The Empty Seashell by Nils Bubandt

Author:Nils Bubandt [Bubandt, Nils]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Asia, Southeast Asia
ISBN: 9780801471964
Google: U2PkBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-05-06T03:29:51+00:00

New Order Dreams

During the early 1990s—the heyday of New Order rule, when annual economic growth rates were above 7 percent and criticism of the Suharto government’s state cronyism was firmly held in check—active state intervention offered a convincing discourse about a new political future as well as a powerful institutional attempt to engineer such a future. Pembangunan or “development” was the shorthand name that people during the 1980s and 1990s had learned to give to this project (Heryanto 1988). It was a name that most people in Buli accepted, even welcomed, less for the benefits it had demonstrably delivered than for the promises of a better future that it held out. The new modern world (I. dunia modern) that development would bring about was one of economic riches, education, public employment, and a sanitized social life. In the early 1990s this project generated particular expectations of modernity in Buli people: dreams about being connected to the electric grid of the PLN generator, which operated from 6:00 p.m. till 12:00 p.m.;3 dreams of corrugated iron on their houses; of a private TV set; of securing a job as a civil servant (I. pegawai) for their children. It was a world in which people, as the state ideology expressed it, had been “becoming aware” (I. sadar), a world that entailed a farewell to superstitious beliefs, not just the belief in guardian spirits (suang) but also, centrally, that in sorcery (payao) and in the witch (gua). Through state-engineered progress (I. kemajuan), so it seemed, the gua would finally disappear.

The attempts to weed out witchcraft that characterized the New Order in Buli were built into a robustly modernist belief in centrally organized development, economic improvement, and social engineering. They were also coupled with a cultural arrogance toward the backward beliefs of the marginalized people of the Outer Islands, expressed in the concept of “mental guidance” (I. pembinaan mental) (Li 2007:58). “The law does not acknowledge magic (I. ilmu gaib),” Syamsul Alam, the police chief in Buli, told me in 2004. Pak Syamsul had a BA in law: “This is a leftover from Dutch Roman law, so the hands of the police are tied. All we can do is to take preventive measures (I. tindakan preventif ) to hinder revenge attack by victims of witchcraft and to provide general guidance (I. pembinaan). Perhaps [things will change], when people become more aware (I. mungkin dengan adanya kesadaran).”

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