Difference Incorporated. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xxii, 196 pp. (B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-7994-2.
This remarkable book attempts to show the ways in which the Indonesian nation-state, under President Suharto and his Reform-era successors, has attempted to appropriate and refashion both court and folk dances for their own purposes. These purposes included covering over both past artistic practices and the killings/imprisonment of their practitioners, taking control of a wide range of cultural practices, and using dance to help promote an image of national stability that assists in securing international tourism, aid and trade deals.
While I often found Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s book to be too heavily laden with a theoretical jargon that was not always grounded by concrete examples, it would be hard to deny the deep intellectual quest and profound moral passion that undergird this frustrating and fascinating work. At its best, Larasati’s work allows us to gain a fleeting glimpse of the spectral figures of those dance practitioners of the Jejer and Janger genres who have disappeared or been banned from performing since 1965. Another great virtue is the fact that it clarifies the ways in which the post-1965 Indonesian state has gone to great lengths to claim ownership over refashioned traditional dances, while at the same time controlling the practitioners of these dances through access to privileged travel for performance abroad and strict enforcement of civil servants’ conformity to state norms.
The Dance That Makes You Vanish also insightfully reveals Larasati’s own history as a member of a family stigmatized by association with the pre-1965 Indonesian political left. Furthermore, Larasati’s personal experience during a cultural mission to Cambodia enables her to engage in an original and revealing comparison of the significance of recreated traditional dance in that country and her native Indonesia.
Taken all together, there is much to recommend this work, despite the difficulties of what I felt were its excessive theoretical positioning.
Larasati’s book is divided into five chapters. The first sets out some of the author’s key themes: the state’s efforts to claim ownership over a variety of artistic practices and to replace dancers branded as politically “unclean” as the condition of the construction of Indonesian culture post-1965; the benefits and limits of international mobility for state-sanctioned performers; and a call for practitioners to act out their “embodied historicity” (i.e., to recall in their performances the dance practices of those otherwise erased from history). The second chapter focuses on the manner in which the Indonesian state redefined the arts to accord with its domestic ideological needs and its sense of the global cultural market. Here Larasati argues that the Indonesian state emphasized the “ancient” and the “exotic” traditions in order to attract international tourists and satisfy the multicultural agendas of countries hosting Indonesian cultural missions. Further, she contends that in the process certain forms, specifically Javanese court dances, were privileged and provided an ideological support system for the continued dominance of the Indonesian ruling elite.
Chapter 3 examines the strategies the state has used to appropriate a number of folk forms thought to be contaminated through their deployment by political left-wing groups in the pre-1965 era, specifically through its “magang” (apprenticeship) program in which state-approved practitioners study with an older master of the form, only to then recreate the dance along lines more neatly conforming to state ideological/aesthetic needs and readings of international cultural tastes. The author also touches on the ways such cultural re-appropriations may contribute to a sense of national stability through their evocation of a collective national cultural identity. Larasati asserts that dancers’ potential to make subtle or obvious changes in the state-defined structure and techniques of individual dances may hold a limited subversive power to disrupt the state’s preferred narrative of history (as embodied in a dance and its dancer’s physical movements, and supplemented in the ways the dances are explained).
Then, though she contends that New Order versions of many dance forms are “replicas” in which the bodies of disappeared and banned dancers have been replaced, she critiques Baudrillard’s notion of the “hyper-real” as neglecting the issue of the “traditional” within colonized space, and for not exploring the possibility of injustice in the process of making a “copy of a copy.” Larasati hardly views traditional culture as something unchanging and pure. What she is arguing is that relations of power which result in the violent erasure or exclusion of human practitioners and their contributions to cultural heritage result in a “hyper-real” copy or “replica” of a dance for which Baudrillard’s ideas are not able to fully account, and that are different than those produced by more usual processes of cultural change. Finally, she suggests that the history made to “disappear” by the New Order and its successors nonetheless lives on in the collective unconscious of the dance community. Unfortunately, this is one point where the book fails to deliver a concrete example which might help us understand how this is the case.
Chapter 4 provides an instructive comparison in which the Cambodian state’s reconstruction of “traditional” dance forms is seen as a positive contrast to Indonesia in so far as they help Cambodian practitioners symbolically master the violence of that nation’s recent past. Chapter 5 represents an exploration of the ways in which women dance artists might find a space for challenging state norms for dance. Here, the author is able to draw on her own choreographed works, and those of some of her colleagues, that forcefully show how conventions can be made to speak about forgotten histories, movements, and techniques.
Ultimately, the last chapter is most heavily laden with Larasati’s own hopes and desires for the future of Indonesian dance and its practitioners. Her commitment to achieving social justice also comes across forcefully here in her condemnation of the slaughters of 1965. Thus, this complex work ends on a chord that integrates the author’s personal life with the considerable fruits of her intellectual quest for ways of understanding the history of the constraints under which Indonesian traditional dance moves.
Michael H. Bodden
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
pp. 391-393