Catergory Archive for ‘Indonesia’ at Joseph Scalice

Archive for the 'Indonesia' Category

Tan Malaka in the Philippines

Published on January 31, 2008 in Rizal, Indonesia, Communism, Southeast Asia, History and Philippines. 0 Comments

This fascinating political cartoon comes from El Debate, a Spanish language news daily during the American colonial period in the Philippines. Tan Malaka, Indonesian communist and cosmopolitan provocateur, was in the Philippines and the colonial administration was threatening him with a lengthy prison sentence. A number of prominent Filipinos came to defense.

Notice the towering figures of Rizal and Plaridel [Marcelo H. Del Pilar] and the approach of the guardia civil. The guardia civil was the loathed tool of repression under the Spanish occupation; here they represent the Philippine constabulary, the likewise loathed tool of repression under the American occupation.

I believe that, in life, Rizal was four feet, eleven inches tall. Here he towers over everyone, much as his statue towers today over every town plaza from the top of a pedestal.

convergent ahistoricity

Published on December 3, 2007 in anthropology, Indonesia, Book review and History. 0 Comments

Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, Trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

Negara In his introduction to Negara, Clifford Geertz argues that Bali’s relative isolation caused it to undergo endogenous historical change; Bali was spared a series of external shocks which dramatically altered the histories of its neighbors, viz., Islamicization and Dutch colonization. Its cultural evolution was thus orthogenetic.

Is this explanation convincing? Is Geertz’ therefore assuming that exogenous contact is the necessary cause of dramatic historical change? What of internal struggles and conflicts? Might not these have dramatically changed the face of Balinese culture? To use Geertz’ biological metaphor against him: allopatric speciation can produce results startlingly different from its progenitors.

Geertz’ protestations of dynamism despite isolation are misleading. Whatever dynamism he claims existed was exceedingly viscous, and it is possible, in his account, to read from the present to the past in an almost transparent manner.

His methodology demonstrates this. He claims that he “will construct … a circumstantial picture of state organization in nineteenth-century Bali and then attempt to draw from that picture a set of broad but substantive guidelines for the ordering of pre- and protohistorical material in Indonesia …” (7) Geertz’ account moves from structure to history and reconstructs that history on the basis of a static set of state organizational principles. He has, from the outset, precluded the possibility of dramatic historical difference.

Continuity and viscous dynamism are thus the necessary conclusions to Geertz’ own methodology.

Clade Van Gennep is not claiming to be presenting us with a diachronic evolution of rites of passage. Rather, he presents us with a taxonomy of cultural practice. His categories seem to be useful heuristic devices. They allow us to read phenomena categorically.

Like all taxonomies, however, when historically situated they become deeply problematic. Either the categories evolve and adapt - become different categories entirely at some point - or they cease to represent history, and thereby, reality.

To wit: Linneaus must be subsumed to Darwin. To read one thousand years of ritual using van Gennep’s unaltered categories is much like attempting to outline the taxon Aves in the Ordovician. It does not work.

Multatuli’s Max Havelaar: a review.

Published on November 28, 2007 in colonialism, Indonesia, Book review and Southeast Asia. 0 Comments

Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards, (London: Penguin, 1987).

[This is a somewhat imitative, tongue-in-cheek review of Max Havelaar which I originally addressed to fellow seminar participants upon our completion of Multatuli’s work.]

Max Havelaar is an angry bitter indictment of the colonial project in toto and not, as has been claimed, a reformist depiction of the evils of misguided colonial officials. Lies and tomfoolery!

Max Havelaar must be read in its entirety – in its ironic, bitter entirety – without privileging one of the many narrative voices over the others. To take Havelaar/Scarfman and identify him with Dekker/Multatuli would be a tremendous mistake. While it may be granted that Havelaar represents the past experiences of Multatuli, his naivete and his compassionate, paternalistic colonial project no longer represent Dekker’s own beliefs.

The book is deliberately nested in the writings of Droogstoppel, then Stern, then Scarfman and finally Havelaar. The tone of the work is bitingly sardonic. The colonial project, from its capitalist origins – here the merchant ‘Change – to its representative officials – from Verbrugge to Slymering – to its deliberate manipulation of existing elite exploitation, stands up to savage indictment. Havelaar is well-intentioned, yes, but utterly ineffectual.

Is the reader truly left with the hope that William the Third will respond any differently than Slymering? The ethical indictment of the text, like Havelaar’s letter, is reinforced by the silence with which those in power greet it.

Further, are we truly to believe all of the ideas of that ‘half-baked dreamer’ Havelaar? Havelaar, like Droogstoppel or Slymering, is a character type rather than the protagonist with whom we are to identify. He represents the idealist, to their capitalist and colonial official. Witness, Multatuli urges, the ineffectuality of even the best intentioned. If a Havelaar cannot save the colonial venture, no one can.

Continue reading ‘Multatuli’s Max Havelaar: a review.’

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje

Published on November 8, 2007 in historiography, biography, colonialism, Indonesia, History, imperialism and Philippines. 0 Comments

I am torn over the person of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje.

Clearly, this Dutch colonial scholar was an academic of first rank, a scholar of the old variety. He was someone who simultaneously grappled with minutiae and enormous sweeping topics, who ceaselessly produced notebooks from his study, who was not daunted to move into completely new fields of endeavor and to draw parallels between disjunct areas of inquiry. A linguist, an historian, a sociologist – his ideas and writings are apparently still defining on several topics. Encounters with scholars of this variety are always inspiring and daunting at the same time.

And yet, Snouck Hurgronje was a tacit and, in many ways, treacherous agent of colonial counter-insurgency. He befriended the Achenese in order to subvert their cause and bring them into military submission. There is an injunction which may seem quaint to postmodern readers but which is in my opinion entirely fitting: The social researcher has to mind a basic mission - solidarity with the wretched of the earth.

There is an ethical, normative obligation laid upon our scholarship to be simultaneously objective and committed to human liberation.

Snouck not only did not live up to this obligation, he failed to meet the much less stringent Hippocratic requirement: to do no harm.

Continue reading ‘Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje’

Notes on Anderson’s “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”

Published on November 4, 2007 in Indonesia, Book review, Southeast Asia and History. 0 Comments

When I first read, several years ago, Benedict Anderson’s “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture” (1972, reprinted in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), I was immediately taken by how pertinent it seemed to the Philippines. I later recognized that this feeling of familiarity and of pertinence had relatively little to do with Philippine history or society and much to do with Reynaldo Ileto. Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution is the center of a mandala in Philippine historiography; it is the point at which this historiography touches the Andersonian sky.

Anderson’s article is well-written, thought-provoking and an all-around good read. How useful is it? I think that, in terms of understanding subsequent historical work, its ‘power’ can not be overestimated. As far as being useful for understanding Indonesian – or Southeast Asian – society, it seems in desperate need of reexamination.

Continue reading ‘Notes on Anderson’s “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”’

IV. ‘Semi-feudal, semi-colonial’ in regional Communist discourse

Published on October 28, 2007 in Indonesia, Maoism, China, Marxism, Communism, History, Southeast Asia and Philippines. 0 Comments

[Section IV. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]

“There is no such thing as abstract truth. Truth is always concrete.” – Lenin.

Robert Brenner in an article in The New Palgrave Marxian Economics defined feudalism using three main ‘complementary’ and ‘integrally related’ conceptions: feudalism as a legal relationship between vassals and overlord in a fiefdom, as a form of political domination characterized by geographic fragmentation, divided political authority and a prominent role given to privately contracted military, and as a socio-economic organization in which the peasantry are in full possession of their necessary means of subsistence and in which surplus is exploited by landlords through the use of extra-economic coercion.[1] This definition, in my opinion, closely reflects Marx’s own writings on feudalism. Feudalism, for Marx, was a political, legal and economic social formation which characterized medieval European societies. This statement is borne out by a close reading of Marx’s writings on a materialist conception of history, in particular the lengthy section on pre-capitalist economic formations in his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, commonly known as Grundrisse.[2]

In Communist analyses of modes of production during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods, these more nuanced and historically grounded accounts of feudalism were supplanted by a highly rigid, schematic reading of history as a succession of five modes of production. This version of ‘Marxist thought’ was largely based upon a sentence and a half in Marx’s acontextually famous Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Marx wrote, “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”[3] These prefatory remarks to a work on monetary circulation, intended to outline Marx’s findings on the Hegelian philosophy of law,[4] were strait-jacketed by Stalinist analysis into a universal, unilinear sequence of modes of production, although the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was replaced with the ‘primitive’ or ‘communal’ mode of production.

The notion of an ‘Asiatic mode of production,’ which is one of the most cheerily ignored concepts in Marx’s writings, points to the hermeneutical imposition of reading this passage as an account of a unilinear sequence of modes of production. For Marx, the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was a system of despotic government characterized by a tributary system of surplus exploitation. He wrote occasionally of it as the ‘Asian’ or ‘oriental’ alternative – not precedent – to European feudalism, one which directly encountered capitalism through European imperialism. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, a Marxist historian of ancient Greece, writes “The existence of an ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’ mode of production seems to me a useless and even misleading conception, evolved by Marx on the basis of what can now be seen as a seriously defective knowledge of the Oriental world (though based on the best sources available in his day), and far too imprecise to be of any value in historical or sociological analysis.”[5] In the above quotation from the Preface to A Contribution to a Critique, Marx clearly did not intend the Asiatic to precede Ancient and Feudal modes of production. In order for this passage to function as the foundation for a universal sequence of modes of production, it was necessary to supplant the Asiatic with the ‘primitive’ mode of production in Stalinist discourse.

This is of more than theoretical significance. In the three cases that we will briefly examine – China, Indonesia, and the Philippines – to determine the historical trajectory of a society’s modes of production was considered the central task for determining the contemporary mode of production and by derivation the necessary revolutionary tactics for the successful seizure of power. The revolutionary tactics chosen by the Communist Party were supposed to be dictated by the mode of production that was dominant in the country at the time. In truth, I will argue, quite the opposite occurred. The revolutionary tactics chosen by the Chinese, Indonesian and Philippine communist parties dictated their theoretical interpretation of the dominant mode of production. The ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode of production’ was invented to serve pragmatic political ends, i.e., to justify previously chosen revolutionary tactics.

Continue reading ‘IV. ‘Semi-feudal, semi-colonial’ in regional Communist discourse’

III. Jose Maria Sison and the founding of the CPP

Published on October 27, 2007 in Indonesia, Maoism, Marxism, Communism, History, Southeast Asia and Philippines. 0 Comments

[Section III. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]

By the mid-1950s the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines, known by its Tagalog name Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), had entered a period of stagnation and dissolution. The rebellion of the PKP’s guerrilla army, Hukbo Mapagpalaya ng Bayan[1] (HMB), had been successfully suppressed by the Magsaysay administration through the combined use of the tactics of psychological warfare and a limited program of land reform for surrendering ‘Huks.’[2] In 1957, having already shifted tactics from guerrilla warfare to legal struggle, the leadership of the PKP announced the ‘single-file’ policy. All cadres were only to have contact with one other party member and directives were to be disseminated orally in a ‘single-file.’ The networks and organizing groups of the PKP, in essence, self-dissolved.[3] A few guerrilla units were preserved as bodyguards and security for those engaged in the legal struggle. Among the preserved units was Kumander Dante’s central Luzon command that would be the founding unit of the New People’s Army (NPA) under Joma Sison’s CPP.

The Philippine Communist Party was thus a nearly defunct organization when the simultaneous waves of bourgeois nationalist politics and student rebellion broke across Philippine society in the late 1950s.

The emergent nationalist political movement was led by Claro M. Recto. A senator from the Nacionalista party, Recto was an electrifying speaker, whose powerful and courageous rhetoric moved a generation of student radicals, among them Jose Maria Sison. Recto denounced what he termed ‘US economic imperialism’ and the local political ‘puppetry’ that was subservient to the demands of foreign capital. A series of unequal trade agreements, such as the Bell Trade Act (1946) and the Laurel Langley Agreement (1955), Recto argued, demonstrated that “it is the declared policy of the state to perpetually chain itself to an agricultural economy, making us, Filipinos, mere suppliers and providers of raw materials and consumers of foreign manufactured goods.”[4] This chaining to an agricultural economy perpetuated a system of Philippine ‘feudalism.’ The only solution to the problem of Philippine feudalism, perpetuated by US imperialist capital and its local ‘puppets,’ was a system of tariffs against imported manufactured goods and the subsidizing of local industrialization. In 1957, Recto broke with the Nacionalista party to found his own political organization. He ran for President but lost to Vice President Carlos Garcia. Recto died at the age of 70 in 1960, revered by radical movements of all stripes.

Continue reading ‘III. Jose Maria Sison and the founding of the CPP’

Notes on James Siegel’s Fetish, Recognition, Revolution

Published on October 23, 2007 in post-structuralism, Indonesia, modernity, Book review and History. 0 Comments

James Siegel. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

I fear that I am predisposed to dislike a work that opens by acknowledging its indebtedness to Jacques Derrida, who “shows the impossibility of our disciplines [viz. anthropology and history], precisely their lack of foundation. To continue after him means to accept this impossibility.” (x) The post-structuralist deconstructionist rupture of signifier and signified – the impossibility of history - entails my immediate alienation. More on this in a bit.

I will limit myself - a solipsistically imposed aporia (sorry, I couldn’t resist) - to a few comments and questions that arose from my reading.

I was troubled by Siegel’s unexamined mechanism of textual selection. Fn. 7 on page 256 merely offers the reader Siegel’s assurance that the selected texts are representative. That the texts are representative of a larger corpus of texts we will accept on this say-so, but how are they representative of ‘Indonesian’ thought? Footnote 6 on the same page makes this question obvious and then leaves it painfully unanswered. Widespread illiteracy is irrelevant Siegel states, a) because he imagines that more people were literate than the evidence indicates “though I know of no figures to substantiate my claim” (!) and b) because these texts were known through the theater. If these texts were largely disseminated through the theater then it seems that Siegel’s extreme close reading of texts may be inappropriate; the extreme inflected nuance of language which he reads into cinta, etc., would, it would seem, only be apparent in print.

I believe that at least part of the explanation for Siegel’s footnoted shrug with regard to what as an historian I would consider a central preoccupation – namely, source material – is a result of the post-structuralist revaluation of all texts as inherently equal. While doing away with the privileging of authorial intentionality, post-structuralist readings – here, Barthes and Derrida – chose to privilege the textual signifier over the signified – i.e., over authenticity, representativeness, veracity, or even verisimilitude. All texts are ‘created’ equal. But some (namely those of an abstruse Derridean playfulness) are more equal than others.

It should be pointed out that this ‘metaphysical’ hermeneutic ironically allows the reader free rein to ride roughshod through the semiotic landscape of post-structural texts. The author, a deus absconditus and not a dieu mort, must relinquish claims to the variant significations of her own text.

From this perspective a post-structuralist work can be simultaneously insightful and utter nonsense – like Douglas Adams’ deity it vanishes in a puff of logic.

Thoughts on Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power

Published on October 19, 2007 in Indonesia, colonialism, modernity, gender, Southeast Asia, Book review and History. 0 Comments

I truly wanted to like Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. I tried desperately. I spilled an inordinate amount of ink highlighting my book, making notes and referring to previous pages, always waiting for the transparently present erudition to payoff in some dramatic historical insight. I was disappointed.

Summarizing Stoler is an act of no small courage; it is difficult to do so without resorting to phrases like “discursive cleavages in unsettled metis liminality,” etc. I will, therefore, take the less courageous route and simply pose several questions of the text.

As I half-heartedly parodied the book is replete with jargon. I am not averse to mobilizing the explanatory force of neologism, nor will I reject an argument simply because it is ‘trendy,’ but to what extent was Stoler’s use of language clarifying? To what extent were the recursive structure and discursive jargon obfuscatory? I will allow two concrete instances of jargon that I personally found more harmful than helpful to suffice as fodder for this question.

Continue reading ‘Thoughts on Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power‘

Ruth McVey’s The Rise of Indonesian Communism: a review

Published on October 18, 2007 in Indonesia, Communism, Book review, Southeast Asia and History. 0 Comments

Ruth McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965)

Ruth McVey’s work, The Rise of Indonesian Communism, charts the emergence, the rise to prominence and the downfall of Communism in Indonesia from 1914 to 1927. The PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, “contributed to two historical streams”: the policy and activity of the Comintern and the “evolving Indonesian independence movement.” (xii) McVey traces the history of Indonesian Communism in extraordinary and fascinating detail from its regional introduction by Henk Sneevliet and the formation of the PKI, to the multifaceted interactions with Sarekat Islam (SI) and the contentious formulation of a united front policy, to the disastrous rebellions of 1926-27 and the downfall of the PKI.

McVey shows how ideological and pragmatic contentions over the interaction between the PKI and SI shaped a policy of bloc within tactics, wherein the Communists attempted to sway the large membership of Sarekat Islam to Communism through the persuasive example and participation of individual Communist members of SI. This bloc within strategy, she argues, affect Comintern policy and was exported via Sneevliet and others to China where it shaped the interaction of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. Indonesian Communism in this account was defined by a series of contradictory historical necessities and competing ideological and political tendencies. These competing ideologies and groups distill analytically in McVey’s book into geographic polarities: Surabaja (Dutch revisionist Socialism) opposed to Semarang (Indonesian led revolutionaries), Semarang (leftist branch of SI) opposed to Jogjarkarta (right-wing of SI), and so forth. McVey portrays the influence exercised at times by the Comintern upon Indonesian communism and the reciprocal contribution that Indonesian Communism made to international Communism.

Continue reading ‘Ruth McVey’s The Rise of Indonesian Communism: a review’