Friendship as Liveliness, Friendship as Discipline: Un(der)employed Young People’s Peer-to-Peer Relations and the Reproduction of Everyday Village Life in Rural Indonesia

Abstract

In this article, I explore the enmeshment of educated, but un(der)employed, young people in their rural communities in Ngada District (Flores, East Indonesia). In particular, I focus on their friendships, which help these young people to navigate personal aspirations, frustrations, anxieties and social pressure by providing channels for projects of the self, mutual care and, most importantly, having fun. In doing so, these friendships also reproduce ‘liveliness’ (ramai), which is a highly valued social quality in Ngada, indicating a sense of togetherness. In Ngada, a strong morality of interdependence prevails and liveliness is one way in which this is expressed. Hence, the reproduction of liveliness by young people matters, as it transcends the everyday, giving sustenance to Ngada life and its social organisation. Yet, ‘enmeshment’ is not only visible in lively events; it also comes to the fore in friendship practices of disciplining and social monitoring, which reproduce gendered norms.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• Youth
• Friendship
• Flores
• Ngada
• Liveliness

Introduction

The six of us arrived on three motorcycles. I had never been to the village before, and felt disoriented in the dark and the stifling heat, lingering under the kapok trees common on central Flores’ north coast. Yet, the scene before me looked familiar: a large clearing was covered by a makeshift construction of bamboo and plastic sheets, under which bright lights illuminated rows of plastic chairs, all facing a small stage on which a young woman sat with her female kin. She had just gone through a coming of age ceremony—but this was not why we were there. We had come for the food and drinks, and to have fun.

‘Are there any girls?’, Adi (23) asked. The place was crowded, and we looked in from the margins. I was hungry, and noticed the buffet on the opposite side of the tent. One of the senior guests was giving a speech. I wanted to go in and grab some food but Ferdi (26), the central figure of our little group, said, ‘Not yet, we need to wait for the speech to finish, so we can greet the hosts, and have an impact’.

We listened to the speech. Adi nodded in agreement when the guest talked about the virtues of rituals and how they strengthen ‘the community’. Meanwhile, Ferdi grabbed a small boy by his shoulder and I gave him some money to buy cigarettes, palm wine and beer. I wondered how Ferdi could withstand the heat in his leather jacket and big boots. He was wearing sunglasses too. ‘Western style’ he had told me earlier.

Uneasily, I noticed that people were starting to come from the back area to clear away the buffet and chairs to make room for the dancing. Adi was growing impatient as well. Only when the speech had finished and the women onstage started to get up (as no more guests were making their way to the stage to introduce themselves) did Ferdi make his move. ‘Now!’, he told us. Ferdi led the way, I was right behind him, and our four friends (in their early twenties) followed. I felt the guests’ eyes on my back as we made our way to the front. Of course, my European appearance always attracted attention in rural East Indonesia, but Ferdi’s timing mattered too. He wanted to be known, and this was his way to make people see that he was a ‘somebody’: he had brought five friends along, including a Westerner, and was claiming his space by greeting the hosts as one of the last guests to arrive. We were welcomed and offered some chairs that had just been taken away, and food was brought from the back area where the remains of the buffet had been taken. When the boy returned with our drinks and cigarettes, slowly the men came to pay us courtesy calls, and we gave them glasses of palm wine mixed with beer.

***

By coming late, and by giving out drinks, Ferdi had used our small group of friends to craft an image for himself as a public ‘somebody’. But by means of our presence and sharing, he had also activated feelings of togetherness, notions of communality and networks of interdependence. His friendships thus had an ambivalent ‘outward quality’. They entangled him in community life, both through his strategic socialising and his desire to have fun.

It is this ‘outward quality’ that I discuss in this article. I argue that young people in rural Flores, through their friendships, enmesh themselves in their communities and contribute to everyday village life through the reproduction of ‘liveliness’ (ramai), a highly valued social quality in Indonesia that indicates a sense of togetherness.¹ Yet, ‘enmeshment’ is not only visible in lively events; it also comes to the fore in friendship practices of disciplining and social monitoring, which reproduce gendered norms.

The literature on youth in Indonesia typically focuses on major urban areas (Naafs & White 2012, 4). In Indonesia, as in many other countries, youth is broadly seen as a vanguard of positive change, often in conjunction with increasingly prolonged educational trajectories. Yet at the same time, youth is seen as a threat to social and political order, particularly when imagined trajectories of upward mobility fail to materialise (Naafs & White 2012, 7; see also Comaroff & Comaroff 2005). Related to this literature, I provide a case study of a demographic that is rarely featured: educated, yet un(der)employed, rural young people.

My argument is based on an analysis of friendships among relatively educated rural young people (aged 20–30, with tertiary degrees) and their mixed-gender socialising in Ngada district on the island of Flores, East Indonesia.² Data for this article were collected during a ten-month period of fieldwork in 2013–2014, in which I studied the troubled education-to-work transitions of university-educated rural young people. I was based in Ronaga, a community of about 3000 people.³ Most Ronaga families have access to land, though income generated from small shops, construction work and work for the government—particular in nearby Bajawa (population 15,000), Ngada’s capital—is important too.

Contemporary studies of the Ngada, the dominant ethnic group in Ngada District, often analyse their rituals and social classification systems, including their uxorilocal and matrilineal practices (for example, Molnar 2000; Schröter 2005; Smedal 2011). They note that ceremonial occasions are critical in determining affiliations, social hierarchy and access to land in Ngada, as ritual and metaphor link people to histories of myth, the cosmos and present-day social regimes. Yet, the structural emphasis in these studies represents a theoretical interest in sociocultural categories and cosmological order, sometimes to the neglect of individual motivations, emotions and reasoning (Allerton 2013, 7). Instead, the focus of this study on the connections between friendship, liveliness and discipline relates to young people’s experiences of everyday life and the mundane. Still, as Jayne Curnow (2016) argues, Ngada ritual, cosmos and social classification regimes, culminate in a strong morality of interdependence among Ngada people. Liveliness, as I will argue, is one way in which this morality is expressed. The reproduction of liveliness (and similarly, of gendered norms) by young people therefore matters, as it transcends the everyday, giving sustenance to Ngada life and social organisation.

Most of the young people central to my research come from modest backgrounds. Their parents are either small-scale farmers able to pool money to support at least one child’s educational efforts, or they are low-ranking civil servants with some disposable income. With the financial help of their parents and, frequently, larger kin networks too, these young people have managed to obtain a tertiary degree, often the first in their families to do so. However, it has become nearly impossible for them to obtain a desired white-collar job in Ngada. There are limited private sector investments in the area, and the local government implemented a hiring freeze in 2011, which is still more or less in place today. As a result, there are hundreds of tertiary-educated young people in Ngada (population 150,000) without proper salaried employment, living with their parents or other kin.⁴

In many ways, young people’s un(der)employment is problematic. For example, on a personal level, these young people might feel frustrated and depressed. On a larger level, they remain financially dependent on kin, and cannot contribute to bridewealth arrangements, ritual costs or the educational trajectories of younger kin. Rather than being disruptive, however, I show that educated, but un(der)employed, young people, through their friendships, establish positive connections between themselves and the community at large. Friendships are primarily about having fun, mixed-gender socialising and peer-to-peer care relations in difficult times; yet, at the same time, they also facilitate the reproduction of valuable norms that form the essence of these young people’s communities. As a result, young people can act ‘good’, even when their education-to-work transitions are fractured (cf. Robbins 2013).

The remainder of the article is divided into three sections. I begin by situating this study within the current anthropological literature on friendship, noting friendship’s ambivalent nature. Then I discuss educated young people’s friendships in Ngada. I use ethnographic excerpts which, together with the opening vignette, illustrate how these young people’s friendships are entangled in village life. In particular, I focus on experiences of liveliness and the reproduction of gendered norms and, thus, on the reproduction of everyday village life. In the conclusion, I extrapolate lessons beyond the specific case of Ngada, arguing that friendships provide a useful lens to understand the position of un(der)employed educated young people in their rural communities.

Anthropologies of Friendship

In the West, up until the twentieth century, friendship was largely imagined as a relation between equals based on free choice and affection (de Montaigne 1972). Contemporary research, however, connects friendship to people’s interests, relations of power and social inequalities (Strickland 2010). Much of this research has focused on friendship’s ‘empowering potential’ (Dyson 2010, 483) and considers friendship as a channel to formulate alternatives to, or critiques of, dominant social structures. This is particularly clear in research about young people facing declining state support, unfavourable economic circumstances and changing social structures, including those who experience troubled education-to-work transitions (for example, Gratz 2004; Jeffrey 2010; Mizen & Ofosu-Kusi 2010).

Others, most notably Pierre Bourdieu (1984), have highlighted how friendships are a ‘medium of unequal social reproduction’ (Dyson 2010, 484). Friends are primarily selected based on taste and social class, implying that friendship ‘serves as a prime site of social monitoring and social control’ (Dyson 2010, 484). Acts of friendship are about displaying appropriate group- and context-specific behaviour, thus reproducing norms and values.

Young people thus have the capacity to engage in complex processes of cultural critique and social reproduction. Friendships can be empowering, yet also disciplining (Willis 1977; Dyson 2010). I take this ambivalent nature of friendship as a starting point for my analysis as it resonates with other youth studies from Indonesia, which mostly focus on urban and Muslim young people (for example, Smith-Hefner 2009; Nilan 2016; Parker 2016; Wright Webster 2016). These studies note that young people’s peer-to-peer socialising, especially for young women, is emotionally supportive and creates safe spaces for mixed-gender socialising in a country where (female) sexuality is subject to moral panic. At the same time, young women are rigidly surveyed from within their peer groups, and they have to conform to strict notions of what is appropriate. For young women, friendships are the locus of projects of the self, for example, realising a sense of autonomy, albeit within gender-specific norms that are upheld by friends (Nilan 2016, 157).

A similar connection between friendship and self-realisation, though in a different setting, is visible in the work of Sean Martin-Iverson (2012). He describes how precarious youth in Bandung carve out ‘underground’ identities through peer-to-peer socialising in the local alternative music scene. These identities are formed in opposition to market-driven mainstream ideals, which are unobtainable for these young people. Yet underground identities remain closely linked to neoliberalism, as commodification of the alternative music scene fosters a capitalist ethos, capital accumulation and class formation. Looking at these processes through the lens of peer-to-peer socialising, we see that such socialising is entangled with processes of cultural production (that is, underground identities) and social reproduction (that is, class structures) and, thus, with empowerment and discipline.

Ferdi used his friends to feel empowered as they helped him to get noticed by his community and to craft a public persona, to be a ‘somebody’. Yet his friends were important in other respects as well: being un(der)employed, they shared their limited resources with each other, like cigarettes and alcohol (which in the above case I paid for). This echoes other work about young people and their fractured education-to-work transitions in Indonesia. Suzanne Naafs (2018), for example, notes how friendships among lower-middle-class youth in Cilegon (Java) are vital for accessing jobs, food and other necessities like mobile phone credit, clothing and cigarettes. As these friendships are reciprocal in nature, however, when a friend fails to return favours, they can be shut out. Moreover, friendships might be supportive in times of need, but they can also prevent young people ‘from migration and [keep] them in place in their neighbourhood’ (Naafs 2018, 62), which might perpetuate precarity.

The discussion here indicates that young people’s peer-to-peer socialising has paradoxical effects. Projects of the self, as manifested in peer-to-peer socialising, often result in the reproduction of social structures. As youth studies in Indonesia are biased towards urban, and often Muslim, young people, we need to place their socialising and, thus, these processes of re/production, within city landscapes, including malls and internet cafes (see, for example, van Leeuwen 2011; Parker & Nilan 2013). Surprisingly little is written about young people in rural Indonesia, where such landscapes are very different. Though youth feature in studies from places like Flores (for example, Curnow 2012; Allerton 2013)—from which we get a sense that they are an intricate part of their communities’ social fabric—rarely are young people from rural Indonesia approached systematically, including their educated subjectivities, un(der)employment and friendships. This obscures the processes through which they relate to their communities and shape village life. Here, using the lens of peer-to-peer socialising, I aim to make these processes explicit.

Friendships in Ngada

There are very few youth-specific spaces in Ngada. Youthful socialising occurs mostly at the church—in central Flores, the vast majority of people identify as Catholic—and the nearby village green, on the road and at the roadside, and at parties. Below, I describe these ‘spaces’ in three separate sections, and show how young people casually interact there with their extended families, neighbours and other community members, while socialising with their friends.

I start with the context of the church because educated young people often identify their close peers and friends through the local chapter of the Catholic Youth Movement (OMK, Orang Muda Katolik).⁵ This is not because they know each other through OMK—most have known each other since childhood—but because OMK provides a relatively exclusive and safe environment for peer-to-peer socialising. These OMK relations are subsequently taken ‘outside’ the church environment.⁶

Church, OMK and the Village Green

Egiel (26) had stopped by my place on his way to choir practice. Together we walked to the village green where some of his friends, who were also going to practice, were waiting for him. It had rained that day, but as evening fell the weather had cleared and people were coming out, socialising with neighbours and doing some last-minute shopping at the roadside kiosks. We exchanged greetings with almost everyone we met, sometimes shouting to people some distance from the road. Meanwhile, we discussed Egiel’s plan to climb a nearby mountain in a few weeks’ time, on a trip organised by the local priest for senior OMK members. He was excited about it as Mira (24) was also planning to go. He told me that he liked her.

When we approached the village green, I saw Mira standing there, together with two other young women and three young men. They were all looking at their phones. We exchanged greetings, and Egiel, who positioned himself next to Mira, made some admiring comments about the new motorcycle that one of his friends had brought along. His friend had borrowed it from an uncle. The young men smoked cigarettes and we made small talk, not just among ourselves but also with passers-by, including Mira’s mother, who informed us of an upcoming wedding. After a while, Egiel, Mira and the others went off for choir practice, hosted by Egiel’s aunt, not too far from the village green. As they walked away, I saw Egiel and Mira rubbing shoulders, talking and laughing softly.

***

Egiel’s socialising highlights the mundane character of his mixed-gender friendships, which were encapsulated in the day-to-day affairs of other villagers that unfolded at the village green, a highly visible place that people passed by on their way to visit family, when returning from work in the fields or while engaging in activities of the local parish (choir practice, in this case). As a result, these relatively educated young people’s friendships contributed to Ronaga’s afternoon liveliness.

To Ngada people, liveliness is important as it is associated with strong interpersonal emotional connections. Jayne Curnow (2016) argues that among the Ngada, notions of the self are subordinate to feelings of interdependency between people, ancestors and the land (which is protected for the next generations). She calls this ‘being-with’, which is maintained through ritual, physical representations of common ancestors (for example, clan-related sacrificial posts) and livelihood strategies, including labour co-operation and food sharing (see, also, Schröter 2005; Smedal 2011). Similar ideals of being-with can be seen in practices of ‘making liveliness’ among Manggarai people who live to the west of Ngada (Allerton 2012). To the Manggarai, ‘“liveliness” is a kind of protective, effervescent, social buzz created through the numerous everyday and ritual events’ (Allerton 2012, 551); it is about creating crowded situations, about being together, and about ‘an interpersonal quality  … contrasted with being aloof or proud’ (Allerton 2012, 552). In particular, the Manggarai make liveliness through hospitality.

Whereas Curnow locates being-with largely in custom, and the Manggarai make liveliness through making guests, I locate liveliness in the everyday. As Pam Nilan notes, liveliness—which qualifies those ‘social settings in which there is a lot of enjoyable action and interaction’ (2016, 169)—is highly valued throughout Indonesia, particularly among young people. Nilan stresses that liveliness implies that young people are ‘intensely bonded to their friends’ (2016, 170). Here, I suggest that ‘making liveliness’ among friends transcends the boundaries of close peer groups, entangling young people in Ngada with the community at large. Their friendships are embedded in church activities, daily socialising on the village green and regular parties and celebrations, all of which contribute to a village’s social buzz.

As noted, most other studies concerning socialising in Indonesia are situated within malls and internet cafes and are focused on the dynamics of mixed-gender socialising, or the lack thereof, in (Muslim) urban areas (see, for example, Barendregt 2008; Smith-Hefner 2007; Nilan & Mansfield 2014; Wright Webster 2016). These studies emphasise how parents, teachers and others in authority express concerns about mixed-gender socialising, as it is widely considered to lead to pre-marital sex. These concerns are mostly directed at young women, and are shared in the public domain in government and public discourse, through media representations and at schools. Such concerns constitute a ‘moral panic’, which blames seks bebas (free sex) on Western influences that contradict customary practices and Muslim morals (Harding 2008; Parker & Nilan 2013). Mixed-gender friendships and socialising are subject to strict social control and scrutiny and are framed as a threat to ‘the self’, one’s virtue and marriageability, and to the social order.

Egiel’s socialising exemplifies how in rural Ngada, the situation is different. There is no modern urban infrastructure such as malls or Western-style coffee shops, and young people are less active in carving out exclusive social spaces for themselves. Moreover, though pre-marital sex is strongly discouraged, and young women are unlikely to hang out unchaperoned with males whom they are not closely acquainted, there is no general panic about young people’s sexual development (which is not to say that young couples do not escape into midnight anonymity to places where they can have sex). Un(der)employed, educated young people in Ngada can hang out together in mixed-gender groups relatively easily. The principal place to do so is at the church through OMK, on the adjacent village green and during church-related activities such as choir practice.

OMK is popular with educated young people in Ronaga for numerous reasons. Most young people are devout Catholics and want to be active members of their church community. OMK is the principal channel to do so, as the priest encourages OMK members to be active in the choir, seminars and Bible clubs. Moreover, OMK members often organise sporting events for themselves or for school children, volunteer for ad hoc jobs at the church (for example, general maintenance), and participate in major church celebrations (for example, the Easter pageant). These activities—besides being motivated by piety and altruism—are modest attempts at self-realisation, as young people want to gain some minor work experience, establish a network and become known as dedicated community members. This is important to them as they hope it will make them more attractive to potential employers (Schut 2019).

OMK is also popular because it provides an easily accessible site for meeting up with friends. The church grounds and the village green are centrally located and extensive, enabling young people to hang out relatively undisturbed by other villagers, either with their mobile phones in hand, to play soccer or to drive around on their motorcycles. The church provides a focal point for young people’s friendships, a place where they can gather, meet and talk, play sports or sing together, organise activities, or do the odd paid job for the parish.

Finally, the church and OMK provide a space for mixed-gender socialising. Because OMK activities take place within the confines of the church, these activities are considered a safe and acceptable space for mingling and socialising by young men and women. Some young women are even allowed to join overnight OMK camping trips, as the local priest also joins these trips. And even when no church staff are involved, OMK’s close connection to the church makes it an ideal and favoured place for young people to come together.

OMK provides a focal point for a relatively small and exclusive community of educated young men and women who have known each other since childhood yet relate to each other primarily as ‘OMK friends’. For these young people, their friendships are clearly supportive and empowering. But their friendships also have an outward quality: this peer group is generally appreciated on account of their connection to the church and their volunteering (which relates to their educated status). Moreover, these friendships are not strictly exclusive. Un(der)employed young people easily mingle with non-OMK peers, other generations and kin, creating many overlapping friendships.

The Road

Standing in the shadow of a large tree, Alfons (31) was telling his small entourage—including some male peers and senior neighbourhood men—about ‘his’ candidate for the upcoming local elections. Alfons was part of a tim sukses (campaign team), helping an aspiring politician during her campaign in return for some pocket money, meals and—if she were elected—possibly a job in her office. ‘Ibu Josefina doesn’t do corruption and nepotism … she’s not connected to the old politics. She is young and educated. She can help us. Yesterday we went to visit the south coast. Which other politician goes to these isolated places … ? I’ll tell you: none!’. His plea for Ibu Josefina was interrupted by the roar of a poorly customised motorcycle coming down the hill. It was Egiel, driving his ‘vintage bike’. At high speed, and with much noise and smoke from the exhaust, he teasingly approached some young women walking on the road, calling out their names, pretending he was about to run them over. He then pulled over next to us. Some female neighbours looked at him, annoyed; one even shouted her displeasure at us. Egiel just smiled, and waved the young women to come over. They laughed, seemingly seeing no harm in his action, though they refused his invitation and made excuses, saying that they were on their way to visit someone further down the road. One of them made a comment about his bike: ‘Better fix that exhaust Egiel, we all thought there was a fire when you started your engine’. We all laughed, and picked up our conversation from where it had been before Alfons had started talking about Ibu Josefina. ‘So, who’s better this season: Chelsea or Manchester … ?’.

***

Ngada’s roads traverse extremely rugged terrain and are vital transport links for people and goods. Roads are also the principal place for people to meet, particularly at the end of the day. Along the fringes of the road, villagers exchange the latest gossip, invite each other over for coffee and discuss the latest English Premier League soccer games. Children play on these roads too, mingling with small groups of young women out for a late afternoon stroll while men smoke clove cigarettes and hang out around their motorcycles. Meanwhile, ordinary travel continues, with drivers honking their horns and calling out to friends and neighbours as they pass by, contributing to the late afternoon liveliness of Ngada.

Most Ngada villages are built along thoroughfares, and everything that goes by on the road contributes to a dynamic ‘see-and-be-seen’ atmosphere: people in their front yards curiously check out the passing traffic, while the passing traffic takes a peek into the villagers’ day-to-day affairs. During the day, the roads provide a constant social buzz, allowing little privacy and rest as the traffic’s liveliness easily enters houses through (unglazed) windows, cracked walls and zinc roofs. Every day I would see people walking up and down the main road of Ronaga, shopping, going to Bajawa for work, or heading to the fields. I would hear motorcycle taxi drivers crisscrossing the village in search of customers and mobile soup sellers tapping their iron bowls and calling out their wares. And I observed the way that people used the street for leisure, as a place where young men and women, and other villagers, gathered, gossiped, played badminton or volleyball, and exchanged news and invitations.

As the sudden arrival of Egiel indicates, street socialising comes about in a rather ad hoc manner. It is public and not much dependent on age, education level or even gender but, rather, on where a person lives. Street socialising is done in the vicinity of one’s house, and people tend to meet up with neighbours. Hence, educated young men and women do not solely hang out with other educated people, or even exclusively with close friends, but also with their less educated and/or working neighbours (who are often family too), both old and young.

Day-to-day socialising on the street is not strictly gender-segregated, and men and women can be seen sitting or standing together, or interacting with each other when they pass by. Still, most times men and women gather separately. Women often come together in small groups at roadside stores or junctions where side streets lead off the main road to houses further afield. One can also see small groups of teenage girls or young women strolling around their neighbourhood. Due to their household and care responsibilities, women have less leisure time than men. Consequently, they stay closer to the house, play badminton with direct neighbours on quiet backstreets, or do the grocery shopping as an excuse for an afternoon stroll with neighbours, peers or friends. More often, however, women visit each other in their homes, where they drink coffee together and help each other with child care or cooking.

Men are generally more present on the streets. While they similarly like to come together at junctions and small stalls, they also socialise at motorcycle repair shops or outside the billiard hall. Here they discuss not only topics such as politics and soccer but also money, women and the daily lottery.

Roads are thus important loci for village-based socialising. Yet, roads obviously also facilitate travel, enabling young people and their friendships to ‘move’. Whereas young people’s roadside socialising is encapsulated in general socialising, by taking their friendships to other places, these young people make their peer-to-peer interactions more exclusive. For example, on Saturdays mixed-gender groups of friends from Ronaga can be seen travelling to nearby hot springs, the beach or Bajawa. In these places they can enjoy some time away from the village and its associated social control, and they can feel a bit more ‘free’, as one young man told me, and act a little ‘crazy’. In practice, this means that young men can talk a bit louder than they would in the village, play music, take selfies with their mobile phones, drive their motorcycles faster than in the village and flirt with young women. This is not something unique to Ngada and has also been documented in other places in Indonesia (for example, Smith-Hefner 2007; Barendregt 2008; Wright Webster 2016). However, in these other studies, city landscapes are central to the analysis, in which young people often pursue leisure in spaces that are separate from the leisure spaces of other generations. Parker and Nilan (2013, 130) suggest that this relative autonomy shapes a ‘morally suspect’ discourse surrounding youth leisure. Yet in Ngada, the places young people frequent on Saturdays remain public: beaches and hot springs are also popular with families, which means that there is still some social control over young people and their friendships.

Movement thus resembles a form of curtailed freedom, which is further illustrated by the means of transport young people use. In Ngada, as in Indonesia generally, public intimacy is restricted. Yet, to get to places, women often ride pillion behind their male friends on the back of a motorcycle. For couples, or for newly developing romances, sharing a motorcycle enables a surprising amount of intimacy. A woman can straddle a motorcycle if she is wearing jeans (commonplace in Ngada), pressing her knees and upper legs tightly to the young man driving the bike, holding him tightly from behind, leaning with her upper body onto the driver’s back.

Sharing a motorbike is a way to circumvent conventions that curb public displays of intimacy between (unmarried) men and women. For young men and women, the motorcycle enables them to hold each other more closely than is usually accepted. Still, due to the public nature of roads, motorcycle intimacy is public intimacy and, thus, limited.

Young people’s friendships in Ngada are both exclusive and public. Young people like to spend time with their friends, where they show off their motorcycles, enjoy bodily contact with the opposite sex, and talk about things that matter to them, including politics and football. But these friendships are not closed-off entities, as young people’s socialising happens amidst, or close to, more general socialising, where young people can be joined, seen and heard.

Parties

During the above mentioned party, Ferdi introduced me to many people, including Ronald, a distant relative he called a friend. Ronald was in his twenties, had no formal education beyond the second class of junior high school, and worked as a casual day labourer in construction. Ronald was drunk, but still pulled off the best moves on the dance floor. We had fun at the party: I drank and danced and, with Ferdi, talked with some of his relatives and senior community members. I watched how Ferdi and Ronald talked to young women and danced with them, returning afterwards to stand next to me with smiles on their faces.

At midnight, we left the party. In a large group, we rode back up the hill to Ronaga. Ronald was also with us, driving too fast while too drunk. Finally, we stopped at Ferdi’s house. I remember feeling relieved we had made it without injury. Before saying goodbye to Ferdi and moving on to my own place, I noticed that he was having an intense talk with Ronald, after which the latter turned around and rode back the way we had come. ‘What was that about?’, I asked. ‘Ronald wants to go back, to this girl … ’, Ferdi replied. He looked worried. ‘He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care’, Ferdi mused. ‘About what?’, I asked.

About getting women pregnant … He’s stupid. You see, he’s already married to this girl he made pregnant a year ago … he’s not living with her, but still … there will be conflict with the family of this new girl if he isn’t careful … .

***

The above vignette shows how easily Ferdi and Ronald connected, like their peers, to a larger sociality while having fun at the party. It also indicates processes of social monitoring among young people in relation to gendered norms and physical contact between the sexes. I discuss both points in this section; first, expanding on the importance of communal parties for young people, using a wedding party as an example and, second, discussing the nexus between educated young people and the reproduction of gendered norms.

Wedding parties and other celebrations, including those associated with customary practices, are important to young people; there is little other entertainment on a similar scale in Ngada. Often, hundreds of people come together to dance and enjoy food and drinks. For young people, these are occasions for dressing up, coming together with friends and having fun. On the dance floor, young men can flirt with young women and hold their hands. It is also a place where young boys learn to drink palm wine from their brothers or where they share their first cigarettes with friends.

Typically, guests at a wedding party are first invited to congratulate the couple, then to take some food from the buffet, after which they are given some water and a glass of either palm wine or palm gin. After they take their places on chairs, they eat and drink, and often continue drinking while waiting for the dancing to begin, listening to speeches from senior kin and community members.

After the buffet is cleared, the bride and groom, together with their parents and some prominent family members, open the dance. They perform ja’i, a central Flores dance that involves two rows of people who slowly make their way through the tent, moving forward in short strides, bending the right knee, keeping their hands at shoulder height. Next, the ja’i is opened to everyone and continues to be danced throughout the night. Other music is played by DJs, including dero music for a circle dance where people hold hands and Indonesian country-style music, which prompts either line dancing or couple dancing if the songs are slower. Pop music is also played and involves a much freer style of dancing where young people stand close to each other in groups. Most music is aimed at group dances, and often the whole dancing area is full of men and women, young and old, causing much laughter when different groups of dero or ja’i dancers cross each other, breaking up dance partners and routines.

In Ngada, un(der)employed, educated young men drink and dance together with their fathers, uncles and other male family members and neighbours. They dance the ja’i and dero with their mothers, aunts and other female family members and neighbours too. Parties reflect how easily these young people mingle with other generations and how much they are part of the community. But parties are not only an expression of communality. Feasts are predominantly moments of fun, providing great opportunities for young men to socialise with and hold the hands of young women and attract attention with their dancing skills. As the dancing occurs amidst rows of chairs, such mixed-gender dancing and socialising is accepted but also observed by the other attendees. Between the dances, everybody returns to their seats or to the margins of the tent, men and women separately, eyeing each other and waiting for the next dance. Men refill their glasses with palm wine and smoke another clove cigarette while talking about the girls, the quality of the wine, the lottery or soccer.

Mixed-gender socialising is not always innocent: unplanned pregnancies are common in Flores, and grounds for personal distress, forced marriages and, sometimes, social strife. Women are particularly burdened as they are less mobile, assume the role of primary caregivers and face difficulty finding another partner when a marriage cannot be arranged. Yet, educated young people seem more careful to avoid pregnancies. Unplanned pregnancy is often grounds for expulsion from university, especially for young women. Graduating from university thus implies that the graduate has exercised some form of bodily self-control; indeed, retaining unmarried status upon graduation might be viewed as a certain feat. As one young woman commented:

You see, I have already experienced life in the city, and I decided to wait with boys until marriage. With God’s help, I will find a partner soon and start a family. But, first, I want to find a job.

Educated young people’s gender and sexuality norms follow traditional patterns. They consider pre-marital sex and its consequences undesirable, stressing that they wish to work first and postpone marriage—thereby remaining ‘young’.⁷ Rarely are gender norms breached in mixed friend groups. At the hot springs, young men and women bathe separately, the women fully dressed. Intimacies are largely restricted to holding hands and sharing motorbikes. Young women’s sexuality is also subject to scrutiny by family and friends. On Facebook, clips of drunken young women circulate, warning women not to fall into behaviour deemed ‘degrading’. If women are considered ‘promiscuous’ by men, they are subject to gossip in male friend groups and are considered undesirable marriage partners. Sometimes, women too refer to these ‘promiscuous’ women as hancur (damaged).

Educated young people have internalised a dominant and disciplining discourse on sexuality, in which women in particular bear the main responsibility to behave appropriately. These processes reflect a national discourse (Parker 2008) and local values (for example, Smedal 2016). Yet, we can also link this discourse to OMK as a moral movement. OMK stimulates young people to regularly discuss each other’s Catholic virtues and interpretations of the Bible. Mischievous behaviour is subject to gossip, and I often heard young women complaining about their male friends’ drinking and gambling. Such complaints reflect real concerns, as for some women these practices make men less attractive as potential marriage partners.

Catholicism provides a moral compass for young people, motivating them to act as each other’s guardians.⁸ In Ngada, it finds expression in the collective experience of Catholicism through OMK and the connections it establishes between young people and the community at large. Thus youthful social monitoring and the reproduction of gendered norms take place because young people connect to a larger (Catholic) sociality and within its formal organisational structures. It is through this collective experience that friendship and its outward quality contribute to a sense of ‘togetherness’.

Conclusion

There are many more places where young people hang out together in Ngada. For example, they gather in houses, yards and around TVs in living rooms; play cards together in kitchens; engage in intimate customary rituals; socialise with friends across fences; and join them in the fields or for house-building parties. Similar to the socialising that takes place in the church, at the roadside and during parties, this youthful socialising is intimately connected to more general socialising, and contributes to the liveliness of events and gatherings, as young people’s friendships overlap with intergenerational and cross-community (kinship) bonds.

While these friendships are likely to continue into later life, the un(der)employed status of these young people shapes the current dimension of their socialising. Un(der)employed young people in Ngada face a dire situation: they want to transform their educational degrees into aspired-for jobs, but cannot due to the absence of local job opportunities. As a result, young people must navigate personal aspirations, frustrations, anxieties and social pressure. Their friendships help them to navigate these issues, providing channels for projects of the self, mutual care and, most importantly, having fun. In doing so, these friendships ‘make liveliness’ yet they also discipline. Here, we see the contradictory nature of friendship: by means of the empowering (and rather self-centred) quality of their friendships, young people also establish moral connections between themselves and the community at large, reproducing valuable norms that form the essence of Ngada communities.

Following other work that aims to study young people on their own terms and less as a potential social problem (Naafs & Skelton 2018, 4; see, also, Appadurai 2013; Robbins 2013), I have demonstrated that un(der)employed educated young people in rural Ngada are neither disruptive nor marginalised. Rather, they are positively entangled in their communities. One way to appreciate these entanglements is to understand the contradictory nature of their friendships.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Rosanne Rutten and Danau Tanu for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this article. Lyn Parker and Greg Acciaioli’s support during writing the earliest version of this article has been important too. Finally, the author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent and constructive feedback.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a scholarship from the University of Western Australia and a Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Sutasoma award.

Notes

1 All non-English terms throughout are in Bahasa Indonesia. Ramai can also be translated as ‘crowded’ or ‘noisy’.

2 Because I am male, I had relatively easy access to groups of male peers and friends, as well as to mixed-gender peer and friend groups. However, it was difficult to be part of groups of female peers and friends. Hence, in my discussion, the gender representation is not balanced.

3 Ronaga is a pseudonym (as are all of the personal names used).

4 This article focuses on un(der)employed educated young people’s leisure activities; for an in-depth discussion of these young people’s subjectivities—including their motivations to return to their natal communities, and their aspirations—see Schut (2019).

5 Members of OMK are unmarried ‘young people’, aged 13–35 years, organised into various age groups.

6 A note regarding the Indonesian notion of ‘friend’: young Indonesians use the words teman (friend), ‘bro’ or ‘sis’ (from brother and sister) frequently and inclusively (see, also, Parker 2016, 98). This does not mean, however, that young people do not have exclusive (friendship) relations; they just tend to use the same word to address people to whom they relate with varying degrees of closeness.

7 As elsewhere in Indonesia, marriage in Ngada is the principal marker of social adulthood.

8 As noted, such monitoring is not exclusively a Catholic trait. See Parker (2016) for an example from Muslim West Sumatra.