) on the deconstruction of the Youth Law and Life Skills Education respectively.

8. Law Number 25/2000 on The National Development Programme 2000–2004, Section 4.2.

9. These new understandings of village and rural life are carefully described for Java in Juliet Koning's Generations of Change (2004).

10. During the 1970s and 1980s the CCCS at the University of Birmingham produced a number of influential studies on the subcultures of British working class youth. The styles and activities of these masculine subcultures were interpreted as symbolic resistance to the power of the dominant forces in their society, for example, in Paul Willis's classic study on the anti-school subculture of working class boys (1977).

11. Indonesian internet penetration, currently estimated at 16.1 per cent, is much lower than Malaysia (58.8 per cent), Vietnam (32.3 per cent), the Philippines (29.2 per cent) or Thailand (27.4 per cent), but higher than Lao PDR (8.1 per cent) or Myanmar (0.2 per cent). Statistics for March 2011 from http://www.internetworldstatistics.com/stats3.htm, accessed 20 October 2011.

12. Statistics for October 2011 from http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/indonesia, accessed 20 October 2011.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzanne Naafs

Suzanne Naafs is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Ben White

Ben White is an Emeritus Professor of Rural Sociology