Southeast Asia Mediated, v.3. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii, 312 pp. (Tables.) US$116.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-25509-8.
This book is a major study of cultural policy (seen as a state apparatus for social control) as it develops over time in the course of twentieth-century Indonesia. It comprehensively documents key debates, institutional formations and regulations around the production, circulation and reception of cultural policy in Indonesia across different political regimes (though a large part is devoted to the New Order under Suharto, 1965–1998). “Culture” here is understood as an institutionally mediated practice which involves the interplay between structure and agency. This is a definition drawn from Michel Foucault and developed by Tony Bennett with a particular focus on the themes of accommodation, contradiction, misrecognition and, should we say, resistance. The author, Tod Jones (in a theoretically well-informed introductory chapter) offers the notion of “culturality” as a concept to help illustrate the working of those themes in order to show how cultures, while constituted by formal (state) institutions, were shaped by a constellation of other unofficial practices. The book thus can be seen as having a theoretical agenda to show how culture is formed through different forces, even as the formal state discourses remain the most dominant.
To write a book about the complexity, or better, the difficulty of producing and regulating culture is indeed a difficult task. One could go into the messiness of dealing with the irreducibility of cultural practices. Jones however manages to “escape” from the messiness of cultural production by sticking with his main target: cultural policy, a domain that represents the cultural strategy of government. The key actors of the study thus are those associated with the different layers of government structures, and in a way we could say that the study is moving within and around these layers, but never quite beyond them. Playing with these layers, Jones shows the tension and negotiation between the regional and the Pan-Indonesian in asserting cultural strategies. The central theoretical struggle in Jones’ book thus is the question of whether cultural policy is best understood as a formulation from above but one that is deeply shaped by “culturalities,” the discursive cultural practices, from below. Such struggle could be seen in his different twists in the study, for instance he relies on governmental discourses and acknowledges the state’s power, but he aims at showing the different implications of the policy. In the end, we see cultural policy as a set of incomplete attempts and unclear desires of the state to control “culturalities.”. The point Jones wants to make however is that while the government cannot control culture, it can keep producing it through policy.
Central to the study thus are the continuous attempts by the government through its network to issue cultural policy and its institutions. While the efforts are not always working, cultural policy is considered important to maintain order and stability in a socio-political domain filled with often uncontrollable culturalities. This imperative applies to all political regimes. Jones’ theoretical formulation allows “old” modes of governance to keep returning to “new” regimes. This has made the study non-linear even as the book is organized chronologically following the rise and fall of each political regime: Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, the Constitutional Democracy and Guided Democracy of Sukarno era, the Suharto’s New Order and the Reform era. The main empirical finding is the influence of colonial cultural policy in the postcolonial era and how the supposedly democratic Reform era is never quite able to leave behind the cultural policy shadow of Suharto’s New Order.
The New Order of Suharto is understandably central to the book, as it provides a bridge between the colonial and postcolonial mode of governing cultures, and it continues to shape the contemporary reform era. The book argues that the New Order replayed the cultural policy of the colonial era, which sought to both preserve and develop Indonesian culture according to the state’s aesthetic and moral norm, and in ways that supported development goals. The discourse of preservation was constructed through the idea that there is a realm of unchanging spiritual qualities in Indonesian cultures. Cultural policy is supposed to protect the spiritual domain by isolating it from politics. After the collapse of the Suharto regime, the preservation of the spiritual domain has been relegated to the regional governments.
The strength of Jones’ study however is also its weakness. With a focus on governmental discourses and their definition of cultures, the study follows logically the purview of the state, thus leaving out cultural forms that did not receive attention from cultural policy makers. What has also been left out in the study is the cultural policy on ethnic Chinese which Jones mentions only in two footnotes. Jones is aware of this limit as acknowledged in various instances. Culture, Power, and Authoritariansm in the Indonesian State is a major contribution to the study of cultural policy in a postcolonial country.
Abidin Kusno
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 364-366