State speech for peripheral publics in Java
Joseph Errington · Pragmatics Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) · 1995
Since the 1965 bloodbath which ended its failed experiment with constitutional democracy, Indonesia has been ruled by a highly centralized, military-dominated government which has moved unilaterally to modernize the country's economic infrastructure and indoctrinate Indonesians into the ways and sentiments of its own version of nationalism.This self-named New Order has quashed all opposition to its top-down implementation of policies which have, among other goals, the national integration of rural .communitieslike those in south-central Java which I discuss here.lA self-legitimizing modernist ideology has licensed the New Order's self-assumed^right to oversee "development" Qtembangunan) and "improvement" Qtembinaan)" of the lot of Indonesia's vast, heterogeneous peasantry, and has underwritten as well the perceived superiority of state officials."All Indonesians I have ever met," one outspoken Indonesian intellectual has commented, "feel that they are the subordinates (bawahan) of the government.Moreover there are very many of our officials in the regions or outlying areas who feel confident that they really are the superiors (atasan) of the people."The Republic of Indonesia (Republik Indonesia) is no res publica, and harbors no such "public" as has been described, debated, or imagined in discussions following Ji.irgenHabermas' influential chronicle (1989) of the rise of civil society.Indonesia's founders, largely a Dutch educated intelligentsia and suborned ethnic elite, took over a colonial administrative infrastructure along with its administrative language, Malay, suitably renamed Indonesian.3The social and technological prerequisites for any sort of "public sphere" hardly exist in Indonesia; the major weekly magazine in this country of roughly 190 million sold only 150,000 or so copies a week before its recent closing by the government; the nation's leading newspaper (over and against tabloid-style mass publications) sells about half a million copies a day.Marketing surveys show readers to be primarily university and high school graduates who live in urban areas and are employed as civil servants, managers, and other professionals.' Research reported here was carried out in 1985-86 with help from the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Grenn Foundation.I am grateful for institutional support from the Lenbaga Ilntu Pengetahuan Indonesia, or Indonesian Academy of Sciences, during that research.All opinions expressed here are my own.2 Unless indicatetl otherwise, foreign words citecl in the body of the text are Indonesian, not Javanese.