Making do in the imagined community: Domesticity and state formation in working class Java

Abstract

This dissertation is based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban, working class neighborhood or kampung. Research concentrated on the work of women as housewives and mothers within the community and specifically on their roles within the national housewives organization, PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahateraan Keluarga, or Support for the Prosperous Family). One of the central arguments of this dissertation is that to be a good citizen in Indonesia is to subscribe to a particular gendered idea of community--community that is virtual, incremental, and cumulative. PKK and the system of local governance are analyzed as residues of Dutch colonial control, Japanese occupation, and post-Independence infrastructural development. It is argued that state-sponsored domesticity and community have been overdetermined by a government that seeks to absorb excess female labor dispossessed by changes in agricultural production, to ameliorate the bottleneck in employment for the young and educated, and to support under-employed males. Women's work as community social workers as well as informal sector workers helps support unemyloyed and under-employed family members, while simultaneously keeping the cost of reproduction low and providing low-cost infrastructural improvements. Moreover, fieldwork shows that the structures of governance, social control and state ideology become lived practice when used as resources by local women to make do within their specific lived communities. Domestic space as it is mapped by kinship practices, economic production and reproduction, and kampung morality are used to show that the domestic is implied within the community as well as vice versa through the daily reproductive work of women which involves them in flows of resources and labor between and within households. The contributions of this research include refocusing attention on the inconsistencies, cleavages, and contradictions in the center rather than just on the margins. The effects of this refocusing emphasize the quotidian over the aesthetics of Javanese court culture and bring the gendered facets of cultural power into view. State formation was and is a cultural project producing not only the "state" as all idea and a set of practices but the citizen and the political culture within which she moves.