Musical Worlds of Yogyakarta

Background

Background For some years now I have often heard Yogyakarta’s Sosrowijayan neighbourhood described as either a ‘typically conservative kampung ’ or a ‘tourist ruined commercial zone’. In Part One I sought to problematise this division by examining music making and capital conversions among becak drivers and street guides. Part Two begins by focusing on women in Sosrowijayan, with subsequent chapters mapping out manifestations of gendered physical behaviour at musical events that took place in kampung and commercial venues across the city. By analysing and comparing nonverbal forms of communication and interaction in these cultural spaces, I seek to identify connections between intergenerational/communal and cross-cultural/commercial influences on gendered identities, and in turn between the kampung and commercial activities that took place in and around Sosrowijayan’s public spaces. These influences can thereby be related to the village/urban, campursari/musik jalanan and becak driver/street guide divisions already identified and scrutinised, but now analysed across multiple spaces and genres. The lives of male street guides and/or street children have been the subject of rigorous research on inner-city Yogyakarta.1 A useful starting point for the present discussion is to schematize the public life of women in Sosrowijayan. I suggest that three broad groups interacted socially around the neighbourhood during my research, each of which tended to gravitate toward some musical worlds and not others. First were those not especially kampung-bound nor commercially exploited. These included public-oriented wives of kampung association leaders, as well as some university students and NGO workers. Second, some women in staff positions, approaching the age of 25 and facing expectations of marriage and children, sought financial and other means to escape ‘kampungan ’ pressures and avoid dependency on men by developing their English language, business and, in some cases, musical skills. And third were a dozen or so women I wish to call ‘perek’, from perempuan eksperimental and meaning ‘experimental girls’ (Murray 1991; Richter 2008b). These women regularly sat about in tourist cafés and hotels, often meeting up with western travellers and entering 1 Dahles and Bras 1999; Dahles 2001; Solvang 2002; Beazley 2000; Berman 2000. | Musical worlds in Yogyakarta 84 into sexual encounters with them, in the process entering a murky middle ground between prostitution and relationship. Perek were emblematic of commercial zone sexuality, in both their day to day clothing, makeup, and mannerisms, and their frequenting of commercial establishments by night. Building on Part One’s analysis of the roles of music in streetbased capital conversion strategies, in Part Two I broaden the focus to gender and physicality across multiple settings, guided by the following questions. Do kampung environments provide safe havens, or are they unduly constraining? Do commercial-venue activities increase personal freedom for women, or are they sites of sexual exploitation? To what extent are westernism, Islamisation, and indigenist Javanism related to these tendencies? What insights might comparisons between these citywide and Sosrowijayan-specific cases lend to these questions? In the following chapters I examine intergenerational and crosscultural influences on gendered and sexualised interactions as they emerged during music performances in kampung and commercial venues. In kampung there was great age and generational variation, while class and ethnic markers were especially prominent in commercial venues. As will be discussed, campursari, jalanan, and related genres such as dangdut and rock influenced, and were influenced by, factors such as setting, event theme, and audience characteristics . Attending to particular actors and variants of the central genres will further demonstrate how musical performers, participants and organizers contributed to peaceful exchange and coexistence between social groups during the early post-Soeharto years. HABITUS, gender, and socialisation Bourdieu’s concept of habitus helps to link musical performance to everyday gendered relations. Habitus conveys the idea that people’s dispositions and habituated physical movements are products of their structured social worlds. The concept attempts to transcend both excessively ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ accounts of the roles of structure and agency in social phenomena (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:115-40). Bourdieu developed the concept of habitus in his studies of the Kabyle peoples in Algeria, where binary oppositions were manifest in housing arrangements and in women’s downcast expression and modest behaviour, as against men’s outward engagement with other men (Bourdieu 1977, 2001). Excessive emphasis on structure reduces the habitus to, at most, a semi-conscious habit. In Background | 85 the current context, the concept of habitus could thereby be invoked in...