AN-R02 Anthropology of Indonesia

Course Code: AN-R02  |  School: School of Anthropology and Society  |  Cluster: Level 3 — Regional and Comparative Ethnography

Level: Intermediate  |  Duration: 6 weeks · 24–30 learning hours  |  Language: English  |  Certificate: Professional Certificate (non-degree)  |  Format: Self-paced with AI support under human supervision

Overview

No other national society has been so thoroughly written about by anthropologists, and so thoroughly argued over, as Indonesia. The country has served as the field site for foundational statements about culture as a system of meaning, about the moral economy of the peasantry, about Islam and modernity, and about what globalisation actually does to particular places. It has also been the site of some of the discipline’s most instructive errors, several of which have had political consequences inside Indonesia itself.

This course studies Indonesia ethnographically while treating the ethnographic record as a historical object. It moves from the classic Java-centred literature of the 1950s and 1960s, through the anthropology produced under and after the New Order, to contemporary work on Islam, decentralisation, resource frontiers, urban life and digital sociality. It asks at each stage what the political conditions of research permitted, what they concealed, and how Indonesian scholars have reframed the questions.

The course refuses two temptations: the reduction of Indonesia to Java, and the treatment of the archipelago as an inventory of exotic local cultures. Its organising claim is that Indonesia is best understood as a continuing argument about how radically plural societies can be governed, and that anthropology’s contribution lies in showing how that argument is lived at close range. Learners finish with a substantial comparative essay on a problem of their choosing.

Learning outcomes

On completion, a successful learner will be able to:

1. Trace the development of the anthropology of Indonesia from the late colonial period to the present, and explain how political conditions shaped what could be studied and published.
2. Assess the classic interpretive and agrarian literature on Java, together with the principal criticisms made of it by later scholars, including Indonesian scholars.
3. Analyse Muslim social and intellectual life in Indonesia beyond the categories of moderate and radical, using ethnographic evidence about practice, argument and institutions.
4. Explain how the New Order state and its collapse restructured local authority, and evaluate the consequences of decentralisation and adat revival for governance and identity.
5. Examine resource frontiers, plantation economies and environmental conflict as social processes, using at least two ethnographic cases from outside Java.
6. Analyse contemporary urban, migrant and digitally mediated forms of Indonesian social life with the same rigour applied to village ethnography.
7. Produce a comparative scholarly essay that situates a specific Indonesian case within a general anthropological argument.

Who this course is for

The course serves graduate students and researchers working on Indonesia or comparable plural societies; professionals in government, development, journalism, business and civil society who need more than a survey-level understanding of Indonesian social dynamics; heritage and cultural sector staff; and Indonesian participants who wish to engage critically with how their society has been represented in the international literature.

Prerequisites

Undergraduate-level competence in social science reading and writing. AN-R01 is recommended but not required. Learners must be able to read substantial academic English. Indonesian language ability enriches the course, particularly for the optional primary-source components, but all required readings are available in English.

Syllabus

Module 1 — The making of an ethnographic archive

The module surveys the intellectual formation of the field: Dutch colonial ethnology and adat law scholarship, the American area-studies projects of the 1950s, and the conditions under which the classic Javanese studies were conducted. It establishes the habit of reading every ethnography alongside its context of production.

Lessons. 1.1 Adat law scholarship and its administrative purposes. 1.2 Area studies, funding and the Cold War. 1.3 The Modjokuto project and its assumptions. 1.4 Reading an ethnography as a historical document.

Deliverable. Source-critical note (800 words) on one classic study.

Module 2 — Culture, meaning and the critique of the classics

This module engages the interpretive tradition directly: culture as a system of symbols, thick description, and the celebrated analyses of ritual and public spectacle. It then presents the sustained criticism this work attracted — for coherence bias, for underplaying power and conflict, for the tripartite religious typology, and for its treatment of Javanese material as representative of Indonesia.

Lessons. 2.1 Thick description and its method. 2.2 The theatre state and the critique of the aestheticised polity. 2.3 The variants typology and its Indonesian critics. 2.4 What survives of the interpretive programme.

Deliverable. Critical essay (1,000 words) evaluating one interpretive claim against later evidence.

Module 3 — Islam, argument and institution

The module treats Indonesian Islam as a field of reasoned argument rather than a spectrum of intensities. It covers the mass organisations and their pesantren and school networks, local scriptural interpretation and public reasoning, Islamic law in practice and in the courts, the growth of Islamic economy and popular piety, and the politics of religious minorities.

Lessons. 3.1 The mass organisations and their social base. 3.2 Public reasoning and local exegesis. 3.3 Law, courts and the everyday negotiation of norms. 3.4 Piety, consumption and minority politics.

Deliverable. Analytical essay (1,000 words) on an Islamic institution or debate.

Module 4 — The New Order, its collapse and the remaking of authority

This module examines the anthropology of an authoritarian developmental state: village administration and the manufacture of the traditional village, the language of development, violence and its silences, and then the reordering that followed 1998 — decentralisation, elections at district level, adat revival, and the new local elites these produced.

Lessons. 4.1 Governing the village. 4.2 Development discourse and its local translation. 4.3 Violence, memory and what ethnography did not say. 4.4 Decentralisation, district politics and adat revival.

Deliverable. Case analysis (1,000 words) of a post-1998 transformation in local authority.

Module 5 — Frontiers, land and environment beyond Java

The module moves to Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua. It covers logging and oil palm frontiers, mining and dispossession, customary land claims and their legal status, conservation and its social costs, and the ethnography of global commodity connection.

Lessons. 5.1 The plantation frontier and its labour regimes. 5.2 Customary land, permits and dispossession. 5.3 Conservation, carbon and green enclosure. 5.4 Friction: global connection as an ethnographic object.

Deliverable. Comparative note (1,000 words) on two frontier cases.

Module 6 — Urban, mobile and digital Indonesia

The final module addresses the majority-urban present: kampung life and eviction, class formation and the new middle classes, internal and international labour migration and remittance households, gender and sexuality in public life, and digital platforms as sites of religious, political and economic activity.

Lessons. 6.1 Kampung, eviction and the right to the city. 6.2 Migration, remittance and transnational households. 6.3 Class, aspiration and consumption. 6.4 Platforms, publics and digital religiosity.

Deliverable. Final comparative essay (3,000 words) with full scholarly apparatus.

Assessment

Pass mark 70 per cent. All assessed components must be attempted. Every mark in this course is issued by a human assessor; no assessment outcome is generated automatically.

Rubric criteria

Each assessed artefact is marked against four criteria at four levels (distinction, pass with merit, pass, fail).

1. Ethnographic grounding. Whether arguments rest on specific evidence from named studies and whether the learner separates observation from interpretation.
2. Historical and political awareness. Whether the learner situates both the case and its scholarship in the political conditions that produced them, including the constraints of the New Order period.
3. Engagement with Indonesian scholarship. Whether work by Indonesian scholars is engaged substantively rather than cited decoratively, and whether the learner recognises where regional scholarship has reframed the debate.
4. Argumentative construction. Whether the essay advances a contestable thesis, addresses the strongest objection to it, and reaches a conclusion the evidence supports.

Reading list

Core. Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

John R. Bowen, Muslims through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Nancy K. Florida, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Academic integrity and use of AI

AI tools may be used for source discovery, terminology, translation support and criticism of the learner’s own drafts. They may not be used to produce analysis or to stand in for reading the ethnographies themselves. A use-of-AI statement is required with every submission, naming the tools and the purpose of each use.

All citations must be verified against the primary source; fabricated references, invented quotations or invented field material result in failure and referral. Where learners write about communities to which they belong or have professional access, the ordinary ethical obligations of informed consent, anonymisation and non-maleficence apply and must be documented in the submission.