Indonesia etc Exploring the improbable nation

Elizabeth Pisani

Book - 2014

"An entertaining and thought-provoking portrait of Indonesia: a rich, dynamic, and often maddening nation awash with contradictions. Jakarta tweets more than any other city on earth, but 80 million Indonesians live without electricity and many of its communities still share in ritual sacrifices. Declaring independence in 1945, Indonesia said it would 'work out the details of the transfer of power etc. as soon as possible.' With over 300 ethnic groups spread across 13,500 islands, the world's fourth most populous nation has been working on that 'etc.' ever since. Bewitched by Indonesia for twenty-five years, Elizabeth Pisani recently traveled 26,000 miles around the archipelago in search of the links that bind t...his impossibly disparate nation. Fearless and funny, Pisani shares her deck space with pigs and cows, bunks down in a sulfurous volcano, and takes tea with a corpse. Along the way, she observes Big Men with child brides, debates corruption and cannibalism, and ponders 'sticky' traditions that cannot be erased"--Provided by publisher.

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company [2014]
Language
English
Main Author
Elizabeth Pisani (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
404 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780393088588
  • Improbable nation
  • The ties that bind
  • Sticky culture
  • Indonesian man
  • The emperor is far away
  • Happy families
  • Spoils of the earth
  • Private matters
  • Historical fictions
  • Misfits
  • Indigenous arts
  • Faith healing
  • The other Indonesia
  • Epilogue
  • Glossary.
Review by New York Times Review

THIS YEAR, three of the world's largest democracies are holding national elections - vast polls spread over several days and thousands of miles of territory, involving more than a billion voters. Two of these elections have attracted intense media coverage, or will. India's national elections, which took place in May, swept out of office the long-ruling Congress Party and handed government of a rising economic and political power to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Brazil's elections, which will be held in October, are coming on the heels of the World Cup, one of several high-profile events that have marked the country's emergence as the second giant of the Americas. The third election, Indonesia's presidential vote on July 9, has been mostly ignored by the international media, even though Indonesia, with a population of about 250 million, ranks as the fourth-largest country in the world, as well as the biggest economy in Southeast Asia. In "Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation," Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist, epidemiologist and on-and-off resident of Indonesia, readily acknowledges the archipelago's feeble presence on the global stage; her friends back in London look at her quizzically when she mentions the country. Though she had flirted with Indonesia for decades, she finally tires of the world's ignorance and chooses to take a break from work to travel the islands, offering a primer and a quick history lesson on this awakening powerhouse. Through her journey, too, she hopes to understand not only how a country as diverse and far-flung as Indonesia - at least 13,000 islands, many with their own unique cultures - has stayed together but also why, despite having had an average income similar to Malaysia's and Singapore's 60 years ago, it now lags badly behind. Today, some 105 million Indonesians live on less than $2 per day, though much of the country is blessed with fertile volcanic soil, rich fishing grounds, abundant natural resources and a demographic dividend, in which the country has a high ratio of working-age people to elderly. And in an era when authoritarian China is poised to become the world's largest economy and democracy is floundering throughout the developing world, perhaps Pisani's study of Indonesia can help answer the question of whether democracy is even compatible with the high growth needed to foster development in these emerging giants. Pisani knows that the only mental images outsiders may have of Indonesia hail from Java, the island containing nearly 60 percent of the country's population: Wayang shadow puppets moving behind a translucent screen, luminous batik cloths and the grim-faced former dictator Suharto, who ruled between 1967 and 1998. From the time of independence in 1949, Javanese elites have monopolized politics, the military and other major institutions. Pisani's strategy for countering Java's dominance is to explore the other Indonesia - the forgotten parts of a forgotten country. Her journey spans a year and 26,000 miles, and she rarely takes comfortable vehicles. She jumps five-day-long ferries to the most obscure islands and cadges journeys along rutted roads on the backs of motorbikes, which leave one's bottom bruised. Her rule for the trip, she declares, is "just say yes" to any invitation. She not only visits Indonesia's forgotten areas; she clearly identifies with their residents, writing with passion and telling detail. On the island of Sumba, near northern Australia, she is adopted by the matriarch of one village, and moves in with the woman's family for a time. Eventually, Pisani becomes so involved in the rituals of this Sumba village that she finds herself carrying a squawking chicken to a local mystic, who will kill it, read its entrails and tell her fortune; later, she joins a massive animal sacrifice on Sumba in honor of a recent death. Her book is loaded with such anecdotes in places that seem the opposite of cookie-cutter Southeast Asian megacities. She watches supposedly forbidden whale hunts on the island of Lembata, near East Timor. She is suddenly swept into the wedding of a friend's brother. She stumbles into a revivalist Christian congregation in Ambon, amid the fabled Spice Islands, a congregation that seems to have been airlifted from a Texas megachurch. For someone who focuses on Indonesia, like myself, these anecdotes are tasty morsels, and rare. I had heard almost nothing, for example, about the sparsely populated Sangihe islands, between Sulawesi and the southern Philippines, where tuna fishing is the only industry. Here, Pisani says no to an offer for once, with good reason - it's a chance to join a four-day fishing trip on the open Pacific in a rickety outrigger with only a shoddy tarpaulin for cover. Unfortunately, these anecdotes rarely cohere into more than collected stories about Indonesia's outer provinces. Pisani introduces some broad themes that could help explain the country's simultaneous survival and failure, but she doesn't expand on them effectively. Indonesia, she suggests, has "welded so much difference together" through collectivism in villages and clans - collectivism that makes people more secure in their daily lives. Its citizens have generally fostered a level of cultural tolerance rare in such large nations. Yet, she suggests, it has failed to change the byzantine bureaucracy, feudal political hierarchies and entrenched corruption left by the Dutch colonizers and then the Suharto regime. At times, she also tries to introduce the nonexpert to the country's myriad cultures but stumbles with strange analogies, calling Indonesia a "Bad Boyfriend" - it excites your senses but then angers you with its flaws. For the most part, she remains content to drift back into anecdotes rather than pull them together. Worse, though Indonesia certainly is more than just Java, the book does not really grapple with Java or several of the other populous Indonesian islands. Mostly ignoring the bigger islands means that Pisani's picture of Indonesia, though different from those of many Indonesia specialists, is badly skewed in another way. She basically leaves out any discussion of about three-quarters of the country's population, and makes only passing mention of Jakarta's governor, Joko Widodo, the winner of the July presidential elections and the first post-Suharto era politician to run Indonesia. It's as if someone tried to write a book about America but ignored 40 of the states. JAVANESE ELITISM or not, it is simply impossible to understand the staggering changes Indonesia has undergone since the end of the 1990s, including decentralization, a rapid transition to democracy and growing relationships with both China and the United States, without truly considering how decisions are made in Jakarta and other major urban centers. Instead, Pisani falls back on easy clichés about Jakarta, reform and the population itself. She deplores the rapid change and construction in the seemingly soulless capital, without seriously examining the positive aspects of all this growth, a strange omission for a public health specialist. She disdains the pork-barrel politics that come with greater direct democracy, as politicians jostle to deliver projects to their districts and sometimes skim a percentage for themselves. But this kind of patronage is necessarily curtailed by the transparency of democracy, and in the long run far healthier than the opaque and unreconstructed Suharto period. (Pisani herself acknowledges that in the latter part of Suharto's time, "all the growth" went "into a handful of pockets," though she still paints a fairly rosy picture of the Suharto era.) She too often portrays Indonesians as accepting their fate in life, a fatalism not apparent in this spring's parliamentary elections, when Indonesian voters tossed out about half the incumbents. In the end, Pisani rediscovers her Bad Boyfriend idea, in a thin epilogue that again attempts to boil down what she has learned about Indonesia but soon turns into another anecdote. And another opportunity to know the unknown giant is lost. JOSHUA KURLANTZICK is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 20, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review

Pisani first came to Indonesia as a journalist and later as an epidemiologist specializing in HIV, living there at various times during a 25-year period. Charmed by Indonesia's idiosyncrasies, contradictions, enigmas, disappointments, and seductions, she garnered the impression that the nation is one giant Bad Boyfriend. Indonesia is a string of more than 13,000 islands inhabited by people of more than 360 ethnic groups who speak more than 700 languages a cobbling together of peoples and cultures that is a result of colonization by the Dutch and occupation by the Japanese. Pisani (The Wisdom of Whores, 2008) spent a year randomly traveling 26,000 miles around the archipelago, visiting the capital, Jakarta, as well as jungles and small villages to talk to farmers, politicians, priests, fishermen, teachers, soldiers, nurses, and others to capture the heart and soul of Indonesia. She encountered child brides, witnessed young men jousting with javelins, sipped tea at a funeral, and spotted satellite dishes on the grass roofs of bamboo huts. An intimate, fascinating look at the world's fourth most populous nation, one working to define itself in a modernizing world.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Pisani first came to Indonesia as a foreign correspondent, then later returned as an epidemiologist specializing in HIV. With over 300 ethnic groups spread across 13,500 islands, Indonesia is the world's fourth most populated nation. Visiting jungles and small villages, the author profiles many people during her travels. Readers will learn that Jakarta tweets more than any other city on Earth and that 80 million people there live without electricity. (LJ 8/14) (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An elucidating journey through the myriad-island republic.Journalist and epidemiologist Pisani (The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, 2008) took a year to trek among the archipelago nation she grew to admire more than 20 years before, when she posted there as a reporter for Reuters news agency. Branching out from the dominant island of Java, home to 60 percent of all Indonesians, and its modern capital of Jakarta, the author found among numerous smaller and less visited islandsas there are nearly 13,500 islands containing over 360 ethnic groups, by her estimate, she could only visit a fractiona richness and diversity. She discovered much that was "friendly" but "schizophrenic," "shambolic" and "unpredictable," a vying for modernity and traditional values with plenty of elements still being figured out. Declared independent in 1945, after the defeat of the Japanese occupiers, and before that, the deeply resented Dutch, whose merchants had exploited for centuries the rich spices (cloves, nutmeg) and pearls along the archipelago, Indonesia is a nation cobbled together by the long tradition of trading, by the lingua franca of Malay, and by the astute charisma and nationalist philosophy of its founding leader, Sukarno. As a woman traveling solo, Pisani encountered some frustrating questions from villagerse.g., why she didn't have childrenbut she was usually embraced by the familial hospitality of the people she met. She unearths interesting material about the surprising, delightful and frequently bewildering spectacle of adata prideful traditionwhich encompasses obligations, spirituality and poverty. Speaking the language and living among the villagers helped Pisani navigate this delicate system of barter and honor. She finds Indonesia gaining democratic agency after a troubling history of authoritarianism, separatist movements, the tsunami of 2004, a mismanagement of natural resources and an urgently needed bolstering of the education system.A brave, lively writer opens up a wondrous, changing nation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.