Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region

12 Riding Postmodern Chaos: A Reflection on Academic Subjectivity in Indonesia

12 Riding the PostmodeRn Chaos a Reflection on academic subjectivity in indonesia Fadjar I. Thufail Social science scholarship in Indonesia reflects three different generations: the pre-1970s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and the post-1998 generations. The pre-1970s and 1970s generation experienced limited opportunity and their intellectual work relied largely on the academic training they received abroad. The 1980s and 1990s generation had a greater chance to enjoy local training and only went abroad if they wanted to pursue advanced degrees. A more open political climate after the 1998 reformation has allowed more freedom for the younger generation of scholars to access centres of excellence in America and Europe, and to obtain English books and course materials. While those who grew up in the 1970s often had to overcome limited sources, scholars working in the late 1990s and in post-1998 were able to choose and manoeuvre among different, and often contradictory, theoretical approaches. The most crucial time of my intellectual development was the period after I finished my sarjana (bachelor) degree in 1989. Therefore, I belong to the second generation of scholars who received local training and later enjoyed opportunities to harness this training abroad. The 1990s scholars also witnessed social science theory reaching its privileged position to explain social changes. As one of those working in the 1990s, I witnessed how analytical 278 Fadjar I. Thufail approaches converged into paradigms that directed scholarly work and illuminated scholarly subjectivity. In other words, my intellectual work took shape in a discursive context that structured the way Indonesian and foreign scholars perceived Indonesia as an object of intellectual exercise. This chapter addresses an ambiguous discursive relationship that links the trajectory of my academic subjectivity to political and social opportunities and constraints in 1990s Indonesia. It highlights how ambiguity reflects different relations of professional calling to social or political imagination. Working as a professional researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences hardly releases me from the demand to perform as a good citizen of the postcolonial republic. On the contrary, my academic subjectivity as a “professional researcher” reflects more the postcolonial desire of a modern subject than the calling of critical professional work. When critical work took precedence over the imagination of a modern subject during a particular moment of my intellectual history, I had to confront a condescending response that charged me and my work with failing to fulfil the “altruistic” role of social science in leading society towards development. Colonial and PostColonial subjeCtivities Social science scholars know that Indonesia has played an indispensable role in the development of many theoretical perspectives on culture, politics, and history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Dutch colonial scholars and Christian missionaries wrote accounts of societies mostly to serve the interests of the Dutch colonial government and Christian missions. The works of C. Snouck Hurgronje in Aceh and N. Graafland on Minahasan culture are a few examples of widely read colonial scholarship which, despite criticisms, still represent a quality of ethnographic work that is difficult to imitate. The arrival of Clifford and Hildred Geertz in the 1950s to carry out a Harvard-funded sociological project in the newly independent Indonesia, and their publications on comparative studies of Islam, introduced Indonesia to a wider academic audience across the world. It would be necessary to learn how the colonial scholars in the Netherlands Indies influenced the work of postcolonial Indonesian scholars if one wanted to understand the genealogy of social science in Indonesia. While foreign observers, commonly called “Indonesianists”, have been the focus of attention in recent critical reviews on area studies, the genealogical continuity between the colonial and postcolonial Indonesian scholars still awaits further exploration. Due to the lack of a careful study on this topic, comparing colonial and postcolonial work would oversimplify the matter. Riding the Postmodern Chaos 279 However, it is nonetheless important to understand how the colonial and the postcolonial work could draw on a similar social imagination about the object of their writings. Until the late 1980s, Indonesia appeared remote and exotic to most foreign observers, attesting to a legacy of colonial politics of knowledge. Colonial orientalists’ work in Africa had crafted a space of “coeval time”, framing how colonial scholarship perceived the “primitive” Africans (Fabian 1983). In Indonesia, however, a structure of “coeval time” can be found not only in the colonial writings on cultures and politics, but also in the postcolonial ones...