January 2003

A short article written for the newsletter of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS).

Power, Religion, and Terror in Indonesia

By Bernard Adeney-Risakotta

Why has there been so much conflict and violence in Indonesia in the past few years? A deceptively simple answer is that Indonesia has been going through incredible power struggles since the demise of former President Soeharto. Conflict in Indonesia is often connected to power. Just as conflict is extremely diverse, so too power has many meanings and many manifestations in Indonesian society. Conflict over power does not necessarily result in violence, let alone in an epidemic of bloodletting. Moreover power conflicts are not the cause of all violence. However this study explores the hypothesis that particular conceptions, symbols, institutionalizations, and concrete practices of power, play a major role in the generation and suppression of violence in Indonesia.

Since the Bali terrorist bombs of 12 October 2002, a great deal of attention has focused on the connection between religion and violence. Religion is a powerful force in Indonesia and has played a part in much of the violence, as well as in attempts to stop it. Religion is integral to power in Indonesia, both in its positive and negative manifestations. During the past four years, terror has become ubiquitous in Indonesian society and frequently linked to religious communities. However, religion is never an autonomous force that acts independently from other factors. Violent conflict in Indonesia is usually precipitated by political, economic, and social changes that are influenced by volatile tensions between authoritarian, traditional structures, and more democratic, modern institutions. Violence also includes profound cultural elements that are embedded in the traditions, stories, rituals, and institutions that are part of the people's identity.

In so far as violence is connected with power (as opposed to psychosis, rage, frustration, hatred, ideology, misunderstanding, principles or more generalized social pathologies), this study is motivated by the desire to understand how power is generated and utilized in Indonesia. Since Benedict Anderson's influential essay on the differences between Javanese and Western concepts of power, European social scientific studies of Indonesia have tended to dismiss ideal type and cultural analyses of power, because they are too generalized and distant from the messy complexity of empirical reality. The past three years have seen a virtual avalanche of perceptive studies, both in Indonesian and English, of violence within particular social and historical Indonesian contexts. Many are unpublished, but see: B. Anderson, 2001; Budiman, Hatley and Kingsbury, eds., 1999; Colombijn and Lindblad, eds., 2002; Coppel, ed., 2002; Dijk, 2001; Gunawan and Patri, 2000; Husken and de Jonge, forthcoming; Idrus, 1999; Rafael, 1999; Sofyan, 1999; Subono, ed., 2000; Sukandi, ed., 1999; Sulistyo, 2000; Tornquist, ed., 2000; Wessel and Wimhofer, eds., 2001.

My research uses a Weberian style model to explore the meaning of power in Indonesia. Unlike most of the current research (to which I am greatly indebted), my project is a theoretical reflection on Indonesian identity, institutions, concepts, and practices that are connected with power and violence. I begin by analyzing ten dominant models of Indonesian identity that have influenced both Western perceptions and Indonesian self-understanding for the past 50 years. All of these models are based on conflictual divisions connected with power. All are still influential both within and outside Indonesia, but I argue that all of them have outlived their analytical usefulness.

All research, indeed all thought, proceeds from models or paradigms through which we make sense of reality. We constantly move back and forth between theoretical frameworks of understanding and empirical data (Geertz, 1976). My research explores the thesis that we need a new theoretical framework for understanding power in Indonesia, that moves beyond simple categories of antagonistic groups. Like Benedict Anderson, my thesis focuses on different patterns of meaning, practice, and discourse related to power, rather than on religious, social or political groupings. However, unlike Anderson, I do not think power in Indonesia can be understood within a Weberian framework of social evolution from traditional to modern, nor from a neo-orientalist dichotomy between Java and the West.

There are three major sets of symbol systems, institutions, and practices in Indonesia that interpenetrate each other and form the conscious and unconscious identity of all Indonesians. These three networks of meaning are not necessarily incompatible with each other, but they contain many elements of incommensurability such as to generate distinctive and competing worlds of discourse. All three are so powerful and all pervasive that none of them can overthrow the other two or claim the exclusive allegiance of any particular group. Virtually all Indonesians live, think, feel and participate in three different conceptual worlds, which are often synthesized or integrated with each other, but just as often separated and dichotomized. Each of these frameworks of meaning has generated their own institutions, practices, and structures of power. I define these three Indonesian worlds as: Modernity, Religion, and the Culture of the Ancestors. My research project explores how each of these symbol systems generates or controls power, and how they become enmeshed in violence.

During my past eleven years of teaching and research in Indonesia, I have also been formed by these three worlds of discourse. Most social scientific studies of Indonesian society assume a fundamentally modern and Western epistemology in which the cultures, religions, politics, and history of Indonesia are viewed as objects to be studied that are fundamentally different, or even alien from the researcher. Anthropologists try to see the world "from the native's point of view," but that world remains eternally distant. "Understanding the form and pressure of…natives' inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke or …reading a poem than it is like achieving communion" (Geertz, 1976). More empirically oriented social science elevates objective distance into a requirement of true science. The researcher assumes a modern (or post-modern), understanding of scientific knowledge, which takes culture and religion as objects of research. Even Indonesians are taught to radically separate their culture and religion from their modern modes of scientific investigation.

In contrast, this research project is written from within the epistemological assumptions and perspectives of all three of these different worlds of discourse. It is a modern analysis of Indonesian identity, power, and violence, which adopts many Indonesian, religious and cultural, assumptions about the nature of reality. Indonesians are shaped by modernity, religion and the cultures of their ancestors. I argue for a new theory of power, which operates within these three different worlds of Indonesian discourse. My theory suggests that a fundamental form of power lies within the people, as distinct from the elite. Recent events demonstrate that great creative and destructive potential is located within the people, whereas their leaders are generally impotent. Violence destroys power (Arendt, 1970). However power is generated and channeled by modern, religious and cultural practices and institutions. Perhaps as many as 100,000 people died during the past four years in violence related to ethnic, religious, economic and political conflicts in Indonesia. In a country known for its gentle culture, high level of tolerance and warm hospitality, what produced such an orgy of death?

Bernard Adeney-Risakotta, Ph.D. was a Fellow at IIAS Amsterdam from October 2001-August 2002. He has now returned to Yogyakarta, Indonesia where he is Assistant Director of the Graduate Program at Duta Wacana Christian University. berniear@ukdw.ac.id