Setting History Straight? Indonesian Historiography in the New Order. MA thesis, Ohio University, 2005. (original) (raw)
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Renewing the New Order?: Public History in Indonesia
Public History Review
After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1988, public debates over the nature of history proliferated. While focusing on a number of key national events, most notably the 1965 coup and the killing of over half-a-million people, these debates have raised critical issues over the role or potential role of public history in contemporary Indonesian society. Questions of historical authority are paramount as Indonesian historians, public intellectuals and politicians struggle with a deeply entrenched historical paradigm and narratives of the old ‘New Order’ which continues to inform history in schools, cultural institutions, the media, literature, personal narratives, public rituals and the academy. This paradigm was based on an unquestioning acceptance of official accounts of the past. The demise of the New Order has left a historiographical vacuum which individuals and groups from a broad range of perspectives are trying to fill. Some, like Professor Azumardi Aza, are seeking to straddl...
2013
This dissertation tackles one central problem: What were the intellectual and social origins of New Order Indonesia (1966-1998)? The analytical lens that this study employs to examine this society is the Indonesian middling classes’ pursuit of modernity. The dissertation comes in two parts. Part One reconstructs the evolution of the Indonesian middling classes and their search for progress. Part Two uses three case studies to analyze the middling classes’ search for Indonesian modernity under the New Order. The first explores the top-down modernization undertaken by President Soeharto’s assistants at the National Development Planning Board, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology. The second case study investigates the “bottom-up” modernization performed by the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information. The third case study deals with how several authors used popular fiction to criticize the kind of Indonesian modernity that emerged in the New Order era. This research yields several findings. First, the Indonesian middling classes championed a pragmatic, structural-functional path to modernity. Second, to modernize the country rapidly and safely, the modernizers proceeded in an eclectic and pragmatic manner. Third, between the Old and the New Order, there existed strong continuity in ideas, ideals, skills, and problems. Fourth, the middling classes’ modernizing mission was fraught with contradictions, naïvetés, ironies, and violence, which had roots in the nationalist movement in the first half of the twentieth century. The New Order was neither wholly new nor an aberration from the “normal” trajectory of Indonesia’s contemporary history. The sort of modernity that the Indonesian middling classes ended up creating was Janus-faced.
Writing Indonesian history in the Netherlands; Rethinking the past
Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 1994
There are two obvious ways of writing about the 'state of Indonesian history'. The first could be called Rankean: objective, scientific, and buttressed with a scholarly apparatus of typologies, tables, inventories and notes. The second is more post-modern: aware of artifice, admitting the influence of context, accepting subjectivity, and sensitive to the need for disclosure. This essay is closer to the latter than the former. In a compromise that is perhaps typical of much contemporary history writing, it concedes a fundamental subjectivity, but hopes to achieve some measure of respectability by considering a few external sources and paying attention to circumstances. It is usual in such essays to have an initial footnote acknowledging the writer's gratitude to various colleagues, students and friends, while at the same time absolving them of all responsibility for the argument presented. Both points must be made here with such emphasis that I have elevated them to the body of the text: many co-workers might recognize individual ideas or comments, but reject the interpretation. I alone can be held accountable for the following opinions. The main argument of the following pages, however, is uncontroversial enough. Briefly summarized, I suggest that the development of Indonesian history in the Netherlands, like all history writing, is shaped by two major, interacting forces. The first is socio-political, and refers to the constellation of relevant interests and attitudes within the producing society, including changing international relationships, in this case between the Netherlands and Indonesia. The second influence is cultural, comprising the institutions and ideas which shape the academic infrastructure and the formulation of research agendas. Here, we focus on debates within and about history and the social sciences in general, and on Indonesian history in particular. This much is fairly obvious. But I also-quite subjectively-suggest that the writing of Indonesian history at the moment seems to be in rather poor shape. We have an image problem, and it is our own fault. The interesting intellectual terrain seems to have been captured by other disciplines, reducing history to being the drab provider of raw material for cultural studies or social science. Or, as the more beleaguered historians might claim, modest and meticulous scholarship is being pushed aside by ill-informed but superficially impressive generalization.
Paramita: Historical Studies Journal, 2018
Narrative in history textbooks usually refers to the history of Indonesia itself. The written experiences are the stories which are considered as proud for the history of their nation and the government in power. Thus, no wonder if the government changes, the materials which are not in line with the present government will vanish or be eliminated. However, for various topics, this cannot be vanished and changed even though the government changes. This situation looks like a ghost and sometimes can cause fear and anxiety because it comes with a strong figure. The aim of this study is to investigate the narrative expression in the history learning textbooks for Senior High School published in the New Order and Reformasi (reformation) era as ideology. Hence, in order to examine the problem, the researcher used critical discourse analysis method in which its main study was texts. Texts are created in the political and social contexts in which there are social power and domination. The r...
Exploration of Everyday Life History as an Alternative Historiography in Indonesia
Background: The rapid development of historiography at the global level has not been fully matched by the development of historiography in Indonesia. In the context of social history, the significant developments that have occurred since the integration of the social science approach have not been able to pave the way for the emergence of new categories of autonomous historical writing as elsewhere. This paper aims to describe the context and challenges of developing everyday life history writing in Indonesian historiography. It draws upon historical writings that have been published in Indonesia in the last four decades or so and employed a historical method. The failure of Indonesian social historiography in pushing the development of the history of everyday life is due to the epistemological and methodological weaknesses suffered by Indonesian historians and the tendency to narrow the meaning and scope of social history in the process of its development. This is also inseparable from the strong positivistic social science tradition that has influenced the development of social history in Indonesia so that it does not provide a broad space to explore the daily experience.