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Page 1: apjor.comapjor.com/files/1433903085.docx  · Web viewDeAndré A. Espree-Conaway. 6700 Queenston Blvd. #432. Houston, Texas 77084. United States of America. University of the South

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DeAndré A. Espree-Conaway

6700 Queenston Blvd. #432

Houston, Texas 77084

United States of America

University of the South

Student

+1 (713) 876-7015

[email protected]

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This is a declaration that this manuscript has not been published or submitted for publication

elsewhere. Thank you.

Sincerely,

DeAndré A. Espree-Conaway

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THE AFFECTIVE SOCIALIZATION OF POWER: LANGUAGE, EMOTION, AND TRUST

IN INDONESIAN SOCIO-POLITICAL KINSHIP

Abstract

Indonesians, during the Sukarno-Suharto era, referred to these first two

Presidents as bapak or pak (father) and the Presidents referred to the Indonesian

citizens as adik (children). Considering the tumultuous times and occurrences

under both Presidents, the questions emerge: What do Indonesians do when that

father-figure is not so fatherly? And how do Indonesians trust such a ‘patronizing

paternal’ figure?

In this investigation, I explore how affect as expressed though language,

specifically kinship terms, works as a vehicle of social power by leaders under

New Order politics in Indonesia. I explain how Indonesian citizens in this époque

dealt with both leaders by means of the tie that affectively-charged language has

with the self.

Keywords: Affect, Politics, New Order, Indonesia, Language.

Introduction

The concepts and family terms wielded (mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandparent,

etc.) ideally allow Indonesians to recreate the familiarity, caring, and

protectiveness of families beyond the household into the public sphere ---

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Lorraine V. Aragon

In the quotation above, Aragon acknowledges the pervasive use of kinship terms in

Indonesia, even outside of the realm of consanguineous family. This is not the most usual

occurrence considering that even in the West people do this, although most often in a cheaply

metaphorical sort of way. However in the context of Southeast, where strong ties to a “broader”

sense of “family” that relates more to place than persons at times leads to an interesting

investigation. This investigation focuses on the area where people use kinship and relational

terms in the realm of national politics. Indonesians, during the New Order period and slightly

before, referred to their first two Presidents, Sukarno and Suharto, as bapak or pak (father) and

the Presidents referred to the Indonesian citizenry as adik (children).

Aragon notes that “these linguistic practices at times instill a cozy family solidary to

Indonesian politics, but they also sometimes aid the surrender of political authority to some less-

deserving father figures, who reciprocate with patronizing paternalism”(Aragon 2011; Shiraishi

1997). The implications of kinship terms used this way in politics raises the question, what do

Indonesians do when that father-figure is not so fatherly? If the person in authority is not

properly fulfilling his duties, people revolt; however not to overthrow the system, but to return

the system to a state of order with someone else who does fulfill their duties, so that balance in

society persists. In other words, if the father does not do as he should, find another father.

Before I proceed, I must introduce the political ‘fathers’ Sukarno and Suharto. Sukarno

(b.1901 - d.1970), Indonesian’s first President who was in power for twenty years, was the son of

a Javanese man of lower aristocracy and a Balinese woman. He was educated at Surabaya,

meeting nationalist leaders and then at Bandung, studying engineering. He founded the

Indonesian Nationalist Association (which later became the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI),

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Indonesian Nationalist Party) in 1927. The Dutch colonial authorities against which he fought

detained him in 1929 for his nationalist undertakings until 1931. They then rearrested Sukarno in

1933 throwing him into exile at Flores and then at Bengkulu in 1938. Freed 1942 by the

Japanese, he led many governmental activities including heading one group in order to prepare

for Independence and participating in drafting of the first Constitution. At the end of the war,

Sukarno’s men kidnapped him in a forced attempt to declare independence, which occurred

August 17, 1945. Sukarno became Indonesia’s first president until 1965 (Vickers 2005: 225).

After seven attempts on his life, he organized a “Guided Democracy” policy for governing

Indonesia. In his autobiography, Sukarno recounts some of his policies concerning freedom of

speech:

A foreign journalist asked, “But didn’t you criticize the government when you

were a young rebel?” “Yes,” I conceded. “I wrote blistering editorials against

them. But they were the Dutch. That was not OUR government. However, I am

now THEIR government.”

“When the last remnant of the Revolution is some day over, will you then permit

freedom of the press?” he asked me.

“I’ll tolerate it only within certain limits. I think now that I shall never

permit that free freedom which gives the public prints the liberty to murder their

Heads of State for the rest of the world to see. Japan, for instance, has headlined

false and vicious things about the Crown Princess Michiko which were so harmful

they destroyed her self-confidence and faith in herself and she became ill. In a

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new baby country like ours it could destroy us. I give my newspapers freedom to

write whatever they like provided it’s not destructive to the safety of the

State.”

“And if they go too far?”

“I twist their ears. This means, I forbid the guilty papers to print for one

week, sometimes two. Should it occur again, I suspend them for three weeks. The

next time I shut their doors indefinitely (Sukarno 1965:280).

These Guided Democracy policies led to the coup of 1965 and the rise of Suharto to power (cf.

Vickers 2005: 225). The New Order era had begun.

The new President Suharto (b.1921) originally from Central Java, initially obtained his

military training from the Dutch and then later the Japanese. He quickly rose to the position of

officer during the Revolution. As one of the few military leaders not pursued during the coup, he

seized control of Indonesia and served as President until 1998 leaving by forced resignation

(Vickers 2005: 228).

The following report describes some of the horrific occurrences during Suharto’s term.

The report documents killings in East Java between December 1965 to January 1966. The author

is unknown. The British organization Tapol2 obtained the report in the 1970s. It was probably

obtained from Indonesian exiles in Europe. Tapol’s Bulletin published these sections of the report

(Cribb 2009: 347):

Singosari, Malang regency

A young boy, member of the IPI (Union of Students of Indonesia) and son of Pak

Tjokrodihardjo, who was a member of the local PKI [Indonesian Communist

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Party]3 committee in Singosari sub district, was arrested by Ansor. He was then

tied to a jeep and dragged behind it until he was dead. Both his parent committed

suicide. Urip Kalsum, a woman was a lurah [village head] of Dengkol in

Singosari, was a member of the PKI. Before being killed, she was ordered to take

all her clothes off. Her body and her honor were subjected to fire. She was then

tied up, taken to the village of Sentong in Lawang, where a noose was put around

her neck and she was hacked to death (Cribb 2009: 348).

Pare, Kediri regency

Suranto, headmaster of the High School in Pare and one of the leaders of the Pare

branch of Partindo [Indonesian National Party] and a member of the DPRD [the

Regional House of Representatives ] Kediri district, lived in the village of

Pulorejo, Pare.4 On October 8, 1965, at about 5:00 p.m. he went by bicycle to

meet his wife, nine months pregnant, who had been at an arisan (rotating credit

and social club). On the way home, they were stopped and taken prisoner by an

Ansor gang. They were beaten until they fell unconscious and were then killed.

The man’s head was cut off and his wife’s stomach was cut open, the baby taken

out and cut to pieces. The two bodies were thrown down a ravine to the east of the

market in Pare. For a week afterwards, their five children who were all small (the

oldest was eleven) had no one to help them because the neighbors were warned by

Ansor members that anyone helping them would be at risk (Cribb 2009: 348-9).

After briefly examining the deeds of Sukarno and Suharto, again it raises the question, what do

Indonesians do, especially in speech, when that father-figure is not so fatherly? In beginning to

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approach this question, one must realize that kinship terms are filled with affect (cf. Besnier

1990: 422). Affect is the substance into which society affixes itself in a person. This implies that

national politics, the agent of societal power, is able to ground itself deep in the emotions of each

individual person which is, as is the general rule Indonesia and most of Southeast Asia, more

socialized. Affect, being the ‘heart’ of the self, is the substance upon which trust and, in the

Indonesian case, social trust predicates itself. In addition, affect embeds itself cognitively in the

individual as Bell and Wolfe writes that psychological research is beginning to realize. Bell and

Wolfe state, “Emotion regulation research usually focuses on socio-emotional development;

however, we have proposed that the neural mechanisms underlying regulatory processes may be

the same as those underlying higher order cognitive processes” (2004: 369). Affect, connected

with the visceral (neural and physiological) and cognitive subject, is the basis of intersubjective5

trust. But how do Indonesians trust such a ‘patronizing paternal’ figure? This question is what

drives this study.

Here in my paper, I explore how affect as expressed though language, specifically kinship

terms, works as a vehicle of social power by leaders under New Order politics in Indonesia. I

explain how Indonesian citizens in this époque dealt with both leaders by means of the tie that

affectively-charged language and behavior have with the self.

Before I begin to explain the response I found to this question of kinship, I will outline

what is known about the interface between language and affect along with its position in culture

and society with a view towards its use in social power and specifically politics in Suharto-

Sukarno era Indonesia.

Following Besnier (cf. 1990: 421), I have chosen to take on a broad and flexible

definition of “affect” as ‘an open, but empty’ term waiting to be defined by specific empirical

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cases—in this instance the Javanese and Toraja cases. I also use affect and emotion

interchangeably. Anthropologists maintain that affect and affective profiles are primarily social

and, moreover, may also distinguish human cultures and societies from one another (cf. Panoff

1995: 210). Heelas notes that “different cultures and societies hold different kinds of emotions.

There are very considerable differences in the number of emotions clearly identified; what

emotions mean; how they are classified and evaluated; how the nature of emotions is considered

with regard to locus, aetiology and dynamics; the kind of environmental occurrences which are

held to generate particular emotions; the powers ascribed to emotions; and management

techniques” (2007: 31). Psychologists, on the other hand, place emphasis on the self or the

subject6 as the root of affective experience. Byron Good observes that this “individual/social

binarism” has plotted itself “onto a [major] disciplinary divide between psychology and

anthropology” (Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004: 438). Following Good (2004: 532) and

Boellstorff and Lindquist (2004: 438), I endeavor to analyze affect as both a sociocultural and a

socioculturally specific phenomenon with reference to and engagement with the individual

without ontologizing either self or society. The social stance is important as way to reveal

“deeply held assumptions (and not just Western ones) about the relationship between embodied

versus transpersonal modes of being” (Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004: 438). However, the

subject or the individual is just as important seeing, as Good explains, that “[t]he subject is at

once a product and agent of history; the site of experience, memory, story-telling and aesthetic

judgment, and of conscious and unconscious motives, feelings, and forms of symbolization; an

agent of knowing and knowledge as well as of action; and the conflicted site for moral acts and

gestures amid impossibly immoral societies and institutions” (2004: 531). In addition all the

major theories in ‘emotion or affective science’—which while being somewhat interdisciplinary

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(anthropology, psychology, genetics, etc.) still leans heavily on cognitive and neurosciences—do

not deny the connection between the social world and the individual body—a connection that I

hope to make. Linking the binarism is essential to a more wholistic understanding of humans (the

goal of Anthropology), but moreover, much more specifically, a wholistic understanding of the

Indonesian case of language and affect.

Language and affect studies approach a new frontier in cultural and linguistic inquiry.

While Anthropologists have made substantial ground in emotion and sociocultural studies—the

legacy in American anthropology reaching back at least to the 1930s (Besnier 2011: 433)—

exploring the interface between language and affect from the anthropological perspective is a

much newer occurrence. Interestingly, most of these studies concern Southeast Asian and

Oceanic cultures. Linguists have hardly even begun to explore this area of linguistic meaning. As

Besnier states, “[A]ffect has been consistently set aside as an essentially unexplorable aspect of

linguistic behavior, a residual category to which aspects of language that cannot be handled

conveniently with extant linguistic models were relegated to be forgotten (1990: 420). In

Semantics—a subfield of linguistics—Lyons delineates linguistic meaning into three

constituents: referential meaning, “mapping of linguistic signs onto the entities and processes

they describe”, social meaning, “consisting of the social categories…represented in language”,

and expressive (or affective) meaning, “representing the speaker's or writer's feelings, moods,

dispositions, and attitudes toward the propositional content of the message and the

communicative context” (Besnier 1990: 419). Although Lyons draws a distinction between social

and expressive meaning, I offer the two more often engage each other. Besnier explains that “…

current anthropological research on emotionality has shown convincingly, emotions and social

life are intricately interwoven, which immediately sheds some doubt on the validity of a sharp

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dividing line between the social and the affective” (Besnier 1990: 431). While not pretending

that all expressive meaning is social, I still emphasize the importance of this link (cf. Besnier

1990: 431).

Most studies that relate to expressive or affective meaning are studies in cultural ‘emotion

lexicons’. These studies recount the names, meanings, and associations (including other affective

associations) present in a given sociocultural context. Scholars have well documented emotion as

an important part of the lexicon (Besnier 1990: 422) and it is through these studies that many

argue the point of culturally specific emotions. Heelas mentions that while “emotion talk”—most

often analyzed through emotion lexicons—are “clearly a product of human imagination”, he

acknowledges that it “does not have imaginary consequences” (2007: 31). “It in fact has great

bearing on the nature of emotional life” (Heelas 2007: 31). He maintains that how people will

respond behaviorally—or linguistically—rests on the knowledge of emotional life, because our

emotional understanding of a social drama or interaction is enveloped in the understanding of the

emotion (cf. Heelas 2007: 32). A person’s emotional interpretation of an event binds itself

dialogically in the interpretation of the emotion and the interpretation of the emotion is most

often bound up with notion of the word. This is where the lexicon gains its principle significance.

Vehicle of some of these lexicons are national languages and “researchers [have] discover[ed]

that all speakers of a language share a cognitive structure for emotion” (Kovecses 1990, 2000;

Wierzbicka 1999; cited in Boellstorff & Lindquist 2004: 437). Besnier explains that “emotions

are not just psychological phenomena but also interactional phenomena, and to demonstrate that

emotions are not confined to the local, the intimate, and the personal, but are also relevant to

large-scale dynamics such as public life, historical change, and global processes” (Besnier 2011:

434). The shared cognition and the interactional nature of affect gains more pertinent

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significance when turning to the case of Indonesia. For while people speak hundreds of

languages in the country of Indonesia there is an aspect that they share transnationally in societal

sense, but also individually in a cognitive sense by speaking Bahasa Indonesia.7

Although I have mostly spoken about the emotion lexicon as a center of affect in

language, I would like to emphasize that “affect…permeates all utterances across all contexts

because the voices of social beings, and hence their affect, can never be extinguished from the

discourse (Besnier 1990: 433). That is, affect (and the sociality of it) pervades all aspects and

levels of language whether there are sounds, words, phrases, discourses, or the languages as a

whole in question. In this investigation, I look at lexical mapping of emotion and language

ideology.

Besnier calls for ‘ethnographies of emotion’ stating that “[i]nvestigations of the role of

affect in language cannot proceed without a fine-grained ethnographic inquiry into language use

in context. Questions that must be addressed include: Who uses which affective tools, for what

purpose, in what context, and what role does affect play in the linguistic representation of

symbolic processes?” (Besnier 1990: 437). Anthropologists should also direct their attention to

matters of nationalism and globalization. “Nationalism is perhaps the most obvious example of

how affect is organized within decidedly non-local communities” (Boellstorff and Lindquist

2004: 439; cf. Anderson 1983). The question here is, what is the role of the state and mass media

in transforming subjectivities and emotional landscapes? (Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004: 439).

Through these questions, this study gains greater significance. For although few have written

‘ethnographies of affective language’, here I parse two principle ethnographies and a few other

associated texts, forming an ‘ethnology of affective language’ through the comparison of the

Javanese and the Toraja under the Sukarno-Suharto political era—that is, two different cultures

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and societies under one macro-sociocultural structure. I address the affective tools that former

Presidents and their governments used, for what purpose they used them, in what context they

used them, and the role that affect played in the linguistic representation of symbolic processes

of power. Here I look at local cases of emotion lexical items and language ideologies in order to

enlighten the understanding of the behavior and emotions of those people as exhibited through

language in the transnational context.

In this study, I rely mainly on two ethnographies, Saya S. Shiraishi’s Young Heroes: The

Indonesian Family in Politics in understanding the Javanese case and Toby Alice Volkman’s

ethnography Feasts of Honor: Ritual Change in the Toraja Highlands for the Toraja case. In both

cases, to answer that primary question ‘what do Indonesians do when that father-figure is not so

fatherly?’, I found that people revolt, not to overthrow the system, but to return the system to a

state of order, so that balance in society persists.

In Java, this notion comes through in language where if bapak is not behaving as bapak

should, he can be replaced; however as opposed to the West, the hierarchy between bapak and

adik, President and citizens, authority and constituents does not change or reduce itself. The

hierarchy is part of the maintenance of order. The crux of order, in this case the hierarchy,

predicates itself on the culturally specific notion of malu (bahasa Indonesia), an emotion of

honor-shame, which supports the respect that hierarchy creates. People also convey this

linguistically demonstrating the case that the emotional responses to a social condition, in this

case the ‘milieu of hierarchy’, predicates itself on the lexical notion of the emotion. In Java,

following Shiraishi, the use of kinship terms and the affective impression with which they are

infused reifies the hierarchy and maintains social order. The irony is that this language does not

remain simply a reflection of how society actually is, but becomes a verisimilitude of social

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order behind which power hides its atrocities. This is the case of kinship terms as it develops

under Sukarno and emerges in full force under Suharto. Bahasa Indonesia itself as a language

that becomes thoroughly embedded with this dyadic hierarchy—bapak-adik, president-citizens,

authority-constituents—in turn becomes an index of societal order leading to the social

perception of it as a highly-valued, elegant, upper register form of speech.

For the case of the Toraja, there is no evidence of the effects of kinship-terms political

speech on society and I suspect that this gap is not accidental. Although it is conceivable that no

one has written on this topic yet specifically with regard to Toraja, I think that effects kinship do

not truly apply, because Toraja was never really part of the ‘family’ from the beginning. Taufik

Abdullah, an Indonesian historian, uses the metaphor of the “family album” where people go to

find their portraits in the book of national history (1993; cited in Atkinson 2003: 136). From my

investigation, it appears that the Toraja do not have a portrait in the album. While the Toraja do

interact with the Sukarno-Suharto government, it is more from the position of the outside. The

kin reference only applies to those inside at the family house inside the familial ‘courtyard’, not

to those outside the ‘courtyard’. Since the period of Dutch colonialism Indonesia has divide itself

into the Inner Island and Outer Islands. The Inner Island, historically, is Java as this was the

center of Dutch organization and control. The Outer Islands were those on Java’s periphery were

Dutch control was not as strong. I hold that because Toraja faces a different situation under the

Dutch and because of its geographical and cultural distance form Java, while the government

would recognize no difference, in practice Toraja is outside of the familial scope, outside of the

range of the lens, and thus outside of the family album portrait. For this reason the kin charged

language is expelled; however I still analyze the interface between language and affect in the

Toraja case.

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Just as the Javanese kinship-based hierarchy, the Toraja interaction with the government

predicates itself on notions of respect, honor, and shame known as siri’. I analyze this culturally-

specific emotion from the local context to understand how it functions in the transnational one. I

found that when people revolted in Toraja, it was due to governmental disregard of siri’. Revolts

occur not to overthrow the system, but to return the system to a state of order by restoring siri’,

so that again balance in society persists. Errington notes that people have said, “It is far better to

die with siri’ than to live without it” (1989: 119). Siri’ becomes an emotion that is not only

expressed lexically, but also though language ideologies. Disdainful notions of the Toraja

language with respect to Bahasa Indonesia which, as I stated above, has become an index of

societal order leading to its social perception as upper register form of speech, demonstrates

underlying notion of siri’ as the local language and people face the transnational language and

people bound up in notions of the primitive world facing the modern world.

In both cases the idea is to enlighten the understanding of language and affect as it meets

the contemporary social world. As Wilce states, “Emotion mediates between the embodiment of

“individual and group agency in…social life” (Lyon 1994:101; cited in 2009: 33). I add that

readers must recognize that this social life consists of a micro- and macrocosm, a local and

transnational world.

Dialogical Formation and Praxis of the “Family” Ideology

The formation of the Indonesian family ideology, like most Indonesian national cultural

traditions, has its roots in Javanese cultural traditions. Bowen writes concerning Benedict

Anderson's work on Indonesian Politics,"[He] discerns the shadow of Javanese structure, history,

and idioms underpinning Indonesian and nationalist modes of expression” (Bowen 1994: 1001).

In this light, as I parse the 'Indonesian' notion of the political 'family' and its attached emotional

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profile, I will also show the Javanese kinship system with its emotional profile as it underlies the

Indonesian national ones. Historically the use of kinship in the political sphere began in Java

which is no surprise. It is not inconceivable for the center of Dutch colonial power in Indonesia

to be the center of anti-Dutch colonial resistance.

The origins of this kekeluargaan or ‘family-ism’ ideology draw from the “Javanese

nationalists” who in the late 1910s endeavored to reconstruct Javanese culture, which they

presumed had been lost to colonialism. Suriokusumo, in 1922, established the Committee for

Javanese Nationalism which produced a monthly publication Wederopbouw (Reconstruction)

(Shiraishi 1997). Suriokusumo stated that his notion of ‘reconstruct’ was meant to restore and

rebuild “Javanese ideals of social structure, social morals, and social dignity, which had been lost

as a result of foreign rule” (Tsuchiya 1982; cited in Shiraishi 1997). He stated that “[t]hese

ideals were conceived of as order, tranquility, prosperity, and good fortune in society, and the

unity of kawula and gusti [master-god and servant] in human relations” (Tsuchiya 1982; cited in

Shiraishi 1997). They felt that the kawula and gusti was the essence of Javanese culture which

was what they lost with the advent of the Dutch. It is from these roots that the bivalent hierarchy

evolves into the notion of family, the kinship vocabulary, and the ideology of family in politics.

The Indonesian language was also born out of an initially Javanese resistance to Dutch

colonial rule. It is under these conditions, an anti-colonial context, where people see the birth of

a unified ‘Indonesian’ people and nation-state. Anderson mentions that “[t]he People, newly

conceived as a political entity in opposition to the colonial rulers, were to inherit …and, at the

same time, to subject themselves, by the crucial mechanism of recognition, to the modalities of a

now updated international law (Anderson 1998: 318-319). Here I take that “international law”

not only to mean statutes of global organizations (e.g. United Nations, international trade laws,

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etc.), but more importantly, the habits of the modern world—the most pertinent of which being,

first, the ‘nation-state’ and, second, the transnational processes that pan that geopolitical

construct. Anderson notes:

The major public function of Indonesian has lain in its role as national unifier.

Through it began to play this part in the 1920s, it is not until the Japanese

occupation that it formally became the language of the state, to be taught in

schools and used in offices as a matter of official policy. During the Revolution of

1945-49 it was the language of resistance to the returning Dutch and the language

of hope for the future. The Revolution also accelerated the process of filling

Indonesian with the emotionally resonant words that give any language its

cultural identity and aura, and that seem to express its speakers’ most vital

experiences…(Anderson 2009: 271).

The primary function of Indonesian was as much resistance of colonialism as it was hope of

modernity (cf. Anderson 2009: 271). Crucial words Rakyat (the People), merdeka (freedom),

perjuangan (struggle), Pergerakan (the Movement), kebangsaan (nationality), kedaulatan

(sovereignty), semangat (dynamic spirit) and revolusi (revolution) demonstrate the affective tone

of resistance era Indonesian language indexing notions of solidarity and the hopeful prospect of

post-colonial modernity (cf. Anderson 2009: 271). But what is important to this investigation and

probably the single most important categorical set of vocabulary in Indonesian—which grew out

of this resistance zeitgeist—is the kinship-term system which created an emotionally-charged,

post-colonial sense of solidarity.

The Indonesian political kinship system is based on a dyadic reciprocal hierarchy.

Essentially the higher stratum has as much responsibility to the lower stratum as the lower to the

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higher. The lower should follow the higher in complete obedience under the presumption that the

higher stratum is more mature, developed, and indeed socially realized and thus would know

better how society should be. To reiterate this hierarchy indexes notions of social order and

connects with notions of social actualization—positions of authority and societal actualization–

modernity. In this light, I peer over to Javanese linguistic ideologies where hierarchy is most

saliently intertwined. Javanese is the hallmark case of linguistic hierarchy. Javanese social

hierarchy expresses itself in the language through the differences between krama which is

spoken only by and toward the elite and ngoko which is spoken to people of lower status and

among social equals (Bowen 1994: 1001). Aragon mentions that anthropologist Clifford Geertz

and James Peacock portray “the language, cosmology, politics, and aesthetics of Indonesia’s

most populous ethnic group, the Javanese, [as] revolv[ing] around a dualism that contrasts the

refined (alus, Javanese; halus, Indonesian) with the coarse or crude (kasar, Javanese and

Indonesian)” (2011: 15). Emerging from this Javanese ideology is the modern practice where

language in present-day Jakarta has bifurcated into Indonesian becoming the “new krama” and

popular urban style becoming the “new ngoko” (Bowen 1994: 1001).

Sociocultural ideologies which become language ideologies influence the lexicon and the

use of the language itself in Indonesian. This is where language ideology gains greater

significance. After noting how sociocultural ideologies and practices evolve into language

ideologies and practices, claims that language ideologies are “secondary rationalizations” as

Franz Boas asserted weaken (cf. Wilce 2009: 70). Scholars have discovered that “language

ideologies actually influence the evolution of linguistic forms and practices” (Wilce 2009: 70).

That might explain the shorten use of bapak (father) and ibu (mother), pak (sir and mister) and

bu (miss) in daily Indonesian speech—forms that are on par with the ideologies of family-ism

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and dyadic reciprocal hierarchy that I afore mentioned. As Ong writes “[f]ollowing Foucault, …

power…operat[es] strategically in everyday action and discourse” (1989). These language

ideologies afore described have affect mapped on to them. And as I stated above, all of the

emotional and structural underpinnings of the kinship terms, Indonesian family ideology, and the

status of the language itself derive themselves from Javanese notions of language, hierarchy, and

affect.

Affect, Language, and Hierarchy in the Javanese Household

Almost every aspect of traditional Javanese culture relates to social status. In addition,

Geertz notes that “a Javanese perceives such status situations in terms of special, accepted

definitions of the “respect” called for and the kinds of feeling-states thought to be appropriate”

(1959: 225). The Javanese disapprove of strong emotional expression and always present

themselves in a way that is controlled and orderly. Order is center to the Javanese life. “There is

a pervasive orderliness in their lives; their persons and property are always clean and well kept”

(Geertz 1959: 225). The emotions Iklas which describes “a desirable state of mind in which one

gives up something without caring, and in which one is simply resigned to one’s fate” (Geertz

1959: 225) is connected with this cultural notion of order. Although the Javanese endeavor to

hide emotions in a sort of passivity, they are always circumspect for any shocking occurrence

that may disturb social order. Geertz outlines two principle emotions connected with shocking

disorder: bingung and kagèt. Bingung describes “a feeling of mental confusion, of being mixed

up, upset, lost”; “losing one’s sense of direction or one’s control of one’s whereabouts, “not

knowing which way is north”” (Geertz 1959: 225). Kagèt is the feeling of being “suddenly

startled or shocked by something that happens outside of one, so that one becomes disoriented,

or bingung” (Geertz 1959: 225). These are apparently very threatening emotions in Javanese

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culture; however they also function to maintain social distance between people of different

statuses.

As young Javanese are socialized into the sort of emotional profiles for manipulating

family life that the Javanese require one to take on in order to be considered an adult, a person,

and indeed a Javanese, one must learn to regulate emotions along the lines of urmat and adji.

Geertz translates both as “respect” (Geertz 1959: 229). While mothers are the source of trisna or

“love” in family life, fathers only have to seneng or “take pleasure” in their children. Also from

the perspective of the child, children are required to show love to their mothers, but should show

only respect their fathers. Geertz notes, “She [the mother] is seen as a bulwark of strength and

love to whom one can always turn, in contrast to the father, who is distant and must always be

treated respectfully”. Children treat their fathers almost with the seemingly same emotional

distance as an outside, but submit to him under the presumption that he has their best interest in

mind. This “respect” predicates itself affectively on three degrees of “shame”: wedi, isin, and

sungkan. Wedi “means “afraid” in both the physical sense and the social sense of apprehension of

unpleasant consequences of an action” (Geertz 1959: 231). Isin describes a “fearful reaction,

especially to strange things” (Geertz 1959: 229). 8 Sungkan “refers to a feeling of respectful

politeness before a superior of an unfamiliar equal, an attitude of constraint, a repression one’s

own impulses and desires” (Geertz 1959: 229). These are the three emotional components of

respect in Javanese culture. Here Geertz describes how these components interact as the children

develops and becomes socialized into the Javanese emotional profile:

[the] father…begins to act like an “outsider” toward [the child], and to expect him

to behave in his presence according to the social forms appropriate to outsiders.

The child finds himself now feeling isin in front of his father, and being told,

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moreover, to be sungkan in his presence (Geertz 1959: 234).

This notion of “respect” and its affective impressions, especially isin, present in the Javanese

father-child relations have influenced the Indonesian bapak-adik relationship and forms the basis

of that dyadic reciprocal hierarchy and that kekeluargaan ideological family-ism described

earlier. In Indonesian, these affective impressions are summed up in the term malu (BI). Malu

(honor-shame emotion) is the social glue of that reinforcing skeleton of “respect” on which the

dyadic hierarchy predicated itself.

Kinship and Affective Language in Java during the Sukarno-Suharto Political Era

Sukarno and Suharto use the dyadic reciprocal hierarchy and the kekeluargaan

ideological family-ism infused in Indonesian in order to maintain a sense of order in Indonesian

society, sometimes to even if this order is only verisimilitude. I would have readers recall the

“Guided Democracy” of Sukarno that the government deemed as ‘order’ and Suharto’s killings

which were supposedly part of the maintenance of “New Order”. This political rhetoric using

kinship terms reinforced order derived from hierarchy present in the language which grounds

itself in the affective profile of bahasa Indonesia and thus Indonesians.

In Saya Shiraishi’s work Young Heroes: The Indonesian Family in Politics, she uses two

important contrasts in vocabulary to demonstrate the pervasive dyadic hierarchy and the affective

associations connected with each aspect derived from the initial family metaphor. The first is the

relationship between antar and bawa. Both mean “to bring someone to some place” except that

antar has more of a sense of “legitimate escorting” and “accompanying” while bawa means

more “to take by force or illegally”. The words penangkapan and penculikan possess the same

sort of relationship with each other as the words antar and bawa. Both mean to detain, expect

that penangkapan means more “to arrest” and penculikan means “to kidnap”. In the mid1960s at

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the fall of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto, Sukarno and a number of high ranking generals were

kidnaped (penculikan). They were taken (bawa) by the revolutionaries, who were actually their

very own men, lower officers, the military/governmental adik. The revolutionaries took the

officers from their homes under the disguise of an arrest (penangkapan) acknowledging the

hierarchy. Suharto, during this time of social disorder, steps in and declares that Sukarno was no

longer taken (bawa) by force or kidnaped (penculikan), but had been “brought to safety”.

President Sukarno was, in this way, escorted (antar) to safety.

Since Suharto stepped in to preserve social order, he became as Heider would call him,

the ‘agent of order’ (cf. 1991a). Heider in an analysis of Indonesian Cinema noticed that films

did not portray evildoers or disrupter to social order as intrinsically nefarious as is done in the

West, but rather “agents of disorder”. It is a case that regretful events must occur, but “woe unto

the one by whom they come”. ‘Agents of disorder’ unlike Western ‘antagonists’ may be

converted and can be made to restore order—there is no need for their removal and replacement,

for only permanently unalterable agents need be completely eliminated. While Sukarno was

removed, the ‘persona of the position’ was not. In this way, the dyadic hierarchy between

President and citizenry, between bapak and adik was maintained. Suharto, being the agent of that

maintenance, proved himself as bapak and this filled that ‘persona of the position’ as President.

He proved by restoring social order that he knew what was best for the Indonesian people and

thus the citizens owed him respect, the same respect dedicated to a father affectively reinforce on

malu (BI) honor-shame.9 Through this newly found power in kekeluargaan-derived dyadic

hierarchy, Suharto served as President for thirty-two years despite his nefarious deeds.

Structure of Family-ism-Derived (Kekeluargaan) Dyadic Reciprocal Hierarchy

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Engaging ‘Outside the Courtyard’: Affect and the Toraja in Sukarno-Suharto Era Politics

As I afore mentioned in regard to the case of the Toraja, there is no evidence of the

effects of kinship-termed political speech on the social context. I discovered that in Java, an

ideology of kinship, kekeluargaan served as the foundation for a dyadic reciprocal hierarchy that

pervaded the Indonesian lexicon of the Javanese and Javanese language use based on social

contexts of respect build on malu (honor-shame). There is no sign of this same sociocultural

process occurring in Toraja. I suspect that this break in evidence is not accidental, because Toraja

was never really part of the ‘family’ from the beginning. Political leaders would deny such a

statement, but in practice Toraja is ‘outside of the family courtyard’, outside of the family

household. While readers will observe overlap with some of the cultural concepts presented in

the Javanese system, the Toraja case, I have discovered, had its own system for engaging with

the Sukarno-Suharto era government.

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Before I begin, I would like to discuss what I mean when I write Toraja. Here, in

describing ‘New Order’ Toraja, I pull the core information of my analysis from Tana Toraja

written in Toby Alice Volkman’s Feasts of Honor: Ritual and Change in the Toraja Highlands;

however I also reference cultural continuities that pervade all Toraja groups and also, when

engaged with it, the island of Sulawesi as a whole in the areal-regional culture sense. When not

specifically speaking of Tana Toraja, I describe the cultural connects and continuities that apply

(or most likely apply) to Tana Toraja as it engages with the ‘outside’. One reason for cultural

sharing in a regional sense might due to the Sulawesi linguistic situation. As Mills points out that

“[t]he languages—or better, dialect groups—include Buginese, Makassarese, Mandar, Sa’dan

Toraja, Pitu Ulunna Salo, Seko and Massenrempulu’…[i]n an area like …Sulawesi where all the

languages have been in prolonged and intimate contact with each other, the decision as to what is

a “dialect” and what is a “language” is often difficult (1975: 205). I would argue that seeing the

influences that language and thus people have had on each other, it is not unfair to imagine

Sulawesi as a cultural region where real continuities apply.

With that said about the evidence, I return to the primary inquiry of this study, what do

Indonesians do when that father-figure is not so fatherly? How do they trust such a ‘patronizing

paternal’ figure? Well again, seeing that the kinship ideology does not really apply here, I must

reframe the question as, what do Toraja do when a national leader does not support the entire

nation as he should? As I previously stated, if the authority does not fulfill its responsibility,

people revolt. The revolution, however, does not lead to the overthrow of the system, but returns

the system to a state of order with someone else who does fulfill their duties, so that balance

persists in society. This social order rests on respect-dependent hierarchy which is reinforced by

the honor-shame emotion. In Indonesian, this emotion is referred to as malu, but in Toraja, it is

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called siri’.10 Hierarchy based on respect through siri’ is central to social order in Toraja.

Errington notes that people have said, “It is far better to die with siri’ than to live without it”

(1989: 119). Before I go any further, I will exhibit how hierarchy works in the Toraja

sociocultural and linguistic context. After reading these two experiences below, it seemed to me

that hierarchy impacts both what one would say and expect to be believed and how one would

say whatever that he or she would wish to be believed. Volkman writes:

Related to this concern with completion is a concern with something like “truth”

(tonganna). When anthropologist Shinji Yamashita visited our house and told a

version of a myth from southern Toraja, Mama’ Agus [informant] remained

politely silent, as she told me later, although she knew that he was “wrong”. But

when a Toraja Protestant minister gave me a poetic, rather formal version of a

myth that Mama’ Agus herself could tell with far more eloquence and with, she

refused to repeat her own account, insisting that I now had the “true” story from

the minister, a yonder man of great prestige…(1985: 15)

This excerpt demonstrates how, for the Toraja, truth is predicated on power and status. This next

excerpt even further accentuates this point, when Volkman writes:

When I began fieldwork I had been advised by a social scientist with experience

in Sulawesi that to talk directly to “small people” might alienate not only those

important, “bigger” people above them, but even the poor and former slaves

themselves. To begin at the top, presumably, would earn me the respect and

confidence of people at all levels. However, the bonds between the Toraja leaders

and followers, high and low are relatively weak. In spite of my position as a

“daughter” in a high-status family, few lower-status people seemed drawn or

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compelled to speak to me for this reason. More commonly such people answered

questions with a repeated “I don’t know”: in the hierarchical organization of

knowledge, they were not expected to “know.” Once an old woman, a former

slave, cried out in exasperation: “Why are you asking me? You’re questioning a

cat! (1985: 18-19)

Those above demonstrate how hierarchy impacts what one would say and expect to be believed,

but the excerpt below gets at how hierarchy impacts how people would say whatever that they

wished to be believed as Volkman writes:

We had studied Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia) in the United States, and once in

Rantepao we began to study the Toraja language, sometimes referred to as bahasa

Tae’. This was not, however, and ideal situation, since most people in Rantepao

also speak excellent Indonesian and were not inclined to speak their “old-

fashioned” language with Americans, especially with a doctored (Ph.D.

candidate). Our Toraja tutor, a judge in Makale, was teaching his three year old

daughters only Indonesian, believing that in the future it would prove more useful

to them than their native tongue. The attitudes and contradictions revealed here

were perhaps more significant than the actual Toraja language training… (1985:

9).

This excerpt reveals something about language attitudes and use—how people perceive a

specific language. Both reveal something about Toraja attitudes as expressed though language.

The Toraja communicate affective messages just as much by changing to a totally different

language as by changing what they express to whom. In other words, I see the two ideas as

connected and coming out of affect. I see these vehicles of social power as being created and

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reinforced at the same time by affect, taking root there in daily life. Truth and the social trust

derived from it are based on the ‘order’ that hierarchy grants. Hierarchy is attached to the

emotional life due to people’s idea of social order. The problem with this dependence on

hierarchy derives from Toraja’s position in the transnational hierarchy. Their status is not even as

adik or citizens, but as those “outside of the courtyard”, those outside of the family.

The Toraja just as other many other ‘outer island’ peoples are viewed with a sense of

‘backwardness’ or barbarism from the perspective of the center, essentially Java. Jane Atkinson's

work in Sulawesi (2003) describes the exoticizaton and marginalization of upland peoples due to

ethnic and cultural stereotypes. Mission-ethnographers Adriani and Kruyt once wrote:

In the wild mountains…there still live many Toraja, who are designated by the

name To Wana, "forest people". They are, however, none other than To Ampana

who, adverse to all rule and coercion, remain roaming the mountains. (Adriani

and Kruyt 1914: 74; cited in Atkinson 2003: 15-151)

The Toraja do not automatically have a place in the family or in the nation, they must make a

name from themselves or prove that they are on par with what the center deems as “Indonesian”.

An instance is when Suharto came into power he opened Sulawesi into the national and global

economic sphere. One of the products of Sulawesi was traditional art; however this excerpt

demonstrates how the Toraja had to adjust their work for it to gain similar prestige and status as

the arts of cultures closer to the “center”:

Usually Balinese carvings get the label “art” (kesenian, BI), but Toraja carving

just get dismissed as “handicrafts” (kerajinan tangan, BI) or “ornaments” (hiasan,

BI). We are putting frames around our carvings so people won’t see Toraja things

just as ornaments, but rather as art or paintings (lukisan, BI) suitable for the rich.

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Torajas are considered ‘outside of the family’. This marginalization based on an idea of

barbarism arises from two cultural differences with the Toraja: one is religion and the other is

language. While Christianity is pervasive in Toraja, traditional practices known as adat still

persist. Part of Indonesia’s definition of nationhood and modernity is the adoption of a single

world religion. The practice of adak contributes to the idea of less social actualization for the

Toraja, for adat represents the pre-modern world.

Languages in Toraja are also really different from Indonesian and their use references a

step back from nationhood. Indonesian as the national language is modern and represents social

order derived from societal hierarchy, Toraja languages are pre-modern and represent social

‘backwardness’. Young Indonesians continue growing up speaking local languages. Bahasa

Indonesia is learned later in schools, through mass media, and in other transnational settings (cf.

Argon 2011). Argon mentions that for her fieldwork in highland Central Sulawesi, although her

“academic preparation for fieldwork was to study Indonesian”, she still “needed to learn a very

different local language [once]…settled in Sulawesi” (Argon 2011). These languages are deemed

even by people of Sulawesi are ‘backward’ and ‘incomplete’. Argon mentions that the Tobaku of

Central Sulawesi “jokingly” refer to their language basa mata’ meaning literally ‘green’, ‘raw’,

or ‘unripe’ language (Argon 2011).

Volkman notes that “[t]here is a strong sense among Toraja that anything in progress

(unfinished) is “not good” (tae’ pa na melo)” (1985: 15) and the use of Toraja languages

represent speech that is belum, or “not yet,” or ‘incomplete’ in sense from the perspective of

modernity (cf. Lindquist 2009: 7). It is probably for this reason, that the Toraja tutor and judge

would not speak Toraja to Volkman and did not teach his children Toraja. Despite these cultural

aspects that push the Toraja to the margins of the transnational realm, they still manage to

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demand respect through siri’ from that government as in this case under Sukarno.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a large outbreak of belligerent rebellion in Sulawesi. It

supposedly placed the island in a state of anarchy (Errington 1989: 16-17). “It was clear to

everyone in South Sulawesi, however, that the fight was about siri’” (Errington 1989: 17).

Errington explains that siri’ is was separates humans for animals and that people would die, as

they did in the rebellion, for the sake of it (cf.1989). In this case the Toraja demanded the respect

of the national government. Despite their position in the transnational hierarchy, the Toraja

placed themselves in the national “photo album” on the grounds of the affective impression of

siri’ and the moral sensibilities of respect associated with it. The foundation of it all is siri’.

Conclusions about Language and Affect in the Social World: Perspectives from the

Javanese and Toraja Cases

To say that words are indexically related to some “object” or aspect of the world

out there means to recognize that words carry with them a power that goes beyond

the description and identification of people, objects, properties, and events. It

means to work at identifying how language becomes a tool through which our

social and culture world is constantly described, evaluated, and reproduced

(Duranti 1997:19; cited in Ahearn 2012).

Language and affect are invariably intertwined as language functions within both the

individual and the social, the subjective and intersubjective worlds. This study has focused on the

affectively-charged language used during the Sukarno-Suharto era. Specifically with the use of

kinship and relational terms in the Indonesian political sphere—that is, both Presidents being

referred to as bapak (father) and the Indonesian citizenry as adik (children)—I raised the

question, in view of these ‘fathers’’ histories, what do the children do when that father-figure is

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not so fatherly? The response is if the person in authority is not properly fulfilling their duties,

Indonesian people revolt; however not to overthrow the system, but to return the system to a

state of order with someone else who does fulfill their duties, so that balance perseveres in

society.

It is interesting that this response isomorphically applies to both the Javanese and the

Toraja case considering the great cultural distance between the two. Nevertheless, the response is

the same, although it has different impetuses in each culture. For the Javanese, it is a matter of

the ‘honor-shame’ emotion (isin-Javanese; malu-Indonesian) upon which the sensibility of

respect (urmat and adji-Javanese) is mapped. Out of this sensibility, one sees the dialogic

formation and maintenance of social ideologies, namely the interconnected notions of

kekeluargaan (family-ism) and the dyadic reciprocal hierarchy, exhibited through language and

in regard to languages. For the Toraja, even though the kinship terms do not apply to them,

because of their position in the national hierarchy—or rather exclusion from the system—they

still manage to demand the respect of the government on the grounds of siri’, also ‘honor-

shame’. These common emotions might have come about due to both cultures having contact

with what is historically known as the rise of ‘Indic states’; however that is not the focus here.

Another interesting aspect, I noticed, was that both cultures did not endeavor to change

the system, but only to transform the agency of the positions from agents of disorder to agents of

order. French anthropologist and social scientist Claude Levi-Strauss coined the term ‘sociétiés à

maisons’ or ‘house societies’ referring to cultures where certain social structures transcend the

importance of the people within. The preservation of hierarchy is central to preserving social

order. In this regard, only the glitches in the system must be adjusted.11

In addition, a few other questions arise out of this study. Besnier posed the questions,

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“Who uses which affective tools, for what purpose, in what context, and what role does affect

play in the linguistic representation of symbolic processes?” (1990: 437). I addressed in this

essay the affective tools that former Presidents and their governments used, the purpose they use

them, the contexts where they use them, and the role that affect played in their linguistic

representations of symbolic processes of power. The Presidents used language that anchored into

the emotions of its citizenry in order to secure power in the transnational political sphere.

Following this, Boellstorff and Lindquist raised the question, “what is the role of the state and

mass media in transforming subjectivities and emotional landscapes?” (2004: 439) I respond

that the practice of social ideologies in language linked to affect shape and revise the

subjectivities and intersubjectives in which emotional landscapes reside whether it is

kekeluargaan in Javanese Indonesian or linguistic insecurity due to notions of primitivism and

social marginality in Toraja language. Through these questions, this study gains greater

significance as an ‘ethnology of affective language’ where individual, local, and global processes

meet and define culture.

It is important to notice how “language can “point to” something social or contextual

without functioning in a referential way” (Ahearn 2012), such as in the way that expressive or

affective meaning indexes moral values and sensibilities. In realizing this, one should note that

language’s affective function is always a matter of interplay between the subject and the group,

the individual and the social. For while Schleifer explains that “[t]he neural bases of human

language are intertwined with…aspects of cognition, motor control, and emotion” (Lieberman

2000; qtd. 2001), one must not forget that that the body where these “neural bases” reside lives in

a social environment.

Notes

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1. Note that I have americanized all orthography for visual coherence.

2. The word Tapol is the abbreviated form of Tahanan Politik meaning ‘Political Prisoner’.

3. PKI stands for Partai Komunis Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party.

4. DPRD is the acronym for Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah which is again the Regional

House of Representatives (or Regional People’s Representative Council in direct translation).

The Partindo, the abbreviated form of Partai (Nasional) Indonesia, is a Indonesian Nationalist

Party which was Sukarno’s political party. Some people also sometimes use PNI to abbreviate

Partai Nasional Indonesia.

5. I hold the definition that ‘intersubjectivity’ consists of “the shared feeling[s], mutual

understanding[s], [and] mutual attunement; the ground of cooperation, successful interaction,

and the co-production of meaning” (Wilce 2009:198) in a given social context.

6. The term ‘subject’ “[f]ollowing Francophone philosophical work on le sujet,…refers to what

the Anglophone tradition calls ‘self’ or ‘person’” (Wilce 2009: 200).

7. Bahasa Indonesia literally translates as ‘language of Indonesia’ and is the official national

language. I use the words Indonesian, Indonesia language, and Bahasa Indonesia (BI)

interchangeably in this essay.

8. There is a congruency between Javanese isin and siri’, the Toraja word for ‘honor-shame’

which I will introduced later.

9. The same congruency applies between Hildred Geertz’s isin and malu (Collins and Bahar

2000: 38).

10. Although there are nuances between malu and siri, here I speak of them as congruent terms

of shame due to the way they construct themselves cognitively in related cultures of Western

Malayo-Polynesian speakers (cf. Collins and Bahar 2000: 36). Observations of usage reflect this

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notion: people use the phrase “to know one’s siri’ untandai siri’na (Volkman 1988: 73) in very

similar ways as “to know one’s malu’. Also, etymologically, both words share a common

ancestry with the words for ‘betelnut’ which is important, due to this product’s connection with

hierarchy.

Betelnut has been an extremely important commodity throughout Indonesian (and even

Southeast Asian) history. Chewing betelnut historically has occurred in many diverse sectors of

Indonesian life such as rituals funerals to those of weddings (cf. Reid 1985). However most

importantly, betelnut has been traditionally linked to hierarchy as Anthony Reid notes that

“[f]rom the earliest descriptions until well into the nineteenth century we learn that no important

person left his house with a retainer or slave to carry his betel equipment, a bronze tray with

containers for each of the ingredients” (1985: 531). Sirih (suroh- Low Javanese) (cf. Reid 1985)

—probably from Sanskrit—are associated with betelnut. In view of this, it is interesting that

Malay and Javanese, languages originally spoken in areas that faced the rise of Indic states,

derived a similar term. Malu--is the word for betelnut in many other Austronesia languages.

(Taber 1993: 412) The connection between betelnut and notions of honor-shame could have

possibly been born from the situations like the one described by Reid above in which two

seemingly opposing concepts ‘honor’ and ‘shame’ unite. This is also another isomorphic

connection, one of semantics, between malu and siri’.

11. The conceptual structure of hierarchy in the house or in the “courtyard”, as portrayed by

Shiraishi, may have pre-historical roots. The word for 'house, domicile', family dwelling'

reconstructs back to Proto-Austronesian as *Rumaq (Blust 1976; Blust 1980).

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