Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

194 CULTURAL TENSIONS IN RURAL INDONESIA
oriented New Order world, local control is crucially maintained through the
disciplinary powers of registration. People need compulsory letters of
recommendation and official endorsement to look for work, enrol in high school,
buy land, move, get married, hold a wayang show, and so on. It is impossible to
survive in modern Indonesia without these endorsements. The key word is
koneksi, because these letters of endorsement can only be achieved through
contacting higher authorities, whether village headman, the local headmaster or a
friend working at a government office. Ambitious and upwardly mobile OKB must
cultivate good relations with the village headman, the Golkar (ruling party)
chairman, the chairman of the Village Community Resilience Board (LKMD) and
sub-district officials. Authorities from outside the traditional village structure have
become sources of power and prominent actors in village affairs. A lot of money
and energy is spent by the elite, and especially the new rich, on lubricating good
contacts in village and sub-district offices, thus seeking peer respect. In this process,
the OKB draw symbolic (and not so symbolic!) boundaries between themselves
and the common villagers. OKB households cultivate relations with other OKBs
and officials: by inviting them to ceremonies, by acting as their promoters during
elections, by joining their state organisations, by being active in village affairs. This
gives them entrance into the official sphere, and access to both the economy and
patronage. This again is a case of ‘betting on the strong’: the OKB tend to mix with
their peers, who have the same cultural tastes and share a similar ideology.
Let me give an example. Sunarya is a well-educated and ambitious man in his late
thirties. He belongs to one of the settler families, and can claim descent to the first
headman in Sariendah (who governed in the 1850s). He is also a distant relative of
the present headman. Earlier Sunarya was a hamlet leader, the only one in
Sariendah with a programme for hamlet development. In the 1982 national
election he was local chairman of one of the opposition parties (PPP), but has
since found Golkar to be more true to his personal and political aspirations. Some
people say he joined Golkar out of strategic considerations. He also had to end his
affiliation with PPP when he became a civil servant in 1983. He works as a lower
bureaucrat in the provincial office in Bandung. Sunarya commutes daily, leaving at
7.00 in the morning and, at best, arriving home at 5.00 in the afternoon. He is a
very energetic leader who finds Sariendah too small for his future ambitions, He
has functioned as Golkar leader only for three years, but has already built a whole
new village organisation. The village is divided into a number of geographic
sections and each is headed by a community leader who is responsible for
recruiting a number of members. In the 1992 election, he enrolled close to all
Sariendah residents as Golkar members.
Sunarya is one of the new rich in Sariendah. His wealth comes from his work in
Bandung, but also from commissions he receives when helping people to fill in
letters and when providing administrative information. Together with his wife, he
also runs a shop in the village junction selling foodstuffs and renting out videos. He
plans to buy a Daihatsu minibus to ply the route to Majalaya. He lives in a rather
fancy house he bought two years after he became Golkar headman: people still