itself, a trio of thirty-something professional women from the capital are on a shopping spree in Seminyak, while a few streets away a local family with a property portfolio worth millions of dollars are getting dressed up for a major Hindu ceremony. On Lombok student mountaineers are posing for selfies, 12,224 feet (3,726 meters) up on the summit of Gunung Rinjani. Back down at sea level, and one island further east, a ten-year-old village boy with a hand-me-down surfboard left behind by a traveling Australian is paddling out for his daily after-school session in the waves, completely unaware that in a decade’s time he’ll be competing on the World Surf League Men’s Tour.
Indonesia sprawls away to the north and the east, with a hundred passenger jets streaking contrails in all directions. In the middle of Kalimantan there’s a trucker with a load of timber, cramming Iwan Fals into the cassette deck and settling in for the long-haul, and in Makassar a middle-aged woman with a small empire of takeaway food stalls is heading for the Trans Studio Mall with the grandkids. In Ambon some young entrepreneurs are frantically plugging their new alternative clothing distro store on social media, and in a village of thatched houses in the green hills of Flores a ten-year-old in a red-and-white school uniform is trying to download an Agnes Monica song on a weak Internet connection.
And still further east, in the terminal of Merauke’s modest airport, an environmental scientist on his way home to Jakarta after a site visit, is hunched over his iPad scrolling through a pithy description of a far-off island on a travel blog. He reaches for his phone and thumbs a message to his girlfriend—“Next trip, we’re going to Pulau Weh…”
There’s a theory—a serious one—that Jakarta’s addiction to social media is fueled by the amount of time its residents spend thumbing their smartphones while stuck in traffic!
A LAID-BACK NATION WHERE “FACE” AND RESPECT ARE EVERYTHING
One of my earliest impressions when I first arrived in Indonesia was of a sense of casual informality. This, it seemed, was a gloriously laid-back sort of country where people were perfectly at ease in one another’s company and untroubled by crippling social niceties. The average Indonesian scene certainly made a refreshing contrast to a roomful of socially awkward Englishmen, brash Australians or Americans, or conformity-bound Japanese. And on the surface, Indonesian society usually does seem decidedly easy-going. But make no mistake, there are powerful forces at play beneath the surface.
National pride, humor and creativity: when a number of foreign governments issued security warnings about travel to Indonesia in the early 2000s, someone came up with a wry response that has since become a popular tee shirt and bumper sticker.
Of course, in a place this vast and this diverse you won’t get very far trying to identify universal societal norms. A middle class Muslim from a big city in the north of Sumatra is never going to have the same ideas about what makes up normal social behavior as a poor Christian from a remote village in Maluku. But there are a few things that you can generalize about. One is the unavoidable influence of gengsi, and another is the admirable emphasis placed on respect…
You Scratch My Back…
You’ll often hear talk in Indonesia of a concept called gotong-royong. It means something along the lines of “communal effort”, and people sometimes proclaim it the ultimate example of selfless community spirit, part of a supposed Indonesian tradition of folks getting together to get something done for the good of all. All very nice, but those who observe gotong-royong in action find that the truth is a little more complicated.
The classic example of gotong-royong is the way entire villages would traditionally pitch in with donations in cash and kind to allow an individual family to hold a lavish wedding ceremony. But these donations were never meant to be gifts, pure and simple; they came with strings attached. Careful note of who’d given what would be taken on both sides, and a like-for-like repayment would be expected when it was time for another family in the village to hold their own wedding feast. The same sort of careful accounting applied even when the “donations” were only of time or labor. Far from being all about selfless communal action, gotong-royong in its traditional form is really a system designed to bind a community together in a web of debts and credits.
Balinese women get together gotong-royong-style to tackle preparations for a traditional ceremony.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
One of the most powerful social forces in Indonesia is a thing known as gengsi. It gobbles up huge chunks of Indonesian salaries each month; it prompts untold anxieties in the hearts of young and old; and it has manufacturers of new smartphone technology rubbing their hands with glee. Gengsi is usually translated as “face”, or “prestige”. Basically, it amounts to the idea that if you’ve got it, flaunt it—or if you haven’t got it, buy it on credit and flaunt it anyway.
Football and friendship—young fans of the Persebaya soccer team hanging out on the streets of Surabaya.
From East Nusa Tenggara to Jakarta Indonesians are seriously sociable people.
The urge to ostentatiously display your wealth is by no means unique to Indonesia, but it does seem to have a particular potency here. It drives choice of schools and universities. It has an impact on where people choose to shop, eat, and holiday. And it definitely affects domestic architecture. When I first moved to Surabaya, the capital of East Java and Indonesia’s second largest city, I lived in a middle class suburb, close to the most prestigious shopping mall in town. The quiet inner streets of each block were lined with modest bungalows, but the much less peaceful outer lots, facing directly onto the busy traffic, were taken up by some of the most flamboyant private homes I’ve ever seen. Their owners had deliberately chosen to build in these noisier, less private positions because they wanted as many people as possible to see their gargantuan concrete and marble concoctions, complete with Doric columns and statues of Greek goddesses. That’s gengsi in action.
The Rough & the Smooth
The degree of emphasis on “softness” in how you handle yourself and your interactions with others varies from region to region across Indonesia. Generally speaking, the people from Java—and in particular southern Central Java around Yogyakarta and Solo—are renowned as the most halus (“soft”, or “smooth”) in their manners, while looking back in the opposite direction the Javanese tend to regard absolutely everyone else as being unattractively kasar (“coarse”)—especially their unfortunate and much maligned neighbors on the stony island of Madura.
Of course, not everyone can afford to build a Greco-Roman extravaganza at a prime roadside location, but gengsi impacts consumer choices across society, not least when it comes to those two Indonesian essentials: the motorbike and the mobile phone. The pressure to have the latest, most keren (“cool”) model is huge, even if the price tag is way beyond your means, and this is where I think gengsi has its most negative
