The Making of Middle Indonesia, Middle Classes in Kupang Town, 1930s–1980s

Judul	:	The Making of Middle Indonesia, Middle Classes in Kupang Town, 1930s–1980s
Penulis	:	Gerry van Klinken
Penerbit	:	Brill Leiden Boston
Bahasa	:	Inggris
Tahun Cetak	:	2014
Halaman	:	300
ISBN	:	978-90-04-26542-4
Sumber	:	http://www.oapen.org/
Download	:	Di Sini

The term ‘Middle Indonesia’ refers to the mediational roles played by middle classes in provincial towns. Middle Indonesia is a social zone connecting extremes. This book is part of a collective writing effort about this zone. We defined Middle Indonesia in a multidimensional way as representing: ‘the geographical space between village and metropolitan city, the social space between the established upper-middle classes and the urban poor, the economic and political twilight zone between formal institutions and markets (and between informal and illegal arrangements), the cultural meeting ground of global fashions and localized practices, and the generational space between child and adult.’ The project was inspired by Clifford Geertz’s idea that the dynamic middle between extremes of various kinds is an interesting place to examine social change. In the vast archipelagic nation’s urban hierarchy there are about 200 midsized cities with populations of 50,000 to a million. They connect metropolises like Jakarta with about 70,000 villages. The social life of these towns is dominated by people who belong, on a national scale, to the middle classes. The economy there has a higher level of informality than in Jakarta. We do not argue that the provincial town is the only place to study the political, economic, cultural and inter-generational life of Indonesia’s middle classes – there are middle classes in the metropolises. But we do agree with Geertz that ‘in-between’ is the provincial town’s ‘most outstanding characteristic’ (1963c:16). This book takes only a tangential interest in the cultural life of provincial middle classes and in the life chances of middle-class youth in these provincial urban settings. The main lines of the research programme as a whole, which did extend to those questions and was essentially anthropological, are described in an edited volume (Van Klinken and Berenschot 2014).1 The present book focuses on the political and economic history of the middle class in one particular provincial town, Kupang, on the island of Timor in the east of the archipelago. Middle-ness is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. To someone in Jakarta, Kupang looks more like a terminus than a middle – shipping and aerial lines end here. But to a farmer’s son from the hills of Amanuban behind Kupang, who took days to reach Kupang on horseback, it was a place full of wonders, and perhaps a gateway to even greater wonders, if he could find the money to take a ship further west.