The domestication of desire: women, wealth, and modernity in Java 9780691016924, 9781400843916, 9780691016931

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THE DOMESTICATION OF DESIRE

THE DOMESTICATION OF DESIRE WOMEN, WEALTH, AND MODERNITY IN JAVA SUZANNE APRIL BRENNER

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1998 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Brenner, Suzanne April, 1960-

The domestication of desire : women, wealth, and modernity in Java / Suzanne April Brenner.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-01693-3 (cl: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-691-01692-5 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Ethnology—Indonesia—Surakarta. 2. Social change —Indonesia—Surakarta. 3. Women—Indonesia—Surakarta. 4, Surakarta (Indonesia)—Social conditions. I. Title. GN635.165B69 1998

306’.09598’2—dc2 1 97-46124 CIP This book has been composed in Janson Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

http://pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 65 43 2 1 100 9 8 7 65 43 2 J (pbk.)

TO MY PARENTS

Howard Brenner and Lorraine Brenner Kulok WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE

CONTENTS

LisT OF FIGURES ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xi

A Note ON THE UsE OF FoREIGN TERMS AND PRoPER NAMES xv

INTRODUCTION 3

Modernity and Its Decline 9 Rethinking the Domestic Sphere 15 Gender and Subjectivity 18 Capturing the Local 22 CHAPTER ONE

A Neighborhood Comes of Age 24 Cultural Authenticity and the Ethnographic Collage 24 Behind High Walls 29 Origin Stories 32 The Development of the Batik Industry in Solo 34 Laweyan tn the Late Colonial Period 39

The Creation of a Community: Turning Inward 44 CHAPTER ‘TWO

Hierarchy and Contradiction: Merchants and Aristocrats in

Colonial Java 52 “Power” and the Contradiction of Wealth 58 A Legend of Defiance: Pakubuwana II's Misadventures in Laweyan 63 Colonial Fictions of Power 69 The Feminization of Javanese Trade 72 The Politics of the Domestic Sphere 80 CHAPTER THREE

The Specter of Past Modernities 87 The Decline of Laweyan 89 “Community” and Status 96 The Fetishization of Deference 102 Workers and Entrepreneurs 109 The Logic of the Commodity, the Failure of Capital 117 Narratives of Progress 121 The Making of the Unmodern 124

Vill CONTENTS CHAPTER FOUR

Gender and the Domestication of Desire 134 Status, Style, and Money 140 Gender, Desire, and Self-Control 144 A Contrary View: The Danger of Men’s Desire 149 Gendered Spaces 157 The Danger of Autonomous Women 161 Reconsidering Ideologies of Gender 166 CHAPTER FIVE

The Value of the Bequest: Spiritual Economies and Ancestral Commodities 171 The Conservation of Wealth: Gifts and Legacies 177 The Economy of Sacrifice 180 History, Descent, and Cultural Value 185 Ancestral Commodities and the Regeneration of Value 193 “Preserving Tradition” 199 CHAPTER SIX

The Mask of Appearances: Disorder in the New Order 206 Signs of Failure in the Merchant Community 210 Catching Fortune: Prestige and Conspicuous Consumption 215 On the Inside: Swindling and Scandal 219 CHAPTER SEVEN

Disciplining the Domestic Sphere, Developing the

Modern Family 225 Modernist Islam, New Order Ideals 229 The Domestic Sphere Revisited 236 Modernity and the Karier Woman 241 Nature Is Destiny: Reortenting the Modern Subject 246

Notes 255 GLossary 281 BIBLIOGRAPHY 283

InDEx 295

FIGURES

All photographs are by the author.

1. Map of Indonesia 2 2. Map of Java 3 3. The pendopo of a Laweyan home dating from the 1880s 38

4. The pendopo of a Laweyan home built between the 1920s and the

1930s 45

5. Aman meditates at the grave of Kyai Ageng Anis at the royal cemetery

in Laweyan 79 6. A batik cap worker applying wax to cloth with a copper stamp 110 7. Young women in a batik tulis workshop in Solo 111

8. A batik worker buys herbal tonics from a local peddler 113

9. A retired batik entrepreneur athome 128 10. Pasar Klewer, Solo’s large textile bazaar 135 11. A Laweyan bridal procession 208 12. A prosperous batik trader displaying her wares in Pasar Klewer 218

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HAVE ACCUMULATED many intellectual and personal debts in the course of carrying out this project. And it is with a mixture of relief and regret that I let this book go, since it has become part of me in a very real sense, providing a sense of continuity through the otherwise dramatic changes in my life. To those who have helped me along the way, I offer my deepest thanks. I owe my greatest intellectual debt to James Siegel, whose own thinking about Indonesia, Java, and anthropology inspired me to think about each of these in ways I would otherwise never have imagined. I am especially grateful for his encouragement over the years and his unwavering enthusiasm for this project. I also wish to thank Benedict Anderson for taking so much interest in my work, for the unstinting time and moral support that he has offered me, and for teaching me the importance of looking at Indonesia through a historical lens. E. G. Bailey, Michael Meeker, and Tanya Luhrmann each read part or all of the manuscript and offered me very useful advice and gentle criticism; I have also been very lucky to have them as colleagues. Indeed, I am thankful to the entire faculty and staff of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, San Diego, for being so supportive since I came to UCSD in 1991. When I was desperate to find time away from teaching in order to finish a draft of this book, I had the good fortune to be invited to spend a year as a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It was there that I first met Clifford Geertz, whose work had been (without his knowing

it) a source of inspiration to me since my undergraduate days. It was a pleasure to finally get to know him after all these years and to share his considerable insights on anthropology, Indonesia, and many other subjects. I was also delighted to spend time in the company of Joan Scott, who is a model for any aspiring feminist scholar. Other colleagues at the Insti-

tute who provided me with intellectual companionship include Suzanne Kaufman, Debbie Keates, Fred Myers, Lilia Labidi, Peter van der Veer, Henry Abelove, Linda Zerilli, and the other members of the “Modernization” seminar. Also deserving of thanks is Debbie Koehler, who, along with the rest of the staff at the Institute, did everything she could to facilitate my work. During the research and writing of this book in its various forms I have had the help and friendship of many people. In Indonesia, special thanks go to Ny. Nora Yap Goenawan, Halim H.D., Bapak and Ibu Suhardiman

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Tjokrosoehardjo, Ibu Budi Maknawi, Ibu Darsono Priyosoemarto, Bapak and Ibu Abdul Somad, and Bapak Sutrasno, along with countless others. I am also indebted to Professor Umar Kayam, who sponsored my research in his capacity as director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University. Others who helped me through this project in various ways include Amrih Widodo, Coeli Barry, Carol Block, Martijna Briggs, Budi Susanto, Alex Dea, Farha Ciciek, Alan Feinstein, Nancy Florida, Jan Hostetler, Webb Keane, Kathryn March, Mary Pat Olley, Paschalis Lak-

sono, John Pemberton, Marc Perlman, Danilyn Rutherford, P. Steven Sangren, Saya Shiraishi, ‘lakashi Shiraishi, Thoriq Addibani, Gigi Weix, John Wolff, and Philip and Tinuk Yampolsky. With Leslie Morris and Ward Keeler I shared the joys and frustrations of fieldwork; I benefited greatly from their ideas and companionship.

Ward Keeler, Patsy Spyer, and Mary Steedly each quickly and unselfishly read the entire manuscript and offered me valuable comments. Mary Murrell of Princeton University Press has been extremely helpful in expediting the review and publication of this book; my thanks as well to Madeleine Adams and Alice Falk for their excellent editorial assistance.

Funding for the research and writing of this book came from many sources. My fieldwork in Solo, Indonesia, from March 1986 to August 1988 and subsequent write-up were sponsored by a Social Science Research Council Dissertation Research Grant, a Fulbright-Hays Disserta-

tion Research Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Research Grant in Women’s Studies, and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship awarded through the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. The University of California, San Diego Academic Senate provided me with a faculty research grant to conduct further fieldwork in Solo in 1992; [ also received a Faculty Career Development Program Grant from UCSD in 1993. The Institute for Advanced Study, with partial funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, supported my writing of a draft of the manuscript in 1995-96. I obtained permission to conduct research through the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and received

institutional sponsorship from the Center for Cultural Studies (Pusat Penelitian Kebudayaan) at Gadjah Mada University. Finally, my deepest debt is to the members of my family, who have been my greatest source of support, and to my husband John Opferkuch, who, although he entered this project relatively late, has helped by providing me with emotional support, humor, and welcome distractions through the trying process of getting it finished.

Parts of this book were published in earlier versions. Part of chapter 2 appears in my article “Competing Hierarchies: Javanese Merchants and the Priyayi Elite in Solo, Central Java,” Indonesia 52 (October 1991): 55-83.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xill

Part of chapter 4 was published in my article “Why Women Rule the Roost: Rethinking Javanese Ideologies of Gender and Self-Control,” in Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia,

edited by Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, 19-50 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Copyright © 1995 by The Regents of the University of California. Both articles are used with permission.

.

A NOTE ON THE USE OF FOREIGN TERMS AND PROPER NAMES

BECAUSE FIELDWORK for this study was conducted in both Javanese and

Indonesian, terms appear here from both languages. Unmarked foreignlanguage terms and quotations are Javanese, or both Javanese and Indonesian; others have been identified as Indonesian (I.) or Dutch (D.). A number of Arabic loanwords appear in the text; since these have been adopted into Javanese and Indonesian I have not considered it necessary to mark them. Neither Indonesian nor Javanese distinguishes the plural form from the singular; for the sake of smoother English sentences, however, I have taken the liberty of pluralizing some Indonesian and Javanese words by adding -s (for example, I have pluralized bécak as bécaks).

The names of people used in this study are pseudonyms except for the names of well-known figures, but all place names are real. Lest there be confusion about the names “Solo” and “Surakarta,” it should be mentioned from the outset that these are interchangeable. Both designate the same city, although Surakarta tends to be used in official contexts, whereas Solo is used more commonly in daily speech. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. A glossary of selected terms appears after the endnotes.

THE DOMESTICATION OF DESIRE

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INTRODUCTION

OLO, a densely populated city of about half a million people, seems

S to epitomize the fitful process of “development” that is so characteristic of Indonesian cities. Located in the interior of Java, an island with roughly the area of New York State but inhabited by well over a hundred million people, Solo (also known as Surakarta) has the feeling of a once-sleepy provincial city that has been rudely awakened by the tremors of modernization emanating from Jakarta, Indonesia’s political and economic hub. Bicycles, bécaks (bicycle-powered pedicabs), and an occasional

oxcart or horse-drawn carriage crowd the roads alongside new BMWs, motorcycles, and double-decker buses. Multimillion-dollar textile factories compete for cheap labor with small batik workshops that are run much as they were in the nineteenth century. At night, hundreds of makeshift food stalls selling everything from skewers of grilled saté to hot milk and toast take over the sidewalks, obscuring the modern department stores, banks, and hotels that local officials proudly point to as signs of Solo’s urban sophistication. While I lived there in the latter half of the 1980s, it seemed that almost everywhere I| looked, “modernization” was taking place, if somewhat haphazardly, right before my eyes. Pasar Singosaren, a large, busy bazaar housed inside a distinguished old building, was torn down and replaced by a multilevel shopping mall, its unfortunate vendors relocated to other markets or left to fend for themselves by selling their wares on the sidewalks. An elite housing complex, “New Solo” (Solo Baru), was being constructed on the former site of farmlands a few miles south of the city; billboards portrayed it as the ultimate in modern suburban living. Several upscale nightclubs and restaurants opened to cater to the middle and upper classes’

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