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INTRODUCTION: RESEARCHING THE MARGINS 1 Introduction Researching the Margins1 Charles A. Coppel To study the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia might be thought a marginal enterprise. The Chinese overseas have long been an exotic interest in Chinese studies, outside the Sinological mainstream, with its thousands of years of historical sources and commentaries. This is perhaps especially so in the case of Indonesia’s Chinese minority, with its large numbers of acculturated, peranakan Chinese, who from the perspective of China scarcely seem to merit the description “Chinese”. In Indonesian studies, too, they have been seen as marginal. This is not only because they are but one ethnic group among hundreds, comprising a mere 2 or 3 per cent of the total population, but also because they have been constructed as “foreign”, no matter how many centuries they have been settled in the archipelago. Many Chinese Indonesians themselves have been marginalized and felt alienated from the surrounding society in their own life experience. This has not only applied when they were classified in Dutch law as “Foreign Orientals” (even if they were “Netherlands subjects”) and in Indonesian law as “of foreign descent” and not “indigenous” (even if they were Indonesian citizens) (Coppel 1999c and 2001). It has also applied to many of those Chinese Indonesians who “returned” to what they believed to be their motherland, only to discover that in China, too, they were “foreign” and treated differently from the rest of the population (Coppel 1990a). Greg Dening (1980, p. 3) writes of islands and beaches as “a metaphor for the different ways in which human beings construct their worlds and for the boundaries that they construct between them”. My islands are Sinology and Indonesian studies, and the study of the Chinese in Indonesia is the study of the beaches, liminal spaces between the two. As 2 CHARLES A. COPPEL Dening found with his Pacific beaches, I find the study of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia valuable as a site for my research, precisely because of their marginal or liminal situation. The study of Indonesia itself is seen by some as marginal to the “seminal civilizations” of India and China. From this perspective, Chinese Indonesians are even more marginalized. That having been said, my own research on the ethnic Chinese of Indonesia lies overwhelmingly in the field of Indonesian studies, not in Sinology. I have tried to understand them in their Indonesian context rather than as an extension of China. I have also tried to listen to their voices, particularly as expressed in Malay or Indonesian, against the dominant discourses of Dutch colonialism and Indonesian nationalism. Over the past century, these voices have not spoken in unison. One of the reasons that I find Chinese Indonesians endlessly fascinating is the way in which they, and I mean especially the peranakan Chinese, have argued with one another over so many political and cultural issues. Many things have changed over the last thirty years, in the world of ideas as well as of events. My own thinking has changed and developed over the period, and this is reflected in the terminology I use to refer to the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. Whereas in my earlier work I wrote of “Indonesian Chinese”, I now prefer to use the more inclusive term “Chinese Indonesians”. In 1970 Leo Suryadinata and I discussed the way in which the word Tjina came to be regarded as derogatory and was replaced by the words Tionghoa and Tiongkok, but then was restored by army and government decision in the anti-Chinese atmosphere of the early years of the New Order (Coppel and Suryadinata 1970). In the post-Soeharto era, the use of Tionghoa has made a partial recovery but the usage is still contested. Similarly, the word asli is used in the Indonesian Constitution of 1945 to denote indigenous Indonesians. For many years, this terminology was used in the discourse of economic nationalism to justify discrimination against ethnic Chinese and in favour of indigenous Indonesians. During the New Order period, it was replaced by the term pribumi but used in the same way. At the same time, proponents of policies of assimilation of the ethnic Chinese began to use the term pembauran instead of asimilasi. Since the fall of Soeharto in May 1998, the voices of ethnic Chinese opposed to these assimilation policies have re-emerged, but they now tend to use the word sinergi rather than integrasi for the integration policy which was favoured by Baperki under Soekarno. The passage of...

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