Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia by Nancy Smith-Hefner (review)

Nancy Smith-Hefner, Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. 262 pp.

The past two decades have brought immense political, social, and cultural changes to Indonesia. Democratization, an Islamic revival, integration into global and regional political institutions, the rise of social media and information technologies, a boom in higher education, continuing high rates of urbanization, and economic growth (and contraction in some sectors)—all of these have transformed the world's fourth largest country at a dizzying rate since the 1990s. Observing that many of the scholarly discussions of Islam and modernity focus on the realm of states and legal institutions, Nancy Smith-Hefner proposes that "For most youth…the debates over Islam and modernity are felt most compellingly with regard to questions of more immediate, quotidian, and intimate provenance, including those of courtship and marriage, relations with one's parents and kin, career and family, and most generally, everyday interactions and patterns of sociality" (18). In her richly detailed new book, Smith-Hefner chronicles how the Islamic revival and other large-scale social changes have reshaped gender, family, and sexuality among young urban Muslims in this Muslim majority country.

One of the foremost anthropologists of Indonesia, Smith-Hefner began doing ethnographic fieldwork to explore these issues in the vibrant city of Yogyakarta, Central Java, in 1999, and she continued to return for fieldwork visits over the next 16 years. This gives Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia a unique longitudinal perspective. Smith-Hefner also draws on her experience studying Indonesia and her wealth of knowledge about Indonesian history to provide critical historical context for her findings.

Smith-Hefner is especially interested in educated youth on Java, Indonesia's most populated island. This demographic has been at the forefront of Indonesia's Islamic resurgence. Thus, many of her interviewees are university students and recent graduates, from both Islamic universities as well as secular universities. She carefully explores the family backgrounds and religious worldviews of students in Yogyakarta, showing how the young generation as a whole practices Islam in a very different and more overtly pietistic way compared to their parents and grandparents, and how even among these increasingly pious young people there is an immense diversity of Islamic orientations and outlooks. One of the strengths of Smith-Hefner's analysis is that she is attentive to the fact that while Islam is a very significant influence in these young people's lives, it is not the only one. Another is her emphasis on diversity and pluralism among Muslims, which highlights the heterogeneity of both the religion and Indonesia itself. As she writes, "in their everyday practice, the vast majority of youth express other, often contradictory, concerns and seem responsive to not one but a variety of moral registers" (41).

Chapter 1 introduces the book, providing an overview of its main themes and a thoughtful discussion of methods, particularly the use of in-depth interviews. Chapter 2 contextualizes Indonesian youth culture in Indonesia's broader history, and particularly among 20th century religious and political transformations, while Chapter 3 sketches out the different religious and political orientations of contemporary Indonesian youth, including some of the primary organizations and institutions with which many youth are involved. In Chapter 4, Smith-Hefner examines Indonesian "gender currents" (70), defined as the "socially sustained normative frame for understanding and enacting" gendered aspects of social life. Here, she explores the sex and gender ideologies that operate in contemporary Indonesia, with particular emphasis on the influences of Islam, Javanese culture, and the state.

At the heart of Islamizing Intimacies is Smith-Hefner's meticulous description of shifts in gender, sexuality, and romance (Chapters 5–7). Importantly, while there has been much concern that the Islamic resurgence in Indonesia represents a "retraditionalization" or "redomestication" of women, she shows how young urban Muslim women are simultaneously more devout but also more interested in pursuing...