From Mother to Citizen
From Mother to Citizen
In a recent article for Inside Indonesia Vita Febriany discusses the kind of citizenship that the New Order promoted for women. She notes that despite the frequent disregard for basic rights, the New Order placed a strong emphasis on the concept of community service, a practice which extends into the present through programs like Posyandu, a community-based health care program. By far the most interesting element of the article lies in the seemingly paradoxical freedom that programs like Posyandu offer their employees. The New Order established firm guidelines of behavior for the ideal female citizen, and although joining community oriented programs seemed to adhere to these standards, many women, like Ibu Nani in the article, were also liberated from the household and placed into leadership roles as a result of their membership. Somehow the act of submitting to cultural standards simultaneously dismantled existing inequalities, something that I think resonates very strongly with the discussion that we had about the wearing of jilbabs in Java. Restrictions becoming liberations seems to be a common theme.
On a slightly separate note, Febriany also mentions the decline in participation in these groups after the forced resignation of Suharto in 1998. In an Indonesia whose cities and populations are increasing, it seems that this decline of perceived civic duty marks a redefinition of Indonesian citizenship. The distancing of the self from the state seems to be an increasingly common pattern in our globalized world (especially for younger generations), and so I wonder what this will mean for conceptions of national identity in the future.
Comments
You raise a very interesting point about “restrictions becoming liberations” as a common theme. I wonder if this can help us understand some of the histories of SEA that we encountered in the long excerpts from the Owen book? In that book, the concept of legitimacy was often noted, and one of the things that we see is how states often justify their particular brand of restriction as a way to give discipline, which will in turn bring development.
Another issue is how this idea of freedom emerging from control is actually embedded in the very idea of liberal freedom itself. Even Rousseau said citizens must exchange (give up) natural liberty in order to gain civic liberty. That is, Rousseau tells his readers to follow the rules of civic life in order to gain civic protections.
Pages