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Abstract
Social categories need to be replicated to endure. Commentaries about social practices drive replication. Commentaries increase the number of signs emblematic of this category. In contemporary nation-states, mass education, bureaucratic processes, and mass media create large participation frameworks that facilitate replication. I term these participation frameworks ‘infrastructures for ethnicity’. This paper examines two types of infrastructures that have facilitated replication of emblems of ethnicity in Indonesia. My data is drawn from a soap opera, Internet commentaries about this soap, and news stories about clothing and culture. In looking at this data, I examine how old elements that point to ‘ethnicity’ are combined with new elements, how this new combination invites commentaries, how this process increases the semiotic density of these categories, and how all of this engenders diversity in Indonesia.
Acknowledgements
Extracts 1, 2 and 4 were originally published in Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad by Zane Goebel, and have been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press “https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/QQegB6FKN0bphY” https://global.oup.com/academic/product/language-and-superdiversity-9780199795420?cc=au&lang=en&. For permission to reuse this material, please visit “https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/xN7GBqUmJn0Lf2” http://global.oup.com/academic/rights. Extract 3 uses some data previously presented in Extract 4.5.1 in Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad by Zane Goebel, and published by Oxford University Press.
I would like to thank my Sundanese-speaking Indonesian research assistant, Junaeni Goebel, for helping me with some of the transcriptions and translations, Sabina Vaskar for reading and commenting on drafts of this paper; and two anonymous reviewers for their invitations to refine the ideas presented here. All errors are mine.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.
2. Lempert, “Imitation.”
3. Aspinall, “Democratization and Ethnic Politics in Indonesia”; Aspinall, “A Nation in Fragments.”
4. Davidson and Henley, The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics; Bünte, “Indonesia’s Protracted Decentralization.”
5. Errington, “Colonial Linguistics.”
6. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
7. Gal, “Sociolinguistic Regimes and the Management of ‘Diversity’”; Heller et al., Sustaining the Nation; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.
8. Agha, Language and Social Relations; Goebel, “Enregistering, Authorizing and Denaturalizing Identity in Indonesia”; Goebel, Language, Migration, and Identity; Goebel, Language and Superdiversity.
9. Ibid.
10. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
11. Agha, Language and Social Relations.
12. A detailed investigation of this process can be found in Goebel, “Talking About Mediated Representations.”
13. Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistics Categories, and Cultural Description.”
14. Ibid.
15. Agha, Language and Social Relations; Lempert, “Imitation”; Urban, Metaculture.
16. Stroud and Mpendukana, “Towards a Material Ethnography of Linguistic Landscape.”
17. Blommaert, Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes.
18. Bauman and Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life”; Silverstein and Urban, Natural Histories of Discourse.
19. Agha, Language and Social Relations.
20. Errington, “Colonial Linguistics”; Moriyama, Sundanese Print Culture and Modernity in Nineteenth-century West Java.
21. Errington, “Indonesian(‘s) Development”; Errington, “Indonesian(‘s) Authority.”
22. See Cohen, The Komedie Stamboel; Dick, The Emergence of a National Economy; Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
23. Goebel, Language and Superdiversity.
24. Elson, The Idea of Indonesia; and the papers in Reid and Ōki, The Japanese Experience in Indonesia.
25. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution; Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia.
26. Elson, The Idea of Indonesia; Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia; Legge, Central Authority and Regional Autonomy in Indonesia.
27. Bjork, Indonesian Education; Dardjowidjojo, “Strategies for a Successful National Language Policy”; Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1300.
28. For a summary of some of the extensive literature on this era, see Goebel, Language and Superdiversity. For an anthropological account of how ethnicity was imitated in the school curriculum, see Parker, “The Subjectification of Citizenship.”
29. Kitley, Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia; Sen and Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia.
30. Goebel, “Enregistering, Authorizing and Denaturalizing Identity in Indonesia”; Loven, Watching Si Doel; Rachmah, “Watching Indonesian sinetron”; Sen and Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia.
31. Loven, Watching Si Doel; Rachmah, “Watching Indonesian sinetron.”
32. Goebel, “The Construction of Semiotically Dense Stereotypes”; Goebel, Language and Superdiversity.
33. Goebel, “Enregistering, Authorizing and Denaturalizing Identity in Indonesia”; Goebel, Language and Superdiversity.
34. Goebel, Language and Superdiversity.
35. TSM, “Iket kepala dipakai sebagian PNS Pemkot.”
36. See TSM, “Iket kepala dipakai sebagian PNS Pemkot.”
37. Agha, Language and Social Relations; Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistics Categories, and Cultural Description”; Urban, Metaculture.
38. Urban, Metaculture.
39. Lempert, “Imitation.”
40. Aspinall, “Democratization and Ethnic Politics in Indonesia.”
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Zane Goebel
Zane Goebel is an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he teaches Indonesian, Asian Studies, and Linguistics. One of his major research themes relates to how everyday talk figures in the construction and maintenance of identity and social relations. His early fieldwork focused upon how instances of neighbourhood talk contributed to the building of convivial and conflictual social relations in two diverse Indonesian neighbourhoods; published in Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press). This work sparked his interest in how ideas of ethnicity emerged and were reproduced in Indonesia and how Indonesians living in Japan appropriate and reuse these ideas and other linguistic practices to do togetherness in everyday talk. These ideas were presented in his recent book entitled Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press). He is currently completing two further projects. One is an externally funded project on leadership talk in Indonesia, while the other is a team project that focuses on the relationship of rapid social, political, and economic change on the value of languages in Indonesia.
Author’s postal address: Department of Languages and Linguistics, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia.