Is Anyone Really 'Pribumi'?

Am I 'Pribumi'?

And is anyone really Peranakan?

In ancient Java, the ideas of native versus foreign identities were usually confined to ethno-cultural and language differences, as the concept of a Javanese identity must be seen as a relatively recent development and related to the notion of a Javanese hegemony in the context of a modern and independent Indonesia.

The ethnic composition in the Indonesian archipelago grew to be more complex with the arrival of the people of foreign origin. Following the adoption of Hinduism, the Southern Indians, called  Keling, began to arrive in the archipelago  early in the first millennium, followed by Tamils who began to settle in several of the ports in Sumatra after the decline of Srivijaya Empire around the time of the 11th century. The arrival of Chinese traders and settlers, had intensified after the Majapahit era, and continued on the arrival of Zheng He's treasure fleet to Indonesia in the early 15th century. Around the same time, Muslim traders from India and Arabia also began to settle in the region. Europeans arrived when the Portuguese colonised Malacca in 1511. The ideas of racial identity as a way to describe the differences between the indigenous peoples of the archipelago and the neighbouring Asian and European 'outlanders' only began to take root during the early period of European colonialism in Indonesia in the 16th and 17th century.

By the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company's involvement in the archipelago, especially in Java, Moluccas and Sumatra, resulted in the 19th century usage of the term 'pribumi', which was translated as 'inlander' in Dutch, and first coined by the Dutch colonial administration in order to lump together in a single category the many diverse groups of indigenous inhabitants of Indonesia's archipelago, as a form of social and racial discrimination.

During the colonial period, the Dutch administration applied a regime of three-level racial separation that became a model in class differentiation as much as an ethnographic one: 

So, the first class race distinction was the colonial ruling class who were obviously the Europeans, positioned well above a second class grouping of those of partial European ancestry as well as "Foreign Orientals" (Vreemde Oosterlingen) which included the settled Chinese, Arab, and Indian communities, the communities that provided all the necessary skilled labour and entrepreneurial enterprise. Well below these two classes were the so-called "natives", the Inlanders, that included the Javanese, the Malays, Dayaks, Papuans and Moluccans. This colonial system was similar to the casta system in Hispanic America, which prohibited inter-racial neighborhoods (wet van wijkenstelsel) and regulated inter-racial interactions by the so-called passenstelsel laws. 

The term "pribumi" was used after Indonesian independence as a respectful replacement for the Dutch colonial term "inlander" which was seen as a derogatory term. Pribumi derives from Sanskrit terms pri (before) and bhumi (earth), so literally "first on the soil".

Following independence, the term was normally used to distinguish indigenous Indonesians from citizens of foreign descent, especially Chinese Indonesians, and common usage made a distinction between "pri" and "non-pri" Indonesians, which tended to amplify a widely held set of popular cultural attitudes about fundamental differences of identity in relation to the Indonesian concept of national identity that led to discrimination to Indonesian people of Chinese descent. 

Following the pogroms targeting Chinese Indonesians in May 1998, and the resignation of president Suharto, the Indonesian government of President B.J. Habibie instructed that neither of these terms should ever be used, on the grounds that the use of these terms promoted and exacerbated ethnic discrimination.
 

Identity
by Arzia Tivany Wargadiredja
18 August 2017

My ethnic heritage is pretty straight-forward. I was born in Bandung, West Java, to two Sundanese parents. Growing up Sundanese—the indigenous people of West Java—in the city of Bandung meant I never had to feel like I was of somewhere else. I never had to question my "Indonesia-ness." I mean West Java covers a huge chunk of the island, and Bandung is only a few hours from the capital. What could be more Indonesian than that?

Then, one day, I was walking down the street in Yogyakarta when a bunch of becak drivers shouted "Konnichiwa!" at me. I smiled and shrugged it off. Maybe they couldn't see all that well. There are a lot of Japanese tourists in Jogja after all. But then a few blocks later, another group of people greeted me with "Konnichiwa! Japan? Japan?"

I kept walking and eventually sat down to drink some es campur. That's when the person sitting next to me turned and tried to strike up a conversation, asking "Where do you come from? Thailand?"

That's when I started to question my looks. Do I not look "pribumi" enough? Hell, am I even "pribumi" at all? Is anyone? The term means indigenous, as in of the nation of Indonesia. It's a signifier that means your heritage is from the soil of this nation, and there alone.

To be pribumi is to have your Indonesia-ness unchallenged. It's an ethnic signifier that has, throughout history, been subject to orientalist myths, vilification, and politicization. To the Dutch, pribumi were backwards natives who couldn't be trusted with anything more than labor and servitude. To Indonesia's nationalists, pribumi was a mark of pride, a sign that you were one of the "real" Indonesians.

This last idea still hold significant sway today. The contentious Jakarta election brought up a lot of the old ideas about pribumi vs non-pribumi in terms of economics, religion, and ethnicity. Indigenous Indonesians started to worry that non-pribumi were stealing all the high-paying jobs. Then Vice President Jusuf Kalla said there was a significant gap between the wealth of different religious groups—a not-so coded statement that accused the country's non-pribumi (i.e. Chinese) minorities of consolidating all the money.

But what does pribumi mean anyway?

Ariel Heryanto, a researcher from Monash University, in Australia, argued that the term "pribumi" was little more than a cultural invention in his book Pergulatan Intelektual dalam Era Kegelisahan. Before the arrival of the Dutch, the indigenous peoples of Indonesia saw themselves as members of distinct ethnic groups with their own histories of rulers and warring kingdoms.

But the Dutch East India Company (VOC) paved over all of these distinctions, lumping people into a three-tiered system. At the top were white Europeans. Beneath them were the ethnic Chinese, Arab, and Indian traders, as well as those of half-European descent. At the bottom were the "inlanders"—or "pribumi"—a term that basically grouped together all the indigenous people who were already here when the VOC boats arrived.

The VOC didn't care about indigenous groups or historical differences. They cared about ethnic restrictions instead. The pribumi class were governed by rules that unfairly limited their professions, political participation, culture, and even haircuts. When we look back on the VOC years, the pribumi class were seen as a vulnerable and oppressed people, according to an opinion piece Ariel wrote for CNN Indonesia.

Fast-forward to the Suharto regime and the power imbalances were flipped. Under the New Order regime, it was the Chinese ethnic minority who suffered racial discrimination and government restrictions that limited their roles politically, as well as outlawed their culture, language, and even last names. As VICE wrote about before, the New Order required Chinese Indonesians to change their last names to something more "Indonesian" sounding.

"Now, the existence of the term is preserved with a little change, which is the swapping of the position of the glorified and the vulnerable," Ariel wrote.

Since the New Order, it became impossible to fully separate ideas of nationalism and ethnicity from internationalism and otherness. Pribumi, once a term used to discriminate against indigenous peoples, now means pureness and authenticity. But how, in a country that's only 72 years old, can one group be more "authentic" than another when both have been here for hundreds of years?

Maybe Herawati Supolo-Sudoyo knows the answer. I met her at her office in Lembaga Eijkman, a a bio-molecular research institute in Central Jakarta where she has spent the last 21 years studying the genetic heritage of Indonesia for a project titled "The Peopling of Indonesia Archipelago."

Herawati told me that her team has been working to reconstruct the country's history of housing, migration, and genetic mixing by traveling across the nation and gathering genetic material to test and analyze.

"Indonesia is a bridge between Asia and the Pacific," Herawati told VICE. "But there's a missing link between mainland Asia and Europe with the Pacific. There's complete information about the people of the Pacific and Polynesia. The same goes for Europeans. But we don't have genetic data for Indonesians because nobody studies it."

Here's what Herawati and her team discovered: The first waves of migration to Indonesia occurred 50 to 60 thousand years ago when early humans left Sub-Saharan Africa and headed east toward Asia. They passed through the archipelago, some settling in along the way, as others continued onward to Australia and the Pacific. The genetic markers of this group are more heavily represented in eastern Indonesia, Herawati said.

Then, 30,000 years ago, a second wave of migration arrived from Taiwan and Mainland China into the country's west, mixing into the existing population and influencing what would later become the Indonesian people. This is why, even today, there is a different in appearance and genetic origin of people from Indonesia's east and west, Herawati said.

"We take two poles of ancestors, which are the Han Chinese from Mainland China and [the Melanesian people] of PNG," she told me. "So which one is native? The fact is, everyone is a mix. Anyone can determine who is the native. If a person says 'you're pure Indonesian' the next question is 'what is Indonesia?' Indonesia is geopolitics, it's one nation with various people."

So am I pribumi or not, I asked.

"It's evident that in the west part of Indonesia there were many Austroasiatic and Austronesian people from South China, Yunan," she said, explaining that the roots of the indigenous people of Java and Sumatra were found not in Indonesia, but 4,000 kilometers north in China.

It's an interesting bit of information. The pribumi/ non-pribumi split often rears its head in Indonesia with regards to the country's ethnic Chinese community. But here we all have the same heritage, if you go back far enough. It sort of feels a bit self-hating to me. The Chinese blood in me might be from 30,000 years ago, but it's there regardless, buried deep in my genetic roots.

Shouldn't that alone mean that we should spend more time focusing on our similarities instead of our differences? Maybe, but saying we're all, on some level, the same misses some of the complexities of what pribumi really means.

The concept of pribumi is more than mere genetics, said Thung Ju Lan, an ethnicity at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). The term, instead, lives in the minds and the social constructions of the people who continue to use it. Today, pribumi is seen as something valuable, something that's a vital part of one's self.

"At first 'pribumi' referred to 'bumiputera,' which was used in the fight against the colonizers," Ju Lan told VICE. "But now there's a different association to the term. Now it's associated with power. When they say 'pribumi,' they're trying to say 'I'm the one who deserves the power,' 'I'm the rightful leader,' 'I'm the leader of the majority.' One thing is for sure, it's not associated with humanity."

Ju Lan herself is Chinese Indonesia, so she's well-aware of the kinds of discrimination non-pribumi can face in Indonesia. To be non-pribumi is to be seen as a non-native, a foreigner, and often the victim of some kind of built-in prejudice about what, exactly, that means, she told me.

"In the case of Chinese and pribumi, the majority still uses this historical construction of pribumi during the Dutch colonial era," Ju Lan said. "Back in those days, the Dutch gave those of Chinese descent certain privileges. But how long ago was that? We've been independent for more than 70 years."

So then why has the term stuck around so long? Because it still means something to a lot of people, Ju Lan said.

"From a biological or historical perspective there's no such thing as native, but I still say there is such thing as native, because 'pribumi' is in everyone's minds, in our construction [of our identity]," Ju Lan said.

The issue gets even more complex when it starts to shift from a search for authenticity into something that more resembles nativism. Similar shifts are currently underway in the United States, where anti-immigrant sentiment is fast becoming the norm in US President Donald Trump's White House and an increasingly bold fringe of white supremacists are rising to prominence.

The Jakarta election exposed some of this nativism. Racist anti-Chinese sentiment boiled to the surface during the contentious campaign season, while issues of religion painted the vote in stark sectarian tones. "The race to 'authenticity' is also fatalistic," argued Lailatul Fitriyah, a PhD candidate at the University of Norte Dame, in an op-ed for the Jakarta Post.

She continued:

"It leaves no room for any pluralistic claim due to its binary-based ideology. Within this perspective, there cannot be two groups of pribumi. One is either pribumi or non-prubumi, and if one is the latter then the other is targeted for extinguishment from the system, hence the inhumane rejection of the bodies of those who allegedly supported the non-pribumi candidate."

I reached out to Lailatul and asked her what she thought of the increasing use of the word pribumi in politics. The whole thing, she said, is alarming.

"The popular nativism right now is alarming because there's a mix of nativism coming from ethnicity, facial features, physical features, and religious elements," she told VICE. "This kind of nativism is more dangerous than nativism that's based on tribalism, because these current cases are a form of theological justification… of absolute truth."

And, today, as religion enters the mix of what it means to be an authentic Indonesian, the term pribumi itself has become more flexible. Under the original Dutch constructs of identity, those of Arab descent were considered non-pribumi, alongside the Chinese and Indian Indonesians.

But definitions shift, and now Islam is seen as a central tenant of what it means to be Indonesian by some of the country's more hardline nativists. So just like that Indonesians with Arab blood went from being an other, a non-pribumi, to being the ideal of what it means to be Indonesian.

"Now there's this tendency to make religion something that can be sold as a political commodity," said Lailatul. "That's why those of Arab descent who used to be alienated just like those of Chinese descent are now not only considered pribumi, but also the ideal prototype. It's like if you have Arab blood, you're more Islamic than others. You're more pribumi."

Indonesians of Arab descent share a religion with much of Indonesia's indigenous population. Those of Chinese and Indian descent don't—a fact that makes them outsiders while pulling those with Arab blood closer to the center.

Ben Sohib, a writer and an Indonesian of Arab descent, told VICE that he thinks the terms pribumi and non-pribumi are no longer relevant in modern Indonesia. The term rose to popularity when it was re-appropriated from colonial rulers to describe something that was proudly Indonesian. But then it became politicized and wrapped up in layers of religion, ethnicity, and power.

"Right now I see that term used as a political issue, especially in identity politics," Ben told me. "It's weird the term is making a comeback. In other words, we're going backwards as a nation."

I started this journey wondering what it mean to be pribumi. Now I'm unsure if it means anything concrete at all. The term is something that's malleable, something based on both our colonial history, our rise as a nation, and the racism that continues to persist today. So what did I learn? Am I pribumi or not? I can only answer that with another question: Is anyone?
 

Populism
by Adi Renaldi
17 May 2017

A rise in racially-tinged populism in Indonesia is leaving some to question whether the country has done enough to repair its fraught relationship with its ethnic Chinese minority in the nineteen years since the May 98 riots left more than a thousand dead and scores of Chinese Indonesian-owned businesses in flames.

It's a stark contrast to just four years ago when President Joko Widodo was widely believed to symbolize a new kind of Indonesian populism—one that that eschewed racial or religious rhetoric for a reformist platform. Jokowi's rise from the streets of Solo, Central Java, to the State Palace was seen as a positive sign for the future of what is arguably Southeast Asia's strongest democracy.

Fast-forward to today and his replacement in Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, is behind bars, jailed for committing blasphemy in a highly controversial case that quickly took on racial and sectarian tones. Ahok, as he is popularly known, is ethnically Chinese and Christian, two distinctions that were made plainly clear during a series of massive protests calling for his arrest.

One of the main groups behind the protest, the National Movement to Safeguard the Fatwas of the Indonesian Ulemas Council or GNPF-MUI, has now set its sights on the country's economic inequality or more specifically, as the organization's chairman recently told Reuters, on Chinese Indonesian's relative wealth. "It seems they do not become more generous, more fair," Bachtiar Nasir said. "That's the biggest problem."

The country's ethnic Chinese minority make up less than 2 percent of the population, according to recent data, but they are believed to hold the largest share of the country's wealth.

But this belief—that all Chinese Indonesians are rich—isn't based in reality. While there are many wealthy Chinese Indonesian families, there are far more middle and lower income households, explained Charlotte Setijadi, a researcher at Singapore's ISAS-Yusof Ishak Institute who studies the Chinese Indonesian community.

"The vast majority of Chinese Indonesians are middle class, and there are also many Chinese who are poor and in rural areas," Setijadi told VICE Indonesia. "For instance the 'Cina Benteng' community in outer West Jakarta is not only poor, but have been the subject of evictions in the past as well."

The Chinese Indonesian community has, instead, long been used as a scapegoat by those in power. The Dutch colonial government originally used the ethnic Chinese as middlemen between themselves and indigenous Indonesians. Suharto's policies further isolated the community, cementing divisions that still haunt today.

"This kind of problematic history is hard to shake off," Setijadi said. "And the New Order's policy of restricting the Chinese to an economic class only served to solidify negative connotations of 'Chineseness' as associated to concentrated wealth, capitalism, foreignness, and political disloyalty."

In the months leading up to the May 98 riots, the county was struggling through a region-wide economic crisis that was perceived to hit pribumi Indonesians hardest. As the crisis progressed, those in the Suharto's New Order regime began to use coded language to lay the blame on Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority. Press conferences were called that warned of the threat of "conglomerates," pegging the country's economic woes on the actions of "traitors," "rats," and those with "henchmen operating overseas."

Again, reality paints a very different story. When the Asian Financial Crisis hit Indonesia, it was the actions of foreign investors, and poor decisions by the Suharto regime and international financial institutions, that caused the worst of the crisis. Suharto's unwillingness to step away from the cronyism that characterized much of his time in power did little to calm public concern.

By the time the protests turned into riots, Indonesia's ethnic Chinese were left to shoulder much of the blame.

But today, anti-Chinese sentiment doesn't have as wide an appeal. Ahok, regardless of his religion or race, still earned 42.5 percent of the vote in a Muslim-majority city despite repeated efforts to highlight ethnic and religious divisions during an ugly campaign.

And he isn't the only Chinese Indonesian to embrace politics. Some of the racism of the late 90s may still be boiling under the surface, but out in the open, Indonesian society is more intertwined than before.

"The political situation now is very different from what it was in the lead up to May 1998," she said. "It is true that the anti-Chinese sentiments and rhetoric are worryingly similar—now with the added amplified religious sentiment—but I think Indonesian society as a whole appreciates the roles Chinese Indonesians play at various levels of society much more than before."

So what does this rise in racial populism really mean? We are living in a time when this kind of populism is on the rise across the globe. The international NGO Human Rights Watch recently warned that there was a growing appetite for authoritarian leaders who use populism to gain power in times of uncertainty.

"They scapegoat refugees, immigrant communities, and minorities," the group wrote in a report titled "The Dangerous Rise of Populism." "Truth is a frequent casualty. Nativism, xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia are on the rise."

Are the same factors at work here in Indonesia? It's hard to tell because, at least on the surface, recent events appear so contradictory.

President Jokowi was recently photographed visiting a mosque in mainland China in an apparent attempt to show that religion doesn't follow ethnic lines. But the same week, Vice President Jusuf Kalla was seen exploiting the same ethnic divisions, telling a crowded room that "in Indonesia, the rich and the poor are of different religions."

Kalla later refused to back down from the statement, claiming that for every 10 Chinese Indonesian businessmen there was only one Muslim. But these statements were only meant to encourage more Muslims to enter the business world, not to enflame racial tensions, Kalla told local media. "The issue remains," he said. "It's always been an ongoing issue, I don't know why."

The country's wealth gap is one of the worst in the world. A recent report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute found that Indonesia's top 1 percent owned 49.3 percent of the country's wealth. But the country's top 1 percent isn't exclusively one ethnicity.

"We can't blame one certain ethnicity," said Enny Sri Hartati, the executive director of the Institute for National Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF). "Ethnicities and religions can't be used as justification since they are irrelevant when explaining economic problems, especially the wealth gap."

Government policies that favor the country's wealthy elite, not the actions of ethnic minorities, are the root cause of Indonesia's income gap.

Yet, populist claims aside, Indonesia is already more economically equal than it was three years ago. The country's GINI coefficient, which measures income inequality, began to fall for the first time in more than a decade in 2015. Between 2000 and 2014, the ratio rose from 0.3 to 0.41. By 2016, it dropped to 0.39 on a scale where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is perfect inequality.

But it will take a dramatic bureaucratic reform to get that number down to an ideal figure, like Denmark's impressive 0.248.

"Everything depends on the commitment of the government," Enny told VICE Indonesia. "Even when the president is replaced, nothing will change if the bureaucracy is still the same. Jokowi relies on his Nawa Cita [or nine priorities] program and he is committed, but, in reality, it hasn't been that successful."

But Indonesia's massive economy is complex and difficult to explain in a soundbite or a slogan that will rally the masses. That's why those looking for a quick boost in their popularity would rather find someone else to blame for all these economic problems—especially if that "someone" is a minority with a history of being scapegoated, explained Geger Riyanto, a sociologist at Koperasi Riset Purusha.

"Our dire economic situation here is hard to explain, and some people know they can blame it on someone else, in this case a different ethnicity," Geger told VICE Indonesia. "It makes them feel more certain about things. They feel like they can get their revenge."

 
It depends.