Souteast Asia Publications Series. Honolulu: Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with the University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xvii, 254 pp. (Illus.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3864-5.
The city of Surabaya has gone through several ups and downs in the past seventy years. Its history reflects, of course, in many ways the changes that have taken place in Indonesia as a whole, but Surabaya also has idiosyncratic characteristics. One trait that distinguishes Surabaya from its biggest rival, the capital city of Jakarta, is the policy to allow most kampongs to stay in the city centre and not to demolish them to make room for office towers, hotels, shopping malls, and elite housing. Robbie Peters has written a fascinating account of the city, from Independence (1945) till 2010. The focus is on the way state interventions and the economic ebb and flow have impinged on the lives of kampong residents and how these residents have struggled to carve out a pleasant living for themselves.
The work is based on an extensive study of local newspapers and other literature, and intermittent ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 1997 to 2010. Peters stayed in the kampong Dinoyo during the whole of 1998, a momentous year during which the Asian crisis hit Indonesia hard, long-reigning President Suharto stepped down, and so-called ninja killings peaked. He returned regularly to Dinoyo after 1998. The focus of the book rests on this kampong, but Peters often widens the angle, making the connection with developments in Surabaya or Indonesia as a whole. For each period, a few themes take central stage, which are analyzed with a range of theoretical concepts.
Two-thirds of the people fled the city during the fierce Battle of Surabaya of 1945, but a reversed flow of migration already started during the Indonesian Revolution. After the transfer of sovereignty (1949) many people moved from the hinterland into town; old and new residents of Dinoyo often found work in the adjacent industrial estate, Ngagel. In 1957 the workers’ movement seized Dutch-controlled factories in Ngagel, but within a fortnight the army took over the seized factories and brought them under army control. Henceforth, labour unrest inevitably developed into a conflict between unions backed by the Indonesian Communist Party and the army (as selfish managers of the companies), culminating in the dramatic prosecution of Indonesian communists in 1965 and 1966. Peters sheds new light on these events by his economic approach to the conflict, with the army targeting the communists not so much for political as economic reasons. The stories of two labourers, Eko and Rukun, show how people tried to survive the purges.
In the next decades, the municipality embarked on a path of kampong improvement and new investments in the urban infrastructure. Data collection as a prerequisite for urban planning reminded the kampong residents of the searches for evidence of communist involvement in the mid-1960s. In the 1980s industries were moved from the inner city to the outskirts and Ngagel was developed into malls and hotels. This created new jobs for young, pretty girls from Dinoyo, like a certain Ria, because the consumer society required beauty as a precondition “to ‘promote’ the sale of commodities” (105).
The Asian crisis of 1998 brought new hardship and drove dismissed workers to the street to engage in informal economic activities. Kampong residents thus ventured outside of their secure environment into the streets associated with danger. Some years later, the War on Terror gave the state an excuse to step up scrutiny of the kampong residents, in order to distinguish between locals and outsiders (allegedly potential terrorists). The state definitions and boundary making, however, do not match the local definitions of belonging, which are based on the participation in ritual meals (slametans), death rituals and activities like pigeon racing. The residents of Dinoyo have until today successfully resisted state intrusions into their community.
It happened that I read Surabaya, 1945–2010 while staying in a Surabaya kampong myself and I found the book very inspiring for my fieldwork. The book is an excellent companion to Howard Dick’s Surabaya, city of work: A socio-economic history, 1900–2000 (NUS Press, 2003), which gives the general history of Surabaya with more “hard facts,” but lacks the experiences of ordinary people, and Lea Jellinek’s The wheel of fortune: The history of a poor community in Jakarta (Allen & Unwin, 1991), which must have been a model for Robbie Peters, but which hardly or not at all covers the disconcerting events of 1965 and 1998. The fact that the illustrations of the book are of an incomprehensibly poor quality is of no import, because of the very vivid descriptions in words that make illustrations superfluous. The book is a real page-turner, because of the lucid argument and colourful scenes, especially where Peters develops his case with the help of short vignettes about kampong residents.
From what I know of other Indonesian kampongs, my biggest concern is that the book might give an overly romantic view of a harmonious community of like people. The preface leaves no doubt that Peters’ sympathies lie with the kampong residents (and shows his excellent rapport with the residents). How about gender differences? We learn more about the men than the women and may wonder whether they liked the pigeon races as much as the men. When young girls go to work as sales girls, are they still controlled by male relatives? And how about class differences? In colonial times the composition of kampongs was determined by low incomes, but nowadays it is not uncommon to see houses with three storeys and a car port in the midst of basic dwellings in a kampong. Monthly expenditure figures of eleven residents (124) testify to enormous income differences, but go unanalyzed. Do the rich and poor get along well with each other or is there a lot of hidden strife? These queries should not distract from the fact that Surabaya, 1945–2010 is an excellent, admirable book.
Freek Colombijn
VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
pp. 369-371