‘Not Fanatical’: The Evolution of Sociable Piety and the Dialogic Subject in Multi-religious Indonesia

Abstract

In Indonesia, the politics of ‘sociable piety’ has been reinvigorated by local Islamic sermon groups opposed to a range of public behaviours labelled as ‘fanatik’. United by an intra-Muslim alliance self-identified as being ‘not fanatical’, members of urban middle-class sermon groups shrewdly redraw moral boundaries across the long-term ‘traditionalist’ and ‘modernist’ divides. As revealed by my fieldwork between 2009 and 2012, the improvisation of ‘sociable piety’ is so prominent that not only optional rituals such as tarawih but obligatory prayers such as salat can be negotiated contextually. Using the multi-religious city of Salatiga as a window to see the broader religious trends in many religiously pluralistic Indonesian cities, this paper contends that the general appeal of Islamic self-cultivation in Indonesia has been simultaneously an individual ethical cultivation and social, even national, improvement. Theoretically, this study of the everyday Indonesian strategies to deal with the tension between piety and sociality is a modest attempt to rethink subjectivity that moves beyond either the docile or the deliberative self and towards the dialogic subject in a world of conflicting heterogeneity.

Keywords:

• Subjectivity
• Islam
• Indonesia
• Piety
• Sociality

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robert Hefner, Nancy Smith-Hefner, Robert Weller, Rachael Rinaldo, Dan Birchok as well as the anonymous reviewers for giving valuable comments on the earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Nat Tuohy, as always. The research that this paper is based on was funded by National Science Foundation (USA) and a Mellon/ACLS fellowship.

Notes

[1] Pseudonyms are used throughout, except where exposing someone's position would otherwise reveal their identity.

[2] The actual compositions and possible orientations of each religious organisation named in this essay are far messier than the easy categories appearing in the article. My justification for this is precisely that this essay is primarily about my respondents’ perspectives and the dialogic subjectivity that they possess in a shifting world, not about scholarly opinions on a proper categorisation of groups associated with Salafism, traditionalism, modernism or cosmopolitanism.

[3] This will be discussed in more detail by the author in a book currently in progress.

[4] In fact, prior to the twentieth century, pesantren were the only formal education institutions in Java, where an almost exclusively religious curriculum was offered to a mix of students including future religious leaders, court poets (Florida 1995) and members of the ruling class (Pemberton 1994, 48–49).

[5] There was RK, or Harmonious Village, that supervised RW. In 1988–89 RK was abolished in favour of the smaller RW.

[6] Ideally RT comprise no more than thirty households and RW three to seven RT. In Salatiga and other cities nowadays, however, these numbers are often far surpassed.

[7] Clifford Geertz and James Peacock in the 1960s both suggested that urban neighbourhoods no longer represented corporate communities but administrative units (Guinness 2009, 169), and that ritual meals would soon lose their appeal.

[8] In the 1950s, Geertz (1960, 12) described the slametan as followed: ‘The ceremony itself is all male. The women remain mburi (behind—i.e., in the kitchen), but they inevitably peek through the bamboo walls at the men, who, squatted on floor mats ngarepan (in front—i.e., in the main living room) perform the actual ritual, eating the food the women have prepared’. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, the exclusively male kendhuren was still held on important occasions in the family life cycle, where all heads of households gathered together to distribute the ritual meal. In more rural areas near Salatiga today, the gender pattern of communal rituals still conforms to the ‘men outside, women inside’ spatial logic that was captured in previous ethnographic accounts.

[9] Sinaran and Graha are pseudonyms referring to the research communities in this essay.

[10] PKK refers to the nationwide, official, yet unpaid, adult women's neighbourhood organisations that were created during the Suharto regime (1966–98) to implement state policies regarding reproductive health, regulation of fertility and nutrition for mothers and children.

[11] Bowen (1993, 318) characterises a local solution to similar issues in Sumatra as ‘an economy of professed ignorance’.

[12] For larger trends of shifting alliances and networks across Muslim communities globally, see Hefner 2005 and Rabasa 2007.